Polygamy versus other forms of relationships.

Great Debates
21

From Grey

I’m thinking more in terms of if polygamy was made legal in the US or Europe. At a guess, laws would have to change. Maybe instead of a 50/50 split, it would be a 33/33/33 split. Setting aside the legal aspects (which would HAVE to be changed and modified to fit the new situation) what other exploitation do you see? Frankly I see none. I also think you’d be surprised at how often it would be 2 men and a woman in the relationship…again, don’t think in terms of native societies of the past, but in terms of this implemented NOW…and in a modern western democracy, say. In THOSE terms, why exploitation of women?

From Aldebaran

I agree. Unfortunately, most of us aren’t set up to properly evaluate such things, nor to determine exactly what ‘exploitation’ is in such a society. Have women been exploited in the past? Sure they have. So have men and children. However, in terms of putting such a system forth HERE, in the US or in Europe, I’m not seeing it. Do people think we’d go back to tribal ways if we implemented such a thing??

Let me ask you something…you don’t have to answer if its too personal or you are uncomfortable. You’ve hinted that you are in such a marrage. How do your wives feel about it? Do THEY feel ‘exploited’ in any way? If I were to guess, the answer would be an emphatic NO! If I were to bet, I’d guess that they don’t feel exploited in the least, and would resent the hell out of anyone saying they were.

-XT

22

Why should the husband has a claim on the property of his wife/wives and why should one wife need ot have a claim on the property of the other(s)?
As I said: All of this should be stipulated in and regulated by the marriage contract. I wouldn’t dream to engage myself in a marriage without having an extremely detailed contract.
You can present me the most intelligent, most beautiful woman and make me fall in love upto a point that I stop reasoning and feel braindead every second she’s with me and every second without her is pure hell. But thank you, no way she is getting me to marry her without a contract.
Again I must ask: Don’t you have marriage contracts where you live?

Not necessarely. First born is first born.
In my patriarchal society up to now this counts for “first born male” of the first wife or if she has no son, of the second and so on. (By the way: polygamy isn’t exactly encouraged. It is also not encouraged at all in Al Qur’an. That is a common misconception.)
Yet there is no reason why in an other society - and in my dreams also in mine - this couldn’t be simply “first born” or more justly: equally among every single child (as is the case in Belgium).

I don’t know what you mean exactly with “step children”.
Salaam. A

23

Well, there are ‘marriage contracts’ called pre-nuptial agreements…but in the absence of one, a divorce proceeding relies on case law and precedent. The precedent in the US, at least, is that the cheated upon party gets the lion’s share of shared assets- house, cars, stocks, etc.
My wife and I don’t have a pre-nup…so assuming there’s a divorce (and we’ve not killed each other), it would fall back to that.

The military thing is true, as far as I know, true. The idea is that it interferes with unit cohesion, as many of these affairs happen among fellow soldiers.

The precedent for polygamy I was speaking to was seen in this country among certain segments of the Mormon church (now disavowed by the main LDS church, i believe) where older men took several sisters in a family as wives, etc. Often the women were little more than girls, as the age of consent age is waived in marriage (ie 16 to consent, but can marry at 14). I could be wrong on this point, so if any lawyers are out there, please feel free to fight my ignorance.

Anyway, providing proper dowry, a man could basically buy a wife, and their entire relationship will be defined by that transaction. And that’s exploitation in my book.

24

I must not be making myself clear.

The traditional setup as I understand it (A marries B, A marries C) At this point the property of A, B and C is considered family property (Z). Now note that a legal agreement (marriage) exists between A and B and A and C. A is in a position to have a legal relationship to property brought into the marriage by B and C. However B has no access to C’s property and vise versa. So…

A has access to Z
B has access to less than Z
C has access to less than Z.

Seems like an imbalance to me. And if you have B leave the arrangement they can claim property though A that is also claimed by C. That sounds like a nightmare to straighten out.

As I said, if you head out and have B and C marry each other, the problems of access to combined property disappear (aside from gay marriage).

Also I doubt very much that current/traditional polygamous setups allow for B to prevent A from marring C.

Aldebaran, I believe the term you are looking for is prenuptial agreement and it not a requirement whatsoever in a marriage. It might be a good idea, but the state has provisions for distribution of the combined assets in the event of a divorce.

25

I believe that in Nepal (or maybe Tibet, I forget which), polyandry (one woman, multiple husbands) is fairly common. In this case, it involves one woman marrying a group of brothers. (The idea of both me and my brother sleeping with the same woman is a major turn-off, but, hey, whatever floats your boat.)

The theory I’ve heard on why is that there’s an extreme shortage of arable land. Brothers inherit the land jointly to avoid fragmentation into micro-holdings. And the fact that they have one wife among them results in a kind of birth control. A large portion of women in that society never get married or reproduce, I believe.

As far as gender exploitation, I don’t know if I’d want to automatically condemn polygyny as bad for women.

At present in the US, a wealthy man may have a a series of trophy wives and/or trophy mistresses. The trophy wives who are dumped once his eye wanders may make out okay, but the mistresses really get screwed, since they’ve got little or no legal ground for support.

Contrast that to a polygynous society, where a wealthy man can have multiple wives. In this case, his ‘mistress’ can insist on him marrying her. And the 1st wife doesn’t get thrown out on her ass, the kids don’t lose a dad, etc.

Monogamy seems like a good system for wealthy women and poor men. The ‘best’ woman can monopolize the ‘best’ man and not worry too much about competition from ‘low-quality’ women. Of course, since there are restrictions on free trade, we often see side payments (dowries) to create a market equilibrium.

Polygyny seems like a good system for wealthy men and poor women. Instead of facing a choice between being a ‘high-quality’ man’s mistress (with no legal status) or a ‘low-quality’ man’s sole wife, a ‘low quality’ woman can get a share of a ‘high-quality’ man.

I’d think polygyny would be very bad for political stability though. Getting young men married seems like a good way to create pillars of the community. If the wealthier men have 2 or 3 wives each, you’re going to have a lot of horny, envious, and angry poor young men.

26

In my late mother’s country, which is Belgium, homosexual marriages are legal since recently (I didn’t follow this closely but I think it is about a year now).
One of my best friends who lives in France is gay. We know eachother almost since birth. He left the country to go study abroad and stayed there. Because as you say, it isn’t easy to be gay in an Islamic society let be to live together with a partner.

As for women with more then one husband. I can’t say I can imagine this to work out well. I have some feeling two men in the same househould would cause tensions you don’t see when women share a husband.
I can be wrong, I have no experience nor examples to base my judgement on. So maybe female members should fill this blank.

As I said: You need to have a detailed marriage contract.
And when it comes to Islamic law: You need to follow the guidance of Al Qur’an as first source. There is stipulated that a man who can’t give all his wives the same (and take that as broad as you can imagine) should not marry more then one. Or stay single if he has no means to give his wife whatever she needs. There are a lot of other commands on this issue.
That is why I said that polygamy isn’t encouraged at all in Al Qur’an.

Of course there are thousands of people who don’t even know what is written there - since illiteracy is still a problem in so many Islamic societies - and who apply the laws of tradition and custom rather then the clear religeous one. That is a problem especially for women who don’t know and can’t get informed about their rights.
However, there seems to be also an other side to this coin: young women well informed about their rights making it the young men difficult because of their (financial) demands. This adds to the frustration of young men who can’t find a decent job and thus can’t afford to get married.
(This is only one of the many social problems that encourages the rise of fundamentalism, but in my opinion not one to be neglected)

Salaam. A

27

Keep in mind that many of the people in the West who practice polygamy (though not in a legal form, as it is not permitted them) are practicing neither patriarchal nor matriarchal relationship forms; they’re just married.

Personally, I’m not interested in marrying my partners’ partner. We just don’t have that sort of relationship, as we’re both straight women. (I do know of another four-person family where the women consider themselves married to each other, but their husbands aren’t married to each other.)

28

I just wanted to point out (if no one else has and I just missed it) that most states are joint-property. We got any lawyers that can tell us whether a pre-nup will override the joint-property during marriage, or just set terms for divorce?

29

Well… Upto now I didn’t see any objects flying towards me when entering their place.
Considering the fact that my first wife would prefer to use icecold water instead of objects and that my second wife would throw anything that came under her hands when in a state of rage…
I guess I can safely assume that they don’t see me as some sort of medieval enslaving exploiting ruler.

On the question if they would “resent the hell out of anyone saying they are exploited”.
To be honest: I am certain that they would be insulted beyond imagination.

Salaam. A
exploited in double.

30

Thanks for answering Alderbaran…I didnt want to make you uncomfortable or anything, but I really appreciate your honesty on this.

I win my private bet as well, Aldebaran, as thats exactly what I thought. :slight_smile: I’m just not seeing all this ‘exploitation’ hand waving about this subject. I think people are vaguely uneasy about the subject (though it mystifies me as to why they are), and maybe the ‘but women will be exploited!!’ thing is simply a reflex arguement.

-XT

31

Yes you did.
Maybe I wasn’t clear.
If there is a contract then there is no need that all property of all the partners is considered to be family property. You can easily avoid such a situation.

If there are no “combined assets” to begin with = when everyone keeps what he/she brings in the marriage and keeps what was in his/her possession before the marriage, how can the State interfere in this?
Salaam. A

32

Why shouldn’t a man be able to tolerate sharing his wife with another man, but yet the woman is “by nature” supposedly capable of this. How are men different? That is most definitely not our culture. Woman here expect to be treated equally, even though a wise woman will still make her husband feel like he rules.:wink: Unless your goal in marriage is lots of children, physically it makes more sense for a woman to have two husbands than the reverse. I can see the benefits to that, but not to two women. I am biased, of course.

The problem with poligamy is when you are raised in it and are expected to follow this tradition; if you chose not to, often there is pressure to conform. I have nothing against any one getting married to more than one person or to the same gender. I don’t think marriage should be legislated in that way. The only laws I can see as necessary would be to prevent immediate family members from marrying. Marriage should be a private contract.

33

I didn’t say that.

In my opinion this says enough to answer the question “how are men different” :slight_smile:

There was no such influence or pressure present in my life and I don’t know of any such cases either.
Salaam. A

34

You did say you felt two men in the same house would cause tension that women would not feel. If a woman had the ability to accept this better than a man, it would mostly be because of her upbringing. Her expected gender role.

To some degree you have a point. Being submissive does come easier to me than to my husband. But I am just as fiercely possessive of him as he is of me. This is how I was raised. He is mine. I would share everything I have, except for him.

You are a man, there would be no expectation to conform. Two wives does not seem like it would create the emotional dilemma that sharing a husband would. You were born the right gender. In our country, in the Mormon lifestyle, it became harder for young women to accept the fate of poligamy as women gained more of a voice. Young women started to rebel because they wanted the choices other women had. Our culture wouldn’t typically support poligamy, but I still believe it should be an individual choice.

35

I would note that I personally know more MFM groupings than I do FMF groupings, if one limits it to three-person relationship systems.

(I also know more systems that don’t fit such a tidy and constrained model than do.)

36

Aldebaran, I think the concept you’re struggling with is that of community property. In a lot of states, when you marry all assets either of you bring into the marriage become community property; everything becomes the joint property of both spouses. In addition, everything a couple accrues during the marriage is shared equally between the spouses. Sometimes a prenup will specify that certain assets remain the property of the partner who brought them into the marriage, but not often.

You see, most Americans just don’t bother with prenuptial agreements because they don’t come into marriage with any assets to protect. When I got married, the only things I owned outright were a 9 year old car, a cat, a dog, and a few household furnishings scavenged from yard sales and the attics of kindly relatives. My husband didn’t have much more; his name was on the mortgage for the house we’d bought a few months earlier and his car was a lot newer, but otherwise his list of assets was just as pathetic as mine. A lot of people marry owning quite a bit less than we did. Why bother going through the hassle and expense of drawing up a contract to specify that I get the dog and my ratty old armchair, and he keeps his tacky Elvis clock if we divorce? It’s just not worth it.

If you look at property division through this lens, polygamy makes things a lot more complicated. Say my husband was to take another wife, whom we’ll call WifeB. During the course of the marriage(s), I buy a property worth $100,000. Under community property laws, he owns half of that property. Under the same laws, WifeB owns half of everything he owns. So how much of that property does my husband own? Is it a 50/50 split between him and me, or is it a 25/25/50 split between him, WifeB, and me? Or are WifeB and I considered married to one another and everything split equally into thirds? And what happens when she decides she hates my guts and wants out of the marriage? Is she entitled to a portion of something I acquired while we were both married to the same man?

37

No, I said :

So I said actually that I have no idea how this would work out in practice.
If you feel that there is something wrong in the upbringing of women that makes them vulnerable for what is called here “exploitation”, then that is not my fault, is it?
And may I add to this that both men and women are strongly influenced by this so called “gender role” and are expected to conform to these rules? Such is the case in every society I know of.

I’m sorry, but you come across as someone who sees marriage as “getting possession” of someone.

Permit me to smile. Read above.

It depends on how you organise such a relationship.
If everything is looked at, talked through and agreed on before you undertake such an step - and I think you largely underestimate and are largely uninformed about what demands - there is little room for developping such dilemmas.

Thank you. I’ve always seen myself as being vorn as such.
I couldn’t be a
In our country, in the Mormon lifestyle, it became harder for young women to accept the fate of poligamy as women gained more of a voice. Young women started to rebel because they wanted the choices other women had. Our culture wouldn’t typically support poligamy, but I still believe it should be an individual choice. **
[/QUOTE]

38

No, I said :

So I said actually that I have no idea how this would work out in practice.
If you feel that there is something wrong in the upbringing of women that makes them vulnerable for what is called here “exploitation”, then that is not my fault, is it?
And may I add to this that both men and women are strongly influenced by this so called “gender role” and are expected to conform to these rules? Such is the case in every society I know of.

I’m sorry, but you come across as someone who sees marriage as “getting possession” of someone.

Permit me to smile. Read above.

It depends on how you organise such a relationship.
If everything is looked at, talked through and agreed on before you undertake such an step - and I think you largely underestimate and are largely uninformed about what it demands - there is little room for developping such dilemmas.

Thank you. I’ve always seen myself as being born as a boy and I always had the impression that I developped rather normal (brain functioning aside).

For as far as I’m informed about mormonism, a man can even marry both mother and daughter and her sisters, a concept and idea which I find repulsive and incomprehensible.
There are in mormonism also other concepts and idea’s regarding women and marriage I would never be able to agree with.
If I’m wrong about this and there are mormons posting here, please correct me on this and give additional information.

You talk about “fait of polygamy” which sounds like : Women must undergo such arrangements without having anything to say about it.
Maybe it is the situation in the cases you observed. But you shouldn’t generalise it like you did.

Salaam. A

39

To the Moderators

I think I pushed the a bit prematurely the submit button.
Can you delete the frist of my posts here above. Thank you.

Salaam. A

40

So this concept of “joined property” is the accepted common rule?
As I said… I wouldn’t dare to get married according the US laws :slight_smile:

As for your further explanation, I have a question about that:

Suppose you get married while both having nothing more then what you describe.
Later on one of the partners starts a business with a capital inherited from his/her family. The business florishes, money comes in in abundance.
Then something happens between the partners with a divorce as result.
Are you now claiming that everything must be divided, including the business started on the initiative of one of the partners and where the other one didn’t need to take any financial risks (=didn’t add to its starting capital) and didn’t work for?
Isn’t it possible to make/change a mariage contract after you were married to settle such things?

Salaam. A