Throwback Thursday — Love And Lust Edition: Polyamorous Love With Professor Marston

No, your generation did NOT invent the throuple…

Hey Fleshbot fans! Here we are at the next movie in my Throwback Thursday Love And Lust Edition series and this week we’re taking a look at Professor Marston And The Wonder Women, a mainstream film from 2017 that depicted a real life  polyamorous throuple made up of of William Moulton Marston (Luke Evans), his wife Elizabeth Marston (Rebecca Hall), and their girlfriend Olive Byrne (Bella Heathcote).

The film takes place in the late 1920s in the Boston area where the Marstons taught and conducted research at Harvard and at Radcliffe College (basically, Harvard for women at the time) in psychology, which was then a part of the philosophy department. Olive is one of William’s students who he hires as a research assistant. On her first day of work, Elizabeth is blunt with Olive and tells her point blank “Don’t fuck my husband.” See who is left out of that statement? Elizabeth and Olive start to have some sapphic leanings, especially after Olive conducts some behavioral research on a sorority by attending a ritual where she paddles the pledges over her knee, and then William follows suit with the three of them finally having admitted attraction.

Their research is in the DISC theory of emotion and behavior, originally an acronym for Dominance, Inducement, Submission, and Compliance--- wait, dominance and submission, you say? Yeah, these people were psychologically kinky, and it’s fascinating. A modernized take on DISC is Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and Conscientiousness. You can even take a DISC assessment online if you are curious which is your strongest trait. Also, another aspect of the Marstons’ research was working on creating the first lie detector.

As word gets out about the unconventional lifestyle of the Marstons to their community and people like Olive’s boyfriend, the response is not welcoming at all. The Marstons are fired from their university jobs and just in time for Olive to announce her pregnancy. Yikes! They tell everyone that Olive is a widow who has come to stay with them with her child. To make income, William becomes the author of the first Wonder Woman comics, drawing on his research and also his penchant for fetish artwork and, well, you can see how the golden lasso grew out of the lie detector, for instance. Because of the time period, things were very difficult for their family to gain acceptance, and the comics raised more than a few eyebrows belonging to those who felt they needed to censor the comics.

I will not spoil it too much, but this film is not only an interesting origin story for the Wonder Woman comics, it really delves into some of the pitfalls of polyamory still experienced today by those who espouse the lifestyle today, despite our current culture (at least for the moment) being more accepting of ethical non-monogamy and LGBTQIA+ individuals. Also there are naked people having threesomes in this movie. Go check it out.

Professor Marston And The Wonder Women can be found for streaming (at press time) on Amazon Prime Video, Tubi, The Roku Channel, and several more streaming services.