Is polygamy inherently bad for women and children?

[tomndebb]

Lilairen, regardless the provocation, calling other posters (or strongly implying that they are) “jerks” or “twerps” is not permitted in this Forum. Either back off and cool down or simply disengage for a bit.

That said,

Diogenes the Cynic, you are behaving as a jerk in this thread. You have made a large number of broad claims without providing any evidence that they are (or can be) supported by actual science. You have made direct comments regarding other people’s mental health that are nothing but your own prejudices (and you will not be allowed to hide behind positions such as “I said it happened to me too” or “it is not a judgment”).

If you cannot discuss this issue without making it personal (especially if you cannot provide corroboration for you position outside your personal beliefs), then you need to excuse yourself from this particular discussion, as well.

[ /Moderating ]

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

@Lilairen

Big whoop. I don’t want to talk about my childhood to an asshole whose only interest in knowing about it is to attack me. I am aware that you are going to claim this as victory for your side, but I don’t really care to sit down and have a heart-to-heart about my mother with an armchair Freud with a chip on his shoulder.

No, you just think that my family is a vile thing that is evidence of my intrinsic defectiveness and should be destroyed so that I can give over title to my genitalia to one person and vigorously curtail my intimacies with others so that they don’t cross over the forbidden line that threatens holy monogamy.

Absolutely none of this is true. I have no wish whatsoever to attack you or your choices. I have absoultely no wish to legislate your choices. I am making absolutely NO moral judgement about you. If it works for you, it works for you. Like I said, I see this kind of thing as a result of damage not as a cause of it.

I don’t think you’re evil.

[HMS_Irruncible]

@Diogenes the Cynic

I didn’t say “damaging” (except maybe to any children). I see it as a result of damage, not a cause of it.

OK, see the title of this thread. “Inherently bad for women or children”. That’s what you came here to discuss. You failed on that, and now you’ve embarked on the sideshow of…

To be more specific, I said that women who do not feel that they have a right to exclusivity in a relationship (or who do not get jealous) are almost always trauma survivors.

Why you’re going on this fishing expedition is unclear, because it neither proves nor disproves your original contention. That’s how this is a fallacious tangent.

I merely stated a statistical probablility.

You said the “S” word twice now. Make with the stats or be off with you.

Prove me wrong. Show me a woman in a polygamous marriage who didn’t have a fucked up childhood.

Here’s an idea; you’re the one making a positive assertion, how about you try proving yourself right?

[Teine]

@Diogenes the Cynic

Prove me wrong. Show me a woman in a polygamous marriage who didn’t have a fucked up childhood.

I know at least 2 personally. Anecdotal, but there you go. Of course, I’m sure you’ll take me at my word.

[bouv]

@Diogenes the Cynic

I’m saying there is little to no chance that this would appeal to a woman who has not suffered some kind of childhood trauma, that’s correct. There are, in fact, NOT “a million reasons” for this to appeal to women without trauma histories.

And that’s not a moral judgement.

True, you’re not judging them for being abused, but you are very close to judging them, and are downright insulting them, for living the life they choose to live.

You have said in this thread that:

Women who think it’s ok to be denied exclusivity in a relationship feel that way because they’re not healthy.

So I guess every single person (or maybe just woman?) in any kind of non-monogomous relationship (be it polygyamy or swinging or something else) are mentally ill? Every one of them? Seeing as you have no factual evidence to back this up, I think it’s safe to asssume that not all of them are metally ill. In fact, I’m willing to best most of them aren’t. Do I have any evidence? Well, not really, no. But unless proven otherwise, is there any reason to assume that the percentage of mentally in of those in polyamorous relationships is any higher than those in monogomous relationships? I don’t think so.

You have also said that:

Healthy, independent, femist women do not think it’s ok to be part of some pig’s harem.

Well, in addition to calling every single male who is not monogomous a pig, you have also caleld every female who is not monogomous one who can’t be independant, healthy, or adhere to any feminist ideals.

You ahve also mentioend that all these women in these relationships suffered this childhood trauma and now have no knowledge of their right to exclusivity, as you called it. You are assuming that:

1. There is such a right,
2. Eveyone wants this right.

Even if we assuem #1 to be true, where is the proof that #2 is true? I guess everyone in the world only ever wants to be with one person? There’s no possible way it would be natural to have multiple partners, except by mental illnes? Well, gee, let’s go round up all the wild animals, because apparantly most of them are mentally ill, what with the lack of exclusivity, and all. Since it’s not normal or natural to have multiple partners, that’s the only conclusion I can draw from these animals not having one partner their entire life. I guess they were abused as chidlren too? :rolleyes:

[Kalhoun]

@Diogenes the Cynic

Absolutely none of this is true. I have no wish whatsoever to attack you or your choices. I have absoultely no wish to legislate your choices. I am making absolutely NO moral judgement about you. If it works for you, it works for you. Like I said, I see this kind of thing as a result of damage not as a cause of it.

I don’t think you’re evil.

What about that whole pig thing? That certainly didn’t come across as a term of endearment.

[dangermom]

@AerynSun

Now, I’m not a fan of Mormon polygamy, because it does seem empirically tied to child brides and involuntary matrimony. I’m not for secret polygamy, because that breaks a very important bond of trust in a marriage. But polygamy where all participants agree? Why not?

I’d like to sidetrack for a moment and get some clarity on the Mormon side of this discussion. Which Mormons are we talking about? There are some different types:

Modern ‘fundamentalist’ Mormon polygamy is not allowed in the mainstream LDS Church. The Mormons you know are not polygamous and glad of it. It is illegal, and has festered underground for decades. In secret, the practice has become abusive and oppressive to most of the people living under it.

19th century Mormon polygamy was optional and voluntary, and a very different animal than modern “fundamentalist” polygamy. Girls did not get married underage for their time and culture (that is, 16-year olds got married, but that was not uncommon in general). It also wasn’t all that widely practiced; most early Mormons were monogamous. 19th century Utah Mormons had an interesting culture that included a lot of early feminism; prominent Utah women were suffragettes and so on, and–oddly to us–considered the right to practice polygamy to be a feminist tenet, for they considered that it made them more independent. Polygamist wives often owned their own farms or lived in cooperative arrangements that allowed them to trade work and avoid some of the more difficult elements of pioneer life; some of them went East to medical school, and indeed the majority of Utah doctors were women at that time. It officially ceased in 1890, and the last remnants petered out about 15 years later, so ordinary Mormons have not been polygamous for about 100 years.

Obviously early Mormon polygamy was difficult to say the least, and didn’t work in many cases. There were abuses, of course–there are abuses of everything, for that matter. But it was very different from what you get now, with people living in isolated compounds in secrecy.

So when you speak about “Mormon polygamy,” it would be helpful to clarify what you mean; the early version was not all about “child brides and involuntary matrimony.” If you mean the modern version, you may want to use the exact name of the group or clarify that you are referring to fundamentalists (as they prefer to be called) or splinter groups, since the word “Mormon” refers, most of the time, to members of the LDS Church, who are not polygamous at all.

[Bricker]

@bup

Given that Diogenes the Cynic (I can’t help but think the real Diogenes wants his name back) said people are very predictable, I think it is fair to infer that he means an abusive childhood leads to polygamy. Otherwise what’s he predicting?

His theory could be that people damaged in childhood seek out unhealthy relationships as adults, and that ONE manifestation of this would be a poly relationship.

IF poly, THEN we can predict damaged childhood.

You are reversing it: IF damaged childhood, THEN we can predict a poly relationship. That’s not what he said.

He is predicting that for poly practioners, we will find damaged childhoods in their past.

Address that argument, not the converse.

[Kalhoun]

@bouv

Since it’s not normal or natural to have multiple partners, that’s the only conclusion I can draw from these animals not having one partner their entire life. I guess they were abused as chidlren too? :rolleyes:

I’d also like to know where “serial brides and grooms” or “playboys” fall in this diagnosis. I mean, how many of us married the first person we dated? Where do you draw the line? Does the marriage vow make it different? Are you mentally ill if you stay single but date your entire life?

[aruvqan]

@Diogenes the Cynic

This is exactly right. It’s not that childhood trauma necessarily leads specifically to polyamorous relationships, but that it leads (almost always) to relationships which will be in some way chaotic, abusive or lack intimacy. Polyamory is just one possible example of that.

Oh come on, back before I got married to my first husband, I was in a stable and loving relationship with 2 men for over a year. The only reason we broke up into a couple and a spare was that the ‘spare’ was transfered to Diego Garcia and the other guy wasnt [nor could I have gone to Diego Garcia, no dependants quarters and we weren’t married] and a couple months after that, the guy who did remain with me got transferred to Sasebo.

Before you say anything I did not get abused as a child, unless you count being given a shetland pony as abuse [they are notorious for being capricious, nasty little beasts. I have NO idea why people give them to little girls. Nasty monsters.] I did NOT want to get married, I had a perfectly good career going, and whereas I did want love and relationship, marriage was not under consideration. Nothing agains either guy, but I refuse to convert to a religion to be acceptable to someone elses family. If they had been willing to tell their families to sod off on the religion thing, I might have considered it.

[Kalhoun]

@Bricker

His theory could be that people damaged in childhood seek out unhealthy relationships as adults, and that ONE manifestation of this would be a poly relationship.

IF poly, THEN we can predict damaged childhood.

You are reversing it: IF damaged childhood, THEN we can predict a poly relationship. That’s not what he said.

He is predicting that for poly practioners, we will find damaged childhoods in their past.

Address that argument, not the converse.

First, he’d have to prove the poly relationships are unhealthy (which he can’t). He’d also have to admit that healthy happy people can choose poly relationships because they’re attractive to them as opposed to because they’re emotionally incapable of a traditional one-on-one relationship (which he won’t).

[Teine]

@Diogenes the Cynic

This is exactly right. It’s not that childhood trauma necessarily leads specifically to polyamorous relationships, but that it leads (almost always) to relationships which will be in some way chaotic, abusive or lack intimacy. Polyamory is just one possible example of that.

Actually, I think I want to come at this from a different angle. Diogenes here claims that polyamorous relationships are examples of chaotic, abusive, or lack intimacy. I’d like some proof of that, please. I will accept that there are religious fundamentalists claiming the Mormon faith who do indeed have abusive polgynous relationships. However, I have not seen proof that polygamous relationships are inherently (or even more prone than monogamous relationships to be) chaotic, abusive, or lacking intimacy.

[Lilairen]

@Kalhoun

There are a million reasons for her to find this attractive, and he’s playing armchair shrink when he has no business second-guessing her motivation.

I don’t need a million.

Let me tell you about my husband. We’ve been together for over eleven years, dating back to when I was not exactly a prize. He’s been there for me through my ongoing wrestling with clinical depression, which is not easy. He’s supported my career choices even though they mean that he is effectively the sole wage-earner for the household at the moment. We can frequently spend hours talking about things (aside from politics; we talk about just anything else), though he prefers when I don’t want :eek: to start at four in the morning. I’ve watched him grow from somewhat shy and awkward into someone with solid self-confidence and a good sense of security, someone with a drive to learn and succeed, though that drive occasionally gets him kind of freaky about World of Warcraft. He’s grown out his hair so that it’s long enough that I can run my fingers through it. He’s held me in the hard times and the good times, and I’m looking forward to spending my life with him just as much as I was years ago, if not more. (And since I know he’s reading this thread: I love you.) I’ve grown with him, and I intend to keep doing so; being with him helps me to be the person I want to be.

Let me tell you about my dear competitor. When we’re both working on our writing, we spend the day telling each other our wordcounts, vying for the most productive day. We share our troubles and exchange support, just being there for each other, whether it’s just life in general or something specific. Our long-term commitment isn’t to family, but to a creative project we’re doing together; it was about the time we started on that that was sort of decided we had a relationship, and that was a couple of years ago. Despite not having a sexual relationship, we discuss our sexual lives fairly freely – I got a comment recently about how good it was to see me so happy with my sex life which just tickled me immensely. I’m always just plain happy to see a login or get some sort of communication – it lights up my life. We watch the Daily Show together on a regular basis, vying to see who can type out the funny lines fastest in chat windows.

Let me tell you about my lover. We’ve known each other for several years and worked together on religious obligations fairly extensively. He is even more careful of respecting my expressed needs and boundaries than I am; despite how little time we’ve been together as a couple, he’s done a great deal to build up a trusting context with that behaviour. He communicates at roughly the same level of disclosure that I do, which has been startling to me, because I hadn’t realised how much energy I put into that in the past, hadn’t realised how easy it could be. He makes me feel beautiful with half-stuttering mumbled compliments. I talked about something important and highly personal I need to do, and he said, “That’s a lifework”; when I said I knew that, he offered his help with it. When I worry about the future, he holds me; when I worry about how he will deal with my depression, he says he’s seen it. He laughs when I say the good thing about getting involved with him after knowing him for several years is that I know the ways he drives me bugfuck insane already. He tells me the things I need to know, and forgives my dithering and making up stupid stresses. He asks me to tell hm about my mental state, even when the causes are things that are currently explicitly outside the scope of our relationship, so he can understand and give support as need be.

That’s three reasons.

If three isn’t enough, let me tell you about my ex-boyfriend. He reads my work as I go through it and tells me when I’m not making any damn sense. He says I was good at giving him emotional support when we were involved. He builds things all the time – scale models of desks he’s planning on making later, model cars, he built his wife a set of bookshelves to apologise for flaking out on her once. Once, when he was visiting, he washed my kitchen cabinets, just because they were there. He’s got an absent-minded professor air about him that is just slightly too intense and monofocused to be compatible with a long-distance relationship, and I expect to mourn that fact for a while. He’s picking me up at the airport on Wednesday, and I’ll visit with that part of my family before going to the convention that is the nominal reason for my travel. We were together for five and a half years; I love him deeply, even though the relationship didn’t work out in the long run.

Now I’m all gooshy and kinda wistful.

But who needs millions of reasons? I mean, I could go on about childcare and stuff, and multi-adult incomes, and strong networks of mutually supportive people, but that’s all fluff for the newspapers, y’know? It’s about the individual, specific people.

[bup]

@Bricker

His theory could be that people damaged in childhood seek out unhealthy relationships as adults, and that ONE manifestation of this would be a poly relationship.

IF poly, THEN we can predict damaged childhood.

You are reversing it: IF damaged childhood, THEN we can predict a poly relationship. That’s not what he said.

He is predicting that for poly practioners, we will find damaged childhoods in their past.

Address that argument, not the converse.

Yeah, I can see that. Given the chronological order of things, I thought bad childhood would predict polygamy (or some other wrong-in-Diogenes’ eyes practice). But I can see that.

Of course, I think he’s falling for his own confirmation bias.

[Stonebow]

I’ve weighed in on the poly threads in the past, as a fairly regular, meat and potatoes kind of guy involved in a very happily monogamous relationship.

In my mind, the biggest stumbling block to legalization of the poly family structure is the absolute disaster that would result in family law/tax codes, etc.

That said, and I don’t this to be construed in any way as support for **DtC’s ** position, I think poly arrangements are not healthy on a societal scale. I am quite sure there exist small poly communities wherein everyone is (or tries to be) enlightened, jealousy free, and considerate of all partners involved. However, I think they are dwarfed by the population that would use it as another form of oppression as we’ve seen in more tribal cultures. As the saying goes, the dose makes the poison.

I’m all for decriminalizing co-habitation arrangements, but don’t think they should be enshrined in law. Do folks in these relationships have issues? I suppose. Is it as damaging as something like pornography or prostitution? Interesting debate, but I don’t have an opinion on it. I see legalization of the latter as minimizing their abuses by offering some form of regulation and oversight. Does legalization of poly-amorous relationships help ease the abuses we’ve seen historically, or does it exacerbate them?

[HMS_Irruncible]

@Bricker

He is predicting that for poly practioners, we will find damaged childhoods in their past.

So? I predict that for poly practitioners, we will find swimming pools in their past. We will find ice cream in their past. No doubt we will find that a number of them watched Tom & Jerry cartoons. None of this means anything unless you compare it to other populations. And then if you do that, then you ask the question of why it’s like this. This isn’t what DtC is doing. He started out asserting that polygamy is inherently bad for women and children. Then he tried to prove this by asserting that polys have abuse in their past. Run that through your logical fallacy filter and see what you come up with.

[Basandre]

@Diogenes the Cynic

Human behaviour is very predictable. I would bet just about anything that Lilairen has some kind of childhood trauma in her background. It’s not a moral judgement and I don’t see what the big deal is. I know something about abuse backgrounds from having lived through one myself.

I’m not Lilairen, but I just had to reply to this. I’m female, identify as poly, and had a disgustingly normal childhood. No traumas, no chaos, no abandonment. None.

Also, (and this may come as a shocker to you) I’m not poly because I’m afraid of intimacy. I’m poly because I abhor the idea of trying to tell my wonderful boyfriend, whom I love very much, what to do with his own time. I also don’t want a relationship with someone who would try to dictate what I do on my time. In my mind, telling my boyfriend that he can’t take another girl to dinner and go back to her place afterwards would be like telling him not to go hang out at the bar with his friends and stay out late drinking. So he doesn’t spend every minute of his time with me - what he does when he isn’t with me is entirely his business.

I have as much “right to exclusivity” as anyone, but I choose not to exercise it, because I find it distasteful, as I have just explained.

waiting for the implications that I just don’t know I’m afraid of intimacy and I must have been traumatized as a child without realizing it

[Lilairen]

@bouv

You ahve also mentioend that all these women in these relationships suffered this childhood trauma and now have no knowledge of their right to exclusivity, as you called it. You are assuming that:

1. There is such a right,
2. Eveyone wants this right.

I agree with Dio that there’s a “right to exclusivity”, though I wouldn’t put it as such. I presume relationships are grounded in what people are willing to offer and what their minimum requirements are. Someone who considers exclusivity as a basic part of what they want out of a relationship is entirely free to find a partner who is willing to offer it.

They may not get it from a specific person if that specific person doesn’t want to offer it – but since there’s no right to be involved with that specific person, that’s just tough noogies.

I could have had an exclusive relationship with my husband if I’d asked for it; we’ve discussed that on and off in a ‘what if’ sort of way, and he was willing at the time to put it on the table. I don’t, personally, derive any value from it; my basic position has always been that if a hobby, a job, or another person would increase a partner’s happiness without threatening me, I have no good reason to keep them from it, and exclusivity thus doesn’t give me anything I want. (I had this opinion even before I concluded I was interested in multiple relationships myself.) At this point, I would definitely not offer it; I’m not interested in drama and chaos.

[cmkeller]

It is definitely bad for a woman to marry multiple children, or for a child to marry multiple women. Statutory rape.

[bup]

@Basandre

waiting for the implications that I just don’t know I’m afraid of intimacy and I must have been traumatized as a child without realizing it

No, I just want to know what you’re doing for dinner…