And, according to a YouTube video I saw awhile back, stripping the lady naked and examining her first to make sure she wasn’t an assassin smuggling in a weapon was also part of it.
Based on my teenage experimental all-day orgasm days, the stuff indeed runs out, resulting in dry ejaculations pretty fast, and those aren’t all that pleasurable, bordering on slightly painful. Like oil, it takes longer to develop than to burn through.
For the ‘once a day long-term’ idea, please note I was talking about ‘wanting’, not ‘being capable of’. Overall, I was going by the seat of my pants, based on living roughly 40 years as a sexually active male, having countless conversations about such things with other men, and general life experience. Personally, bunny phases with new partners have shown me that three times a day is feasible, but it never lasts (no need to, either).
Extreme polygamists don’t run out of new partners, but still, we are talking about a situation where sexual gratification is always available at the flick of the fingers, regardless of partner willingness etc. I feel there’d be some King Midas type issues mixed in there, and activities like archery or falconry (going with the sultan theme) would often feel preferable to yet another rump, of which there will always be an effortless opportunity available.
Allegedly, Warren Jeffs in prison was (still is?) a compulsive masturbator, and in multiple times per day. Methinks there are some mental/addictive issues going on with him.
Also tried to hang himself on at least one occasion, and may have attempted suicide by hunger strike.
I wish to emphasize that Jeffs is not a typical polygamist if you hold up a Muslim man with a couple or four wives, or even a FDLS member with a few wives. In addition to being in a position of power where he can really monopolize women, there’s other stuff going on with him as well aside from the compulsive sex activity.
I wasn’t suggesting continuous all-day wank/tantric sex sessions. You have to take hydration breaks if nothing else. That and the chafing… but a combo of regular sex and masturbation can add up.
But I was more referring to what would motivate anyone to … conserve their semen, as it were. Old notions of the stuff not being renewable came to mind.
I’m not young anymore, either, and I still want, a lot. And anecdotally, so do most of the guys I know well enough to talk about this kind of thing. So we have competing experiences here.
Like … every other non-disabled man, you mean?
“I still sleep with women, Mandrake. But, I do deny them my essence.”
Heh, I’m reminded of a porno comic titled “Bill of the Beach” where the protagonist, superhumanly potent and desirable, decides to finally test just how many women it takes to wear him out. At one point he’s ejaculated so much that he chugs a five-gallon jug of water.
Didn’t you watch seaon 2 of “And Just Like That”? Kegels, kegels…
The Coolidge effect…
IIRC, the Egyptian Pharoahs went for something slighly opposite. A pharoah had a harem, and multiple wives - but married his sister often because it kept the blood of the Gods within the family, and limited the number of more distant relatives who could use a direct relationship to a previous pharoah as a reason to try to usurp the throne.
Which brings up another question - presumably, even way back when the necessary experts or schedulers realized the approximate fertile time in a woman’s period?
Meh - there’s little evidence than anyone really knew (or often, even cared) what a woman’s fertile period was prior to the 20th Century. Lots of ancient speculation it was during menstruation, or just after, or just before. Random guesses, really. The whole conception thing was a mystery. Lots of uncertainty in ancient times about just how long a pregnancy was or wasn’t as well.
Moderator Note
This isn’t where the thread starts to drift out of FQ territory, but this is the point where we have clearly left SDMB territory and have gone full Penthouse Forums.
Let’s drop the Penthouse type posts and get back to the polygamy discussion, please.
Actually, up until the fourth marriage Kody was very careful to spend equal time with each wife. After the fourth he just holed up with her, using Covid (among other things) as an excuse. So one by one the other wives drifted off.
ASUI, in FLDS households, it is not unusual for the older wives with grown children to become household help for the younger wives with toddlers. Kody’s fourth wife hired a nanny, and the other three wives felt rejected.
There’s a lot more to it, including financial abuse, where the other wives’ earnings and savings went toward buying her a big house while the other family investments slowly disintegrated. (One was living with her youngest daughter in a camper) It was really painful. Kody is a narcissist, at best.
OK, yes, I admit it; I watched it. It’s like a train wreck I can’t look away from. blush
Another salient point about FLDS “marriages.” They believe that a woman must be married to an FLDS man in order to be called to heaven when the time comes. So, literally, it’s their belief that God can call a man to heaven, but a female can only be called to heaven by her husband. So if a woman is elderly and unmarried, leaders like the Jeffs will “marry” them, not for sex, but as a spiritual kindness, to allow the women a hope of heaven.
The misogyny goes even further than that; it’s pretty shocking.
From what I’ve read, they just sort of pack them off to some other palace to live out their days.
Definitely. With a whole staff of eunuchs who ran the place as well, and the Kislar Agha (head eunuch) as the person over it all.
What made the Ottoman harems weirder is that the mothers of the Sultans (the Valide Sultanas) lived in there too- it was basically the women’s quarters and where the pre-pubescent princes lived as much as the “harem” as we typically think of it.
Why worry about distant relatives when the harem itself does the usurping?
Why do you find this in any way unusual? The whole point of a harem is that all the women of the house (and certainly not all of them were slaves) are housed there, though, as described above, this was not always successful in keeping them from having or gaining power and influence.
Dredging up an ancient academic book I once read on harems. Apparently the most powerful position in a court with so many wives and concubines was to be the wife of the king. It was to be the mother of the king.
Well, sure - the king had many wives, and they were to one degree or another replaceable.
But he only ever had one mother.
Correction to above. NOT to be the wife of the king. Sorry, I can’t edit the post now or I’d fix the origina
It’s not that strange when you actually sit down and think about it.
But the popular Western idea of the Sultan’s harem is that it was basically his stable of hot women that he kept for sex, not merely the women’s quarters for the Sultan’s household.
I suspect a lot of people don’t really know that it was more (and less) than that.
My bolding, see below.
Kody was Apostolic United Brethren (AUB) and not FLDS.
They are completely different sects with very different lifestyles and religious beliefs.
Both are polygamous sects, but from very different roots, and AUB are much more integrated into the surrounding communities and have much more freedom.
Many non-Mormons assume that all polygamous groups are part of the FLDS, but that is incorrect.
As wiki says:
The difference is that all polygamous sects are described as fundamentalist Mormons, but not all sects are FLDS. Only the followers of Warren Jeffs are FLDS.
I don’t know that much about the day-to-day for most polygamous households now, but with historical Mormon polygamy, the more successful families for tended to have separate houses for the various wive
That was the mainstream Mormon belief up until when I left the LDS church in the 80s. My understanding is that certain changes were made to the LDS temple ceremony starting in the 90s so that may not necessarily reflect the current LDS belief, but it was official doctrine while I was growing up and in my 20s.
This idea that unmarried elderly women were taken as wives for salvation and not sex is something that Mormon apologists said about early Mormon leaders, but the reality was that in Mormon polygamy, very few women make it to an advanced age without being married.
A few top leaders get dozens or score of wives, some second tier leaders get a few wives (the majority of historical Mormon polygamous family has two to four wives) and then many men would have only one wife and some wouldn’t have any. The pressure to get married was high, and in highly religious groups, the emphasis is on marriage rather than being overly selective. The competition for women is pretty high so consequently, there were few women who wouldn’t have opportunities to be married.
The problem with extra men is well known, aka, the lost boys.
In historical Mormonism, what was more common was that “lesser” men wound up marrying widows of high status men. Leaders typically would marry brides in the teens or early 20s, and as the leaders got older, they would still be marrying that age of women so there would be relatively young widows.
IIRC there was also the aspect - like European monarchs - that marriages were made for political reasons, to cement alliances, etc. Obviously, being one of several dozen or more wives did not carry the same importance, but still it was a consideration. Plus, neighbouring potentates might have dozens of daughters to trade off, too. There was always the chance that your bloodline would be part of the neighbour’s dynasty depending on who became mother of the heir.