Someone with a better grasp of history can correct me but it’s my understanding that the concept of polygamy came about when there was a shortage of men due to extended periods of war.
In theory you could have a polygamous society where the marriages aren’t 1-man-many-women or 1-woman-many-men, but instead many-men-many-women, in a share and share-alike sense. (one example in fiction is the line marriages of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress).
Now, that’s probably not want most polygamy activists are supporting, but if polygamy ever becomes legal (again) in this country, I foresee it being legally irrelevant what the gender ratio is for a polygamous marriage. If most of the polygamous marriages were many-to-many instead of one-to-many, then it would balance out.
Even if the majority of polygamous marriages are one-to-many, I imagine that society will still stay one-to-one marriage for the vast, vast majority of marriages, so the gender imbalance will be more like a rounding error than a societal problem.
That, too; I was going to say there were probably men off in the army (or dead because of it).
Our genes show that we’re descended from about the double amount of women as men (80% vers. 40%). One man to many women. Polygamy has probably been a part of human society from prehistory.
Or one man going through three or four wives, serially, following death in childbirth.
Here’s an interesting Scientific American blog posting on the subject:
The story is complex …
A lot of men got killed in war, raiding parties, hunting/farming/fishing accidents… You probably went through periods where the society as a whole had more men or more women for various reasons.
Yes, except it seems when sex-selection is an option people tend to opt for boys over girls.
sneaky tricksy little femalses
On the first point, I read an interesting article that described how, while actual war or raiding was very unusual among hunter-gatherers, in fact over time murder was common - statistically speaking. It was actually very dangerous, on a per-capita basis, moreso than in many agricultural or later state-level societies. Most of those killed this way were young men.
The reason was that there was no law, other than public opinion (meaning, basically, the opinion of a small number of families who were all intermarried), and everyone was throughly familiar with the use of weapons - so any dispute had the potential to turn deadly - and if it did, there was always the spectre of further retaliation.
Naturally, the level heads did everything they could to de-escalate any source of conflict, because of this possibility. Being meek and peaceful was, culturally, praiseworthy traits. So anthropologists tended to interpret hunter-gatherers - who had no wars, and praised peacefullness - as fundamentally peaceful people. However, when they closely studied their societies, they discovered that the reason everyone went around praising peacefulness so much was that murders were pretty common, and totally feared for good reason.
The reason people killed? Not for greed, as hunter-gatherers were not into posessions (all they need, they carry); not much over territory (low population density); mainly, it was simply festering personal hatreds - even though population density was so very low, you would think that people who hated each other could avoid each other, fact is that the density of intermarriages and reciprocal relationships over resource-gathering meant that the few people who lived in a territory, tended to run into each other all the time.
The significance of this? It could explain how there could come to be fewer men than women, even in a society that, by its nature, doesn’t know war. In hunter-gatherer societies, allegedly, murder was of sufficient significance as to actually skew the sex ratios.
The Islamic word covers a lot of ground, but I can speak to a small corner of it. Where I lived in West Africa, having more than one wife was kind of like owning a boat.
It wasn’t something most people have, but it’s common enough that you probably know someone who has one. It’s weighted toward the well-off, but an average Joe can probably pull it off if they really prioritize it. Lots of people, however, find it more trouble and expense than it is worth.
I think it’s important to note that polygyny is not all fun and games. Sometimes it’s about ensuring that widows, the disabled, and other less sought-after women can join a household. In a place where women usually cannot support themselves, polygamy provides a sort of social safety net. Your second wife may not be a hot young thing- it may be your uncle’s elderly widow.
Social science has shown polygamy is correlated with high rates of violence and crime, low status of women and children, and other social problems. When polygamy is outlawed and made socially unacceptable, crime tends to go down, inequality decreases, investment and long-term planning become more common, and women get increased rights. Here’s an article on it:
Monogamy reduces major social problems of polygamist cultures
So if conservatives are opposed to polygamy, good for conservatives.
If you have a growing population, you can actually have a polygamous society without leaving any wife-less males. Just have older males marry wives one or two generations younger than themselves. Since each generation is larger than the last, each man can have multiple wives, and so long as population growth is maintained, no one has to go wife-less. Plus having men wait till later to marry furthers the generational population imbalance, since some of them will probably die before they have a chance to take on their first wife.
Real polygamous societies seem to follow this at least somewhat. The requirement that men beable to support multiple wives plus their many children serves as a defacto requirement to wait until later in life to marry, since they need to aquire enough wealth.
I’m happily monogamous, but that’s my take, too. Thinking about it from a gender ratio is the wrong way to think about it. The right way to think about it is, what percentage of people who have found a willing sexual partner are able to enjoy that partnership?
Any arrangement at all, short of a cross between Match.com and Big Brother, is going to end up with some folk who are unhappily single. As long as the system allows people to enter into the relationships that everyone involves wants, and doesn’t force anyone into a relationship they don’t want to be in, the gender ratios are unimportant.
I’d be curious to know how these murder stats would be arrived at.
A very large number of prehistoric skeleton remains have injuries consistent with a violent end. Either with a stone axe or spear or arrow etc. I believe it’s something like 50% of the remains collected at the Copenhagen National Museum.
In the case of this article, it was based on ongoing interaction with a group of present-day hunter-gatherer people by various anthropologists and others over some sixty or seventy years or so (can’t remember which one). During that time, a number of murders occurred for various reasons.
While there weren’t many, the authors of the article tallied them up and tallied up the total population, and came to the startling and counter-intuitive conclusion (at least, counter-intuitive to anthropologists) that, on a purely per capita per year basis, murders were actually very common, moreso that in other types of society with a more violent reputation, and so a serious problem in hunter-gatherer society.
The problems with this can be easily stated: drawing conclusions from it is drawing conclusions from modern hunter-gatherers, who may - or may not - resemble pre-historic hunter-gathers. Also, small sample sizes.
However, it is consistent (or at least not contradictory to) widespread skeletal injuries from human weapons that pre-date organized warfare found in pre-agricultral skeletons.
[It is of course also possible that the ‘meekness’ or peace-loving cultural traits associated with modern hunter-gatherers are, likewise, a “modern” development - in that pretty well all huter-gatherers existing today have non-hunter-gatherer neighbours who tend to be much more numerous and aggressive. How pre-agricultural hunter-gatherers actually behaved will always be subject to a great deal of uncertainty]
Chimps have organized raids on neighboring troops. I think concluding that these prehistoric deaths by weapons happened “before organized warfare” is highly dubious.
Maybe. Typically, anthropologists limit “organized warfare” to societies that are organized above the level of hunting/gatherer bands in terms of complexity. The ethnographic evidence concerning existing hunter-gatherers indicates that they rarely engage in anything that resembles “organized warfare”; that what they do more resembles feuds and murders of the “Hatfield versus McCoy” variety; and that such behaviours are highly frowned upon (but do happen).
Yes, this is one area where conservatives care about externalities and don’t mind destroying the free market and redistributing wealth to the plebs. Although it’s not perfect. Rich guys can still have a list of mistresses as long as their arm, just as long as they don’t marry or live together too long.
In this alternate reality you live in, do these serially monogamous men murder their partners each time they move on to the next younger woman? Or is it more like the world I live in, where each time a serially monogamous couple breaks up, both partners re-enter the dating pool, thus not causing a problem at all.