This thread on Big Love, the new HBO series about a polygamous family – http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=362625 – got me to thinking: In societies where polygyny (one husband, several wives, but never the reverse) is commonly practiced, does that produce a shortage of women? Wouldn’t it leave a lot of men unmarried, and with no possible sexual outlets but masturbation, homosexuality, or spending money on prostitutes? What are the social effects of that?
WAG’s:
-
Yes, to a certain extent, it does leave some men ‘unpartnered.’ I’m not sure how great a proporting of multi-marrying-men there would be even in a society where it is considered ‘common.’
-
On the other hand, I’ve heard that in some historical contexts, polygny was counter-balancing a regular disparity in gender population, especially when infant mortality rates of male babies was high.
You left out at least one possible outlet – having affairs with women who are in a polygynous marriage. (by the laws of supply and demand, it would seem likely that at least some are feeling underappreciated 
)
Yesss . . . I’ve also read that, in the context of Arabia, it was a way of sharing the men in a society where a great many men died young in battles and blood-feuds.
I read a newspaper article about this very thing a few years ago (I think it was in the Arizona Republic). The polygamous societies there tend to be small villages in remote areas, and the young men there were banished from the town by the elders, who marry the young women these young men would otherwise compete for. It was pretty sad, the boys were basically abandoned by their families. If I remember correctly, some of these young men end up in homeless shelters in St George, Utah in noticable numbers.
Yes, it was in the Arizona Republic. A search for ‘polygamy’ at azcentral.com give the following exerpt of the archived article available for purchase:
*POLYGAMIST TRADITION LEAVES NO ROOM FOR MANY YOUNG MEN
September 28, 2003 •• 1422 words •• ID: pho81638422
They are the forgotten victims of polygamy, young men pushed out of towns like Colorado City as older men take on more wives. CAPTION: 1) Isaac Black, with daughter, Zowie, 1, in Roy, Utah, grew up in the polygamist community of Colorado City, but left the church and community in the mid-1990s. 2) James Black (with his horse, Maverick) near his Coalville home. Black says family support is key in the transition to the outside world away from Colorado City. Most have eight grades of education *
I doubt that the “social effects” are possible to measure.
In the New York Times this weekend, there was an article about polygamy, and they suggested the real losers were poor men. . .that perhaps women were better off in the society since it was better for them to share a piece of a rich man than get all of a poor man.
Yes. It is common practice in the polygamous (non-LDS) Mormon communities out west (such as Colorado City, AZ) to “run off” a fair number of the teenage boys to counteract the gender imbalance caused by the (frequently older) men having multiple (frequently much younger) wives. Dr. Phil did some shows in the last couple of years featuring two boys who were cast out of such a community. There are also books that discuss this phenomenon. Go to Amazon and search on “Mormon polygamy” to get a whole list.
I’ve read about the polygamous communities in Arizona. Basically, a teenage boy will get exiled for even the most trivial of transgressions. They’re driven into a nearby city, dropped off on a street corner somewhere, and left to fend for themselves. It’s absolutely sickening.
As for the Muslim world, maybe I’m just taliking out of my ass here, but could a shortage of women be the reason why the Middle East seems to have an unlimited supply of young men who are willing to blow themselves up? I’d expect that life might get pretty depressing for a lot of guys when they realize that their chance of ever getting married is pretty much exactly zero.
Well, in the Muslim case the high birth rates of those societies does partially allieviate the problem - since the men tend to marry women a fair bit younger than them (IIRC, the “ideal” woman to marry is half the man’s age + 7 years) that increases the number of women available; of course, a pyramid marriage system like this can’t be sustained forever.
In Richard Posner’s book Sex and Reason, he states that the political opposition to polygamy has come, not from women, but from men. As others have noted, assuming a roughly 50 50 split between the sexes, then if some men are in exclusive relationships with multiple women, then other men are left without partners.
In practice, few Muslim men actually do have more than one wife. The few that do, mostly the extremely wealthy, are not in high enough numbers to upset the balance.