Polygamist Objections to Polyandry

I don’t know about what the laws should be in any given situation especially since I know next to nothing about SA cultural background. There are probably several different takes on the subject. I used to be very interested in this topic but only within the Mormon and/or LDS context and in the U.S., Mexico and Canada mainly.

I’ve been doing a lot of study lately on sociobiology and the evolution of cultural institutions like marriage and sexuality and recently read a really in-depth book, The Red Queen by Matt Ridley. It explores the possible origins of sex and how this might manifest in different cultural forms such as marriage. I get from it that the conclusion seems to be that humans don’t have one particular but use whatever makes the most sense in a given situation.

Sex is looked at from the p.o.v. of game theory, where each gender makes decisions based on presumptions about the other and what might be the most benefit in terms of offspring. A key point is: “If females do better by choosing monogamous males, monogamy will result, unless men can coerce them. If females do no worse by choosing already-mated males, polygyny will result, unless already-mated females can prevent their males from mating again, in which case monogamy will result.”

You mentioned jealously, and males are certainly biologically programmed to be jealous and possessive to a greater degree than females (who will usually favor their offspring over their mate in almost any situation.) But I imagine this would vary from individual to individual and I wouldn’t prejudge a specific situation out of the blue.

Ridley makes some interesting points, e.g, the idea that anti-polygamy laws and their enforcement are more to protect men, or protect the overall society from an excess of unmarried men, than they are to protect women. This seems to throw light on why, for instance, in Utah anti-polygamy laws were so vigorously enforced and prosecuted for many years.

That said, if they’re going to allow polygyny they might as well allow polyandry as well, and let individuals themselves decide what works best for them. Different individuals will have different needs at different times in their life. The only thing that needs to be enforced of course is age of consent and insuring that actual consent is given in each case, as well as consanguinity laws.

Anti-polygamy laws are to protect men? As in protect men from a lack of available women? I do know that there are some harmful effects to society when there are not enough young women for the young men. China ran into this problem with the one child per couple rule that they had. Couples would prioritize having a male child as a family heir and it ended up with a lopsided demographic. The poorer young men had a hard time finding spouses and tended to get into more trouble and engage in more risky behavior than their married counterparts.

That’s definitely one good example of the bad things that can happen when plural marriage becomes dysfunctional or imbalances a given ecosystem. It’s also connected with how the sex balance among humans & other creatures with two sexes is almost always 50/50 or very close to it, and attempts to skew the sex balance artificially never work in the long run. (Ridley used a lot of examples from selective breeding attempts with cattle, birds, certain sexed plants, etc. but the same principle applies.) It always leads to the ‘better bet’ being for genes to reproduce more of the rarer sex, until the balance evens out again. Otherwise you end up with a lot of violence among excess men and warfare, which might kill off enough of them to balance the scales.

I’m not sure this is particularly relevant to the Utah prosecutions. I feel that the LDS church took a hard stand against polygamy in 1910 and started excommunications for polygamists in earnest. The church and the state of Utah at that point both had something to prove to the rest of the country and world that polygamy was no longer being tolerated.

True, and tbh, the book doesn’t get into that much detail about polygamy in Utah, it’s mainly just one example among many of the seemingly endless cultural manifestations of sex and control of reproduction. (The author goes way back, too, speculating that early Australopithecus, a couple of million years ago, was naturally polygamous, with males possessing ‘harems’ of females, based on questionable fossil data that shows the male was much larger physically than the female.)

In the case of Utah, of course, the persecutors / enforcers of the anti-polygamy law were naturally themselves monogamists, and in the peculiar position (leading to a plague of conflicts of interest) of being part of the same religious and cultural background, the polygamists being basically disaffected members of the same church that most law enforcement and judicial authorities in the state belonged to. No doubt that officials came under pressure from both the federal government and their local priesthood leaders to crack down on this particular problem, while conveniently overlooking other areas such as corruption within their own ranks or dubious church-state coziness which had by the 20th cent. become endemic.

I think the monogamist enforcers of the law had to be partly motivated by concern about the future prospects of their own sons and daughters, if polygamy ever became more widespread than it had, in a very skewed competitive scenario for their offspring.