Not sure where this belongs (GQ or here), so if it is in the wrong forum, mods please move.
I happened to be watching Mutiny on the Bounty, and if I remember correctly, the book was much more detailed about sex and relationships.
The people of Tahiti had sex whenever they wanted with whomever they wanted. There was no idea of jealousy, and if one of the two people didn’t want to have sex with the other, that was it. No hard feelings, no hurt feelings, just move on to the next person. You could even go back to this person if your mood changed.
Sounds like a pretty good deal to me. And since the people of Tahiti were as far as I know a peaceful lot. When the English came and tried to instill christianity, monogamy was certainly a topic.
So, my question is, did monogamy exist before religion, or was it something invented to keep the huddled masses in line (and away from potential intermingling of the royal class with the unwashed)?
This book is one of the more revelatory things I’ve ever read. People’s behavior actually starts to make a bit more sense after reading this thing. The basic idea is that the economic changes that stemmed from early agriculture, including the notion of property, drove a desire to more stringently control sexuality. This is not about religion per se. It would only seem so since traditional hierarchical religious belief is an ideological offshoot of our historical agricultural origins. Here’s an interview that one of the authors, Christopher Ryan, did for Salon. Here’s a thirty minute video interview.
There’s no way you can look at actual human behavior and conclude that we’re straight up monogamous. Naturally, some couples are monogamous, but the point here is not universality, but rather modern behavioral tendencies and our likely historical behavior. And looking at those general tendencies, humans like to sleep around. A lot. Women as well as men. The only argument I’ve seen against the thesis in Sex at Dawn is that humans practice serial monogamy, but even that is iffy.
The human penis is quite enormous compared to other primates (suck on this, chimps!), and its design actually creates a vacuum in the vaginal canal that removes previous men’s semen. That’s design by gangbang. Our testicles aren’t as big, but they’re still a decent size comparatively and we create four times as much seminal fluid as our nearest relatives. In addition, testicle size could have started shrinking with the advent of monogamous agricultural culture ten thousand years ago to reduce us to the middling size balls we currently possess.
Now, this is not my area of expertise, so I won’t be defending their thesis to the death. But it’s going to take an equally well thought-out and well-researched position to argue against the wealth of evidence than Ryan and Jetha bring to this issue. They make an extremely strong case that humans participated in multimale, multifemale mating patterns until relatively recently (10k years ago). I highly recommend people take their points seriously.
Agriculture is absolutely a deciding factor. In traditional agricultural societies you find strict controls on female sexuality, because lineage becomes very importance due to inheritance. A man has a strong interest that his farmland is handed down to is actual children.
In non-agricultural societies or societies with unusual circumstance, you find a great deal more variety. And of course in our own post-agricultural society we began to give up these “values” pretty much as soon as we left the farm.
True. Agriculturalists/pastoralists have greater strictures about legitimate lineage.
And lest we forget, hunter-gatherers have religions, too. Numerous religions through history have been OK with polygamy, and in turn there were pre-Christian societies where monogamy(*) was the norm.
(And when we say monogamy, do we necessarily mean lifetime* monogamy, vs. serial? How about cultures that demand monogamy for purposes of marital legitimacy, but tolerate extramarital dalliance?)
We must of course be wary of falling into into the fallacy of wanting to believe we all were one happy free-loving commune in harmony with nature before the patriarchal meanies came in and took away our fun. Was more complicated than that (it always is, with humans).
Well, no. That is a fantasy with no basis in reality.
In simple terms Tahiti was basically a Fuedal society, with a small overclass of nobility, a middle class of craftsmen, fishermen and landed farmers and an impoverished underclass of serfs and slaves.
The women who had sex so freely with Europenans were invariably poor middle class or, in most cases, serfs or even slaves. They engaged in prostitution with sailors just as whores in Europe did, and for exactly the same reasons.
Many of these “women” were sold by their families in order to pay off crippling debts. As Cook noted “A virgin is to be purchased here, with the unanimous consent of the parents, for three nails and a knife.” As Hamilton later noted “Many beautiful girls were brought on board for sale, by their mothers. In exchange for their daughter the mothers demanded a small axe”.
These girls were not sexually liberated and happy. They were the children of impoverished dirt farmers sold into prostitution by their own families. For some reason a 14 year old girl being sold into sexual slavery by her parents is considered to be a sign of gross sexual inequality and repression when done by people in India or Thailand. (or the US, though ta least it is illegal there). Yet precisely the same act described in Tahiti has come to be seen as sign of how sexually liberated the women were.
This fantasy was promoted in large part by the travelogues of the time. These were incredibly popular, potentially made a lot of money for the authors, and of course sold a lot better if full of scary monsters, grisly deaths and, of course, sexual fantasies. If you read the fuller and more reliable accounts from ship’s journals, you will receive a very different picture, one of forced sexual slavery and rape.
In reality people in Tahiti d not appear to be have been much more sexually liberated than people in Europe. The very poorest people were forced to engaged in promiscuous sexual activity for money, just as they did in Europe. The landed farmers were promiscuous in youth and largely monogamous once a child was conceived, exactly as they were in most of Europe at the time, and the upper classes held to at least a pretence of monogamy.
If by “a peaceful lot” you mean “in a state of constant warfare, and with an intra-clan homicide rate at least 10 times higher than the modern US” then yes. If you mean “actually peaceful in any normal, modern, western sense of the word” then, no.
You do realise that Tahitians had been practicing religion for over 100, 000 years by the time Europeans arrived. Right?
Even if you mean “Abrahamic Religion”, since early Christians, Jews and Moslems were not monogamous, I still have to wonder what you actually mean.
Good post** Blake**. Except for the 100,000 years part – was that a typo?
When I think of monogamy it seems like a form of redistributive sexuality for men. Now that we’ve passed the point where we recognize women as actual human beings I wonder what kind of chaos polygamy would cause for lower class men. Wouldn’t it be better to be Brad Pitt’s fifth wife than the only wife of a Doritos salesman? Let the market decide.
Do you people realise that the people of Tahiti, and that other alleged sexual paradise, Samoa, had been practicing agriculture for at least as long as the people in Europe?
Except that HG societies are no more likely to allow sexual freedom then agricultural ones. In fact I can’t think of a single HG society that is more sexually free than some agricultural societies.
In contrast in some HG societies, especially in Australia, having sex outside a permitted relationship resulted in immediate punishment by death.
We’ve done this a bajillion times on these boards.
First off, no, we are not naturally monogamous. I don’t think any society on Earth was even officially mongamous until 2000 years ago. Polygyny has been the mimimum standard for all agricultural societies as far as I know, while serial monogamy and polygyny are the lowest standard for all HGs that I know of. SO no, we are clearly not “naturally” monogamous, nor even factually monogamous. That has no bearing whatsoever on the idea that issue at hand, which is one of promiscuity.
The fact is that even in societies that permit polygamy/promiscuity, the vast majority of humans practice monogamy where they have the choice. In societies such as experimental communes where people have a choice about the type of relationships they formed, polygamy invariably fails and prompts numerous complaints and is a major cause of desertion form the commune. The only time that the vast majority of people engage in polygamy/promiscuity of any kind is when they are forced to do so for religious, social or economic reasons.
In the sense that humans are “naturally” anything, that means we are not naturally promisuous. Sure, some people buck the trend, but by that token humans naturally eat their own shit, since some people also volountarily do that. But if I said that we were not naturally coprophiles nobody would challenge the statement.
To the extent that volountary promiscuity exists with human societies, it seems to be a case of young people engaging in promiscuous sex until such time as they can form a stable pair bond. In this respect we are no different from most other animals that are widely considered to be monogamous.
Oh Og, not this again.
There is no good evidence that it is true.
Even if it were true, it posits a stage in human history where women had sex with multiple men within a 5 minute period. Because after 5 minutes all the vacuum in the world ain’t gonna have any effect in fertility.
We’ve been through this a bazillion times as well.
It’s not true. Morris had to cherry pick his examples to make this claim work. had he included all the great apes his correlation would have failed to materialise and human testicles wouldn’t have been anomalous.
Even if that were true, testicle size and semen production are highly dependent on both available protein and penis size. Since humans have both larger penises and consume much more protein than other apes we wold expect them to have larger testicles and produce more sperm.
There are about 40 other reasons why this “theory” of Morris’ is so much horsehockey. You can do a search of previous threads if you really want to see it dissected in mind numbing detail.
Yeah, right. So have Australian Aborigines, most of whom have only been practicing agriculture for 3 generations, have also seen the the same evolutionary shrinkage? Or are you positing that Murries have bigger balls than white fellas?
Probably a good idea since it appears to make no sense at all.
Not really, since I see very little actual evidence.
The biggest problem they have is that we really only have two groups of people in the whole world who have been continuously and mostly isolated non-agriculuralists: the Eskimoes and the Australian Aborigines. Both groups showed some variation in sexual mores, but in general neither were more sexually liberated than most agricultural groups.
And totally fail to explain why Australian Aborigines and Eskimos did not, despite never being agriculturalists and, in the case of Aborigines, never having contact with Agriculturalists.
I will when they start making sense and start being supported by evidence.
No, if anything it’s probably an understatement. As far as we can tell religion pre-dates humanity as a species, Certainly we have pre-human gravesites that would seem to indicate belief in an afterlife.
Well amongst the lowest classes “polygamy” is rapidly becoming the norm. What is it now, 80% of poor Black and 70% of poor White children are born outside marriage and over half of those will not be living with the father by age 5.
It’s not the lower class men who are affected by this, it’s the women. Marriage as an institution primarily benefits older, poorer women. In every society it is overwhelmingly enforced by older women. Young women don’t benefit from marriage because they are at peak attractiveness and fertility and need nothing more to obtain stable relationship. Young men don’t benefit because they are also at peak attractiveness and fertility, as well as fighting ability and productivity. Older men don’t benefit because they at peak social influence and wealth while their decline in fertility is minimal. It is older women who stand to gain by enforcing long term pair bonding. And universally this is the group that promotes and enforces the concept most strongly.
Moreover it is the poor women who are affected by this new polygamy. Men and wealthier women generally have something to offer in terms of resources or prospects. In contrast poor women do not. With a free availabilty of sex due to birth control and no societal demand for marriage, in order to obtain a stable relationship women are being forced to trade upon the only thing that most have left to bargain with, which is their reproductivity.
The idea that monogamy was implemented to aid men makes little sense, since few societies had monogamy until just a few thousand years ago, yet all had marriage, and because men as a group don’t actually benefit from it. Some men do, but precisely as many must lose out. It’s a zero sum game after all. Similarly for the idea that monogamy ensure paternity, which is a statement that is often made but never supported. Fidelity ensures paternity, not monogamy. Paternity can be just as certain under polygamy as under monogamy, and just as uncertain.
The current trend amongst the poorest segments of society simply highlight that this is the case. It isn’t men that are having less sex or losing income and options, and it isn’t rich women. It’s poor women, and largely poor older women, older in this context often being mid-late 20s.
Most hunter-gatherers living today that we know of are boringly similar in their sex and relationships to the most modern suburbanites - they are mainly monogamous and live in nuclear family groups, but oftimes cheat, and divorce is not unusual - some practice ‘serial monogamy’. If they can get away with it, they sometimes attempt to make their partner monogamous with them, while having nookie on the side … but this is frowned upon.
I would posit that monogamy was invented for the same reason that democracy was invented, for the same reason that education was invented, and for the same reason that individual freedom was invented. Human beings can think, and can thus figure out which systems of social organization lead to human happiness and flourishing. Monogamy is the system of social relations that produces stability and low levels of sexual violence. Polygamy, regardless of the details, leads to high levels of rape, child abuse, and all kinds of other bad things.
As pointed out earlier much of it seemed to be about owning property and inheritances rights.
Spirituality pretty much is hard wired (invisible friends, gifted or ‘lucky’ individuals) and I don’t see the link to monogamy, though a structured religion is a different story, that is a power and control structure which could impose rules such as monogamy.
When did the Polynesians arrive on Tahiti? I thought it was much less than 100,000 years ago. That is not to say that they weren’t practicing a similar religion before they arrived.
For Moslems, what do you mean “were?” Are not monogamous is more correct. And not just royalty. Our tour guide in Cairo was the first of two wives of a not at all rich husband. Until she dumped him.
Still it is surprising that so many people still think Margaret Mead got it right.
If we judge by the Old Testament, the early Jews valued monogamy, while a few powerful men got away with marry multiple wives. The early Christians quite certainly demanded monogamous marriage with no ifs, ands, or buts. But fish pot’s idea that it was invented to “keep the huddled masses in line” is absurd. For the entire history of western civilization, the huddled masses have generally wanted monogamous marriage. It’s generally the royal, the wealthy, and the powerful men who have tried to take multiple wives. So the truth is exactly the opposite of the OP’s thesis.
And I’m with Blake one hundred percent of the way on debunking the myth of the noble savage in Tahiti or anywhere else. (I assume the 100,000 years things was a typo and he meant to say “100’s or 1000’s of years”.)
As for the 100k years in **Blakes **post, he is clearly talking about Tahitians and their ancestors, whoever they were. He clarified that in a subsequent post. It’s likely that religion predates our emergence as a species some 200k years ago, so the 100k years is a lower estimate.
OK lets define the term monogamy, does it mean:
1 one person for all the foreseeable future as long as both are living - I contend that this is identical to marriage (or captivity but that’s another subject)
or
2 one person at a time, dating without cheating.
First, thanks for your first post. Very informative.
For you and the rest of the SDMB, my apologies on my misinformed ideas and opinions on the island and people of Tahiti. My knowledge of the subject is entirely encompassed by the book “Mutiny on the Bounty” and the three movies made during the 20th century on the subject, starring Clark Gable, Marlon Brando, and Mel Gibson as Fletcher Christian.
The good news is, a real question came from this sad, pathetic bucket of “knowledge”. I’m so ashamed.
And as I pointed out earlier, this is clearly a crock.
First off it fails to explain why monogamous marriages are the norm in HG societies where people have no property.
Secondly it fails to explain why societies in the Middle East, India, South America and South East Asia manage, to this day, to function perfectly well with effective systems of property and inheritances rights despite monogamy being uncommon amongst the wealthiest men. If we go back just 200 years, the vast majority of the world did not enforce monogamy for wealthy men, and the vast majority of the world seems to have managed owning property and inheritances rights just fine.
So the hypothesis falls down on the two most basic tests of its predictions.
No.
Firstly, it isn’t identical to marriage. That is, unless you contend that King David wasn’t married to his wives, or Henry the Eighth wasn’t married to his wives or that Mohmommed wasn’t married to Ayesha or that Alexander wasn’t married to Roxannae etc. Marriage already has a meaning. It is a meaning accepted by both dictionaries and by 99% of the world’s population. That meaning is not identical to any form of lifelong monogamy. Your contention is clearly false.
Secondly, neither definition is applicable to the vast majority of societies 200 years ago. They aren’t even applicable to most Abrahamic religions. So even if your bizarre definition as correct, the vast majority of societies have functioned perfectly WRT owning property and inheritances rights despite not being monogamous.
The early Jews were commanded to be polygamous. A man was obliged to have sex with his dead brother’s wife if she had no children, for example. The Jews were also commanded to have sex with all th4e virgin women and girls in the lands they conquered. These are not the laws of a religion that valued monagamy.
I would be interested in seeing your evidence that bronze age Jews valued monogamy in any way.
Nope. That is a concept that originated with Paul, 50 years at least after Jesus’ death. And even then there was bitter argument over it.
