Polygamy in Primetime

Polygamy in Primetime MEDIA, GENDER, AND POLITICS IN MORMON FUNDAMENTALISM BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY PRESS Waltham. Massachusetts d Media and the Polygamy Narrative I just fell in love. Then I fell in love again, and I fell in love again. —KODY BROWN, TLC’s Sister Wives Americans are fascinated by polygamy, and the media has helped mold our images of those who practice it. Although the public often shows disdain to ward plural marriage on television talk shows, in book groups, and in response to sensationalized newspaper headlines, people are drawn to its exoticism. Just as the Brady Bunch introduced the concept of divorce and the blended family in the Iq7os and Queer Eye for a Straight Guy of zooc created more acceptance of gay professionals at the turn of the twenty-first century, the new polygamy shows, 1-IBO’s television drama Big Love and TLCs reality program Sister Wives, paved the way for a new narrative about fundamental ist l\’Iormonism. This new narrative has enormous entertainment value. It evokes a dream like frontier utopia where men are tough and fatherly and women are femi nine, courageous, and motherly. Plenty of children sing around the piano to give the family a Waltons flavor. Yet the television narrative also evokes an image of danger, sexual intrigue, abuse, and lawlessness. This dichotomous portrayal is what led 2.74 million viewers to watch the Season finale of TLC’s Sister Wives in zojo. The sensationalized narrative of polygamous lifc feeds into headlines about the horrors of the sexually outrageous behaviors of Warren Jeffs or Ron Lafferty, but it overlooks the rather nondescript, boring lives of most members of the AUB and most independent polygamists. In the twenty years I have studied the Alireds, the most benign of the groups, I can recall only a handful of stories in the media about little Pinedale, Montana, where I conducted my first research project, or the larger congregation in the Salt Lake Valley. There were no sex scandals (other than when a sex offender intruded into the Pinesdale community from Alaska). nor was there any swapping of underage brides, as took place in Bountiful, British Columbia, 1-j HOW DO WE DEAL WITH POLYGAMY? MEDIA AND THE POLYGAMY NARRATIVE or Colorado City, Arizona. The Pinesdale community has a positive relation raid on Short Creek, the witchhunt for Utah polygamists prior to the ship with neighboring townships and works with the police on common goals. 2002 Olympics, and the kidnapping of children from their families in Eldo Pinesdale community members send their children to the same high school rado in 2008. According to sociologist Ryan Cragun and psychologist Michael that the children of nonfundamentalists attend, and they shop at the same Nielsen (2011), the media helped justify the raid in Texas with stories about stores and work in the same industries as nonfundamentalists do. Because Warren Jeffs idiosyncratic abuses, such as him placing a bed in the FLDS journalists were bored by Pinesdale, they ignored it, and most Americans temple that was supposedly used for the consummation of marriages to un have never heard of this particular banal, ordinary polygamous community. derage girls, according to the testimony of former FLDS witness Rebecca According to sociologist Sarah Whedon (2010), the media purposefully Musser at Jeffs’ 2011 trial (Bentley 2011). Yet the media also created an alterna makes a spectacle of polygamy-style sexuality and the potential within it for tive narrative about the injustices of the Texas government, which served the abuse. Journalists avoid focusing on polygamists faith or the full complexity interests of the FLDS in pursuit of their civil rights. This media unreliability of life in the Principle. They use elaborate images of “outsiderness” to sell serves, on the one hand, to promote anti-polygamy sentiments that inform newspapers and attract readers on the Internet. We respond to these arche public policy against polygamy, and, on the other, promotes anti-government. tpal threats to our innocence and our monogamous Victorian values; we pro-libertarianism policies. Neither serves the interests of most polygamists. gawk in horror at their sexual practices and at the way they treat women and Yet in the last few years a different portrait of polygamy has begun to children” 2,). (ibid., Ironically, once you live inside polygamy, as I have done, emerge, due in part to the growth of pro-polygamy weblogs and new tele you find that most polygamists are essentially Puritan in their marital and vision programs such as HBO’s Big Love. This new image is positive and sexual modesty. For example, 1 attended a priesthood meeting with married dynamic and has the potential to alter the way people think about the poh’ couples to discuss the proper decorum and behaviors in matters related to mindset. University of Utah law professor Ed Firmage states that series such sex. I never saw such blushing and nervousness in my life; the discussion was as Big Love and Sister Wives can familiarize an exotic form of marriage and painfully conservative and naïve and, above all, proper. set the stage for the recognition of new legal rights (2006). For example. the The American public is especially vulnerable to the “save the children” pro-polygamy website Principle Voices, which was founded in 2003 by three mentality, and the media often uses this idea to create mass hysteria about women who favor polygamy, is quite positive about the poly lifestyle. Found plural marriage. For many viewers and readers, the subject of pedophilia can ers Anne Wilde and Mary Batchelor represent themselves as deeply commit be both disgusting and compelling. According to James Kinkaid, Americans ted to their faith and the culture of polygam but they are careful to align that are obsessed with the topic and are quick to shout “sexual abuse!” even where position with a commitment to liberal American values of freedom, equality. they cannot find it (case in point, the 2008 raid on the community in Eldo education, and care for children. Along with the new television shows, these rado, Texas). We are quick to label polygamist behavior as illness or deviance, websites promote the normalcy of the day-to-day lives of polygamists. Blogs especially if we don’t quite understand it or if we allow a particularly nasty and television programs on national networks have the potential to spread case of abuse within a polygamous family to represent all plural families in positive information about polygamy in the United States and around the our minds. Jon Krakauers book Under The Banner of Heaven focused on world so that people can discuss the pros and cons of this lifestyle just as they sensationalized cases of polygamous life that “fueled the fire of mass hysteria discuss any other controversial topic. about polygamy” (Whedon 2010, I). The book recounts one horror after an In their analysis of the social and psychological impact of the media cover other without providing a single glimpse of how most polygamists live their age of the 2008 raid on the YFZ ranch in Eldorado, Cragun and Nielson (2011) day-to-day lives. This type of one-sided profiling engages a large audience of noted how subtle biases tended to shape the public’s view of polygamy. But Americans who are drawn to the topics of violence and mayhem, abuse, and media coverage has begun to change as journalists have become aware that the bizarre. It makes the public believe that all polygamy is inherently ugly more evidence of vile conduct is not likely to emerge. Polygamists use the and abusive and can lead to actions taken against polygamists such as the media to present their own framing of events and promote pro-polygamy son- /64 HOW DO WE DEAL WITH POLYGAMY? MEDIA AND THE POLYGAMY NARRATIVE timents, They also use the media as a way to develop new and ever-changing because the practice is on the rise in North America. Mormon fundamen views of themselves. Frantz Fanon ([19521 1980) wrote about Algerian black talists have extremely high natural birth rates, and some appeal to potential men who developed identities from 19505 comics that depicted only white converts. In addition, the growth within Muslim populations in both the men. Likewise, polygamists who read the news begin to see their world as United States and Canada increases the possibility of more plural marriages composed of dark, perverse villains. They see the predominantly evil depic among both immigrants and converts (Dixon-Spear 2009). tion of themselves on talk shows and subtly adopt the mainstream view of themselves, further promoting isolation and alienation. TV Dramas Recently, the media has produced a more progressive, sexy depiction of polygamy: charismatic Bill Henrickson of Big Love, Joe Darger of Love Two venues that provide positive images of the relative normalcy of life in po Times Three, and handsome Kody Brown of Sister Wives and their vocal, lygamy are HBOs Big Love and TLC’s Sister Wives. In this section, I analyze educated plural wives. But anti-polygamists such as anthropologist Stanley whether these two programs truly represent life in Mormon fundamentalism Kurtz (2006) believe that sympathetic treatments of polygamy on television or are just a Hollywood fabrication. will undermine cultural taboos and foster support for pluralist definitions of marriage and family, He points out that the authors of Big Love are gay BIG LOVE men. This, he says, should indicate to us that the show is trying to destroy HBO’s Big Love ran from March 2006 to l\’Iarch 2011, was produced by actor traditional family. “At the heart of the show,” Kurtz worries, is the claim that Tom Hanks, and was written by Mark Olson and Will Scheffer.

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