Sister Wives: the Musings

Carly goes on these weird binges of bad reality TV shows. Tonight, it is "Sister Wives." She claims that she just wants to see what the hype is about, but she goes pretty slack jawed on the things right away and secretly watches the rest of the season when I'm not looking.

This stuff is nuts. This guy is clearly a bit of a stud who likes the attention of women, and is lucky enough to have found a religion that supports his lifestyle. He actually converted to the religion. It's a weird thing. The big reveal in the first episode is that he's going to bring another wife (total 4) into the mix. He's running the idea by his children.

Part of the episode, they prep the audience by talking about how he keeps his wives basically separately, that there's no sexual congress between the lot of them, and so on. But here's something kind of creepy about the situation: in addition to being married to three women, with whom he has 12 or 13 kids, he is out there dating another chick.

I wonder, when the guy goes and proposes to the new wife, is she excited about the prospect of being a 4th wife?

They think of these things in terms of fate and divine provenance, but all I see is a bunch of women being brainwashed into allowing their husband to go out and date other women. You can hear the concern and jealousy and justifications in their monologues... they tolerate the behavior, but it puts them on edge. They know that, despite their relative brainwashing, their husband isn't truly their own. He could leave them all and go set up shop wherever. Three of the wives are not legally married to him, and when he dies they won't get a cut of his estate if wife #1 decides to probate the fucker.

And then there are all the kids. In an age when population growth is more or less the signpost for the apocalypse, how does this guy get away with quadrupling his genetic footprint on the planet? Why, instead of producing a million kids, don't they adopt some needy babies? Does this only work because they were lucky, and none of their kids have genetic disorders or autism or anything else that makes it relatively difficult? What if one wife only produced blind offspring, or all her kids had CP? What then? How would the family deal with that kind of stigma?

I have glanced over the internet about the subject of the show and he just doesn't come off, to me, as a genuine guy. He puts on a good show, but I don't buy it. I think his mommy used to put him in dresses and made him dance when he was little, or maybe he was breastfed until he was nine....