'couple to throuple' was always going to fail

could i please never have to hear about another straight man's boner while his girlfriend kisses another woman, tysm

Friends! Thank you so much! I officially hit 100 paid subscribers this week. I am so grateful to every person who thinks my work is worth paying for. Here is a testimonial from a paying subscriber, if you’re still on the fence about taking the plunge:

I subscribe because I love good pop culture criticism and nowadays it’s hard to find it amidst the overflowing content we have incoming. Frankie’s coverage of queer sports gives me access to those stories of struggle and joyful resilience. Above all, the newsletter is informative, it’s great writing and it also is FUN!

Please consider becoming a paying subscriber of this newsletter so I can write more deep dives like this one. You can do so below:

I’m still in the (admittedly slow) process of moving off Substack; if you want to pay for a subscription but don’t want to give money to Substack, feel free to use my Venmo or PayPal. Just reply to this email and let me know you’ve sent it so I can add your email to my paid list!

---

I’m proud to have blurbed Michael Waters’s forthcoming book, The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports, alongside some of my favorite authors.

mwaterswrites

A post shared by @mwaterswrites

My full blurb reads:

Michael Waters has written a book that should revolutionize the way we think about sport and gender. By examining the history of the gender-diverse athletes who have always competed—as well as the systems that have tried to limit their participation—The Other Olympians is as relevant today as it would have been during the events it chronicles nearly a century ago. In showing us our history, we will perhaps not be doomed to repeat it. The Other Olympians is a warning; let us heed it.

You can (and should) pre-order The Other Olympians from your favorite indie bookstore. It’s out this June, just in time for the Olympics.

---

I also have a piece up at The Daily Beast this week about Peacock’s new polyamorous dating show, Couple to Throuple.¹ The show is about ethical non-monogamy², a topic which is trendy right now, with recent features in the New York Times, New York, and The New Yorker, and on the heels of several new books and memoirs written about opening marriages. On the show, established couples are looking to add a third member to their relationship to form a triad—or, a "throuple."

via The Daily Beast

Non-monogamous content creators and influencers—as well as some of the singles who appeared on the show—have roundly criticized the format of Couple to Throuple for several things, including throwing inexperienced couples headfirst into what is notoriously the hardest relationship dynamic, not providing enough tools for the couples new to navigating non-monogamy, prioritizing the couples experiences and desires over the singles, and not allowing the singles the opportunity to have fully fleshed out narratives or needs. 

As I write in the piece:

Any argument that polyamory thus deserves the same messy representation as monogamy falls apart, however, when considering how Couple to Throuple could affect real-world practitioners of non-monogamy. Polyamory is a stigmatized relationship structure with few legal protections practiced largely by queer people. It doesn’t matter if people watch The Bachelor and come away thinking negatively about the people on the show; no one sees the franchise as a referendum or statement on monogamy the way that people unfamiliar with polyamory are likely to see a show like Couple to Throuple. Monogamy has the luxury of bad representation because monogamy doesn’t need PR (though it really should—it has massively high rates of failure, with infidelity being the leading cause of divorce).

But here's the thing: this is the only kind of show about non-monogamy that could have been made for a mainstream audience. That's because mainstream culture, while coming around to the idea of open relationships, still sees opening a relationship as okay as long as it's in service of a primary (ideally straight) dyad (most of the memoirs, like Molly Roden Winter's More and Rachel Krantz's Open are written by women in straight primary relationships). Many couples open their relationship to pursue sex outside of it but still view the marriage or established relationship as something "primary," deprioritizing and therefore dehumanizing their other partners. 

To understand why that is, you have to understand the modern polyamory movement. Much of that history was cut from my Daily Beast piece, but I think it’s important and so I want to talk about it here.