(no subject)

[eirias]

For some reason, gay marriage isn't controversial enough for some people, and I have read a whole bunch of pieces on polygamy in the last couple of months: two of them are here and here.

The thing that bothers me about these pieces -- really bothers me, bothers me so that it makes me boiling mad -- is that they implicitly assume that legalized polygamy would be in the form of "one man, many wives" -- and then use this as a jumping off point to say that multiple marriage is inherently hierarchical and bad for women. Well, NO SHIT, you morons, if you build sexism into a law, you will get sexist results. But why the hell do you assume that multiple marriages would necessarily be polygynous and not polyandrous? Just because polygyny has been more common throughout history? I can think of a couple of extremely obvious reasons for this that have nothing to do with women naturally preferring to share themselves with only one mate, namely: 1) in many many societies, pregnancy and childbearing have been a vital function of sex for everyone, because children represented likely-able workers and a net wealth gain, and 2) because of this, women spent most of their years of strength and vigor pregnant and therefore not in a position to bargain. But neither of these applies to most of the modern West, where we have birth control, where women have economic and political power, where children are a net wealth loss and hence must be had sparingly. I know a few poly people, and several of these are women, and they seem perfectly content to have multiple partners.

It's not the fact that these people oppose multiple marriages that bothers me. It would certainly be fairer if legal institutions existed to protect those kinds of relationships, but it would not be a simple plug-and-play into traditional heterosexual marriage, for reasons enumerated here (scroll down to Thurs. 12/29). It's the fact that they do so for reasons which imply deep, unacknowledged sexism in themselves, all the while waving the flag of equal rights. It's the feel-good liberal intolerance of the day! Let's all protect women by limiting what kind of sexual freedoms everyone can enjoy, because lord knows the women won't want to or be able to use them! Fuck off, you pseudo-feminist crusaders. I don't need your protection.

Christ. Sometimes I hate everyone.

Comments

[thekat03.livejournal.com]

*hugs*

you rock, eirias (:

[tla]

I had always assumed it was because the people making the anti-arguments have only heard of polygyny. Utah, Muslims, etc. So they just haven't thought about the (to them) theoretical other approach.

Still irritating, but less "sexist" than "informed by experience". Has there ever been a society in which polyandry was practiced? If so, it is a pretty obscure fact because I've never heard of it.

[leora.livejournal.com]

Yes, assuming what I was taught in high school social studies is right. It was an incredibly sexist patriarchical society, but there were far more males than females (probably due to genocide, China and India have this problem currently, which is doing sad things to their societies). It was normal for all of the brothers of a family to share one wife and raise the children together. Since all the males were genetically related, the children are fairly close to being yours whether or not they are yours. It did have some provisions for very young brothers to not actually have sex with their wife til they came of age, but the woman (girl, probably realistically - we didn't study this in-depth, it was high school) was generally with about 4 men with quite an age range. I doubt she had any say in whom she married.

Which just goes to show that sexist societies lead to sexist practices. Most marriage styles have been linked to some horribly sexist society at some point in time, because so many human societies have been sexist. Fix the sexism and the marriage styles won't be so much of a problem.

[cynic51.livejournal.com]

Other than Nepal, has there been any society where polyandry really caught on?

[cos]

Davis Square, Somerville? :)

(or did you mean polyandry exclusively)

[cynic51.livejournal.com]

I meant societies where one female, multiple males was a norm. In Nepal it was not uncommon for multiple brothers to marry one woman. Something to do with the way they commonly inherited land, or something. I forget the details, and am far too lazy to look them up :-)

[kirin]

Yeah. I had similar thoughts when I read an article in Newsweek a while back. On the whole, it was pretty fair and open-minded, and yet it never so much as *mentioned* the possibility of polyandry. Or multiples of both sexes. Or the fact that this occurs in hippy liberal cultures, in addition to highly conservative Mormon-type cultures. Argh.

I fear that inevitably, when we get to the point where poly rights is approching the same cultural awareness that gay rights has been at from a couple decades ago to now, there's going to be a huge schism along these lines and it'll confuse and slow things down considerably. Suckage.

[leora.livejournal.com]

Plus groups all of one sex. I think the most recent post I read about was a m-m-m group. Since our society does have out homosexuals, you can also get all one sex groups. Which can actually help balance some of the imbalances, I suppose. Or make them worse.

polyamory

[cos]

This is actually exactly the reason why the word "polyamory" got coined. My friend Jennifer (though I only knew her online then) had two boyfriends. She was talking about "polygamoy" on Usenet newsgroups such as soc.couples (the main "relationships" discussion forum on the net at the time), and people kept assuming it was about one guy with multiple women, it was sexist, etc.

It didn't matter that it was a woman with two boyfriends bringing up the matter sometimes, people couldn't get past the baggage the word polygamy had gathered. So Jennifer decided we needed a new word, "polyamory", and one of her boyfriends created a newsgroup named alt.polyamory

(alt.* was where you could create newsgroups without going through the long official voting process on new groups, it doesn't mean the topic of the group is alternative, it just meant the creation process was "alternative" :)

That day and the next, tens of thousands of college students, computer researchers, grad students, professors, and employees of computer networking departments around the world, saw on their terminals,
"New newsgroup: alt.polyamory (y/n/u)?"

That's how I learned the word. I suspect that I, along with many many others, saw it and instantly knew what it meant even though we'd never heard it before.

Re: polyamory

[eirias.livejournal.com]

Hee, that's cool, though not entirely surprising, that you know that word-coiner ;).

Re: polyamory

[thekat03.livejournal.com]

that is really sweet. i wish i could put on my resume, "coined the word polyamory" *grin*

Re: polyamory

[cos]

*laugh* She actually doesn't :)

There's a widespread belief that "polyamory" was coined by Morning Glory Zell-Ravenheart. It has a bit of truth behind it, but it's mostly false. Jennifer doesn't care and doesn't want to argue it. I think it's nifty and instructive 1) how a new coinage was spread by the net for possibly the first time, and 2) to know the origins of the word specifically as a way to avoid the baggage of "polygamy".

[leora.livejournal.com]

From their description of Big Love... I'm glad I haven't seen it. Poly doesn't have to be a nest of misery and jealousy. I admit relationship problems happen, but duh, they happen with monogamy too. And how well it works out varies a lot. Some people will create horrible messes; others will create beautiful families. Others will create beautiful loving relationships that don't connect very much.

*sighs*

Nothing for it but to curl up on the couch while RPGing with one lover while the other DMs.

[ksledgemoore.livejournal.com]

I finally read both articles. The second one, which talks about the tv show exclusively, is pretty much lame. So I'll just discuss the other one. This article does acknowledge the possibility of polyandry. It just assumes that polyandry would be significantly less common than polygyny. Despite your quite valid points, I still believe that polygyny would be more common if made legal (maybe not to the extent that this author suggests, but I think there would be a difference). Maybe my opinions are just based on history, but I still feel that way nonetheless. I don't think that legalizing polygamy would be an equally liberating thing for everyone. Even at this day in age, men tend to be more powerful than women. The powerful people in general will be the ones who can have multiple partners. Ultimately I think there will be more men with multiple wives than vice-versa.

The article does basically ignore groups of people where everyone feels romantically connected to each other (including groups of one sex) rather than one person being the guy/girl who married everyone else (like in the Big Love tv show). These relationships are fundamentally different, don't involve the weird power relationship, and should be discussed. I personally can't see anything wrong with them.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I feel conflicted on the issue. It would be nice if the laws were more permissive, but I would worry about the consequences. I think the one article does bring up some possibilities of consequences that wouldn't be good for society. I'm not sure I entirely agree with it, but I still felt like it brought up some ideas to think about.

I will say this -- one thing we agree on is how it's annoying that in general discussions of polygamy usually don't include discussions of anything other than polygyny. Even though I feel like polygyny would be the most popular choice, the other options need to be discussed, especially in the context of the modern society where the other choices would be more commonly practiced than historically.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

I don't think I agree with your premise that the powerful people will be the ones getting multiple mates -- at least, not where we take "power" to mean "money and financial status." To the extent that there are sex differences in mating patterns, it seems to be that women gravitate toward money and status and men toward youth and beauty. Even if we had gender parity among CEO's I don't think that those women are necessarily the ones who'd have multiple mates. It would be the really hot ones. And the kind of patriarchy in our society isn't the kind that prohibits women from being hot.

Or it'd be the ones in subcultures with a big gender imbalance tilted toward male predominance. I suspect that the fact that poly is AFAICT more common in geek circles can be completely traced to this. (Not that there aren't poly male geeks too -- I certainly know a few -- but I can see why a gender imbalance would make the option of one woman, many men kind of appealing, and if you have that it's not a huge step to the other.)

In general I just think the historical argument is a load of bunk, because Western society, as far as I can tell, is a pretty damn big outlier in history as far as women's roles are considered. And we all know the perils of extrapolating from a model normed on a limited sample to predict the behavior of an outlier.

I want to reiterate that it's not the issue itself that bothers me this much -- I happen to think it'd be fairer if we rejigged things to accomodate poly folk, but it would take an incredible amount of work and figuring and money. So I do think society has grounds to refuse to do that work, even if it's a decision with which I don't agree. What bothers me is the hideously sexist rationale. And don't even get me started on Rauch's claims about how terrible it would be for society if some men couldn't get laid -- HELLO, that already happens, and it is *not* my job or the job of any woman to keep men sexually satisfied just because they want it. I'm not chattel to be thrown at your social-control problem, thanks. I don't think there's any way to interpret Rauch's social-stability argument that doesn't boil down to "women are property and we've got to make sure we're distributing them fairly."

[ksledgemoore.livejournal.com]

I don't think I agree with your premise that the powerful people will be the ones getting multiple mates -- at least, not where we take "power" to mean "money and financial status." To the extent that there are sex differences in mating patterns, it seems to be that women gravitate toward money and status and men toward youth and beauty. Even if we had gender parity among CEO's I don't think that those women are necessarily the ones who'd have multiple mates. It would be the really hot ones. And the kind of patriarchy in our society isn't the kind that prohibits women from being hot.

OK I actually agree with this...but somehow it still makes me feel like that difference between the way people choose mates would make the outcome unideal and/or unfair.

In general I just think the historical argument is a load of bunk, because Western society, as far as I can tell, is a pretty damn big outlier in history as far as women's roles are considered.

It is certainly an outlier, but I think that I believe it to be much smaller of an outlier than you do, especially in regards to this topic. That's just somewhere we might disagree.

What bothers me is the hideously sexist rationale. And don't even get me started on Rauch's claims about how terrible it would be for society if some men couldn't get laid -- HELLO, that already happens, and it is *not* my job or the job of any woman to keep men sexually satisfied just because they want it. I'm not chattel to be thrown at your social-control problem, thanks. I don't think there's any way to interpret Rauch's social-stability argument that doesn't boil down to "women are property and we've got to make sure we're distributing them fairly."

I noticed all of this stuff and yes, I found it equally creepy.


Interesting thought on the geek group and similar circles.

[evil-fizz.livejournal.com]

I don't think there's any way to interpret Rauch's social-stability argument that doesn't boil down to "women are property and we've got to make sure we're distributing them fairly."

Agreed. In his analysis, women simply become a commodity which some men have access to and others don't. That doesn't not translate into an effective argument to allowing people to sort out their own personal intimate relationships.

However, I think that modern American culture is a bit less of an outlier than you seem to. We clearly live in a patriarchy which has exhibited itself in some pernicious ways as of late. (Looking pointedly at Tucker Carlson who says that women who strip are liars about sex.) I don't think those kinds of underlying attitudes are likely to disappear anytime soon and have the potential to manifest themselves in negative ways if multiple marriage is sanctioned.