A sociological note of interest I found wikitrawling.
A good point, and yet another indication of how the population could be biased. Let’s say Angie and Will get married, and Angie gets pregnant. Will, not being removed from the dating pool, may be much more likely at this point to try to find a second wife, than Angie would a second husband.
It is not correct in the sense that those relationships are not depriving other males of female partners, because there are females with more than one male partner, regardless of whether they live together in the same household or not.
I think it’s reasonable to say that even if polygamy were legal, the majority of people would still choose monogamy. Being legal would not make it mandatory, and there are a lot of people out there who are not willing to share.
As has been pointed out repeatedly: among those who are inclined to have more than one partner at a time, there are just as many women with multiple partners as there are men with multiple partners. And whether they are living together in a single household within the current cultural and legal framework is irrelevant, before that one gets trotted out again (not by you, necessarily, I’m just saying). Those who are poly-minded come from both genders.
But polygamy means, among other things, going steady with multiple girls is possible in high school. So Jack Quarterback is now dating two cheerleaders and one brainy chick to do his homework. And don’t tell me Jack wouldn’t. Think about what that does to the immature high school dating scene. You have to look at this at the points of friction.
And why do you think the majority of people would still choose monogamy? Polygamy is, when you get down to it, a boast. I am successful! I can support multiple partners! You will RESPECT me! People are, when you get down to it, pack animals. Look at how wolfpack mating relationships happen. One alpha, a few betas, and a number of people who don’t get nookie till they either take over a beta’s spot, or get run out of the pack. Which is, concidentally, what we see an echo of in the Lost Boys situation. You can learn a lot about human behavior by looking at canids. We spent our entire civilized history with them, after all. If you don’t like the wolf example, you can check out apes… which seem to have similar events happening.
Cite, please. Certainly some women have multiple partners at the same time. How many of them have multiple committed partners? A fling is one thing, but it’s not a relationship. Over the span of the last ten thousand years, how often has this been a stable situation? We’ve got all of human history to use as a sample size here, polygamy’s been tried before. What are the historic results? How is it different now?
I can certainly think of ancedotal situations where a guy has multiple girlfriends and they aren’t in favor of the situation, but decide it’s better to have some of the guy than none of him. But the plural of ancedote is not data.
And, as was pointed out, its very hard to get data on this sort of thing. Polygamy (as opposed to open marriage) isn’t well defined in our society. It isn’t legal. And where it has been studied, its been studied from the outside generally looking at religious communities. I’d guess there aren’t two groups of people more different than the members of the FDLS and the members of Fen Poly households (which is where I know poly people, and who tend to get their models apparently from reading lots of Heinlein). Historic results aren’t very indicative of what could happen today, because there has been a shift from sex for procreation and the need for a mate for protection of a child. Moreover, as I pointed out above, this part of the discussion sort of assumes heterosexuality - which is often not the case in a poly household. A guy can have four wives, but if one of them is bi and three of them are lesbians, he isn’t exactly removing women from the pool. (In my experience, it seems to be more common that a bi guy will have a gay husband and a straight wife - a family of three).
It would be very interesting to spend some time academically looking at Fen Poly households, or Poly households within the Pagan community (from what I can tell there is a lot of crossover between the groups).
That’s why I support a one month limit on going steady.
Wrong? No. But what a huge pain in the ass! What man in their right mind would want to surround himself with that many wives?
Alternatively, think of all the extra tax credits!
This is precisely what I’ve been saying. The FLDS arrangement seems to match what we would historically see in a poly society, while the fen arrangement is a more modern, personal, a-legal arrangement that can be emotionally healthy.
I see relatively little difference between the FLDS arrangement, and say, a middle eastern sultan or chinese emperor’s court, to take two well known, but stereotypical arrangements.
You have the alpha on the throne, the beta courtiers… and the lost boys, or eunuches, who do various flavors of work. In china, they were the bureaucratic elite, but they weren’t getting any nookie.
China’s model is actually fairly interesting to examine, being somewhat isolated from our western mode for many years. It winds up more or less as expected, except with a high mortality rate taking care of the lost boys syndrome, with patriarchs and a very low view of the value of women. The Curious Case of Judge Dee goes into relationships in some detail, if incidentally, in much the same way Sherlock Holmes discusses relationship patterns in Victorian England.
Looking at our society, and the examples provided by our best and brightest, I don’t think we’re ready for fen-poly as a wide-spread thing.
The biggest difference that E-Sabbath’s examples all seem to miss are the fact, mentioned several times in this thread, that modern society has women with orders of magnitude more agency than any previous poly-friendly civilization. Cindy Cheerleader has every incentive to date both a cute guy and a guy who’s willing to trade homework for sex.
Historical comparisons with societies in which women were chattel or denied suffrage are invalid on their face. Even the comparison with the FLDS is basically meaningless, since those women are also raised and conditioned for obedience, compared to mainstream modern civilization.
I don’t think most human beings are wired for “fen poly,” and therefore, it will never be a widespread thing. Not without incredible amounts of cultural change. But that doesn’t mean that for those that ARE wired for it, its wrong. It may not be the societal norm, but it can be functional.
I suspect that most men are wired for traditional polyamory and women in such societies have had little power to object.
Zeriel, the examples don’t miss the mark. They’re just the best examples I can find, historically and in the animal kingdom. And further, that the historical ones match what happens today, eg, the FLDS.
So I can say, as things are, what has happened before will most probably happen again, if, god forbid, someone were to wave a wand and go ‘tra la go date’.
If you notice, I have been talking about a kind of poly relationship that incorporates women with agency. Or, well, three guys in love with each other, I suppose. But, like Dangerosa says, I don’t think we’re ready for it yet. Not here. Not with the society we have, and not with the likely results I’ve mentioned before.
If, say, we were to establish a… I don’t know, some space colony on another planet full of the best and brightest and most emotionally mature, I don’t see why it couldn’t work.
But I’ve seen how possessive people can get. And yes, it’s stereotypical, that the female wants a provider, but it’s not entirely wrong. So…
I’m not saying you’re wrong, Zeriel. I’m saying that I have serious reservations, and I’m backing up my reservations with examples of behavior. How people do act, rather than how they might act. How do you keep good poly from becoming bad poly?
Remember, my key point here is that it’s going to start at the teen level, and teens are overly emotional, hormonal idiots, who are prey to their base instincts. Is Cindy going to want Wally the geek when she can have Derek the quarterback?
Is Cindy going to want to date two people at all? Derek, historically, has, but Cindy, from the vast sum of human experience, at that age, tends to want to focus on one guy.
When was the last time you dated a teenager? Because let me tell you something, that wasn’t true in backwards-ass rural Appalachian PA in the 1990s when the last time I dated a teenager was–the girls were just as interested in collecting the cute boys as the boys were in collecting the cute girls. A good 10% of the young ladies in my class could be relied upon to choose a different guy at every week’s hunting-camp beer bash.
Can you point me to the law that currently bans this?
The reason it doesn’t happen isn’t anything to do with marriage law, it’s simply that most teenage girls don’t want to share the hunky quarterback with two other girls, and would rather be the sole girlfriend of the slightly-less hunky guy than one of the three who date Jack. Most people don’t really want to be poly, and changing the law is about as likely to make them want to be poly as legalising gay marriage is to make people gay.
There are possibilities for abuse in repressive societies, but that really isn’t one of them.
Jack Quarterback would still have to deal with the fact that some girls don’t want to share, and would have to make his choices accordingly. And some girls want more than one boyfriend as well, so there would be chances for the others (because there are many girls who are not interested in the quarterback types, Hollywood cliches notwithstanding).
Based on the number of people (many of which have said so here on the Dope) who insist that they would be neither able nor willing to share their romantic partner with others. Sure, if polygamy were more normalized, there would be fewer people growing up with the notion that MONOGAMY IS MANDATORY, so there might be more polyminded folk out there, but there will still be some whose nature doesn’t lend itself to such a scenario. And even among those who are polyminded, there are relatively few “harems” of the sort people here are warning against.
Regarding the “look at nature” aspect: We are not wolves, so their strict hierarchical culture doesn’t apply to us. We are apes of a sort, and our closest relatives are the chimps, so look at the bonobos. They are free and indiscriminate with their affections and aren’t locked into a “one male, many females” culture, so at the very least that puts into question the “oh noes, there won’t be any women for the lower caste men” argument. But aside from our relations to other animals, we have our own common traits that have developed over the millennia, and jealousy is one of them. Just because some people don’t have it to the same degree as others doesn’t mean it’ll completely disappear if polygamy is legalized.
For data you’ll have to look at actual poly communities, meet poly people, and listen to those of us who are posting our own experiences here, and try to extrapolate from that to the larger poly population. Because, as has already been pointed out, we’re not all “out of the closet” as far as the mainstream culture is concerned, for various reasons, and there’s no checkbox on the census form for multiple partners, so it’s not like there’s some easily-found pile of statistics to point you to.
The poly configurations I have personally seen include just as many women with multiple partners as they do men with multiple partners, and these are mutually willing participants rather than “oh well, if I must share him I must though I don’t like it” scenarios. My own situation reflects exactly that; as I’ve already pointed out, due to various differences in our natures and needs, I am much more likely to put the effort into having multiple relationships (and I mean proper relationships, as I’m not interested in flings) than my husband, though we both identify as poly.
Neither of us is just “settling” for allowing the other to have other partners – in fact, for me at least, polymindedness is a crucial trait in any partner I might have. That monogamy is not for me is a lesson hard learned and taken entirely to heart. My personal preference would be committed relationships with multiple people who all live together in a big house, but I recognize that for various reasons it might never happen this way, and it wouldn’t diminish the value of the relationships if some of us live separately.
Most of the poly people I’ve personally known or heard from in various communities have serious relationships with multiple partners who don’t live together and are not necessarily involved with their partners’ partners (if my husband had a girlfriend, she would be my metamour because I, being straight, would most likely not have a romantic relationship with her, though I would want to know her personally and would prefer to at least be friends if not BFFs or housemates). In the case of triads (or Vs in the absence of bisexualism), there are just as many triads or Vs that I’ve seen with one woman and two men as the other way around.
What’s different now? Everything, at least in terms of the role of women in society. The world has changed. Women now have independence and autonomy that they didn’t have historically, especially not in those cultures where polygamy was part of a strict and patriarchal (and often misogynist) religious scenario. Modern women, in the Western world at least, are free to choose their mates in a way that they were not historically able to due to constraints of religion, culture and economics.
Nobody now has the right or authority to tell us who we must marry – or even THAT we must marry, because we would have no other way to support ourselves. We can choose any mate we want, with or without legal recognition of the relationship, or choose no mate at all if that’s our preference. We have a say in who we end up with, or whether we end up with anybody. If some women would flock to the rich guys, that doesn’t mean we all would, and even those who did would have the exact same right as that guy to have multiple partners of their own. And if he tried to gainsay that, he could shove it – I for one wouldn’t put up with that kind of double standard.
The idea that a few men would snatch up all the available women and there’d be none left for the rest of the male population is insulting at best, as it treats women like commodities who have no control over our own destinies. In the modern world, that’s not how it works. We’re not pieces of pie to be divided up and distributed evenly amongst the deserving menfolk. Maybe some men would remain alone no matter HOW many free women were running around unattached, and maybe they should look for ways to make themselves more appealing instead of blaming other men for what they don’t have.
It’s odd to me (but then again unsurprising) to see people argue against polygamy while simultaneously arguing that “group X” should be allowed to marry because blah blah blah consenting adults. And thus this thread is why I continue to ask what people mean by “marriage equality”.
The thing is, there are fairly rational arguments for legally treating polyamory differently than pair marriage of any stripe–for one thing, as I mentioned upthread, most people in the modern-day poly communities are not forming closed family units and would not want collective community property, so there’d have to be a legal structure for that. Let alone what to do with children in closed triads/quads who are of uncertain parentage when a divorce happens. Let alone what “Married filing jointly” means when you’re living with one spouse and also partners with another, whom your spouse doesn’t interact with (and their spouse doesn’t interact with you". Let alone the distinctions many modern poly groups make with regard to primary and secondary relationships, and what that might mean in a context of visitation rights and family law.
It’s certainly not as bog-standard simple as it is to simply allow all two-person marriages regardless of involved gender or race.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think there’s any MORAL reason to keep polyamory illegal, but there are certainly valid reasons why our current legal structures for marriage could have a very hard time supporting it without a massive overhaul.
I does not require a massive overhaul. A bit of tinkering will do the job. See my post in the other poly thread.
In any event, isn’t the purpose of law makers to keep the law up to speed with society?
I think your analysis is a bit simplistic, myself–I LIKE having those nice, complicated legal frameworks that expressly spell out my rights and duties, rather than leaving it to the courts.
The part where it gets messy if you just “allow” it is in line relationships–specifically, the scenario of “You live in a community property state. You are married to Linda, Linda is also married to Roger. You and Roger have no legal connection except through Linda. Roger runs up $500,000 in gambling debt. When they come after Linda, what of your marital assets are going to be able to be taken to satisfy Roger’s debt?”
I think any polygamous marriage as such would require a rather detailed prenuptial contract specifying things like individual and joint property, child custody, and so on. My husband reckons it would be a lot like starting a corporation.
How do community property states deal with prenups that dictate individual property? Is it permitted to establish a contract for that or do they have to submit to the state rule?
I’m listening to what you say, and you’re right as far as it goes. In the poly community, this is how things work.
But good portions of the US are still under a strict and patriarchal and often misogynist religious scenario. And that’s the people I’m looking at. The ones that have abstinence based sex ed, that have daddy-daughter charity vows, and so on.
I never said a few men would snatch up all the available women. Just that it will become a social sign of wealth and virility for cisgendered men to have at least two wives, not just one. Are you disagreeing with that?