Is Polygamy Really Wrong?

Great Debates
201

This is an interesting topic for some reason to me, and have spent to much time thinking about it instead of doing more productive stuff. Just some thought after reading the thread over a few days and mulling over a few things for another few.

I could be wrong but it seems that there are a fair number of people that think polygamy wouldn’t lead to an imbalance in the number of available women as others claim, and cite the current poly community as evidence among other things. I guess I just don’t see how it’s relevant how a select (and small?) group act, is in any way indicative of how the rest of the country would act and practice polygamy if we snapped our fingers and it was now legal.

The big twist is that we are not an overtly male dominated society as others that have/do practice polygamy are, so it’s not an obvious imbalance as well as a twist we don’t have a lot of data points on.

In short I find it hard to believe that their wouldn’t be more MFF then FMM marriages. I do think the overwhelming majority will be monogamy though.

I don’t have any studies or such to back this up but it’s what I believe. Men (or a good portion anyway) all else being equal (i know this is never the case) would resist sharing a women with other men. I believe its fairly high up and near the top of our “priory list”.

I don’t think it’s as high for women. I think security ($), family and the ability to raise said family, is much higher. I think when presented with a choice of marry Guy A be the only wife and work full time while raising you children, or Guy B be the second wife and you can work part time or not at all while raising your child, some when will choose B. More so than men, in my opinion. I don’t think it will be a lot, but i also don’t think it will be uncommon either. I know it’s not as simple as those two choices but for some i think it will be.

In summary though I think their will be poor, less well off men who will find it hard to find a mate because some of the men at the top will collect multiple wives and why not if you can have a trophy wife, why not two? A trophy husband seems to be a lot less common. I guess I just don’t see how it would be any other way, I know some people point to the poly community or more choices for women but I guess i don’t see it as balancing out what I see as humane nature.

To address the OP. In short I think it, polygamy should remain illegal. While it dose no harm on an individual level that I can see, on a society level I see harm, and no benefit at all to society to out way that harm. I believe it would leave a shortage (probably slight but still real) of available women to marry. This is actually the reverse of the opinion that I came to the thread with.

202

Morally, I don’t think polygamy is wrong, but it doesn’t make sense to anyone who is not a weak minded person. To get involved with a man who also has other wives does not make sense to me. Its like serial dating with constant committment. Who would be content with that ? I think that people who practice polygamy are somewhat brainwashed because of religion, society, and to be frank, perhaps some mental issues (co-dependent, depression etc etc). No woman would want to share the “love of their life” with another woman so unless you are a practicing polygamist, its hard to get into their psyche.

203

So, bascially everything you said is not only wrong, but insulting, and in any case only applies to people practicing the archaic and relatively uncommon harem-model polygyny. Next time, try reading the thread.

204

So far, the brick remains unshit. That’s gotta hurt.

205

The relevance is in the fact that these “select (small?)”* groups of currently poly people are indicative of what the people who are currently interested in being poly are actually doing about it.

*(which aren’t “select” in that anyone who wants to be poly can be, nor are they small, as evidenced by the vast number of people involved in online poly communities alone)

I think you’re right in that the majority will still be monogamous, which means that the number of people who choose to be poly will still be smaller than the population as a whole. If poly were made legal, I doubt that a majority of currently monogamous people would suddenly decide to be poly – maybe some would, as they’ve only been monogamous because that’s the prevailing pressure from the current society, but most people I’ve met throughout my life are decidedly monogamous and wouldn’t change that even if they could have a legal poly marriage. Most of those who would choose a legal poly marriage would be those who are already poly and decide to formalize it, therefore the behaviour and choices exhibited by the extant poly community are entirely relevant.

This is one reason why I think that making poly marriages legal won’t affect the overall availability of women – the others being: 1) as pointed out by many people in this thread including you, men don’t have the power to tell women how to live their lives or decide how they choose their mates and therefore 2) poly women can (and do) have multiple mates themselves. If a man is appealing enough, he will find someone who wants to be with him. If not, he shouldn’t blame someone else for his failure because they’re “snatching up all the women”.

As to “MFF vs FMM”, bear in mind that not every polyglot is a triad. There are lots of poly configurations involving multiple partners of either or both genders on all sides. The poly community is full of variations on MFFMAMMFFMGQFFFMMFFTGFMMBM combinations (like the one depicted in the Poly in Pictures links I posted earlier), which would look more like snowflakes than triangles and don’t noticeably have more male participants than female.

206

I think you’ve made that extremely clear with your insulting misconceptions. Thanks for assuming, though.

207

I cannot conceive of a society wherein one man has multiple wives. I cannot imagine sharing my husband with multiple women. The whole concept is archaic; a double-standard system with women in strictly subordinate rolls of baby machines. Think about a whole bunch of women with PMS, or going through menopause at the same time!

The thought of one woman having multiple husbands seems ludicrous also. Imagine having several husbands around the house, after they retire!

Absolutely ridiculous.

208

I really wish people would think about how insulting their choice of words is before they post. Just because YOU cannot conceive of loving more than one person at a time and wanting to be in a committed relationship with them doesn’t mean that anyone who does is ridiculous, ludicrous or a subordinate baby machine. Also, in the modern poly context it’s not “archaic” at all, in fact it’s rather revolutionary.

209

This thread totally slipped by me. I suppose I was too busy getting ready for back to school shopping with my wife, our partner and our three kids. I’ll share some of the insights into how plural marriage can’t work with them, as well as let them know how weak minded and oppressed they are. Maybe after they quit making out.

210

Don’t forget to mention how you’re stealing all the wimmen.

211

There are about 6 million more women in the world than men and that number is growing, despite the countries who choose to only have male infants. Add to that, men are less likely to marry, especially during slow economic times than women are. In the U.S. there are 103 women for every hundred men. That doesn’t sound like much, but it does mean that there are millions of women who either don’t marry or only have a man for part of their lives.

I am a Muslim woman and unmarried, but if I decide to marry, I absolutely do not want a monogamous marriage. My kids are grown and I am much too independent to want a man around every day. I like taking care of a man and being taken care of, but the time off makes it much more appealing to me. In a co-marriage in Islam, each wife gets her own home and the husband spends a week with one and then the other or whatever the couples agree on. I see a polygynist marriage as an ideal solution (for me), although I was much too jealous for it when I was younger. The ratio of Muslim men to women in the U.S. makes it more likely that I will be struck by lightening, while I’m teaching an alligator to speak French, than marry a single Muslim man in my country. Twenty thousand people convert to Islam each year in America and 75% are women. So I can either be celibate for the rest of my life, share multiple men with many women or share one man with a couple of women and have financial security.

The way it typically works in the U.S. is a woman is either married to a man for awhile or if she is not, she is in a relationship with a man who soon goes onto the next woman, if he is not already sleeping with several. Or the woman moves on. For some reason people don’t see that as a big negative. In polygyny, the man has a religious marriage with the other wife or wives (up to 4) and he is required to financially support a woman the same as his other wife(s), if he wants to have a relationship with her. People often think the woman who is the extra wife is being oppressed, but they see nothing wrong with a woman just being used for a semen drop and then the man goes on to the next conquest. The “unoppressed” women are still sharing a man, but they can just pretend they are not.

I can see why from a legal perspective, there could be more complication with polygyny, but we need to get the government out of marriage anyway. With a few new laws that recognize the validity of the contract terms in a marriage, there doesn’t have to be a problem. Being held answerable to a contract makes more sense than being legally bound by a license, with no real conditions, other than not marrying anyone else. People should be free to follow their own beliefs when it comes to defining marriage and family, even the ones who are wrong!:slight_smile:

Oh for Oxpictus. I know many women who are co-wives in the U.S. Most are college educated or in school and are fully able to use birth control, if it is not a good time to have a child. Many of the women have started their own business, after finishing college. A woman in this country doesn’t have any kind of pressure to stay in a marriage if her husband takes another wife, yet most do. Several of the women I know actually picked out a woman they thought their husband should marry or suggested a good friend. Muslim wives can keep whatever money they make for themselves, while their husband is required to support them. She does not have to work unless she chooses too. Just because you can’t conceive of how it could work doesn’t mean it has no applicable value for others.

Monogamy is pretty much a failed system in the U.S. with the failure rate being higher than it’s successes. People should be looking at why a man and woman can’t manage to stay happy in a marriage, instead of trying to claim it’s worth, when it clearly has a serious problem. Monogamy has become seriously oppressive for many American households. The woman has to work. If she wants children, she has to let strangers raise them for what adds up to more than half of their waking hours during their most formative years. She comes home from work to take up her second job of parenting, cleaning, cooking, etc. If her husband is still around, she still does the lions share of the house work. She is lucky to get ten minutes to herself and still a huge percentage of women are part of the working poor. Liberation seems to be a bit of a misnomer. I’m not sure why women in the U.S. don’t realize what a bad deal they made. Being poor and having no time for your family is about as oppressive as it gets, imo.

212

I wish we had a “like” button here. :wink: You’ve made a lot of good points.

213

This is completely wrong. Look at the source data:

[QUOTE=CIA Fact Book]
World:
at birth: 1.07 male(s)/female
under 15 years: 1.07 male(s)/female
15-64 years: 1.02 male(s)/female
65 years and over: 0.79 male(s)/female
total population: 1.01 male(s)/female (2011 est.)

United States
at birth: 1.05 male(s)/female
under 15 years: 1.04 male(s)/female
15-64 years: 1 male(s)/female
65 years and over: 0.77 male(s)/female
total population: 0.97 male(s)/female (2011 est.)
[/QUOTE]

The only demographic that has more male than female in the U.S. is 65 and over (due to the longer average life span of women). This pattern is pretty normal throughout the world. More men then women at birth, fewer men than women in old age. What happens in between depends on the mortality rate of men in most countries as the populations either equalize or women overtake men.

By your logic we should ban multiple wives and encourage multiple husbands.

The big exceptions to the pattern that I see are rich Islamic countries that allow multiple wives (but not multiple husbands):

In fact there is only one country I could find that was not Islamic that had higher than 1.2 male/female was Palau (population 21,032):

This raises several questions about allowing ( or just having) multiple spouses of one sex and not the other.

214

Wow, those numbers are really surprising. How can Qatar have 4 times as many adult males as females? Their “at birth” numbers don’t indicate rampant infantacide. Do they not count women in the census? Do men keep a wife in a neighboring country while being counted as a resident of Qatar? Is the CIA relying on extremely shoddy intel?

215

Thank you for the information Strassia. There are apparently many differing sources. I used the U.S. census for the information on America, which showed about 5 million more women than men overall. I’ve went to 4 different sites for the world numbers and found three different numbers. I do suspect that some of the ratios in other countries are off because women don’t have a voice. Outside of their home, they are almost non-existent.

Since most people who live in the U.S. don’t typically move to a different country, the world #'s don’t matter, to us anyway. I think to get a somewhat fair idea of the average gender ratio in the world, we would have to remove some high’s and lows.

My chances are still on par with the French speaking alligator, since Muslim women do not marry anyone but Muslim men and so many more women in the U.S. become Muslim than men.

Thanks again for your information. I’m going to have to do some more digging, to see why there is so much disparity in the numbers, although I just discovered that the WorldDataBank seems to agree with you on the world numbers at least. Ma’salaama.

216

Then it’s a self-created problem.

217

Yep, guilty as charged.:slight_smile: I knew it when I became a Muslim. It’s okay. I can’t speak French anyway. The only reason I said something here is because of the absurd comment from Oxpictus about co-wives/women being oppressed baby making machines, who can’t be trusted to menstruate anywhere around each other; if they share a husband. Talk about ignorant stereotyping.

218

I suppose that makes me guilty of removing one woman from the available population in the US, then, and my husband guilty of “stealing their wimmen”. :wink: It wouldn’t matter anyway, though, as I wouldn’t want to be partners with anyone who wouldn’t let me be poly. So those who look down on poly relationships wouldn’t have access to me in the first place.

219

The difference may be in definitions. If you took the CIA numbers and just look at the population of adults 18+, you should get more women than men, but that is going to be skewed because at almost every age level men have higher mortality rates than women. Not to insult, but based on your statement about your children, I would guess that if you are looking in your age bracket (even disregarding the religious issue) the numbers are not in your favor. As women get older, the number of men will drop.

To the point of the OP, how polygamy would affect society is hard to say. We know the effects in small highly hierarchical and patriarchal societies. But we don’t know how it would work in more egalitarian settings. We do have good data that extra young males with no chance of long term relationships cause social unrest. Having extra unattached females of retirement age may be a problem on a personal level, but I have never heard of anything suggesting it causes society wide issues.

That said, IMHO, there are still way too many unanswered questions to say for sure what effect it would have. In my mind the two primary questions remain:

  1. How many people would participate?
  2. What structures would emerge?
  3. Would they be gender symmetrical?

If the answer to 3 is yes, then there is no gender imbalance question. 1 and 2 are more interconnected. If 1 out 100 men had 10 exclusive wives and 4 out of 10 had 5 wives but no women had more than 2 exclusive husbands and only 2 percent had that, then even assuming party of populations that would leave about 20% of the remaining men without any marriage options. Change percentages or the exclusivity, and you have a different outcome.

220

I don’t see a way to intelligently answer the three questions. I’m guessing there would not be very much participation, due to the social taboos. Most of us were raised to think our partner belongs to us. The women I know who were raised in big poly families typically want to re-create that in their marriages. Most of them came from other countries where polygyny is acceptable. The American Muslims that I know have chosen to be co-wives for various reasons, but many don’t because of the laws. Imo, most men are not capable of sharing. Women are more ‘tribal’. We get closer to each other and being co-wives can be a positive experience. We are fully capable of nurturing other women. I think biology gets in the way for most men.

I just read that China has 32 million extra men, if I understood that right. That seems like it would seriously alter the world average? I am 59 and I realize the ‘pool’ is shrinking for me. I know some Muslim couples where the men married someone their own age and also married an older woman to help her out, but that is not for me. I can only imagine how ancient I would feel next to a 30 or 40 year old.:eek:

Regardless of whether or not there would be much participation of polygamy in the U.S., it is wrong for our government to criminalize different family choices. That makes one kind of family right, based only on the fact that it has been the main custom in the U.S. I hear the excuses about how awkward it would make things for divorce, etc, if there is more than one spouse. That is why marriage shouldn’t be part of our government’s rules and regulations. It should be a private contract and a religious commitment if the couples want that. Even if there were good reasons for not legalizing it (not!), I have not seen anyone come up with a valid reason for criminalizing it. I have never heard any logical explanations for why it would harm marriage or society. It is legal to have a wife and girlfriends, but illegal to have a wife and take a second wife. It is illegal to make a real commitment to two women, but okay to just use one of them.

I think what women are running into right now is the men who are available often are not that successful. The economy isn’t helping. Since women can do well on their own, they are alot less likely to marry the guy who hasn’t done very well. There’s probably not statistics for that. I guess it seems kind of harsh, but it’s not unreasonable to want a man who is independent. The men are available, but not so desirable. Love stretches pretty thin, when the lack of money wears people down.