I don’t think that such problems are relevant to our culture given the low marriage rate among young people. When a big percentage of young men either cannot afford to marry, or don’t feel like marrying, or are scared of doing so, or have various other reasons to put it off continually, gender ratio becomes less relevant. Of course, it is still to some extent relevant for the dating scene as distinct from marriage practices.
It probably won’t happen, but I could see a society maintaining a grossly imbalanced sex ratio by keeping women in a form of polyandry that would amount to sexual slavery: Three or four (or more?) half-brothers would share a “wife” (more like a breeding unit), who would bear each brother a son or two and then maybe have one daughter. The half-brothers would grow up and then get their own breeding slave to repeat the process.
I’m sure I’m overlooking social, economic or psychological reasons why this would never come about, but given a sufficiently fanatical anti-woman culture it makes a chilling scenerio.
I’d say there are probably two reason why it hasn’t happened (at least, not on a large scale) in the past. The first is simple jealousy. It takes a pretty radical society to convince men to share their women. (Although not, apparently, the other way around.) Of course, it helps if they don’t think of them as people, more as incubators or spoils of war or at least less valuable and more of a burden than men. It also helps if your culture thinks in terms of finding a husband to “take care of and support” their daughters - if one man can’t do that alone, then two or three taking on the task together isn’t a far leap. So yeah…chilling.
Secondly, in the past, you had long gestational times and infant mortality holding you back. One woman can breed roughly one child a year, even if there are five men having sex with her on a regular basis. When infant mortality is high, she’s going to lose a lot of those babies, and end up with only a few living to adulthood - perhaps enough to replace herself and her husbands. Back when everyone needed a lot of people in the tribe to make it run, and the focus was on increasing your population numbers, that would have been a terribly inefficient way to do it. Now, in countries experiencing overpopulation and the problems it brings, is exceeding replacement levels really required? Well, yeah…chilling.
I think we may be poised at the brink of the first time in history when that sort of “sufficiently fanatical anti-woman culture” may potentially become a reality.
Well in The Handmaid’s Tale (where the problem was merely the shortage of fertile* women) Handmaids were essentialy property of the state and loaned to “deserving” Gileadian men for a year for the sole purpose of producing offspring. It was serial polyandry (Handmaids were only assigned to one man at a time), and men still had access to barren women for recreational sex.
*Over the course of the novel it’s implied that male infertility is at least as big a problem as female infertility, but admiting that fact is utterly incompatible with the Giledian power structure.
That form of polyandry has happened in a few societies, most notably Tibet. But I think it’s more a reaction to a scarcity of arable land. In areas where land is extremely scarce, breaking up a plot of land for inheritance can lead to plots that can’t support anyone. So brothers will marry the same woman to keep the land intact. I’m not sure how this amounts to sex slavery any more than your average forced marriage.
What we do see is bringing new people for marriage. In India we see more cross-caste marriages. In China there is a thriving industry bringing in “wives”- often bought or kidnapped- from North Korea and Burma.
And then history shows us that the easiest remedy to a gender imbalance is to get ride of some boys. One good war can remove a lot of extra men from the scene.
Even Sven, this is generally true for say 1/3 of Chinese women. Hell, it might even be ballpark for 2/3 of Chinese women. But at least 1/3 of the Chinese women in the Eastern Seaboard and Tier 1/Tier 2 cities are generally ***not ***like what you described. And this means for a population greater than the US, the dualism of China comes into play. For Example, In Shanghai, most women control the family finances and the men do the cooking and housework. Most of the male cousins in my extended family are nice but not sucessful, their wives make much more money and the husbands are pretty domestic.
In my previous office environment (Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Wuhan, Nanjing, Chengdu, Xiamen), it was roughly 50-50 male female professionals (and most of the admin/non professional jobs were done by women), 50-50 split or better on the management side for women.
My 15 years of working in Mainland China (based in Shanghai with offices around the eastern seaboard), we had staff from all over China. The best and brightest working for a foreign corporation. The women generally did not conform to your description (and again, I think your description is valid for a big chunk of China).
Of course. I think it’s good that the two of us on on here to round out each other’s experiences.
My experiences are mostly with people who grew up in the countryside where traditional ways of life still have a strong grip. And no doubt in a low-ranked school you’ll find more than your fair share of lazy and unambitious people. I was surprised to find the whole “grandparents live with the family, women don’t work, having sons is paramount” thing was so alive, because all the magazine articles I’d read about China said these practices are dying out. I guess some areas didn’t get the message!
As far as I know it isn’t a form of “sexual slavery”, but polyandry has been practiced in Tibet and other places for centuries.
The reason polygyny is far more common is because both men and women are much more comfortable in such relationships than in a polyandrous marriage. It’s just more natural to us; and while being more natural doesn’t make something better, it does make it more comfortable.
Of course it’s not sexual slavery. Marriage is more about property & children than just sex.
But I wouldn’t feel personally “comfortable” with either polyandry or polygyny–because I was not raised in a society where either practice was the norm. Culture is learned, it is not “natural.”
To be clear, people will naturally be more comfortable with polygyny than with polyandry, because with polygyny, knowledge of genetic parentage is somewhat less uncertain.
Not all societies consider knowledge of genetic parentage to be important. Genetic parentage is most important in property-based agricultural societies. In societies with different inheritance patterns, everything is different. There are places where men specifically seek out women who have already given birth to at least one child, since that is pretty solid proof that they are fertile.
While it is true that such characteristics have existed in human societies, it’s not really a factor that is likely to become relevant in economically mature modern societies (developed and devloping) like China and India or any other place with a large population (urban or rural), significant territorial holdings, or significant participation in the global economy. While male dominance may be becoming a hindrance to development in developing countries, property ownership and inheritance are likely to continue being a major factor in most societies.
Sexual behavior has a heavy instinctive component. It’s not all culture.
Perhaps your instincts would make you more comfortable in a polygynous marriage.
Mine wouldn’t.
We talk of “instinct,” we’re talking about something that’s not dependent on a particular individual’s preferences.
But would it make you even less comfortable to be in a polyandrous marriage? Taking the dynamics between them and their impact on you into account, of course.
Der Trihs’s point wasn’t that polygyny is more instintively comfortable than monogamy, but more instinctively comfortable than polyandry. While I’m not sure whether it’s due to “instinct”, it’s indisputable that the majority of historically and currently polygamous cultures are polgynous, not polyandrous.
Even if we zoom in from the culture level to the individual level, the majority of polygamous people even within our culture and subculture here in the nominally monogamous US are polygynous, not polyandrous. That suggests to me that there may very well be a biological factor at work. Nothing proven, of course, but it’s a reasonable hypothesis.
I guess, now that I think on it, that may be why, as I said in my earlier response, “It takes a pretty radical society to convince men to share their women. (Although not, apparently, the other way around.)” It seems like it takes great external pressure - hostile environments, family weakening inheritance systems, etc. - to convince many men to share one woman (or perhaps to convince one woman to share many men), but it takes far less pressure to create cultures which have convinced many women to share one man.