Forbidden territory: polygamy

Setting feelings, prejudices, and moral traditions aside, what is the argument for polygamy? It’s obviously something that holds a natural attraction. It’s certainly been common enough in history in one form or another. Whether it’s simply having multiple wives, having wives and concubines, serial monogamy, the multiple families of the rich and the French, etc, it’s happened a lot. Which means men have some natural inclination toward it and women have some capacity to tolerate it, and possibly even embrace it.

From a purely genetic perspective, there is something in the fact that we all have roughly twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors. You can get that result without polygamy, but it’s still significant. Men have a stronger natural compulsion toward casual mating, and have more relaxed standards for qualification, and have a greater desire for variety. Women are choosy and picky and tend to fixate on only the most desirableable mate. All this makes perfect sense considering how much more risk and commitment is assumed by a woman in mating. Women also have a much shorter reproductive window. And on a population-wide level, you can lose practically all the men in a society, either by accident or by expenditure, and still maintain the survival of the lineage.

Oddly enough, both of these different preferences could result in polygamy. Men’s desire for variety and open acceptance of a number of viable partners could be formalized into polygamy. And women’s fixation on selecting only the best possible mates could result in them focusing on only a small pool of the very best mates, which they would then share, also resulting in polygamy. If women wouldn’t compromise on quality then they might compromise on sharing with other women.

Sexually, women seem to also be more tolerant of other women in the mix. You can share your mate with someone else and still maintain access to them reproductively. Men can’t do that. And men are in greater natural competition, practically and genetically, whereas women are more cooperative and genetically conservative. Men, much like males of many species, don’t share territory well. From a genetic standpoint, their position is tenuous, and from a practical standpoint it’s also very vulnerable. It can and likely will be easily taken from you if you don’t defend it.

Females share territory much better and are adapted to do so much better, physically, emotionally, and socially. Men individually require far more resources to maintain, are much more lacking in social skills, are less interested in other people, and are more aggressive and competitive. Women bond together and solve problems cooperatively and socially. By personality, women are also much more agreeable, which is a very pro-social trait to possess, as it mollifies your individuality somewhat for the sake of social cohesion and cooperation. The greater disagreeability of men pushes them further apart on average individually, and their often less-developed verbal abilities make complex social structures more difficult and more stressful to navigate.

Sexually, women also seem to have a greater tolerance of other women’s sexuality and are more flexible. Men are more set and more singular in their behaviors, and their neurology reflects this, being far less distributed and interconnected. Having multiple long-term mates, as a man, allows you to invest in a committed relationship and child-rearing, while also scratching that itch for novelty and the need to spread a wider net with a more chancy set of genes that men have. For women, having multiple committed partners to one male mate (compared to uncommitted promiscuity by men) has some value, in that you do get a stable reproductive choice and you do get a mate that is locked in and committed to helping with child rearing, as well as the potential benefit of a cooperative female ally.

Not that women haven’t been known to try to push out the children of other women, especially those whose mother is gone (the stepmother phenomenon), children in whom they have no genetic stake and who exist as a distraction from investment in their own children. But generally it’s much easier, for many reasons, to get women to share territory than men. And women naturally seek the company and society of other close women far more than men do, regardless.

Because of the massive difference in mating windows and gestation periods (as well as desire and inclination), it’s also far easier for a man to be shared than for a woman to be shared. So long as the women’s needs are being adequately met and they are still enjoying the benefits of their much pickier mate selection by getting the most impressive man out of a hundred, along with access to his resources and the advantages he can provide for their offspring, it’s much easier to keep women happy. As long as their position and the position of their children is secured to maximum advantage, women are more willing to make the tradeoff of also sharing that mate. I’m not saying that’s what they want, in an ideal world, only that it’s much easier to understand why it might be acceptable (and more workable than multiple men to one woman).

There is a large imbalance between men and women of who they find acceptable mating partners, both short and long term. Experiments that involve young people asking random strangers if they’re willing to have sex universally result in a near 100% acceptance of females by males and a near 100% rejection of males by females. Men generally, in my own experience, find about 80% of all the women they know attractive enough to mate with, if the women men were interested (which they aren’t). Women generally find only 20% (or less) of the men they know attractive enough to mate with, if the men were interested (which they are).

The ideal amount of women to mate with, for a man, would instinctually be somewhere around most of them. When it comes to long-term mating partners, it might be a different story, but a lot of men could see themselves being happy with a lot of women, even in the long-term. The lower prevailing rates of neuroticism and lower rates of pursuing a divorce among men speak to this matter. It’s just easier for them to happy enough with a much wider selection of women. They’re less likely to be seriously unhappy with their mates (unhappy to the point of wanting to end the relationship), and are more easily satisfied.

Men might be a little too open to potential alternative mating partners, even if they don’t actually want to leave their spouses (and most who stray don’t). But they’re fairly easy to please. They aren’t very selective, really. They’re broadly enthusiastic about women in general, and quite happy to be among the minority of men who are judged and found acceptable and favored to pass their genes forward.

Women, on the other hand, are far less easy to please. The ideal number of men to have around, for women, possibly averages slightly less than one. Most divorces are initiated by women, and women are much more exacting and have greater expectations of their mating relationship. Understandably. They invest more, risk more, and have fewer opportunities over a shorter amount of time. So they tolerate less and are more sensitive to things that might be a problem. They need to be picky. And men are more risky bets.

Women want the best option. But men tend to pile up at the extremes more than women do. Their curve of outcomes is much steeper than women’s. So there are a lot of wholly unsuitable men, not enough average guys, and a larger but still comparatively small pool of exceptional men. If women are looking for the best and have exacting standards, there’s a pretty good pool, but not nearly enough to go around. And below that there’s a lot of junk.

How women judge fitness is a little more complex and subtle than men; it tends to be mediated by action rather than appearance. Not that appearance doesn’t come into it, too. But whereas all female gene lines get carried forward in mating, males only pass on their particular lineage if they manage to stay with their mate long enough to have a male child, which is in no way guaranteed. So that puts more pressure on male mating to be competitive with one another, and less pressure on women to compete within the sex (except as far as access to the best men is concerned, a problem polygamy solves).

These days, when technology opens up new possibilities that are less bounded by the limits of ordinary life, sex preferences become more obvious. Men, if they could, would like to have multiple female partners. Either serially or at the same time. And they will fulfill that desire through technologies like pornography, if life still makes the real thing impractical, while remaining attached to their mate. Men would keep what they have and add even more, if they could. Women, however, are fairly likely to choose no man at all, to cut them out and go it alone, which is hard but is much easier now than at any previous time in history. The number of acceptable mates, especially acceptable long-term mates, is much lower in women’s eyes. So why not jettison the men altogether and focus on building your own life, and your children if that’s part of it for you (the genetic means to whom is widely available without needing to keep the men on long-term). The modern world has made it a much more viable choice.

You cannot separate the behavior of men and women from their respective genetic, emotional, personality, biological, and mating differences. One explains the other. And both sexes make tolerable bargains to deal with the realities of life. It’s better to accept some man than to accept no man, as a woman. At least until the technology improves and solves that forced compromise. It’s better, as a man, to be faithful to some woman than to have no woman. Each sex pays the price of not getting to fully indulge their instincts, in order to negotiate with the other sex for some fulfillment.

One possible way out of this trap, of course, is homosexuality. Where you can get what you give and seek what you want, at least more reliably. You avoid the compromise of having to indulge the other sex. On the downside, you lose access entirely to the actual end products of sexuality itself. The rate of pregnancy resulting from a homosexual union remains stubbornly set at 0.00%. But eventually the technology may cure that and then the sexes won’t have to compromise and negotiate with the other sex.

In think, in conclusion, that we can at least see that polygamy is not so strange a phenomenon. People have been obliged to make and still do make all kinds of compromises throughout history to get what they want, or some version of it. Right now they way we structure relationships is quite messy and carries a lot of cost and produces a lot of anxiety and frustration. It’s not entirely clear that structured polygamy is worse than our current prevailing structures of single parenthood, multiple divorce, risky late-life reproduction, promiscuity, and multiple non-invested fathers. That doesn’t mean polygamy is good, or best, or free of problems, but it might mean that we’re not so justified in looking down on it. Our own position might not be so superior and without flaw as we imagine. I’m not advocating for it in any way, I simply wanted to explore the reasons why it might have occurred in the past at deeper level than “because those people were so much dumber or worse than me”. There are some very good arguments for monogamy and it’s value. It’s just less clear that what we take for superior sexual morals now are convincingly better than either monogamy or polygamy.

Powered by Journey Diary.