"Professor Marston and the Wonder Women"

Al99

Well-known member
Intriguing reviews. I've added the movie to my list of movies to see.
 
Well, dunno...

Quote:
the polyamorous relationship between his wife and his mistress
Still seems like it's going to come across as painting polyamory to be "kinky fun" pasted onto monogamy rather than a serious relational form.

My first reaction would be to agree with you - sex sells and all that....

But Alan of Poly in the Media wrote the following today after seeing the movie:

We saw Professor Marston and the Wonder Women — and yes by damn, it's the loveliest, most down to earth, most kind and moving representation of a polyfamily ever to appear on screen as far as I know. All those mainstream reviews I've been posting here? It's at least as good as they led us to expect.

Polyfolks are telling of literally crying at finally seeing such a straightforward representation of what they're about. (For instance, a thread on reddit/r/polyamory.)

https://www.reddit.com/r/polyamory/comments/7695ov/professor_marston_the_wonder_woman/

I seldom find time to go out to the movies - but almost certainly will stream it when it becomes available.
 
Well writer/director Angela Robinson is of the feminist ilk so I wouldn't expect the poly to be exploited for cheap thrills. Of course, I don't expect the marketing of the film to not be titillating. I may actually pop into a theater and watch this some afternoon.
 
I saw it this week and loved it. I thought they did a great job with the story.

I know there is some controversy over the granddaughter saying that Elizabeth and Olive didn't have a sexual relationship, but regardless it doesn't take away from the poly aspect of the story in my eyes. And anyway, how many of us really know the sex lives of our grandparents?
 
Sadly it appears that there is very little truth to the movie. Marston's granddaughter is speaking out against the film and quite clearly stating that it has twisted the facts of their family. The poly slant seems to be more made up and real. It also appears that the filmmakers did not consult the family. :/

Lynda Carter, who has been very close with the Marston family is also speaking out against this.


https://twitter.com/RealLyndaCarter/status/919216536967106561
 
I've been following the controversy for awhile.


Here's the thing, from what I can tell, Christy Marston never even met her grandfather. He died in 1947 and I can't seem to find her age, but it seems that her father Pete, was born in 1928, which means he was 19 when his father died. So it seems highly unlikely she even met her grandfather and if she somehow was alive, that she would have little if any independent memory of him.


How many people today, in 2017 are out as poly to the world? Lots of people are still closeted. Now imagine the 1920s - 1940s. Christy is specifically saying that the two women didn't have a sexual relationship. To me the issue if the two women had a sexual relationship isn't the primary story here. But it's not surprising that they wouldn't have been open with their kids about it, especially in that time.

The fact is that Elizabeth named her daughter Olive. The fact is that Marston fathered children with both Olive and Elizabeth. The fact is that Marston and Elizabeth adopted Olives children, which means they had his name. The fact is that they all lived together and that Olive stayed home and raised all the children. The fact is that Elizabeth financially supported the family. The fact is that the women did continue to live together after Marston died in the 1940s until Olive died.

What about Olives journals? The ones where she refers to her anniversary with Marston? What about the house that they lived in, Cherry Orchard, with the a-joining bedrooms so you could get from Olives bedroom, Elizabeths bedroom, Marstons office and a bathroom directly, without having to go out to the hall?

Can any of us say we really know the details of our grandparents sex lives?
 
Sadly it appears that there is very little truth to the movie. Marston's granddaughter is speaking out against the film and quite clearly stating that it has twisted the facts of their family. The poly slant seems to be more made up and real. It also appears that the filmmakers did not consult the family. :/

Lynda Carter, who has been very close with the Marston family is also speaking out against this.


https://twitter.com/RealLyndaCarter/status/919216536967106561

The family and Lynda Carter are both relatively conservative. So of course their (female) grandparents never had sex.

But that doesn't make it true. Sex between women does not result in children so it is impossible to 'prove' that it happened in a concrete way (unless there is some sort of a paper trail which has happened very, very rarely.) I'm an historian and it is extremely difficult to determine for sure if any two women had sex with each other. It was either strongly condemned so people hid their experiences or it was literally inconceivable so that two women have sex with each other may not even think of it as 'sex' since sex was only penis in vagina. For a long time, English culture didn't recognize that women could have sex with each because no bio cock was involved. (There was even a legal case where a woman accused of having sex with another woman was acquitted by the judge because in his eyes, clearly women could not have sex with each other.)

If you are wondering about male-male sex, in Western culture, that was almost always condemned and illegal - because there was penis involved, it was sex of the most perverted kind. There are hundreds of court cases involving what we would call gay sex across the West - and since gay sex was seriously feared as a major disruptive act, unlike woman on woman sex, it got a lot of attention in the medical, legal, social, and cultural arenas.

I highly recommend the book about these three people, 'The Secret History of Wonder Woman' by Jill Lepore. Lepore is one of my favorite historians and one of the best in my opinion. She does not definitely say that Olive and Elizabeth had a sexual relationship because the 'proof' is not there. They never wrote anything definitive down. All three kept their children in the dark about the nature of their relationship - Olive's children fathered by Marston were said to be fathered by an imaginary deceased husband. This was told to the children.

As skadhi notes, there is a great deal of 'circumstantial' evidence that the two women had a sexual relationship at some point, likely a romantic one as well. They lived together for the rest of their lives even after their mutual partner, Marston, died. There is no evidence I am aware of that they had other lovers after Marston's death (although if they did, this would not surprise me).

So yeah just because the family was unaware (or wanted to be ignorant) of their grandparent's relationships, doesn't mean it didn't exist.
 
Well I navigated a maze of clicks to get to that interview. I got the impression that the granddaughter was mostly upset that she did not get a piece of that movie. There is no way that she can say for certain what is or isn't true. The best she can say is she has no idea, yet she makes statements as if they were fact. She is definitely rallying the comic book geeks against the film.

If this has anything to do with Marston being ashamed that people might think her grandmother had homosexual relations, then I feel sorry for her.

And who cares what Lynda Carter thinks. She wasn't there either.
 
DVD Now Available

Just an fyi - the DVD of the movie is now available from Amazon and other fine stores. I did not get to see it at the theater, so I did purchase and view the DVD. I found the movie reasonably intelligent and enjoyable, but it is highly dramatized when compared to Lepore's heavily researched book "The Secret History of Wonder Woman" (which I just completed at Opalescent's earlier recommendation).

Opalescent wrote:
As skadhi notes, there is a great deal of 'circumstantial' evidence that the two women had a sexual relationship at some point, likely a romantic one as well. They lived together for the rest of their lives even after their mutual partner, Marston, died. There is no evidence I am aware of that they had other lovers after Marston's death (although if they did, this would not surprise me).

The two ladies lived together for another 38 years after Marston's death until Olive Byrne passed at the age of 81. Olive was the live-in partner and the younger of the women. Elizabeth Marston lived to be 100. Another lady, Marjorie Wilkes Huntley, also lived with the Marstons and Byrne off and on through the years, and with the other two ladies periodically after his death as well.

Lepore does not have any direct evidence that the ladies were involved romantically or sexually, although she does report that one of the children witnessed Marston having sex with Olive Byrne on one occasion. Al
 
After seeing it, it was a bit like 50 Shades for polyamory. It was a film full of coercion and trampling on consent.

Interesting perspective - and the first real negative comment I've seen about a movie that got generally good comments from the "poly press" (such as Alan M's Poly in the News blog site, and Cunning Minx's Poly Weekly - both very well established poly sites) - doesn't make your opinion any less valid, however.

And I do see your point - the movie reflecting the traditional story that Marston "coerced" Elizabeth into accepting Olive (albeit in a somewhat dramatized and sexy manner in the movie). Although apparently it all worked out - given that the ladies remained together for 38 years (until Olive's death) after Marston's relatively early death in his fifties. In a sense, this may reflect many poly stories - a married couple in which one partner wants to transition to poly and the other really doesn't but makes the effort anyway either out of love for his partner or out of fear of losing them. Sometimes it works out - sometimes not. It did in our case - my wife having asked me to open our marriage. Although I reluctantly agreed in the beginning, after a good amount of work and processing, I do now self identify as "voluntarily" poly. Al
 
I finally watched this today. What a great film. I saw no coersion or trampling on consent. As I suspected, the film was heavy on feminism. The sex scenes were tasteful, not gratuitous. The triad was shown to come about organically. I enjoyed the bondage element, which was also tastefully done. I had no idea the comics were so full of sexual imagery.

(Available for streaming on hulu)
 
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