Social revolution in the wrong direction
Mar. 18th, 2004 08:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfs"If we give gays the right to marry, what's next, polygamy?" A common refrain here in the U.S. from those who are opposed to both. Interestingly, the United Nations was recently asked by several member countries such as Belgium and the Netherlands to extend employment benefits to same-sex partners recognized by those countries.
Naturally, this has prompted an explosion. Both Islamic and Vatican-inspired states have objected strenuously. But you'll never hear the polygamy refrain coming from these people.
The U.N. already recognizes polygamy.
[EDIT: It's the Washington Post, not the New York Times.]
Naturally, this has prompted an explosion. Both Islamic and Vatican-inspired states have objected strenuously. But you'll never hear the polygamy refrain coming from these people.
The U.N. already recognizes polygamy.
[EDIT: It's the Washington Post, not the New York Times.]
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no subject
Date: 2004-03-18 11:08 am (UTC)Tangentially, a comment on China:
In China, because the "one family, one child" policy has been in effect for long enough, there are now roving bands of young men who kidnap women to have children by them, or a group of men will hand off one woman so they can all have children, because in China, the preferred child is still a son, and a "family" is defined by the identity of father, not both parents. The daughters are classified as "stillborn", because they are strangled at birth, and the sons are preserved. This has resulted in a huge surplus of men and not enough women, and the problems I outlined above.
no subject
Date: 2004-03-18 11:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-03-18 12:12 pm (UTC)It's worth noting that marriage, before the Church started to stick their meddlesome noses into it in the middle Middle Ages (12th-13th centuries), was purely a civil contract. You stood in front of a bunch of witnesses and swore you were married. After the advent of Christianity, then you went in and heard Mass. But the actual legal stuff took place outside of the church (although frequently at the door, since it was a convenient place to gather). [Most of this applies to the UK, other countries had different practices, but most of our law comes from English law, common or otherwise, so we're not really counting what they did in Byzantium for the purposes of this discussion.]
There are plenty of legal instances (in the aforesaid MA) where the man went off and took up with another woman, and his first partner took him to court on the grounds that he was married to her first. If she could get enough of the neighbors to testify that the couple was married--usually two non-related neighbors were enough, and all you needed to say was "I thought they were married--they acted like it" or something along those lines. You see this a lot in cases where something tangible, either money or property, is involved.
Personally, I think if the state has to be in the marryin' business at all, it should be considered another form of contract. But that's just me.
no subject
Date: 2004-03-18 12:26 pm (UTC)I disagree strongly with this reasoning, though. Both because it can be used to justify all sorts of Very Bad Things (if it's a general argument) and because I don't believe that the current status quo in terms of marriage is really less harmful than many possible alternatives (if it's a specific argument).
And personally, I agree, marriages should just be a civil contract. That's effectively how my spouses and I have managed it.
I will admit that I have some personal stake in the matter -- it galls me regularly that I can be denied a wide variety of privileges that other people who've put far less thought into their relationships can take for granted. Some of those things are potentially very big -- for example, my wife's mother was and is extremely abusive and is very much the sort of person who would try to steal our children, or deny us access to her if she were injured, or so forth. We've got a wide variety of paperwork to attempt to make it clear that my wife explicitly and legally does not want her mother to have any say in her life, but because she's not in a mainstream monogamous heterosexual relationship, we may not ever be able to make it all stick.
That sort of thing frustrates me regularly.
no subject
Date: 2004-03-18 12:53 pm (UTC)I myself would love to be able to add the man who is my primary secondary to such useful things as health insurance, but because he is not my dependent or my legal husband, I can't, and when we travel overseas, I just pray that nothing happens to either of us that would involve a hospital stay.
no subject
Date: 2004-03-18 03:45 pm (UTC)Polyandry, for all of its practice among an insignificant subculture such as the poly community, would not catch on in the wider world. It's simply not going to be an important factor. Yes, it would happen, but I argue that polygamy would be much more commonplace for one simple reason: children.
Say what you want about the equality of the sexes; biological reality is that only women can bear them. For the first two years of life, women only can do the essential task of feeding and raising them. Not only does this mean that someone else has to do the supplying in the household, but it means that the mother experiences a significant disruption in her career. A hole of two years, in a culture moving as fast as ours does, can be devastating.
Men will always have a practical advantage in the workplace simply because they have a choice in avoiding this disruption, whereas women do not-- not if they want to have kids.
Men therefore have an enormous economic advantange that cannot be erased. And after thirty years of encouraging women to be like men, more and more women are opting out of "being like men."
Here's the classic thought experiment: take a thousand men and a thousand women, and remove all the stigma of polygamy. What happens? Well, if the thousand men and thousand women have the usual power-curve distribution of resources-- money, good looks, health, and so on-- what we'll start to see is men with more than one woman, and far fewer women with more than one man.
The logic behind this is brutal and simple: A woman with more than one man cannot be sure which man fathered her child, and so no man in that state is incentived by the reproductive instinct to "care for his children." Therefore few men would willingly get involved in such relationships because the evolutionarily-described payoff is slim.
For the women "at the bottom" of this socioeconomic ladder, however, the prospect of ditching the guy she's paired with and "moving up," thus acquiring better genes (there is no better measurement of genetic value is there other than the capacity to be "successful" in the given environment) and securing territory and sustenance for her children, is hard to argue against. And for the man who acquires more than one woman, he knows (or at least can have far better reason to believe) that the children he is working to provide for are his genes-- and evolution would naturally encourage that.
Today, we have technological methods for determining beyond doubt parentage, but those methods do not erase the thousands of years in which we've programmed to feel certain ways in certain situations; the vast majority of men would be very uncomfortable in a polyandrous situation, but would be quite pleased with a working polgynous one. Remove all stigma and legal barriers, and a lot of women-- a signficant enough percentage-- would prefer a polygynous one that better guaranteed her and her kids' socioeconomic well-being to a monongamous one that did not.
Excuse Me!
Date: 2004-03-18 10:52 pm (UTC)You quoted:
For the first two years of life, women only can do the essential task of feeding and raising them. Not only does this mean that someone else has to do the supplying in the household, but it means that the mother experiences a significant disruption in her career. A hole of two years, in a culture moving as fast as ours does, can be devastating.
I'm not at the moment poly - I am single mother. If you ever tooken glance at my journal Elfs, your aware that I'm widow. I like to know whom supply my household - My answer is, Me! I didn't run to daddy or the government for help. I had a job and I kept it and no I didn't experiences a signigicant disruption in my career. I wasn't rich in the beginning either. I fought hard to earn what I got now.
Not true - sorry! In the beginning after the death of my love. I moved to Alaska to run from the memories of him. I quit my first job, I ever had. I got hired on quickly in Alaska in something similar. I was on call 24/7 and I establish daycare that ran 24 hours. That was disruption in my pocket book, I manage to get a part-time job that work with my hectic schedule. It wasn't a pretty place to work at, It was a job that pays.
So if the women part in raising a child or your words her only essential task is to feed and raising....Men is at work place. Can I slap you across the face? Hello - Not all poly trads are like that. Women Work and Men stay home or ONE man stay home. Women are lionesses that hunt for thy food or in this case MONEY!.
Personally I rather have A man stay AT home and share him....technoly it's been proven men are better in cooking and cleaning. If you look in the cooking industry there's more men that are Chiefs, than women. Why has it been proven that men are better in handling the kids cause why ? Nerves ! Women nerves are more sensitive than men. Why?
Re: Excuse Me!
Date: 2004-03-19 05:06 am (UTC)P.S. hope the pain is not to bad...
Re: Excuse Me!
Date: 2004-03-19 08:48 am (UTC)Now to play with Elfs after I do alittle historical research (after I get my real world work square way some what.) to prove something that he may or may not have forgotten. If I'm on same brain wave in where he's going with his response with me. No I didn't take what he said to offensive measure. I'm just in argumentative mood he just looks kind of tasty play with on debatable issue.
Thank You for your concern and response. That was very sweet of you.
Re: Excuse Me!
Date: 2004-03-19 09:15 am (UTC)Re: Excuse Me!
Date: 2004-03-19 08:05 am (UTC)Prior to 7,000 years ago, you'd've been tiger bait, to use the anthropological term.
Re: Excuse Me!
Date: 2004-03-19 10:09 am (UTC)Re: Excuse Me!
Date: 2004-03-19 10:30 am (UTC)Legalized polygamy (as opposed to social polyamory) would be a step backwards in the evolution of civilization.
Monogamy is a conspiracy among powerful men to affect the fortunes of lower-class men: to pacify them in peacetime and to make effective warriors of them in times of war. In a monogamous society, the lower classes, when they have to go to war, do so with meticulous forethought and utter brutality: they have something to lose if they don't, and comparatively little to gain for battle in the first place.
Legalized polygamy undoes this conspiracy. As much as I admire Flying_Pegasus's success, most women in her condition would much rather have someone look after them. Have this happen enough and you have a shiftless, rootless, desperate population of lower-class men. What happens next is uncomfortably well-documented.
no subject
Date: 2004-03-19 07:52 am (UTC)I believe your analysis to make a number of incorrect assumptions, and thus I disagree with your conclusions. Primary amongst them being some sort of rational-analysis-of-evolutionary-advantage thing that I don't believe people actually do, or at least that I've never seen anyone actually do.
Personally, I believe the prevalence of polygyny in polygamous history has nothing to do with the forces of which you speak, and has everything to do with male power. In the communities in which there is no particular stigma against poly, my experience is that polyandry is just as common as polygyny.
no subject
Date: 2004-03-18 11:19 am (UTC)s/less destructive/less or more destructive/
Whups. *grin*