To my chosen family, with love.
In the spring of 2007, I came upon a happy surprise in my new apartment: free cable television. As a recent law school graduate studying intently for the Colorado bar exam, I took full advantage of this circumstance, and got hooked on a little show called The Girls Next Door. This reality program chronicled the lives of magazine tycoon Hugh Hefner’s three 20-something live-in girlfriends: Holly Madison, Bridget Marquardt, and Kendra Wilkinson. The girls lived with Hef in the Playboy Mansion; they dressed up
Over the last few years, I have spent a lot of time thinking about alternative family structures; that is, conglomerations of familial interactions and relationships that encompass something different than the nuclear structure. Traditionally, our culture defines “family” as the nuclear family—a structure centered on marriage and including children born out of that marital relationship. This conception of family is imprinted on us from as far back as the beginning of western civilization. In Politics , Aris