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163 5 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 toward 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 1970s and Queer Eye for a Straight Guy of 2000 created more acceptance of gay professionals at the turn of the twenty-­ first century, the new polygamy shows, HBO’s television drama Big Love and TLC’s reality program Sister Wives, paved the way for a new narrative about fundamentalist Mormonism. This new narrative has enormous entertainment value. It evokes a dreamlike frontier utopia where men are tough and fatherly and women are feminine , 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 1 finale of TLC’s Sister Wives in 2010. The sensationalized narrative of polygamous life 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 Allreds, 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, 164 how do we deal with polygamy? or Colorado City, Arizona. The Pinesdale community has a positive relationship with neighboring townships and works with the police on common goals. Pinesdale community members send their children to the same high school that the children of nonfundamentalists attend, and they shop at the same stores and work in the same industries as nonfundamentalists do. Because journalists were bored by Pinesdale, they ignored it, and most Americans have never heard of this particular banal, ordinary polygamous community. According to sociologist Sarah Whedon (2010), the media purposefully makes a spectacle of polygamy-­ style sexuality and the potential within it for abuse. Journalists avoid focusing on polygamists’ faith or the full complexity of life in the Principle. They use elaborate images of “outsiderness” to sell newspapers and attract readers on the Internet. We respond to these archetypal threats to our innocence and our monogamous Victorian values; we “gawk in horror at their sexual practices and at the way they treat women and children” (ibid., 2). Ironically, once you live inside polygamy, as I have done, you find that most polygamists are essentially Puritan in their marital and sexual modesty. For example, I attended a priesthood meeting with married couples to discuss the proper decorum and behaviors in matters related to sex. I never saw such blushing and nervousness in my life; the discussion was painfully conservative and naïve and, above all, proper. The American public is especially vulnerable to the “save the children” mentality, and the media often uses this idea to create mass hysteria about plural marriage. For many viewers and readers, the subject of pedophilia can be both disgusting and compelling. According to James Kinkaid, Americans are obsessed with the topic and are quick to shout “sexual abuse!” even where they cannot find it (case in point, the 2008 raid on the community in Eldorado , Texas). We are quick to label polygamist behavior as illness or deviance, especially if we don’t quite understand it or if we allow a particularly nasty case of abuse within a polygamous family to represent all plural families in our minds. Jon Krakauer’s book Under The Banner of Heaven focused on sensationalized cases of polygamous life that “fueled the fire of mass hysteria about polygamy” (Whedon 2010, 1). The book recounts one horror after another without providing a single glimpse of how most polygamists live their day-­ to-­ day lives. This type of...

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