Tonite there was a segment on NBC Dateline about Tom Green, a Utah polygamist in big trouble with the Man.
My question is, in polygamist societies, assuming there is about a 50-50 ratio, eventually all the babes get married off well before you run out of men. What happens to these poor dorks? Do they become slaves? Boy toys for insatiated wives?
The only examples I can think of are the Middle East and Utah.
I can’t say about Mormonism – which gets weirder and weirder the more you look at it – but in the case of Islam, the permission to marry up to four wives (4 is the maximum) came about due to wartime conditions when there were a lot of orphans and not so many men left alive to take care of them all. The idea was for surviving men to shoulder more social responsibility by taking more orphans and widows into their families. The context in the Qur’ân talking about orphans makes this clear. It was never meant to be a polygamous free-for-all. (Although at times guys did get carried away with it.) Under normal conditions there should be about a 1:1 ratio of men and women.
You asked a good question, VV. I too would like to know what the non-alpha males in old Salt Lake did when Brigham & them were snapping up most of the women! I guess they just had to go without! Not very fair, is it?
I’m just as good as the rest of those guys, and yet I only have the one wife… dang it! Now my wife, apparently, could get more wives, but they wouldn’t be interested in me… oh, wait, you meant just mormans… uh, nevermind…
My WAG [sub]and all jokes aside[/sub] would be that the structure of such societies is very planned- one would tend to think that such relationships lend themselves to arrangement. One of my history teachers told me that one of the primary functions of polygamy in Mormonism was so that the wife would have a provider. IIRC, many of the wives of famous Mormons were taken on just for that purpose- many of them weren’t sexually active with their husbands.
I think prostitution would become more common, as it seems to do in societies where finding someone to marry you can be difficult - it was fairly common for ‘gentlemen’ to frequent brothels during Victorian times.
From my anthropology class, I remember that one way to adjust is to have different marriage ages for women and men–i.e., the women get married at a much earlier age, so a greater percentage of them are available for marriage.
My impression is that even in polygamous societies, only a relatively small percentage of the population was actually polygamous. I can’t say this with certainty about all, but certainly in Jewish society up until about 1000 years ago (and until this generation for Sephardic Jews) polygamy was allowed and occasionally practiced, but was very rare. Generally only very wealthy people “indulged” in it. Thus the impact on the overall population gender ratio was not as great as might be supposed. But it is likely that male members of the lower classes had a realistic chance of not getting married at all, while for lower class women it was an opportunity to marry up.
From what I remember in Anthro classes and the various enthographies I read, in polygynous socities, you have to be able to support your wives and their children, so having the wealth/abilities to do so is imperative. You, also, cannot play favorites between the two, otherwise, either wife is going to lose her patience, pack up her stuff and move.
I was just reading something about all this (I believe it was in the excellent Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works). The interesting take was that contrary to our first reaction, polygamy actually favors the women more than men. Sadly I forget all of the evolutionary argument, but it came down to, would you rather have 1/3 of Brad Pitt (assuming he had two wives already), or all of Al Bundy? Your average man has a much harder time getting a woman, as he has still has to compete with the superstuds, they aren’t “taken off the market”.
IIRC, from this report and another (on another show), the women all claim to be single and receive food stamps and WIC and welfare money. That was part of the case of going after them. I guess it would be considered fraud, to claim to be single in order to get benefits, but claim to be married in the eyes of God. This guy isn’t supporting his 5 or 6 wives and 30 kids by having them all get food stamps.
My great-great-grandparents, Neils and Anne Johnson, left Salt Lake City in the 1860’s to get away from what they called “the religion of polygamy.” There was so much pressure for Neils to take a second wife (even though they were not wealthy) that they were willing to risk starving to death on their way to a better place in Nevada and, eventually, California.
Two of Anne’s brothers were polygamists, and each of them married their two wives at the same time.
I was just reading something about all this (I believe it was in the excellent Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works). The interesting take was that contrary to our first reaction, polygamy actually favors the women more than men
The same arguement is made in The Armchair Economist, interestingly enough (to me, anyway).
My anthro classes suggest that polygamy was usually used when there was a shortfall of men, usually do to war. Some cynics have suggested that it also helped to cause a shortfall of men, especially young, sexually frustrated ones. These make good shock troops…
In parts of Tibet, polyandry is practiced. I sort of wonder how a shortage of women could come into being.
Anyone read the Sir Arthor Conan Doyle novel, A Study in Scarlet? It’s with Sherlock Holmes…part of it takes place in Utah when a guy refuses to make his daughter marry a guy with a million wives. His daughter wants to marry this other young guy. They have to escape from the clutches of the evil Mormons.
That story always scared me. Never am I going unarmed to Utah ever.
Tibetan polyandry stems, not from a shortage of women, but from a shortage of goods (usually arable land) for the bride-price. Rather than subdivide the family’s wealth, a number of brothers will share a household, including the wife. That way, they keep it all in the family.
According to my antho class, we are my nature polygynists. The only reason monogamy ever became popular is because usually the large surplus of lonely men was a hot bed for criminals. It was imparitive to give these men some sort of responsibility so some wise men of the past independently decided to enforce monogamy and that eventually became the laws that we practice today. This is in tribal societies.
[snippy remark]So, Zog; how many other places are you afraid of based on works of fiction incorporation myth & misinformation?[/snippy remark]
As far as polygamy in Saudi Arabia goes, I’m given to understand that each wife is to be treated in an identical manner as the other wives. Thus, a man with four wives must also have four houses; a nomad with four wives must provide each wife a separate tent, etc.
Interesting assertions I’ve heard for defending polygamy (BTW, the LDS Church and the laws of Utah prohibit polygamy) is that a lack of available men for the women gave rise to the practice. I doubt that assertion is true in most cases.