400-1000 teenaged boys abandoned by their famiies so older men could have more wives is a pretty fair problem to be examined. There are problems with monogamy as you point out, but just because we have problems with monogamy, I see no reason why we should invite this additional social ill. Especially if polygamy became commonplace in the US it could pose a serious problem, even if only a percentage of polygamists did such things.
I also have always suspected that one of the reasons there are so many young men in Arab nations willing to blow themselves up is that they can’t get laid because the rich old guys are sucking up all the marriageable women. Especially the hotties.
Is there anything that would prevent a group of consenting adults from hiring a good attorney, and creating a contract that, except for things like insurance, worked just like a group marriage? communal ownership of properties, all heirs to each other, legal acceptance/responsiblilty of each others debts, common guardianship of any offspring, sharing power of attorney? What would be the impediments to something like that?
I don’t think there’s any impediment to it, it’s just that heterosexual couples that get married get all of that and more for the low, low cost of a blood test and a visit to a justice of the peace. Gay rights and Poly rights people want the same rights that straight couples get, without having to jump through every single hoop the lawmaking types can think of. They’re trying to get rid of this last (hah) vestige of that whole “separate but equal” idea.
I’m guessing that this would be the most problematic. The best interests of the child would likely override any arrangements set up by the poly group. Plus, if one parent opts out, the court system will probably only recognize the two parents, not the others. Just my guess. All the property stuff can be handled much more easily than children.
Almost all the assumptions here are that a man will marry multiple women. Only betenoire has pointed out how tangled the definition of marriage will become with women having equal polygamous rights with men. Has such a setup ever actually been used? Maybe the “plural marriage” of the Oneida community was something similar.
If you seriously want to consider how polygamy would fly in contemporary American law, you do realize it would have to make equal provision for men and women. You weren’t thinking of a patriarchal Mormon or African or Islamic model, were you? Once you alter the pattern to where wives in a polygamous marriage can bring in extra husbands the same as the husbands can bring in extra wives, there’s no telling how big it could grow. And how would the sexual alignments be structured once you wind up with a conglomeration of X number of women and Y number of men? Would each individual in the grouping feel free to get busy with any other individual? Or would you be limited to doing it with the one who recruited you? How well has anyone thought this through?
The example of the FLDS goes to show how in a system where women are oppressed by men, some men are also oppressed by other men. Most examples of polygamous societies (except for Oneida) are actually polygyny, where a man controls a harem of wives and women are not allowed to marry more than one husband. Such a system is inherently unequal for women and places them in an inferior status.
The only examples of polyandry I can think of come from tribes in the Himalayas and the Nilgiri Mountains of South India. In the Himalayan societies, a woman marries all of her husband’s brothers. That is the only way it works; she can’t pick and choose different husbands that she might like better. This does not work out to more equality or freedom for women. Maybe it just means the wife has to do extra housework.
A guy has three kids and the mom dies making all three his next-of-kin and heirs. What’s the difference between that and three wives in the scenerios you present. (Except for #2, that’s obvious - birth parents).
I believe it is rare but not unknown historically; it’s certainly just as frequent as polygyny among the polyfolks I know.
Am I the only one who finds this question bizarre? People’s private sexual arrangements are their business, not a matter of concern for legislation!
For the record: different groups of people have different preferences and set up their arrangements as suits them, using the amount of thought that is required to do so. The idea of some sort of group relationship (as the question presumes) rather than multiple relationships does not apply to all systems in the first place.
I’m aware that there are real live polyamorous communities who have been making their own arrangements. I’m not familiar with all the details of how they arrange their private lives, but I gather it’s a very different proposition from traditional patriarchal polygyny. That’s why I was hoping the OP could clarify just what was he suggesting. Which model of poly marriage did he intend? The examples given by the OP and subsequent posts seemed to focus on old-fashioned patriarchal polygyny as though that were the default model for “polygamous marriage.” That system, wherever it rears its head in real life, is bound by rules that govern precisely who can have sex with whom. The point of these sexually restrictive rules is to safeguard the control over property exercised by alpha males, by ensuring that they will pass on property to their own sons, by tightly controlling women’s activities and restricting access to sex. I’m of course aware that polyamorous pioneers since Oneida have cast off that whole way of thinking about marriage and relationships. So which model of marriage are we discussing here?
So clearly marriage contract would have to be rewritten. My point was that the legal issues cover in that particular post are already ones that need to be dealt with with multiples descendents, thus with multiple spouses can be dealt with as well.
It’s tempting to imagine that a civil union involving three parties would just be 50% more complicated than one only involving two, but this simply is not the case.
That said, so long as this can be resolved, then I don’t personally have any objection, I just think this issue deserves more than a dismissive sentence to address it.
I think the problem is that any time you permit polyamory in a society, you’re going to have a big problem with patriarchy polygyny, because there are always guys who will be as greedy for women as they are for gold (if not more so) and will set about building harems and committing any ethical misdeeds necessary to make it possible for them to do so. Before you can expect to put a stop to that kind of behavior, you need a much better understanding of dominance behavior, especially among men, but among women too, than has ever been exhibited by any society on earth.
Polyamory either way (ie Multiple - Female > 1 Male or Multiple Male > 1 female or group marriage of some sort). It does seems, however, in seeing how these arrangements resolve themselves in the real world, that the multiple wife > 1 male model is likely to be predominant over the others. The reason for this (IMO) is dictated by the decisions women make about who the best resource provider is likely to be in their cultural context and situation. A mature man with a harem of wives and property is likely to be a more attractive mate prospect to some women than a struggling young up and comer.
For a man to be an integrated part of woman’s harem, (again IMO) it would require his subsuming his need to dominate other males and monopolize breeding opportunities, and I don’t know how feasible this is unless the man is fairly passive, which is not an attractive trait for many females.
I think the problem is that they expect a limited contract (marriage license) to apply broadly. The point of a marriage license is that it’s a very simple form of incorporation. They could quite easily incorporate and count each spouse as a shareholder. You can setup a corporation any way you want. If you want to do something outside of the societal norm, go ahead and do it, just don’t expect others to back you up on your lifestyle choice.
Do you have any evidence for this, or is it just speculation? I have not seen any such bias in the ten or so years I’ve been observing multiple-adult relationship systems.
Pure speculation on my part based on why people marry. If were are hypothesizing about polygamous, heterosexual marriage couplings in this specific instance, I’m trying to foresee what decisions men and women will make about coupling based on the variables men and women typically weigh in these decisions and the nature and motivation(s) of the parties.
If we are considering multiple male -1 female /multiple female - 1 male formalized polygamy relationships as the two option in this set, it seems to me there are probably more (relative) resource advantages for multiple women in joining the household of a patriarch than for multiple men to join the household of a matriarch. It is assumed that the parties want to establish households and potentially raise their own children in these scenarios, and that these are the among the prime drivers to legally formalize the relationship as a marriage.