I don’t buy that. Men earn higher wages on the whole. Such a “matriarchal” household would be likelier to have a higher income.
An altogether different variety of poly relationship that was used in pre-Islamic pagan Mecca: A woman made it with a variety of men, whoever took her fancy. They all entered into this arrangement with her with the understanding that when she became pregnant, she could name any of the men she chose and the child became his to take responsibility for. It was a daddy lottery. It shows that even though at that time in Arabia women were degraded in other respects, there were survivals of earlier times when women were more autonomous and of higher status.
I think considering those “the two options” is pretty much ludicrous, since those are a fairly small minority of actual multiple-adult relationships in practice. Webs are the most common in my experience, though not all of those are marriage-type relationships. Small closed knots – generally of three or four – are also common, and in a variety of configurations of sexes and orientations. Irrelevant to a discussion of polygamy are the primary-couple-with-other-partners cases, which are a huge fraction.
And that’s setting aside Johanna’s point about the economics of the situation, to which I would add that the concern about economics only makes sense in a one-income household in the first place. And most monogamous households aren’t one-income, let alone multiple-adult things. Three or four incomes makes for a better-financed family, no matter what genitalia are attached to them.
Ooh, I forgot the Amazon basin tribe that holds that babies are built out of supplies of sperm, and the more ‘fathers’ a baby has the better off it’ll be. (Probably in part because taking on the role of father in that context also includes economically supporting the mother and child, so a woman with many partners will probably be getting more and better quality food than a woman with few.)
The real world predominance of sexual “webs” may be a hard fact, but most of the time I really don’t imagine these generally flexible relationships looking for, or desiring, some external legal validation of their coupling via marriage. If people are not interested in creating and raising children or in forming long term households the entire notion of a desire to be married is sort of moot.
Polyandry (world wide) as a formalized coupling construct for humans is fairly rare relative to polygamy and it’s not difficult to see why. Historically the the prime mover for males has been to to maximize their reproductive success by gaining access to females. Cooperative polyandry has few benefits for males in this context.
If it’s a sexual and resource arms race between the two coupling constructs males getting access to more female raises reproductive success for males, whereas females getting more males does little to maximize reproductive success for females.
Let’s see. My family has either two men and two women or three men and three women depending on how the boundaries are drawn. (Setting aside non-familial interactions.) A subset are explicitly committed to childrearing as a family; the other relationships are comparatively young but actually having more shared-household stuff than the more established ones at the moment.
Most webs, in my experience, have knots of more closely committed relationships, including pieces that are involved in raising children. Many webs include several connected households, with some adults functioning as parents and others as auncle figures to whatever children are involved.
“Polygamy” is a gender-neutral word, by the way. The one you want is “polygyny”.
I don’t conduct my relationships as warfare, myself. I have my doubts that those people who prefer to do so will ever be in a position to disrupt my relationship network with their antisocial behaviour.
Just so I’m clear re your examples. We’re not simply talking about extended families as seen in some areas of the chronic underclass with itinerant males and female centric households, where grandmothers and aunts act as defacto mothers for children whose mothers are absent or too young to be proper mothers.
You are saying that there are numerous “web” relationships in modern western societies in middle class households and up, where individuals overtly and cooperatively share sexual partners, financial resources, and child rearing duties as part of a communal arrangement of some sort. That’s interesting, I would have thought these arrangements would be extremely rare.
I’ve been paying attention to various polyamorous communities, mostly on the 'net, for over ten years; in that time I have encountered a number of folks other than myself who do some or all of that. (And that’s limiting to those people who find that sort of thing useful to participate in and know it exists; I only know such things exist because a partner’s ex-partner is a librarian and did her research.)
This means, among other things, that my sense of rarity is extremely skewed; I can only speak to my own experience, and I don’t spend terribly much social time with people who are not familiar with the basic concepts even if they are not personally interested in multiple relationships.