The 'insistent straightness' of polyamory stories
Plus: toxic masculinity as 'crypto pyramid scheme,' 'Anatomy of a Fall' fancams, and more in the weekend roundup.
Y’all.
I’m trying to finish up this book proposal and I had a very mildly injured kid at home this week. (Slippery shoes and slides with bonky metal parts! What are you gonna do?) So it’s…
Straight to the links
“Toxic masculinity is a crypto pyramid scheme.”
Swimsuits and beach body horror.
Anna Merlan is brilliant and absolutely vicious on “the insistent straightness of how polyamory is covered in mainstream media,” where “the same blind spots, and the same prurience, appear again and again.” In the same way that “all successful countercultural moments essentially get co-opted and defanged,” she argues that “a malformed,” “sexy, pop-cultural, hierarchical version of polyamory” has arrived “in Park Slope and similar environs.” It’s one in which “secondary partners” are “often praised for making the primary marriage better, like a sort of human-shaped marital aid.”
That last story was published by Flaming Hydra, a journalism collective with a paywall, and I assure you it is worth the $36 a year. No journalism project in recent memory has given me such a sense of relief and excitement as this one.