How does polygamy work?
There are two extremes. In one model, a person has multiple, completely independent marriages. Think a sailor who has a wife in every port. In the other, a group of people are a household and think of themselves as a unit. And the sexual relations may go every which way, too. If a new person joins the group, everyone agrees to it.
Most are something in between. Usually, a man has several wives, and they need to work together socially, negotiating who their husband eats dinner with, who he spends the night with, and often sharing some tasks (big shopping trips) but maintaining separate households, or territory within a large house. Sometimes the man takes a new wife without consulting his previous wives, and sometimes that causes a lot of strife.
In states that have been ok with polygamy is polyandry equally ok?
By which I mean are the laws specific to one man, many women in marriage or are the laws just written as anyone can have as many spouses as they want? And does that have to be one man or woman with multiple opposite gender partners or any mix you can think of?
This may seem annoying but I think it illustrates some of the issues that need to be considered. (and I’ve got even better stuff that illustrates this whole thing is a mess.)
Polygamy doesn’t mean polygyny.
Generally no. Our marriage law permits customary polygyny (both African and Islamic) but not polyandry.
ETA: And that goes for all polygamy-allowing Islamic states, AFAIK, since polyandry is expressly forbidden.
Ok. Are women equally (legally) as capable as men to have multiple partners?
@MrDibble answered my question same time I posted.
Yes. In the United States poly relationships are not currently legal (and aside from that, many of us who are poly don’t have the faintest interest in the institution of marriage, which many of us view as inherently mono and sexually possessive).
But within that grey area of “we aren’t legal arrangements”, there is no built-in gender difference. My partners can have either of-the-moment or permanent-in-love connections with other people; they are female; their other partners can be male, or female, or intersex for that matter. They can have one other partner, two other partners, nineteen other partners, although in the latter case if I felt left out I have the freedom to say so. There’s only so many hours in a week. You can’t subdivide infinitely.
It’s ultimately about being free agents, about not doing the sexual jealosy drama, and about not having to differentiate between people you like as friends but also find hot and attractive, and people you are in a relationship with. It’s about not having to make choices that there’s no reason to have to make.
The word we use is “polyamorous”. “Polygamous” pretty much brings up associations with the Mormons of a prior century.
I am now approaching the 12 year mark of two of the three ongoing poly relationships I entered into in 2010. The third gradually faded out as the other partner involved withdrew from the world after the election of Donald Trump and she opted to spend her time on other continents. My partner’s various other partnerships haven’t fared quite as well during this time frame (although she who withdrew from me may still be with her other main partner).
It’s not about having a harem. My partners are feminists and assertive people and don’t put up with sexual inequalities.
I assume that means no legal connection to any of your partners. Is polyamorous a better description?
Mormon polygamy is supposed to work by giving the first wife a veto on subsequent marriages, but in reality that was rarely the case.
Mormon polygamy simply can’t work. It’s inherently imbalanced with the man having explicit control over the wives. It leads to underage marriages and the problems of surplus males.
I stand to be corrected, but I think the Muslim Marriages Bill is still stuck in parliamentary limbo.
The SA government has also proposed a wholesale revision of the marriage law, including the legalisation of polyandry. It has of course been met with public opposition, not least from the same people who are in favour of polygyny.
Under traditional Jewish law, a marriage is effectively a form of purchase, and the husband owns his wife. Therefore, it makes sense that a man can purchase multiple wives, but a wife can only be owned by one man.
I believe that Islamic marriage law and probably Mormon marriage law come from this same tradition, so of course people from this mindset would be happy to legalize polygyny but not polyandry.
(Traditional Jewish law also outlawed polygamy more than a thousand years ago, but remnants still remain. When the world trade center collapsed, a lot of Jewish widows had no solid proof their husband was dead - no body - and needed to get an Orthodox Jewish court to declare them eligible to remarry. The widowers had no such issue. And in ugly civil divorces the man sometimes holds the threat of refusing a religious marriage over the women, because he has the power to prevent her from remarrying, and not vice versa.)
As AHunter3 says, modern American polyamory has no such gender bias. Both the women and the men in these arrangements often take multiple partners. But it’s not a group marriage. The word for your partner’s partner is (in the circles i know) metamour, and while it’s understood that you have a relationship with your metamours, that is similar to your relationship with your in-laws, indirect, not a direct relationship. Each not-marriage-because-polyamory-has-no-legal-standing-in-the-US is its own thing, a relationship between two people. And sometimes the map of relationships is very complicated.
True, but the Supreme Court of Appeals has ruled in 2021 that prohibition of polygamous Islamic marriages is unconstitutional, so they are afforded legal protection, regardless of the upcoming legislation.
I understand that by only linking to the Customary Marriages Act as “marriage law” I was implying that specific Act covered Islamic ones too, I apologize for that, I had a couple of links open but just used the one.
Even using that outdated model, it’s entirely possible for people to be co-owners of something, and I’m sure that was also the case in Israel (it certainly was a legal principle in the Roman world)
It’s forbidden by Jewish law, but i see your point that it could be done. But that would imply that the husband negotiates choosing a second partner for his wife, not that she does so. Which would be…weird, for him to be the one taking marriage vows and all that.
Technically, it could be polygyny or polyandry or a mix of both.
The fact that so many people assume that polygamy doesn’t include polyandry says a good deal about the culture.
“Polyamorous” doesn’t either include or exclude marriage, as I understand it – am I wrong about that?
You – specific you – are explicitly excluding marriage; but some of this conversation has been about the legal issues of legal marriage, and it seems to make sense to have words for that also.
There may exist some people in the US who self-identify as “polygamous” but everyone I’ve met or communicated with who has multiple partners or whose partners do, or is open to the possibility of same and considers that stance a permanent one (as opposed to “well I’m just dating I’m not looking for anything permanent yet”) refer to themselves as “polyamorous”, or “poly” for short.
Yeah, exactly correct.
I tend to agree, but I think the biggest issue is that the groups that practice Mormon polygamy are cults, and it’s hard to separate the abuses that are a result of plural marriage from the abuses that come from being a member of a controlling, abusive cult.
The people in these groups are not entering into multiple legal marriages and I don’t believe they have any interest in doing so. One wife, usually the first, is a legal wife and the rest have no legal status, even if they’ve been married in a religious ceremony. For the most part, they wait until the women are above the age of consent before placing them in a marriage - it’s a small price to pay to keep the law away. Sometimes first wives are younger, but legally married in a state that has an age exception for marriages with parental consent.
The controversy with the law, which I totally see, is in the eyes of the law these are married men having affairs with multiple women, and why should they be prosecuted/persecuted just because they purport to be married to their girlfriends?
I do not believe most polygamous groups have any interest in obtaining legal status for plural wives, the men are generally not able or willing to fully support all their wives and children and rely on them receiving welfare as single mothers. It’s also important to remember that most polygamous Mormon marriages are arranged by the cult leader.
Within these groups, the questions of agency and consent are complex, because they young women have been indoctrinated from birth. One of the most interesting anecdotes I have read involved a young woman and her loss of faith.
It happened on the day she was scheduled to meet with the cult leader and find out who she was supposed to marry, the day God’s plan for her was going to be revealed.
She went into the meeting and her prophet asked her the question that destroyed her faith.
Who do YOU want to marry? Is there a boy you like?
The woman was crushed. What happened to God’s plan for her life? Was she this UNIMPORTANT? Did God not CARE who she married? The leader tried to backtrack by talking about how God revealing his will through her, but the damage had been done.
When you’ve been raised like this, do you really have agency? Are you really giving informed consent?
My concern about the decriminalization of Mormon polygamy is the way they facilitate the abuse that goes on within the cults, by eliminating the hook that allowed law enforcement to go after these groups. “Sister Wives” used to push my buttons for many reasons, but mostly because it whitewashed the AUB cult. Granted, it isn’t as bad as some of the other large cults, like the FLDS and the Kingstons, but it’s not nearly as innocuous as the show makes them out to be.
How did you feel about “Big Love”?
I thought Big Love was pretty good. I didn’t find the Hendrickson backstory, the excommunicated cult member making a late in life conversion back to polygamy very plausible, but it was fiction and that angle made for good cable TV.
I thought they did a really good job in portraying the fictionalized FLDS cult and many of the story arcs were adapted from real life situations, like the feuds with the crazy-assed Mexican branch of the cult and the son taking power and going full authoritarian. And they got a lot of the little things right, like the cult women being into MLM’s.
And I liked the final season story arc where they found out the youngest wife was underage at the time of her marriage, it exemplified some of the complex issues of agency and consent that I mentioned upthread, and I’m glad they went there.
That said, I hated the series final scene showing the wives living together after Bill’s death, and I wish they’d left it out.