The 2017 Women's March. Photograph by Evy Mages When I first saw the Sister Wives episode about the 2017 Women’s March, the whole world seemed to be in peril. It aired in early 2018, when democracy was faltering and the nation was beset by gender-relations turmoil on a scale I’d never seen. Everything felt so binary and cartoonish that I worried we’d lose sight of the complexity of things. In that context, I turned on a hotel TV and found myself inside the sixth episode of the 12th season of Sister Wives, which was ostensibly about the largest single-day protest in US history but was actually about the intricacies of love. I don’t want to overstate the intellectual and aesthetic achievements of a mid-tier reality television show about the ups and downs of a family of Mormon polygamists—a patriarch, his four wives, and their 18 children—but actually, the Women’s March episode is phenomenal. It’s complex and searching, politically provocative and humane. I thought about it for a long time after watching it. And this weekend, when I re-watched it for the eighth anniversary of the march, I found that it basically held up. The episode opens on one of the family’s adult children, purple hair and ripped jeans, asking two of their moms to attend the Women’s March. This is a big and complicated request, both logistically and emotionally, but the moms agree to go—not because they’re feminists but because their child, Leon, has just come out as gay and has asked for their support. (Leon is not the name they were using in 2017. Back then, they were identifying as a lesbian but have since come out as trans.) Meri and Janelle are conservative Mormon women, so they’re uncomfortable with marching on the Capitol—but they’re even less comfortable with turning their backs on their kid. In the end, whether to go to DC is not really a question at all. The season prior, Leon had gathered all five of their parents and come out. They sobbed and explained how hard it was to accept who they were—because of the conservative culture they grew up in, because of the strict teachings of their church. “I’ve been told my whole life that being gay was bad, it was evil, it was selfish,” Leon said while their parents hugged them and told them they were proud. “My children are loved no matter what, okay?” Kody, the patriarch, said. Separately, he told two of his wives that it’s his job to love and it’s God’s job to judge. At home in Nevada, Leon was slouched and reticent, smiling nervously if they smiled at all. But in DC, Leon transforms. At the march, they’re playful and confident: taking charge, giving directions, pressing protest signs into Meri and Janelle’s hands. Meri notices Leon’s joy, and perhaps that’s why she stays—soldiering through this carnival of pussy hats and megaphones, of ambulances and the National Guard—despite her fear of violence and her uncertainty about where she fits in. Repeatedly, Meri and Janelle remark on the crowd’s passion and energy, but also its anger. They’re taken aback. “Should we be here?” they ask one another. “Politically, it’s very much different than my opinion,” Meri says with more diplomacy than I’d expect. Other TV shows addressed the Women’s March—Modern Family fed viewers pablum on the wage gap, Roseanne mocked the hats—but Sister Wives was different. This was not a narrative about how feminists are right and Trump is wrong. It was about the complexity and fragility of solidarity, the fraught and powerful nature of love. These moms wanted to support their child badly enough to sacrifice their own comfort. It was a shockingly empathetic depiction of women who attended the march ambivalently, who wanted to belong but couldn’t quite fit in because of the conservatism and the polygamy, because of everything else that they were. “It’s interesting because I’m sitting here thinking that I agree with a lot of the empowerment for women that’s being spoken of here,” Janelle says into the camera, “but I know that [feminists] would look at us and say, ‘well you live a lifestyle that’s counter-empowerment.’ ” Still, she refuses to judge these people who she assumes would judge her—and actually she’s kind of open to their ideas. Previously, she’d acknowledged that feminism could benefit polygamist women—that it might make them more independent and powerful, that it might help insulate them from abuse. But she also thinks polygamy might benefit feminists. Being in a plural marriage, she says, is “very liberating as a woman” because she can “be absolutely independent and do my thing and still have a great husband and family.” She insists on her right to “define my marriage and have the freedom that I want.” In 2018, before I was a parent, I felt taken aback by the notion that I’d have anything to learn from polygamists. But now it seems more plausible. This weekend, after watching that episode, a friend and I joked bitterly about how if we had sister wives, we might be able to better manage our lives: our kids, our households, our jobs. In a polygamist family, there’s always someone to help—to prep meals, to hold your kid while she cries, or to take you to the doctor in an emergency. It’s the village model, but the village is also your nuclear family—which is, yes, helmed by a man with multiple wives, none of whom enjoy even remotely the degree of social, financial, or sexual power that he does. The sister wives believe some polygamist women are “brainwashed,” but they insist not all of them are—that some are capable of rationally deciding that this is the kind of life, and the type of freedom, that suits them best. Later, I brought all of this up with another friend—proposing that a sister wives situation is sort of a heartland funhouse version of the communitarian fantasies of the anti-loneliness folks on the left—and he was incensed. How was I willing to even entertain the show’s suggestion that a solution to women being overwhelmed was not a wholesale reordering of gender relations but simply to have sister wives, to ask more women to do more work? I know that he’s right. But I also found myself wondering what woman could possibly get out from under her responsibilities for long enough to create that kind of egalitarian world. Perhaps that’s how Janelle and Meri summoned the energy to attend the Women’s March in the first place; the sister wives had distributed the load. I know that I’m being inflammatory. I don’t actually envy these women’s lives. There’s a galling scene, in advance of the march, when Meri and Janelle nervously tell Kody about their plans. Immediately, he makes it about how polygamists are more oppressed than women. “It’s a frustration to me,” he says to the camera, that “I’m being told by my wives that they’re going to go off on this other march, but my rights aren’t even acknowledged by the law.” Delicately and expertly, Meri and Janelle defuse his outrage. They downplay the march, claim that it’s not really a protest—that it’s actually just a million women gathering to gently remind lawmakers that they count, a fun sorority that happens to be meeting on the National Mall. “I just look at it as women supporting each other,” Meri says, “and is that not what we’ve always kind of been about?” Sister Wives is explicitly a propaganda vehicle for a band of activist polygamists who want to show America that they’re normal, that they deserve more rights. They want to present the most palatable version of themselves and their faith. At one point, the camera crew rounds up a few of Leon’s non-Mormon friends who dutifully say that polygamy seems kind of fine and not at all incompatible with feminism, looking a little like captives as they speak. And I should say that the family has since spectacularly collapsed; three of the marriages dissolved, and Kody is now monogamous with his youngest wife. Many of them have left the church. Leon seems to barely have a relationship with their parents at all. It’s a brash choice for a show about polygamy, of all things, to tackle the Women’s March. It grates when religious conservatives position themselves as radically pro-woman or tolerably pro-gay—particularly in a time when other religious conservatives are on a relentless and spectacularly successful campaign to roll back women’s and queer people’s hard-won gains. But in a sense, that’s why the episode felt refreshing. Sister Wives could have no sweeping political thesis, because everyone’s position was so vexed. It could not plausibly fall back on the piousness and shallow triumphalism of the moment, so it was just astonishingly humane. Onscreen, this family was engaged in a thorny negotiation: parsing their differences in values, struggling to balance their need to belong with their desire to give love. Throughout that episode, nobody retreated into easy, binary political thought. Nobody whipped up baroque justifications for hating the people they disagreed with. It was the inverse of that moment’s tribalism: not casting out apostates but incorporating them, maintaining the fabric of the family despite its seemingly unbridgeable gulfs. Here was a queer person folding their conservative moms into a feminist march, and here were those moms marching alongside their child—everyone grasping for a more expansive moral vocabulary, relinquishing the illusion that they have sole custody of moral truth. In that episode, and the ones leading up to it, Meri talks a lot about not knowing what to say to Leon, worrying that she’ll tell them the wrong thing in the wrong way. She’s never known anyone gay before, but she’s doing her best to be supportive. You see her bewilderment, her grief over Leon’s future being different than she expected, that her own dreams as a mother won’t come true. And you also see her love for her child, her hope that they can still be close, her attempts to understand Leon, to bridge their gap. “You’re really good at wanting to learn,” Leon tells their mother after dinner on the night of the march—and it’s a backhanded compliment, for sure. Leon is reminding Meri that her ignorance and ambivalence have hurt them, but they’re also saying something true: Meri does want to learn. She’s curious and humble. In a way, that’s the show’s whole point.The post Somehow, Reality TV Polygamists Best Captured the Women’s March first appeared on Washingtonian.