Makes total sense, thanks.
Getting legally married to a second person when already legally married to someone else is a crime in all states. Living in a polyamorous household without marriage licenses involved can still bring legal risks.
I seemed to remember that some polyamorous families ran afoul of anti-brothel laws in some states, but I could not find that online. I did find this article from 2014 that goes over some of the legal risks involved.
It’s also true that two soldiers / sailors / ordinary citizens with e.g. $25K pay each will pay more in tax as two single individuals than they will as a married filing jointly couple making $60K combined.
So the difference doesn’t affect their gross pay but certainly affects their after-tax actual income.
Any desire I might have had for polygamy, I shed after watching the HBO series Big Love…
whooo boy, no judgment, but that was complicated. I also begin to understand the polyamory community’s obsession with calendaring and scheduling tools!
Based on the polyamorous people i know, that part was reasonably accurate.
My problem with polygamy has to do more with the practical implications of the practice. It appears to me that it mainly takes place in religious communities where there is no choice. The idea of informed consent about this issue in a religious community is laughable. The women generally have no choice about who they marry, much less about how many wives their husbands have. Granted, this is also a problem in some communities without polygamy, but polygamy compounds the issues. Furthermore, what happens to the excess male population? Only the alpha males get to have multiple wives.
It is a practice that sounds much more reasonable outside the context of religion.
Really? AFAICT, it’s certainly true that the incidence of polygamy is much higher in such communities than in the general population. But it’s not clear to me that such communities actually account for the majority of people who are in de facto polygamous/polyamorous relationships.
Who Really Practices Polyamory?
Again, it’s by no means clear that polygamy in society at large, rather than in small patriarchal religious communities, would end up being substantially more polygynous than polyandrous.
If it did, though, “what happens to” the “excess male population” would be the same thing that’s happened to the “excess female population” in societies with significantly fewer males: namely, a lot of them wouldn’t get married.
Women are not a societal resource to which men are automatically entitled some kind of “fair share”. I’m all for society protecting individuals from being coerced and abused, but society has no responsibility to protect individuals from simply not being chosen by other individuals who are free to make other choices.
And I would argue that society has no right to restrict the free choices of individuals solely to boost other individuals’ chances of being chosen.
I wonder how much of that choice is the same as FLDS-type “choice”, when the women are rasied from birth to be subservient, and with the idea of becoming a sister bride someday. When you’ve be raised to accept the necessity of the hijab, and society is structured around it, it is really a free choice?
I see the hijab as a symbol of make dominance and loss of freedom for women. I also don’t think the government should outlaw its wearing. You can’t nanny-state people into freedom of choice - it has to come from within.
Most of this post is correct, and well done. But I have issue with …it mainly takes place in religious communities where there is no choice… since that part isnt true. Well, if you define it as a older male with half dozen wives, then yes.
But I have known several poly trios, some two men one woman, others one man, two women, and that is more likely the commonest form of poly in America. And pretty damn harmless too.
I have a friend who’s in a poly relationship; she lives with her lawfully wedded husband of 30-plus years, and their common-law wife of 5 or so years, and the common-law (or whatever) wife also has a girlfriend, who does not live with them. FWIW, all of them are on disability, and there are no children involved.
The biology behind female monogamy totally clicked for me when I saw this program 20-plus years ago. FYI: The second man in this threesome left the relationship by the time the clip aired, her preschool-aged daughter from a previous relationship ended up in this custody of her biological father’s parents, the married couple themselves divorced within just a few years, and the legal husband died a few years ago. SFW
While it may be true that polygynous (a new word for me) arrangements are not the dominant form of polygamy, I am not convinced of that by a self selected online survey. When I spoke about “excess males” I was referring to the problem in isolated communities where these men are sometimes simply ejected form the community. However, while I certainly agree that women are not a “resource” that men are entitled to, large numbers of unmarried men can become a problem for societies at large.
From this Slate article;
“Monogamous marriage reduces crime,” Henrich and colleagues write, pulling together studies showing that polygynous societies create large numbers of unmarried men, whose presence is correlated with increased rates of rape, theft, murder, and substance abuse. According to Henrich, the problem with unmarried men appears to come primarily from their lack of investment in family life and in children. Young men without futures tend to engage in riskier behaviors because they have less to lose. And, too, they may engage in certain crimes to get wives—stealing to amass enough wealth to attract women, or kidnapping other men’s wives.
I don’t see these choices being restricted (at least I am not aware of these folks being hauled into court), but society certainly has the right not to encourage practices it deems harmful to society at large.
Lastly, marriage is, at its heart, a legal arrangement, and people entering into this arrangement have the benefit of that protection. People entering into a “poly” arrangement do so at their own peril, and developing a legal framework to account for all the permutations you describe would be a huge undertaking.
I think that that’s a large part of the problem.
That, however, is also true.
Here’s an article about a polyamorous household that has done a lot to be visible, to grow support for their lifestyle. They also do legal work to protect sexual minorities.
Well, the hijab is not a burqa. It’s basically a head-scarf. I’ve known a few Muslim women who wear hijab, and it really is almost a fashion statement. One had the most beautiful scarves. I was almost always complementing her on them. Lots of Christian women won’t wear pants. I see it as comparable. Yes, the “rules” are set by the community, but if that’s your community, I don’t see it as that coercive.
I agree that stable, childbearing two-person marriages are a key part of a healthy society. I also think that polygamy of any kind (either legally recognized, or - again - de facto legal contract-based polygamy which exists right now for anyone who actually wants to engage in it) is about 10,000th on the list of reasons why stable, childbearing two-person marriages are on the decline. The number of people who would simply switch to being happy suburban nuclear families if only polygamy were stamped out by law has to be trivial and I can’t believe anyone really thinks otherwise.
I think you misinterpreted the reference to that published paper in my quote. The study in the Balzarini et al. Journal of Sex Research paper was not “a self selected online survey”; rather, it gathered data by having its recruited participants (not self-selected) fill out an online survey:
Initially I agree with you in this.
But …
I saw an interesting and telling single panel cartoon a year-ish ago.
It was a drawing of a woman in a burqa walking from left to right encountering a woman walking the opposite way wearing a bikini, big voluptuous, presumably enhanced, breasts, stack-heel wedge sandals, big eyeglasses, and big hair.
The thought balloon hovering in the empty space above and between them both said something like: “What a victim of male exploitation!” With the connecting lines drawn down to both womens’ heads. IOW they both saw the other and had the same thought about that other.
That cartoon made me more uncomfortable than it should have. It was masterful. Be careful about what you think without really thinking about it.
I saw that one too. It was genius.
I’m going to make a lot of typos trying to respond to various posts about Mormonism because I’m posting on my phone but here goes. Also if you aren’t interested in the Mormon aspect or prefer a more positive view of its history, you can scroll past,
I’m from polygamous stock—two of my great-grandparents were born in polygamous families. I also studied a bit about it after I left Mormonism.
Interesting, this is sort of right but also reflects a popular misconception which the LDS church wants the World to believe.
The founder, Joseph Smith, had a large number of wives. As it was illegal and also done in secret from the common members and while was an open secret among the top leaders, it was still a secret and not everyone knew everything.
It’s generally thought Smith had in the range of 50 to 60 wives, but scholars disagree on the exact number. It certainly wasn’t just a handful nor in the hundreds. The youngest were child-brides with the youngest two documented as 14 (almost 15 as the official LDS website helpfully points out). There were women married to other men, not only to “Gentiles” or non-believers but also some who were married to Mormon men. He would send the husband on distant missions and propositioned their wives.
As a devout Mormon, my mother taught me and my siblings about polygamy from when we were very young. I was surprised to grow up and discover that not all Mormons were aware of the history of polygamy in Mormonism.
The LDS church has gone to great lengths to downplay or cover-up polygamy, including attempting to erase the existence of the marriages and modifying quotes from early leaders to avoid any mention of the practice. Ironically, downplaying this contributes to the recruitment of active LDS members by the fundamentalist groups as people attempt to become more devout.
After the early Mormons fled to the wilds of Utah and the surrounding areas, they began openly practicing polygamy. There were many problems with the Mormon practice. There was never a shortage of men so many with lessor status went without as young men. In the days without systematic forms of retirement, many often young widows of higher status males married lower status men.
The idea is “sister wives” happily living together seems to be the exception rather than the rules. More often than not the waves were set up in separate households. Many of Brigham Young wives were dispatched to outlying areas without any financial support and left to fend for themselves.
Divorce was easily obtained with Brigham Young personally benefiting by collecting a fee as the governor.
Almost all the plural marriages were with just a few wives. Both of my polygamous ancestors each had three wives and 20+kids, although the possibility apocryphal story has one church leader asking a boy at an event whose child he was and the boy replying “Yours, Father.”
The federal government was determined to eliminate the practice and when withholding statehood and even jailing husbands failed to curb it, the government started seizing Mormon property, including the all important temples.
Mormon theology taught that polygamy was a requirement for the highest degree of salvation, the place in heaven where became a god or goddess yourself and it wasn’t until the location for the essential rites were seized that the Mormons relented.
A common misconception, actively pushed by the LDS church, is that revelation then lead to the elimination of the doctrine of polygamy. This was not the case.
The president of the Mormon church had his secretary draft a “To Whom it May Concern” statement “advising” members to not break the law. This statement satisfied the Federal government; the properties were returned and Utah eventually became a state. However; new polygamous marriages were continued in secret. Many were performed in Canada and Mexico.
Eventually a subsequent leader made the decision to eliminate the secret authorization of new plural marriages which drove the practice even further underground. Apostles were performing ceremonies in secret and one crackdown involved top leaders being asked if they were aware of such ordinances being performed, often with the questioner being the very person who had secretly approved the marriage.
The First Manifesto was issued in 1890 and the final officially approved marriages stopped in the 1910s, perhaps as late as1920. Because of the secrecy involved, it was inevitable that splinter groups would be formed.
I think that’s often the case. And i think that’s a way to make it more likely that the wives can live happily together. Each gets her own domain.