Brian Gulliver travels. I’m not entirely sure where or how because I only discovered this programme during Episode Three. He has already visited two other lands; the first being run entirely by doctors, the other where every other person is a lawyer with only one law.
This week he travelled to a very interesting place called “Osminia” where marriage is outlawed and those found guilty receive a ten year sentence.
There is an obvious joke here that is hardly worth mentioning but I will do so anyway.
Ten years?
Is that all?
Brian Gulliver discovers all sorts of interesting facts about the place as he meets the various people of the town. On arriving from a land called “Eng” he is invited to speak to the townfolk about life back in Blighty. He then continues to explain how society in England is based upon the sanctity of marriage with monogamous, life-long relationships that are deemed as the perfect way to procreate and raise children.
There is stunned silence from the audience and then hecklers pluck up enough courage to start bickering at the speaker and calling for his head. The irony, of course, is that Brian Gulliver does not know the meaning of fidelity, or rather he knows it but he has never practiced it in his life.
As he goes to meet the Mayor of Osminia at his house, he realises just why the crowd were after his head when he mentioned marriage. On arriving at the house, a woman duly opens the door and Gulliver assumes that she is the Lady Mayoress. She is completely affronted by this and tells him in no uncertain terms that she has never been so offended in her life. She is merely the mother of the mayor’s children. He puts his foot further into an already sticky situation by asking her if she is joining them for dinner.
How very dare you! She announces. I am the mother of his children not a lover or a social friend.
And so it goes on.
He makes a similar mistake with the next woman he meets who he assumes is a lover of the mayor. No, she is the woman who he socialises with. There is a third woman who is the lover.
Bizarre? Well different to England, says Gulliver.
The mayor continues with his justification by stating that it is impossible to find these three roles within one person and so therefore it is much better if there are three people in one’s life.
Before all the feminists jump up and down in apoplexy, this was not a misogynist existence. Women had three men just as men had three women. As the man said, nobody can possibly fulfil these three roles successfully.
Why the hell do we try?
But try we do.
Unless you are a particularly fortunate person, or someone who is happy to settle for less than what is required, it is almost impossible to find someone who you want to raise children with, have glorious sex with and socialise with too.
Maybe the ideas of Osminia are not that far-fetched after all.
If you are lucky you may actually get a two out of three but the Osminian’s are quite rightly pointing out that this is less than satisfactory. As far as they are concerned, they have found their Utopia. But then again, one person’s Utopia is another’s dystopia.
It sounds so terribly complicated to the unenlightened, this notion of having a polygamous existence but what the writer, Bill Dare, has carefully done here is to distinguish between roles and responsibilities so that the nasty green-eyed does not need to rear its intensely ugly head.
With polygamy as we understand it, there is still the possibility of jealousy and envy creeping into a relationship. Sharing a partner with another is sometimes difficult, even for those who are allegedly enlightened. There is always the possibility that one person can believe that they are being treated with less respect, less time or less consideration than the other(s) even though that may not be the case.
In Osminia, this is not a problem because everyone has their triplicate of roles, only with different people.
Sounds perfect.
Of course, in reality it is not that simple. I would suggest that you are probably not using every ounce of intelligence if you are able to do this. Or alternatively maybe you are doing things in a very Zen-like manner – non-attached. Maybe this utopia is really the answer to many problems.
My problem with it is that I rather like socialising with my lover. But I suppose I am one of the lucky ones.
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Today on the radio there was Midweek with Libby Purves. Two of her guests were talking about their upbringing. The first one mentioned how he had a cold and distant mother, who was such an evil cretin that she asked the head teacher of her son’s boarding school to tell the child, at the age of fifteen, that he was adopted. He met his birth mother some years ago alongside his half-siblings but he had no idea who his natural father was and didn’t have any inclination to find out.
We are who we are, he said. Does it really matter if you were fathered by a one night stand? In his case, with either a band leader, an army officer or some other lovely that his mother delighted in bedding.
The other guest that I listened to had quite the opposite upbringing. Her grandmother was a Tibetan nun who had escaped from the Chinese uprising and fled to India where the Dalai Lama had once retreated. Her mother was a product of an exceptionally warm and loving relationship between the nun and a Buddhist monk. She herself had a Swiss father. Her parents met in circumstances of great interest and did all the lurve thing.
It just made me think. There are thousands of different relationships, all across the world. Nobody has a monopoly on theirs being unique, and yet every single relationship, be it mother and child, lover and lover, husband and wife, friend and associate – they are all different despite having some similarities.
If this is the case, then why on earth do we try and impose conformity on relationships? Why do we have a so-called preference for one state of being, i.e. monogamy when it clearly does not work for the majority of people?
Are we not deceiving ourselves?
What has this monogamy lark got to do with Midweek on Radio Four? Well it once again demonstrates that in trying to stick to this matrimonial bliss and continue to perpetuate the myth, we are doing a real disservice to people who know that they cannot live up to this expectation of perfection.
The woman who treated her son so appallingly was clearly not a happy bunny, and in no way should that be used as an excuse for what she did. However, maybe there were some significant things missing from her life. Maybe she just couldn’t cope.
Maybe she would have been happier and more able to live life in Osminia.
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And of course, on my monogamy rant, this week could hardly go by without mentioning Charlie Sheen.
He apparently now holds the record for the Twitterer who got to more than a million followers in a quicker time than anyone else. One could argue that the world is full of madly nosey people which is part of the reason, but I would hazard a guess that Charlie Sheen has managed this so-called feat because people are interested in his sexual life.
Here is a man who is clearly at odds with the world, and in many ways is pretty fucked up. But he has now been sacked from his job not because of his perpetual bouts of needing rehabilitation from his drug addiction but because he has now chosen to live with both of his lovers and get up to a tidy little threesome. The women are lovers too and everyone is supposedly happy with the arrangement.
But not Warner Bros, who have reneged on the contract, nor Sheen’s ex-wife who has said that she does not want her children anywhere near this man until he has stopped living in this polygamous way.
I’m not going to defend Sheen. Compared with the brilliance of his father, he is a mere shadow of a man, and evidently has problems. However, I am not convinced that his insistence of living a polygamous life is one of them.
It might not be for you or for me, but it suits him and who are we to judge? All he is doing is being honest. He is saying that one woman will not cater for his needs. He wants a little more. He wants a bit of naughtiness, if that is the right word to use.
If we, as a society, were being more honest, we would admit as to why he has so many twitter followers, i.e. that we can connect to this man in the vain hope of him discussing his sexuality and his sexual acts because we sure as hell cannot discuss it with our nearest and dearest, and in actual fact we are genuinely interested in how this polygamy works.
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Back to Osminia, I guess.
