More Poly in the Media, from Fox News to Miss Manners
The last three months have seen a continued stream of Polyamory in the News, as you know if you've friended the nice LJ feed at LiveJournal polymedia.
So where's the conservative backlash already? The coverage we're getting -- the stuff your worried mother is reading (and your boss) -- continues to range from neutral to remarkably positive, by and large. Even a Fox News commentator had decent things to say.
Have the bigtime conservatives shot their wad (those are the items with my "critics of poly" tag) and quit? They've hardly peeped about us in more than a year aside from the pro-forma mentions, which haven't changed in maybe a decade, that after gay marriage polys are the next step down the slippery slope to marrying goats.
Maybe they’ve realized that the more they call attention to us, the more people hear that polyamory is actually possible. So, have we been bracing for a storm that's not coming? I wouldn't bet on it; keep your wits and arguments sharp.
Meanwhile, if you haven't kept up with what the world is saying about us, here's some of what you recently missed:
"Redefining Love and Sex in Middle Age" appears in WomenBloom, an online magazine for middle-aged women seeking to remake their lives. This long, thoughtful article presents poly as a serious option for expanded your later-life horizons, if you're suited for it.
Similarly, MomLogic interviews Loving More's Robyn Trask respectfully and approvingly about her life as a poly parent.
Here are reviews of the season's three new polyamory books, and news of two more in the works. Two of the books' authors, Tristan Taormino and Jenny Block, have been doing book-promotion tours and generating media along the way, nearly all of it sympathetic.
For instance: "How not to become a desperate housewife"? Look into the poly option instead, suggests the mainstream Sunday Observer in London, which sent a reporter traveling around with Block.
"Whom, and how, would you love if no one ever told you how it was 'supposed' to be done?" writes the Baltimore City Paper. "Think about it for a moment. Would you love men or women? Would you love for life? Would you love in series or in parallel? What would you do if you had to create the rules from scratch?"
"Why is this stuff so hot right now?" asks Style in Virginia. The author of the piece doesn't try to answer this, so I give it a go.
A fifteen-year quad makes the news signing legal papers in California.
A mono guy at UC Berkeley marvels, in the student newspaper, at what polys can teach ordinary couples about how to do relationships well.
Everyone knows that polyamory is hard it demands serious work, jealousy will strike, it'll test you bigtime, this ain't for wimps. Right? Not always. A writer at a women's webzine describes how she and her two triad partners handled it as easily and naturally as if they were born to it. Some people are.
Miss Manners, the standard-of-propriety newspaper columnist, advises on how best to introduce members of a poly triad to the more conservative guests attending a wedding.
In "Scenes from a Group Marriage", a nine-year-old boy, now grown, looks back on the good and bad that resulted when he unexpectedly went from having two parents to four. (The good: life in a big group household with extra parents and siblings. The bad: suddenly losing half his family when the grownups broke up.)
A feminist leader of Polyamorous NYC takes a starring role in a documentary about open relationships on the Women's Entertainment Network.
This new addition to the collection of poly webcomics is my favorite yet.
An oddity: Russian TV news -- which has become almost as state-controlled and divorced from reality as it was in the Soviet era -- reports that millions of Americans are going wild for polyamory and displays New York City's huge Gay Pride parade as a polyamory event.
Elsewhere in ideology-driven TV, the "FOXSexpert" on the Fox News site discusses polyamory quite evenhandedly and muses on whether you can be in love with more than one person.
Plus great coverage in Spain, Brazil, Mexico, and the Netherlands.
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Here's the site: Polyamory in the News (http://polyinthemedia.blogspot.com). The most recent 10 items are up front. Here are the May, June, and July archives.
Here's where to get the LJ friends feed.
I've done 239 of these reports in the last three years. They're sorted in the archive by category, month, and sometimes location. I hope you have as much fun browsing them as I did getting them up.
Cheers,
Alan
P.S.: See you at Loving More East Sept. 5-7, and at Poly Pride Weekend in NYC Oct. 3-4!
(Crossposted)
So where's the conservative backlash already? The coverage we're getting -- the stuff your worried mother is reading (and your boss) -- continues to range from neutral to remarkably positive, by and large. Even a Fox News commentator had decent things to say.
Have the bigtime conservatives shot their wad (those are the items with my "critics of poly" tag) and quit? They've hardly peeped about us in more than a year aside from the pro-forma mentions, which haven't changed in maybe a decade, that after gay marriage polys are the next step down the slippery slope to marrying goats.
Maybe they’ve realized that the more they call attention to us, the more people hear that polyamory is actually possible. So, have we been bracing for a storm that's not coming? I wouldn't bet on it; keep your wits and arguments sharp.
Meanwhile, if you haven't kept up with what the world is saying about us, here's some of what you recently missed:
------------------
Here's the site: Polyamory in the News (http://polyinthemedia.blogspot.com). The most recent 10 items are up front. Here are the May, June, and July archives.
Here's where to get the LJ friends feed.
I've done 239 of these reports in the last three years. They're sorted in the archive by category, month, and sometimes location. I hope you have as much fun browsing them as I did getting them up.
Cheers,
Alan
P.S.: See you at Loving More East Sept. 5-7, and at Poly Pride Weekend in NYC Oct. 3-4!
(Crossposted)