The kind associated with Middle Eastern or Asian potentates*; or for a modern example, Hugh Hefner. A guy who has scores or even hundreds of women available for sex. So just how does a mere mortal practically handle this? Do such men usually have an inner circle of regulars who are effectively their common-law wives, with the rest being merely on the side? Do they simply have sex with a particular woman until the novelty wears off and someone new comes along? Given enough available women to glut even the most voracious appetite, how much sex does a man end up choosing to have?
*I swear I had the word typed out before I realized the pun.
I am not sure that “extreme” (or even any) polygamy was as common as you think, or that it was considered favorably
Of all the Persian kings, Ḵosrow Parvēz was the most extravagant in luxury and pleasure seeking. He searched the empire for beautiful girls (a document specifying their qualities has survived, see Ṭabari, I, pp. 1025-26; Christensen, L’Iran, p. 475), and it was rumored that he had kept some 3,000 of them in his harem (Ṭabari, I, p. 1041). This was clearly an aberration, and the people so profoundly abhorred his keeping of those girls in seclusion and denying them the benefit of marriage and progeny that they counted it as the fourth of the eight crimes for which Ḵosrow Parvēz was tried and executed (ibid., p. 1074).
Someone did the numbers for Wilt Chamberlain’s claim to 20,000 sexual partners and calculated roughly 1.5 partners per day.
Maybe the male body can handle more but I’d say that 2-3 ejaculations does seem like a limit to what a person can manage in their youth, and that drops with age to not much. Given that, an average of 1.5 ejaculations per day over the course of your life seems plausible. If you can manage to find a different partner for each occasion then that basically puts you at Chamberlain’s record.
But, at that point, it’s probably better to term it “masturbation by process of another human body” more than “a relationship with another human being”. Polygamy implies some sort of relationship.
I think there’s a certain type of male sexuality, found especially among the rich and powerful, where the sex with women, itself, is almost irrelevant. It’s all about the bragging rights. It doesn’t matter how many women you actually do sleep with, only that you can sleep with more than other men. A king with a thousand concubines might not necessarily even have sex with any of them.
IIRC, according to Islamic law, a man can only have up to four wives. Also, he has to prove he can care for each extra wife financially and each must be treated equally to the others. As a result, it is not that common and only the very well off can manage it.
Hugh Hefner was not married to the women at his place. He just built the ultimate bachelor pad that women wanted to stay at.
ETA: I was travelling in the Caribbean and met a man from Saudi Arabia (along with his gorgeous wife and kids). I was a teenager at the time so maybe more brazen than I should be and I asked him about multiple wives. He told me that you either need one wife or four wives. If you have two they will gang up against the man making him miserable and if you have three wives, two of them will gang up against the third woman and make her life miserable (and by extension the man’s life miserable). But with four the dynamics workout again and it is a happier household. Was he telling a teenager a story or did he mean it? I do not know.
Not in the sense of legal marriage, but a mansion filled with attractive young women whom it was understood were there to have sex with Hefner certainly counts for the question posed.
But with no payoff it’s just a lot of work. Being intimate with your partner you love can certainly be a good reason. Lacking that is there another reason? Good cardio exercise?
I don’t know your age but I have noticed that since I passed 70 I can still enjoy sex very much without an orgasm. 75 now and it takes a full week to recover 100%. I figure I have about 2 in me so if I only let go once a week I am good to go all the time.
The founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith, had scores of wives, with the LDS church acknowledging 40, although other scholars place the number higher. Of course, he was killed when still 38 years old, so that number would have been higher had he not died young.
His successor to mainstream Mormonism, Brigham Young, had 56 known wives and other leaders also had dozens of wives.
Warren Jeff, incarcerated former leader of the polygamous FLDS offshoot had 78 wives, and other leaders of other branches of various polygamous groups also had dozen or scores of wives.
There have been some accounts by various wives, both modern and historical, of some of these leaders, and it varies.
Many of these Mormon polygamists had or have favorite wives who would have a higher frequency of sex with the leader than others of his wives, but new wives were regularly introduced, often with little attempts at emotional connections.
Looking at the track record of Mormon leaders, I would assume other autocratic leaders would be similar, and my WAG is that would be a very rare case, if it ever happened.
Having never been an autocratic ruler myself, but ISTM that part of having power is needing to exercise it at times.
I am not sure about the laws of the land when the others you mentioned had “wives” but, I feel safe in saying, Warren Jeffs only had one wife and lots of women living with him. He may have played at having 78 wives but he only had one. That truth would have become apparent after he died and 78 wives asserted their claim on his estate and they found out he had one wife and 77 mistresses.
I remember reading someplace (sorry, can’t cite) that early civilizations that had polygamy had certain things in common; wet nursing, young (preferably virginal) acquisition, menstrual cycle monitoring. They hypothesized that these were tactics for maximum offspring, rather than sexual excess for its own sake. It claimed that there were some recorded cases of people complaining about their burdensome sexual duties. --shrug–
The article actually fails to mention how Wilt came up with that number in the first place. Courtesy of Wikipedia;
More on the topic of the OP, I have a vague memory of watching a video in high school about one of the final Empresses Dowager of China, which stated that it was three years between when she became one of the Emperor’s wives and when he bedded her for the first time.
Why would there have to be such frames to the situation? Given unlimited, sultan-type, power imbalance-based access, I think it would vary chaotically, both within a polygamist’s life and between polygamists.
I think most guys in that situation would have sex as their whims tell them. Maybe even most of it would end up being “chance encounters” wherever, whenever, however, with whomever one finds sexually attractive at that specific moment. Variety is the spice of sex life.
