Monogamish

An exploration of Sex, Love & Monogamy Feat. Dan Savage, Christopher Ryan & more.

6,4

Giancarlo's Recommendation

As many of you know, the director Tao and his brother Francesco are childhood friends of mine and we both share an Italian playboy father. I remember once my father made my brother and I wear ski clothes to pretend we were going skiing in order to persuade one of his girlfriends that he was going away, the truth was that another girlfriend was moving in the house for a few days. Needless to say that this was a bit confusing for my 10th year old psyche. I couldn’t reconcile the values of truth and honesty preached by my mother with my father’s behaviour. Unfortunately for my future mental health I suppressed those emotions of confusion and sense of being lost. Tao’s father Prince Dado Ruspoli, famous eccentric “tombeur de femmes’ who was credited to have jump started the “dolce vita ” in Rome in the 60s also was not a big believer in monogamy.

Tao and I, one year in venice beach, had the idea to make a documentary about monogamy and non monogamy and the growing American movement called Consensual Non Monogamy. After his divorce, he decided to go on the road to find out what experts and normal people think. The film premiered in a packed cinema at the Rome film festival. mangu.tv interviewed NYU Professor of Sexuality Zhana Vranglova on the alternatives to monogamy, check it out on our blog mangu.tv/blog/zhanavranglova. Also watch “Estado Impuro” a film about 3 friends persuading 2 monogamous couples to open up for one afternoon.

The institution of marriage is in crisis. 1.1 million Americans get divorced every year. And it’s not just the couples who suffer: half of American children will see their parents get divorced.

Meanwhile, the “traditional” values that have shaped our understanding of love, sex, and marriage are losing their hold on our culture. The last half century has seen dramatic changes in attitudes about sex, work, gender roles, and the distribution of social and economic power.

But despite all these transformations the ideal of a monogamous loving couple hasn’t changed one bit.

It’s as if we are held captive to a certain picture of what a loving relationship must be like, which continues to exert a powerful influence on the popular imagination. But why? Where does this ideal come from? Is it inevitable? This film attempts to answer these questions through a very personal reflection on Ruspoli’s own marriage, divorce, and family history. What he discovers about his very unconventional family, and about the history and psychology of love and marriage leads him to question everything we take for granted about marriage.

Why are relationships so hard? Recovering from a very public divorce, Tao Ruspoli took to the road to ask this question to advice columnists, relatives, sex therapists, historians, anthropologists, artists, philosophers, sex workers and ordinary couples. The results of this exploration of sex, love and monogamy were so unexpected and so surprising he had to make a film about it.

Synopsis

"Monogamish is like a starter course in the prevailing thinking around non-monogamy as taught by its foremost writers, philosophers, and therapists."

IndieWire

"An unexpectedly robust, eye-opening take on the history, as well as the contemporary state of marriage, love, and sexuality."

Film Inquiry

"Monogamish addresses the fact that a lot of people want to be monogamous but are in fact human, and stray."

Metro