Poly Movie Review - Trois

Is it possible for someone with an American accent to say "menage a trois" and not sound pretentious? I have yet to hear it.

While adding Poly movies to my queue, Netflix recommends "similar" movies to watch. Most of the ones recommended on the basis of poly movies sound pretty awful, but if there's a chance it's a hidden poly movie, I add it to the queue too. Troi sounded like one of the awful ones, and I wasn't disappointed.

The summary says "Seeking to put excitement into his humdrum sex life, young Atlanta attorney Jermain Davis pressures his reluctant wife, Jasmine, to engage in a menage a trois with curvaceous bisexual stripper Jade Owens. But the choices made by each of them soon expose deep wounds and come back to haunt them in this steamy indie thriller.

Let me tell you just how bad this movie was. It was so bad, that the movie isn't even over yet and I've already started writing this review.

This was not a poly movie. This was a cautionary tale against non-monogamy and against kink. This was a third-rate Fatal Attraction. In addition to it being completely sex-negative, it was also poorly written.

( The entire plot, including the ending - the movie isn't worth watching IMO so you could read this and skip the movie, or you could skip even the spoilers and save yourself entirely )

Oh my god - this movie is part of a trilogy!  There are two more of these movies out there!  I will not be reviewing them for ya'll - I think it's safe to assume the rest of them are just more of the same.  I wonder if they thought it was clever making a movie called Trois into a trilogy?

So the moral of the story is, if a man says he wants a threesome to "expand and explore his marriage", he's lying - he really just wants permission to fuck another woman; if a woman likes having a threesome, she might be gay or freaky and that's bad; and "you can put yourself out there, but you never know what you're gonna get - people be crazy yo", so don't fuck up your marriage by having a threesome.

I think I ought to start signing my reviews "Movie Reviews by Joreth - I watch the crap so you don't have to".

Poly Movie Review - Shortbus

http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/Shortbus/70053448?trkid=2361637 - Netflix
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0367027/ - IMDB Database
http://amzn.to/2wd1KOz - Amazon

I'm just going to come right out and say it ... I didn't like this movie. I know, it's all groundbreaking with its use of real, actual, penetrative sex among the actors and it's gritty look at alternative sexuality. But I didn't like it. I didn't like the characters, I didn't like the situations, I just didn't like it.

Shortbus is a movie that takes us on a series of vignettes of random people with no other connection to each other except the Shortbus - an alternative club that features a drag queen host and just about every sexual desire you can imagine. We have the sex therapist who has never had an orgasm, the gay couple who want to add a third to their family (well, one half of the couple wants to add a third), the creepy voyeur across the street from the gay couple, and the depressed dominatrix.

Yeah, it belongs on a poly-ish movie list because the movie embraces all forms of relationships and sexualities, including consensual non-monogamy. I just thought it was a crappy movie that tried too hard to be avant-garde. The moral of the story seemed to be "sex with strangers fixes everything", and that bores and irritates me.

But just about everyone I know loved that movie, so don't avoid seeing it just because of my review. We might have different tastes in films, and I seem to be an outlier on this one.

Poly Irony

Irony: I have fewer concurrent sexual partners as a polyamorous person than I did as either a "monogamous" person, or an openly poly person with monogamous-identified partners.

In a conversation today, I realized something funny. We were talking about couple-privilege and how some people who come to polyamory from within a previously-monogamous marriage have never had to experience poly dating as a single person, and how that seems to affect how they manage their relationships, often to the detriment of the single person coming into the relationship.

We were comparing our own entry into polyamory, and I pointed out how I had discovered and decided to explore polyamory when I had absolutely no sexual partners at all, so my experience has been shaped by that of a single poly. Because of that, when I finally started having poly relationships, it never occurred to me to date "as a couple" because I had always dated as an individual.

So then I started reminiscing about my past relationship patterns. I have never had a boyfriend, that I can recall, that I remained sexually fidelitous to. I do not defend my actions. I was wrong. But I can explain the motivation. Loving my then-boyfriend has never been enough to prevent me from either falling in love with, or becoming attracted to, someone else. Without any examples of ethical non-monogamy to guide me, I resorted to cheating. Sometimes, I had one boyfriend and one fuckbuddy, but quite a few times I had more than one fuckbuddy and a handful of guys that I just "made out" with, and a couple more that I had phone sex with.

When I was single and in between "real boyfriends", I usually had a couple or a few guys I could turn to for sex - guys I considered friends and we could talk and do things together that wasn't sex, but it wasn't the same kind of stifling, possessive "relationship" that I would have with "boyfriends". But it was rarely fewer than 3 guys I could call on.  The lack of commitment from these casual partners meant that I needed to have more than one on standby, for when they were unavailable.

Later, when I discovered the word "polyamory" and began trying to date polyamorously, I met a lot of guys who had never heard of the word before, but who said they could "try it out" - in other words, guys I call "playas" who were just looking for casual sex anyway and thought that polyamory was effectively "permission to cheat" or honest casual sex. These same guys always dumped me when they got a "real girlfriend" because "real relationships" are monogamous. So, when I was dating mono-identified men, guys who always chose monogamy, I had more sexual partners than when I date poly-identified men, mostly because the mono-identified "playas" were not emotionally fulfilling, so I had plenty of room and emotional energy for more people, and they had no interest in how many people I was fucking because it was just casual sex to them, even though they never admitted that, but it was crystal clear in the difference in behaviour between how they treated me, and how they treated the girls they called "girlfriend".

Once I started dating actual, poly-identified men, I have pretty much tapped out at 2 concurrent romantic partners, but only 1 partner that included intercourse (that has historically always been a point of contention with me, actually, and not my own preference - I'd much rather have 2 partners who both included intercourse). Right now, I have 3 partners - 1 partner who is, in every sense of the word, my romantic partner, 1 who is only vaguely defined as "partner" and does not include intercourse, and 1 who is also my romantic partner that includes intercourse, but I only see him twice a year, at most. So, in practice, it could be argued that I still only have 2 partners and only 1 of whom includes intercourse, with a twice-a-year exception, although our emotional relationship spans the distance & the time.

So I find it ironic that being polyamorous has actually reduced my partners and limited my options. This isn't a complaint. I'm not interested in polyamory for the numbers. I'm interested in polyamory for the freedom. But I come away from these musings with 2 observations.

1) People who think polyamory is all about racking up points on a sexual score card, collecting a harem, or regular debauchery, have no idea what polyamory really is.

2) People who think monogamy is the safety net, where you can limit yourself and your partner for physical and/or emotional safety have no idea what monogamy really is either.


**Note**
It should be noted that I am, of course, aware of plenty of polyamorous people who have handfuls of romantic partners, even handfuls of sexual partners. I am not saying that polyamory necessarily places limits on the numbers of partners. After all, that's contrary to the whole point of polyamory, which is "multiple" and usually preferred by people who want "freedom", as I do. I'm just saying that polyamory also doesn't necessarily mean that you will have lots of partners. Sometimes, being polyamorous means that you only have one partner, or that you have none at all.

I find that, for those of us who are seeking freedom within our relationships, often getting that freedom satisfies the need for freedom, whereas getting lots of partners does not necessarily mean that we feel free. Sometimes, just knowing that I *could* have another partner is enough, and I don't have to go out and get another partner just to make myself feel free.

**Note 2**
It should also be noted that I am, of course, also aware of plenty of monogamous relationships that actually are monogamous, meaning that there are no additional sexual/romantic partners, and that monogamy does not necessarily have to include cheating or that not all monogamous people are interested in casual non-monogamy.  My point here is that monogamy also doesn't necessarily mean that you will have that sexually exclusive arrangement, even if that's what you signed up for, and that the word "monogamy" does not mean the same thing to everyone. (there's a Sex And The City episode on that:

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