Polyamory and sexual dynamics

[Steven Barnes]

A female, monogamously married heterosexual friend sent me the following note (lightly edited) that I thought to share...
##
" I have a friend in
Japan and his insights into dating, romance and marriage in Japan fascinate
(and sometimes repulse) me. It shows me just how ingrained my sense of
chivalry is, and confirms that culture has a huge effect on every aspect of
daily life. Oddly, or maybe not so oddly, culture doesn't seem to have as
much effect on living and loving successfully! For example, although
Japanese culture supports and even encourages middle to older aged men to
lust after underage school girls, the men who follow through on this are
clearly damaged goods, as are the girls who succumb to their seductions.
Culture makes no difference to the physical, spiritual and emotional effects
of sexual activity between a very young female and an older male, at least
in Japan.

I've done some reading on single man multiple wife households, mostly
regarding seraglios. It's very interesting that the male children of a wife
that is less favored (or not favored at all during his lifetime) strongly
object to multiple wife households, as much as if not moreso than the
neglected wives. This would seem obvious except for the fact of men in
Saudi Arabia (I think I have the country right!) at one point chanting 'we
have a right to three!' when it was considered to limit marriages to one
man-one woman during one of their periods of modernization. You think
they'd listen to the voices of their peers and leaders. At this same time,
women who had their veils ripped off of them in the streets felt as if
they'd been raped and shamed. The veil was their chief form of safety,
especially in the streets, and only a bold few thought the loss of the veil
as a sign of increasing feminine independence. For many, the veil provided
anonymity for those who chose to have affairs, anonymity for those who
feared their husbands and didn't want to be 'caught out' when they weren't
supposed to be shopping or whatever that day, and it's a cultural symbol of
fidelity and moral uprightness. A bare face represents prostitution,
infidelity (somewhat ironically) and westernization, which many find very
threatening. This was a very interesting period in history and I
occasionally find fresh sources about it, but mostly it is inaccessible to
westerners, a private moment in a culture that feels very threatened by the
rest of the world.

In a somewhat-ideal situation, the first wife is and remains dominant, and
participates in the selection of additional wives, who join the family only
through her approval. In this way she can maintain a sense of power and
have something balance inevitable feelings of being replaced. The women
form a sisterhood, yield to the dominant wife in disputes and bring their
grievances to her rather than the husband directly, and care for each other
as family. What more frequently happens is that the husband gets bored with
the first wife, or only accepted her in the first place because he was
pressured to by his or her family. When he's fiscally able to, he finds a
second wife that he actually desires, and the first wife is completely
bereft sexually, emotionally and spiritually. She ends up as a servant to
the favored wife at best, and is even shut out of any sort of usefulness and
presence at worst, literally eating scraps and hiding in her room for
endless days while the preferred wife lives in relative luxury. In large,
sultan seraglios, the situation is even worse. Women murder each other for
favor, murder each other's children so that their children will receive
favor, care and attention (and hopefully the sultanate.) The poetry they
wrote in their all-but-prisons is heart breaking. The men, including
favored children later slated to become sultan, go insane. After literally
hiding in their mother's skirts exclusively among women and eunuchs in a
kind of familial war zone, when they become sultan they are suddenly foisted
into an environment where their mothers and their allies can no longer
protect them, and they're supposed to make national decisions, communicate
with community leaders and run a household with no male model. If they did
happen to spend any time with their father, his own insanity hampered any
practical learning they might have received at his knee. These large harems
devastated the governmental system. It's one of the reasons Mohammed wanted
to limit marriages to three women, preferably one. The 'preferably one'
part of the scripture is pushed mentally aside among young, eager men who
want to demonstrate their wealth, power and sexuality through owning wives.
The older, more centered ones try to explain that this leads to trouble, but
when have the young in any culture listened? They usually have to learn on
their own. This affects their fiscal lives severely. A friend of mine in
Israel described the 'ideal' Palestinian life, and it's surprising that the
society hasn't utterly collapsed. Life for a young man begins in debt, and
continues deeper into debt until he dies. There is no concept of living
within means. It's all about getting in over your head and swimming as hard
as you can until you drown. Their resentment of 'rich Jews' stems largely
from lack of understanding about how young Jewish men are schooled to live
within their means and build their economic lives very carefully. Most
employers of Islamic men inevitably are Jewish, which leads to an evil
overlord mentality, sometimes on both sides of the fence. The Jewish man
totally disrespects the Palestinian, and the Palestinian resents the Jewish
man. They find each other the source of most of their problems, or so it
would seem to them.

So that's what I've learned so far about multiple female, single male
households that is culturally supported. I think the Mormons have had
somewhat better success, but I have no first-hand or primary source
information for that beyond a tv special, and tv specials are fraught with
difficulties as far as getting good info.

I've always been curious about multiple male, single female households. If
men truly have an innate desire to compete, and an occasional desire to test
themselves through combat (hopefully more ritualized than actual,) you'd
think that eventually a culture would arise where two or more men are
married to one woman and compete for her. I think it breaks down, even as a
thought experiment, simply because one man or the other will never win, and
therefore there is literally and figuratively no endpoint success in the
relationship, or economically, although there may be a potential for
spiritual success if the three (or more) people involved can find a dynamic
equilibrium that is stimulating and loving. There may be a need to win at
some point, and simply endlessly competing would lead only to frustration.
In the one two man/one woman trio I met, the relationship didn't seem very
healthy, at least from the outside. It eventually ended after I'm not
certain how many years.

I agree that it's important for parents to stay together for their children
when possible. I have many opinions on that, but no experience and so I
tend to keep my mouth shut as far as advice and try to be as supportive as
possible to everyone involved. I've been lucky in that only one couple that
was very close to me separated and then divorced, and they waited until the
children had moved out. I noticed that however much pain they were in while
they were together, that pain skyrocketed when they separated and the
fallout was intense. In their case, definitely, not waiting until their
children matured into independence would have been a disaster. I found it
amazing that something that one of the partners in particular hoped would be
a healing step forward in her life became so traumatic, despite the fact
that she had left her spouse in her heart and mind long before. It truly
demonstrated to me that no matter how bad it was while they were together,
it still had to get worse before it could get better. If they'd had young
children in the house, the effect would have been chaotic, even though they
separated equitably and reasonably.

Have you thought about the effect of terms like baby daddy and baby momma?
When I first heard them I found them shocking and my moral sense was
affronted. I had to step back into my 'pagan brain' and think about older
versions of fidelity where, through various rites and contracts, a woman
would have legal, accepted children by more than one father and no one
sniffed at it. So why the strong reaction? Looking deeper I decided it
probably wasn't my Catholic upbringing manifesting itself again. The
difference between one and the other is that among the Celts, the other
father didn't vanish, and was productive within the society. He had always
been present in village life, and always would be. There were a lot of
problems in village life; the acceptance of spousal abuse and sometimes even
child abuse, petty dictatorships, rampant injustice. But when someone
stepped over the line, everyone knew about it and it was dealt with. There
wasn't much hidden crime. Everyone knew everyone else's business and
problems and they were handled as a group. So if a woman conceived during a
May Day rite by someone other than her husband, the baby daddy would still
be around, active in his child's life, plus the woman's husband would also
be present to raise the child. As far as historians can tell, the parents
are in a village raises the child situation. The trouble with modern baby
daddys and baby mommas is that these individuals come and go without
consequences to them unless they personally choose to take in a sense of
responsibility. Society is too big, too anonymous, and there is no village
raising the child. There are tax dollars, public schools, but few models
for loving relationships, success and spiritual growth. By creating a term
for a physical parent who is not part of the household and comes and goes as
s/he pleases, to me it seems like it's simultaneously legitimizing broken
relationships while creating an artificial sense that there has been an
improvement over no acknowledgement at all of physical parenting.

But maybe it is a step in the right direction. In my mind I see a smiling
baby daddy hanging with his friends and lovers and occasionally popping in
to check in with his baby momma and child, bribe gifts in his pocket,
shaking hands with whoever his baby momma happens to be with today. The
reality may be more functional, may be better than this. I hope so."
##
Steve's note: what in the hell happens in a culture in which
1) men are encouraged to have multiple wives and
2) homosexuality is frowned on?

I would think that the only option is either killing lots of male babies, or insane levels of competition between men, leading to expansionist policies, where one wars with surrounding tribes to take their women. Are there other options I'm not considering?

Steve

[Doug G.]

Steve,

Why is your first assumption here that only the men are encouraged to have multiple wives?

I suspect your answer will be linked to something you said over at Dar Kush yesterday in a slightly different context: that men make up the overwhelming majority of those wishing/seeking to have multiple sexual partners. Or perhaps you are, in this specific instance, responding to the specific premise of your correspondent - all of her arguments describe situations where the men hold greater rights and powers than do the women. Even when she discusses a "one woman many men" instance to balance the multiple (and more typical) "one man many women" examples, the secondary male partners enjoy the ability to choose the degree of their involvement with the children they sire. Thus, they have greater freedom of choice than do their female counterparts. (Please note that I do not say your correspondent says this is a positive thing, I'm merely trying to paraphrase the setup she describes.)

Now, if you are coming at this question from the perspective of a science fiction writer, trying to extrapolate the fallout resulting from a given set of initial conditions (i.e., beginning with your two numbered conditions, what will logically grow out of them), then there is nothing wrong with stating the question as you have done. And perhaps you feel that that your basic initial condition (i.e. that men will be the only ones encouraged/allowed to have multiple wives) is the only likely version of polyamory to arise, given another assumption (not stated here) that it will not be the women who will be, by and large, seeking multiple partners.

But if we are coming from the perspective of mounting a discussion of polyamory as a potential alternative to the current norm of heterosexual pair bonding, then I think we need to ask some very different questions. And if we are to have such a discussion, I think that we need to begin by making a very important observation of how this set of concepts is usually perceived within our cultural milieu. I submit that there is a subtle, but very strong piece of misdirection built directly into the way polyamory is usually addressed from within our society, and that the subject cannot be fairly considered without first identifying, and then disarming this particular misleading meme.

Take, for instance, the best known example of multi-spousal marriage seen in American civilization, polygamy among the early members of the Church of the Latter Day Saints, aka the Mormons. Although this instance is more than a hundred years old, it is often trotted out as an example of the evils of polyamory. Indeed, this example maintains some relevance today, as there are LDS splinter groups (though disowned by the mainstream church) still practicing 'one man many women' polygamy. I have made no in-depth study of either implementation of the practice. I do know that the current followers cause a great deal of difficulties by ejecting many of their young men from the subculture, young men who known nothing of how the outside world works, but are thrust into it because it is inconvenient for the group elders (always men) to have them around to compete with.

While many might maintain that the 'Mormon polygamy' model is wrong merely because it incorporates a form of polyamory into its structure, I think it is important to understand the real reason it is ethically flawed. The Mormon polygamy model fails, not because it is an implementation of polyamory, but to the degree it incorporates structurally a fundamental imbalance in rights between the parties involved. In other words, it is *not* an issue of how many wives somebody has, it is an issue of what rights those wives have with respect to the rights granted their husband.

Of the various examples given by your correspondent, I would suggest that each embodies exactly this ethical defect . Certainly this is true of the various aspects of Islamic multiple wife situations she discusses - how many of the problems stated would survive complete equality of the women involved?. And as I pointed out earlier, this flaw extends even to the proffered counter-example. Though an example of one woman many men, it shares the trait with the 'one man' instances of the men having rights and freedoms not granted the female.

Thus, if we are attempting to identify modes of polyamory which are not ethically questionable from the outset, our task is, given any particular implementation, first making sure that all parties involved enjoy equivalent rights and freedoms, at least as allowed by the laws of reality and perhaps by other considerations. (For instance, there will be issues stemming from the question of what is best for any children involved, issues that may well take precedence over the question of the rights of the adults involved. But that's another argument, albeit a very important one.) But I think it is exactly this question of equality of rights that is missing from most discussions of polyamory.

(As an aside, I expect another bad example of this shortly. HBO is about to begin airing a drama-comedy staring Bill Paxton about a polygamist family interacting with society in general. Even if the writers understand the true tragedy underlying the practice, I wll not be surprised if the public at large entirely misses the point in their rush to pillory anything poly.)

Having said all this, I do not have ready answers at hand to the question of what possible modes of polyamory there may be out there unchallenged by the ethical flaw of inequality, either as a model that would serve for an entire society, or on a smaller scale imbedded within the larger society we live in today. I'd like to believe that such could exist, given healthy individuals openly working to establish poly families. And I've read stories I thought embodied such structures, which led to my interest in the subject in the first place. ("The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", anyone?) But I could also be swayed by arguments that there are structual reasons in the human makeup making polyamory fundamentally unlikely to succeed. All I'm saying is that if such a lifestyle is to be constructed, it will ultimately have to be based upon (at the very least) complete equality as a necessary initial condition.

Which leads me back to your original question, Steve, because your first condition, that only the men are encouraged to have multiple wives, seems to violate what I believe to be a requirement for any successful implementation of polyamory. It's a fine question if you are trying to make an extrapolation for a story - it is the distopic case guaranteed to move towards failure, as opposed to the utopic instance I'm trying to outline seeking out that perfect end game of a alternative that works. But of course, utopic stories are generally pretty boring, and the very best s-f usually comes out of the distopic instance.

But if we are trying to come up with alternative ways to live, it seems necessary for us to strive towards the utopic even as we understand that the effort will fall short. But we still must try to create new solutions. After all, humans have come a long way from the days of the caveman pulling the unwilling cavewoman to his cave by her hair. Could any of the steps along that path have been made without questioning how things were done before?

Doug G.
aka The Baron Larkonnen

[Steven Barnes]

Doug, I defy you to quote anything I wrote to the effect that " only the men are encouraged to have multiple wives."
That is a misstatement of my position, or any position I've ever taken. Now, having said that, let me clarify what my position IS.
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In the vast majority of cases, what you're going to find is a male with several wives rather than a female with several husbands. And this is a cultural pattern that arises from a very simple biological truth: two men cannot simultaneously share reprouctive space with a single female, and multiple women CAN be simultaneously impregnated by a single man. There it is, and unless that fact changes, it will always effect the relative percentages. While unions exist for love, finance, companionship, sheer sexual pleasure, etc., the only factor which CANNOT be removed without a society collapsing altogether is the production of children who will go on to produce more children. So the primary rules in any society I know of deal with the production and maintenance of principles that maximize the production of what that society defines as an optimal number of children. I'm not saying this is exclusively true, or right, or anything like it--its just an observable fact that the majority of marriage contracts respect and address this reality.
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That given, there are some other interesting things--it is hard enough for two strong women to be partnered under a single man. I would suggest that it is almost impossible for two alpha males to be married to a single female. I understand that there are contexts in which this is not true, where brothers will marry a single woman to protect property within the family, and so on. But in general? Two alpha males will butt heads over a single female. Which leaves the possibility of two betas sharing the same female. And frankly, a society that encourages its males to be betas is gonna get creamed by that neighboring society that encourages its males to be alphas. Not a really efficient social strategy, in my thinking.
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Now, that's talking about a society: a self-contained, self-replicating group. That WON'T apply as much to sub-groups within a society, which can be non-reproductive, or whatever, and it doesn't matter. But most of the rules we have come out of these self-replicating groups, or at the very least, do not violate the principle that any organism--or social group--will attempt to survive, replicate, and grow, and that the production of the maximal number of children who can grow to become parents themselves is such a common thread that it comes close to a universal.
##
It is out of this that it becomes obvious why there are FAR more instances of single man/multiple women than vice versa. I'd say that the first outnumbers the former by about 100:1 worldwide, and would say further that this is no accident.

THAT is my attitude. Not that this is "right" or "universal" or says anything determinative about the future of male-female interactions. Just that it is an observable reality based on social needs in response to genetic and psychological realities on the part of most men and women. It's always interesting to investigate the variations, but I think it would be a real mistake to consider this stuff random, or just the result of male psychology. Men aren't smart enough to have implemented this world-wide, and women aren't weak enough to have allowed them if it didn't serve some of their needs as well.

Steve

[Doug G.]

Steve,

First of all, I need to apologize if it seemed that I was trying to misrepresent your position. What I wrote was in response only to the original post, not to rebut any perceived position of yours. My response was directed chiefly to your comment near the end of the original post:

     Steve's note: what in the hell happens in a culture in which 
     1) men are encouraged to have multiple wives . . .

I will grant that the word 'only' is not in your original text. And while 'only' would have made the statement more absolute than you had intended, perhaps I can be forgiven for perceiving what was written as being somewhat gender specific, or at least sufficiently so to serve as a starting point for a conversation on the subject. Certainly I do not believe that you have a gender-biased bone in your body, and I am very sorry if I left you, or any of the readers, with that impression.

I believe that your sociological analysis is very accurate and comprehensive. And while it may not be 'determinative', it may well represent a near-complete truth on why ultimately monogamy usually forms the primary structural unit of human society, as well as describing what sociological results one would expect to observe in situations when and where monogamy is not the rule of the day. Though my arguments were made upon a different basis, I agree that it is not possible to ignore the sociological perspective if one hopes to build an accurate model for understanding human interaction at the familial level. This is as true if one wishes to write an believable s-f story with a heavily modified human society as if one wishes to understand our own.

My theme takes a different tack. In the original post, your correspondent listed a number of polyamorous examples, each seriously flawed. She gave some reasons why this might be so. I was not surprised by your own, well-stated reasoning on why polyamory is suspect - this is not the first time you've discussed the subject in your forums. My intent was to introduce another viewpoint for examination based upon a belief that the best known examples of polyamory have failed, at least in part, due to built-in inequalities between the parties involved. There may be other, valid explanations for the failures as well, but such wouldn't necessarily negate my own thesis.

If all we wish to do is examine the causes of failure of historical examples of polyamory, then my thesis may well be superfluous - your sociological basis may be all we need to explain why it did not work out. Further, perhaps a 'fairness' analysis has little bearing on if any particular sociological structure will work out in the long term. Certainly, some degree of fairness and inequality seems a universal feature of civilization and sociological structure.

But I'm interested not only in the causes of past failure, but also in how polyamory might be better implemented in the future. It is of some interest to examine Mormon polygamy or the harems of sultans, and to understand their flaws. But if my first observation of those systems is noting a glaring display of fundamental unfairness, then my first task in positing a better system is to ensure I avoid that particular pitfall.

Doug G.

[Argent'horn]

There is a factor that no one has touched upon here, and I think it may be important. The societies where polyandry has been successful are those where resources are really scarce, and one man simply cannot provide for a child, whereas two or three working to support the same child give the child a chance for survival. There are cultures where this is formal one female-several male marriages (Tibet, I think.) and there are cultures where there is a belief in multiple fathers. When a woman has several lovers at the time she becomes pregnant, all the men are expected to support the child. In circumstances where a man can barely feed himself, with a tiny surplus, it could easily take quite a few men to support one child for the first few years. If the men refused, the society would simply die out. If I recall correctly, this sort of thing also happens with some bird species; when food is scarce, females have multiple mates, whereas when food is plentiful, they are monogamous.

[Steven Barnes]

However we evolve toward choice, it is a mistake to forget that human and animal behaviors are grounded in survival. Even suicide can be seen as an attempt to preserve the ego at the cost of the body. Mating behaviors: love and sexuality especially, when viewed through this lens, are far easier to understand.

[motherhuldra]

Since Mormons were brought up, I wanted to contribute an excellent little lecture I once received from a Mormon historian.

He maintained that polygamy at the time of the early Mormonism and of early Islam was fueled by the universal needs of a people struggling to establish themselves. Men were more willing to sacrifice themselves in battle knowing that their families would not be left widows and orphans, but would be absorbed into other households. At the same time, every woman of childbearing age had the means, or, rather, man, necessary to produce new Muslims and Mormons.

From this point of view, the center of polygamy is not the adult participants, but the children, and in particular the children of a culture unwilling to lose any of its future strength to physical or moral neglect.

[Steven Barnes]

I would suggest that the laws of marriage anywhere are about producing the maximum number of children who will grow to become parents themselves. Any social structure that does not provide for this will be gone in a few generations. The passage of both memes and genes is essential. HOWEVER, it is often brutal to the men and women who live under such systems. Men have the overt power, and have always been encouraged to stay silent about their pain. Women speak up more, and confide in each other more, so it seems like they are the ones carrying the social burden, while men are lords of the manor. It boggles my mind when I've heard feminist interpretations of, say "Gone with the Wind" that concentrate on the (undeniable) suffering of the female characters while never mentioning the ocean of dead, dying, and disfigured men. Boggles my mind. Society is a blind animal, created by the needs of both men and women to reproduce. And it holds its power so long as each side blames the other. The instant you wake up, you get the obscene joke, and have a prayer of correcting the situation.

[nancylebovitz]

I know a happy, stable, two men/one woman triad. I suppose you'd say the guys are beta males. The initial partner is an unusual person--he doesn't get jealous. The man who came in second is (by implication) capable of jealousy, but he's in love with the woman and likes the other man well enough--and the woman is very concerned with having the relationship work.

It probably helped that this is the result of one woman being in love with two men--none of them were trying to make an ideological point by setting up a triad.

[Steven Barnes]

I don't KNOW that the men are betas--haven't met them, and that's such a subjective term anyway. I would be willing to wager at short odds that they aren't above-average in testosterone production, however--which does correlate to a degree. Now, love is a tricky thing, and frankly, I'm sure its possible for a healthy, balanced woman to attract two healthy, balanced males and for the three of them to find love together. But boy oh boy, would I love to talk to them, and understand how they arrange their lives. If the men were strong, such a conversation might well expand my view of human nature, something I'm always looking for.