Comment & Debate
Polygamy is the state or practice of having two or more mates at the same time, this includes both Polygyny (the union of one man with more than one woman – literally, ‘many females’) and Polyandry (the union of one woman with more than one man: literally, ‘many males’). Polygamy is a social phenomenon that has existed for thousands of years in cultures around the world. Polygamy is believed by some to be condoned in the original texts of many faiths – in the Bible from Lamech’s marriage to Adah and Zillah in Genesis (4:23), to Joseph’s four wives (Gen 29-30). In Judaism, most of the prophets – God’s messengers – were polygamous. Solomon is said to have had 700 wives. In America, substantial controversy surrounds Mormon fundamentalist forms of polygamy. In the 1840’s, Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon Church, approved the practice of polygamy. In 1896, Utah’s leaders were forced to abandon polygamy in order to achieve statehood. Polygamy is a felony in the state – albeit not often prosecuted. In 1953, the American public reacted adversely to a ‘polygamy raid’ in Utah, causing a reduction in the enforcement of polygamy laws in Utah and elsewhere in the United States in subsequent decades. For more than a century, the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints has expelled those practising polygamy. Polygamy has been maintained, however, by break-away Latter Day Saints Churches such as the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Later Day Saints (FLDS). This church was led by Warren Jeffs before his high-profile arrest in 2007. In 2008, starting on April 4, Texas State officials “raided” a FLDS community in Elderado, Texas, and took 416 children there into temporary legal custody in an effort to protect them from allegedly abusive conditions. This has enlivened the polygamy debate in the United States and internationally. Many polygamists and non-polygamists strongly advocate the practice. And, with an HBO show called “Big Love” that features a more-or-less happy polygamous family, many are taking a fresh look at the arguments. The Mormon church (the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints) does not practice, support, or encourage polygamy anymore.
“Why not Mr. and Mrs. – & Mrs… & Mrs…?”, The Jerusalem Post, Apr 2, 2006: “Since so many monogamous relationships don’t work and betrayal fuels bitterness and spite, polygamy may be the ideal solution to Jewish continuity and bring about a drop in the divorce rate. One of the rules in a polygamous marriage could be that when a husband and wife are angry at each other they don’t have to rant and rave or say hurtful things they might regret. She would simply retire to her room to cool off – or unburden her heart to one of the other women in the household – and he could do the same.”
These could include women marrying multiple husbands, or gay, lesbian, and even bisexual partners. This openness to all kinds of multi-partner relations would combat any concerns that polygamy is merely patriarchal (with the man at the top). If all varieties are possible, it is impossible to argue that the law is biased toward patriarchy in polygamy.
The institution of marriage is already broken, with divorce rates as high as 50% in many countries. Therefore, what exactly are people trying to protect against polygamy? The “institution of marriage”? What institution? It doesn’t seem that there is much to protect, so polygamy shouldn’t be held up this account.
“in general, man requires variety and woman requires security. And security for many women means knowing that you are not alone, that you’re part of the tribe. When families were larger, loneliness was less problematic than it is today. These days, many people aged 20 to 40 have only one or two siblings, and lots of folks have no one at all. A lot of people are – by ancient standards, at least – leading an “abnormal existence” in one-person households.”
Polygamy undermines the traditional institution of marriage, trivializing the union of two people.
Carrying for a wife is about more than supplying her with material needs, something polygamist husbands are frequently capable of doing for their many wives. It is also about more than treating all wives equitably and even “loving” them equitably. It is, rather, about providing a wife with reciprocal attention, love, sexual attention, and feelings of individual value and meaning. This is reflected in the notion of the yin and the yang; parity and complementarity between two partners. A man with even just two wives is incapable of reciprocating equally the love and care he may receive from each of them. He will fall short to some degree with each of wives and violate the notion of reciprocity in marriage.
With an essentially 1:1 male to female ration in the world, a man that accumulates three wives can be seen as depriving two other men of wives. In this zero-sum reality, polygamy is unsustainable, and results in many social frictions as men compete intensely for the “scarce” wives and as many of them fail to secure them.
“With all things being equal, the quality of life for a family decreases as the family size increases.”
“Polyamorists emphasize that multipartner unions take intense and constant work. Yet this need for a higher level of monitoring and negotiation only highlights the forces pushing against stability.”
Adultery is based on a desire for the ‘other’, for something outside the known, outside the home. Polygamy does nothing to combat this; adultery still occurs in polygamous societies. Indeed, polygamy encourages adultery as it dilutes the idea of fidelity from being loyalty to one person, substituting the legitimacy of intercourse with many.
Men have an inherent desire to mate very frequently. But, it is not possible with a single wife to have multiple children in rapid succession (or as frequently as a man wishes to have sex and thus procreate). Clearly, men have a desire to have sex and procreate more frequently than every nine months, the period of time that a man would have to wait if in a monogamous marriage. Thus, the only way for a man to satisfy the inherent desire to procreate with a high frequency is if he marries multiple wives, whereby he can satisfy his desire to have and and procreate in rapid succession.
“Since so many monogamous relationships don’t work and betrayal fuels bitterness and spite, polygamy may be the ideal solution to Jewish continuity and bring about a drop in the divorce rate. One of the rules in a polygamous marriage could be that when a husband and wife are angry at each other they don’t have to rant and rave or say hurtful things they might regret. She would simply retire to her room to cool off – or unburden her heart to one of the other women in the household – and he could do the same.”
Polygamy encourages men to make a commitment to those that they have sex with, as opposed to only having sex with them once because they possess another wife.
Men should be able to control their sexual impulses with reason and control. This is very important to avoiding an obsession with sexuality and a distraction from other important elements of life. Philosophers throughout history have stressed the hazards of uncontrolled sexual impulses. Yet, polygamy allows men to let their sexual impulses loose without control and reason guiding the impulse to have sex and procreate. This damages discipline among men, allows their sexual impulses to become a controlling obsession and distraction, and allows sex, procreation, and child-rearing to become the dominant factor in a man’s life. This is unbalanced and unhealthy.
Polygamy is unsustainable, or at least inequitable in this way. With many women marrying a single man, many men will be left without wives. Certainly, this would be depressing and even disastrous for these men. The injunction against premarital sex means, for men, no sex, ever in your life. In other societies, this would not present such a drastic problem, but wide scale polygamy would at a minimum, result in severe depression for a large segment of the male populace. And make no mistake, it would eventually become common.
When a few men win all the wives in a community, many men are left without wives and the opportunity to live fulfilling lives with a lover, sex, and children. Realizing the costs of failing to secure wives, men will compete viciously for a scarce supply of wives. This competition can prove nasty, violent, back-stabbing, and socially damaging.
“Polygamy is an empowering lifestyle for women. It provides me the environment and opportunity to maximize my female potential without all the tradeoffs and compromises that attend monogamy. The women in my family are friends. You don’t share two decades of experience, and a man, without those friendships becoming very special.
I imagine that across America there are groups of young women preparing to launch careers. They sit around tables, talking about the ideal lifestyle to them in their aspirations for work, motherhood, and personal fulfillment. “A man might be nice,” they might muse. “A man on our own terms,” they might add. What they don’t realize is that there is an alternative that would allow their dreams to come true. That alternative is polygamy, the ultimate feminist lifestyle.”
“Now if polygamy came back into vogue, women in such marriages could form an amicable sorority, taking on duties they liked rather than what is imposed on them as wife, mother and homemaker in most monogamous relationships.”
Polygamous wives often consider themselves in a loving sisterhood or sorority, in which they are best friends with their “sister wives”.
“The question is, can petty jealousies be kept in check? They could if the wives thought of themselves as a sisterhood.”
Women shouldn’t have to pass-up a man that they fall in love with simply because they are married. Polygamy allows them to attempt to marry that man, thus satisfying their desire to be with the one they love. The same applies to men, who may fall in love with multiple women.
“The point was not to facilitate more sex for men, but to give best protection to the women.”
Women that are interested in marrying a polygamous man, benefit from seeing how he acts with his other wives, and thus achieve confidence in what they will get as future wives. This helps women avoid marrying bad or potentially dangerous spouses.
Women, being aware that men are promiscuous and desirous creatures, worry that their husbands will fall in love with other women, and divorce them to be with those other women. But, in a polygamous marriage, they don’t actually have to worry, as their husbands can marry other women without divorcing them.
“Polygamy means to protect, to take care of and maintain the wife. He told one social worker that polygamy was not illicit. But, Srila Prabhupad explained, only if the man is able to maintain his wives. Otherwise, if he cannot maintain another wife, then to want another wife is not actually for protection. Then all he wants is to have sex only. That is irresponsible and thus illicit sex. Even if a man cannot maintain one wife, but has sex with her and gets her pregnant, this is not good. Who will maintain the woman and child? Then it is irresponsible sex, and that is illicit. But, if the man can properly maintain additional wife, then it is not illicit, then it is proper religious marriage, protection, of the women.
It is OK for women to join polygamous marriages in order to climb the social ladder. This is often a good way for women to get out of poverty and achieve a greater respect and status in a community.
“There is good reason to outlaw polygamy. Marriage is the most romantic institution because it establishes the inviolate uniqueness of its participants. A woman is made to feel that she is the one and only to her husband. A husband’s devotion confers upon his wife the blessings of primacy and exclusivity. But polygamy subverts that pledge, establishing not a woman’s uniqueness, but her ordinariness. Her husband marries her with the express understanding that she alone will not satisfy him. He requires others. She is inadequate.
[…]After marrying and sacrificing all for her husband, no woman should ever have to feel that she is still not good enough.”
“As a clinical psychologist who has treated women formerly involved in plural marriages, I can attest that the effects on them are devastating: profound depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, sexually transmitted diseases and poverty, among many others.”
“There was tremendous competition between the wives, wasn’t there?
Oh, tremendous. We were all required to live in the same home, and there’s just a lot of dominance that goes on about who has the right to rule. And, of course, the woman who has the most favor with her husband is going to rule over the other wives and their kids.”
Carrying for a wife is about more than supplying her with material needs, something polygamist husbands are frequently capable of doing for their many wives. It is also about more than treating all wives equitably and even “loving” them equitably. It is, rather, about providing a wife with reciprocal attention, love, sexual attention, and feelings of individual value and meaning. This is reflected in the notion of the yin and the yang; parity and complementarity between two partners. A man with even just two wives is incapable of reciprocating equally the love and care he may receive from each of them. He will fall short to some degree with each of wives and violate the notion of reciprocity in marriage.
Marriage is largely about committing to a woman. But, polygamous women discover that men are only making open-ended commitments to their wives that allow for them to make new commitments to new wives. These new commitments undermine or diminish previous commitments.
“I’ve been following accounts of polygamous societies ever since I saw an article in the early 1980s about a Kenyan man with 150 wives. It set the template for every first-hand description of polygamy that I’ve read since. The reporter diligently interviewed the youngest wife, who thought polygamy was terrific since it allowed her to marry the richest, handsomest, and most respected man in her village.
He also quoted the oldest wife, who was nostalgic for the days when she didn’t have to share her husband with this army of younger wives.”
While a sisterhood can emerge among polygamous women, it is typically undercut by jealousy and competition between them for the attention of their husband.
As a husband has unprotected sex with his many wives, venereal diseases are commonly spread around.
Women have strong sex drives; often equally as strong as men. It is difficult for them, therefore, to have to share their husband with other wives, and go many nights and sometimes weeks without sex. Such sex deprivation can create an impulse among polygamous women to seek sex elsewhere in affairs with other men.
If polygamy is legalized, does that mean that all existing husbands in monogamous marriages can all of a sudden seek additional wives? If so, this will create great worry among married women.
Raids by police of polygamous sects, and the division of children from their mothers is a highly traumatizing experience for children. If the interest of the state is to, in part, protect these children, their raids are doing more harm than good.
The illegality of polygamy forces polygamists to live in the shadows of society. In these shadows, children are unable to obtain a proper education. If polygamy is legalized, polygamous families will come out of these shadows and will be able to send their kids to proper schools.
More parents can equate to higher income (more people capable of working) and less time for the child to be without an accompanying parent (due to working, etc).
“In polygamous households, the father invests less time in the upbringing of his children, because there are more of them.”
New wives in polygamous families are often the subject of great attention from their husbands. This draws attention away from the children of other wives. And, as new children are born by the new wife, attention is taken away from the other children. Children are aware of this, and respond resentfully to new family members.
Children realize that the attention they receive from their father is conditioned in large part on the presence of other siblings and the nature of their mother’s relationship to the father. This builds resentment and competition between siblings, which is unhealthy and potentially dangerous.
The children lose because they are being forced to work and doing things that they don’t want to.Some children are being forced either to marry at 14 to their own relative like cousin or even brother. Some girls start having children before the age of 17. Many children are basically not living a normal childhood and are suffering.Some children even try to escape the polygamy world in order to start a new life.
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