Legalize polyamory, and we get suicide bombings?

[elfs]

Professors of Social Science Alan Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa at Hokkaido University have dropped another analysis of societies and have concluded

By allowing some men to monopolize all women and altogether excluding many men from reproductive opportunities, polygyny creates shortages of available women. If 50 percent of men have two wives each, then the other 50 percent don't get any wives at all.

So polygyny increases competitive pressure on men, especially young men of low status. It therefore increases the likelihood that young men resort to violent means to gain access to mates. By doing so, they have little to lose and much to gain compared with men who already have wives. Across all societies, polygyny makes men violent, increasing crimes such as murder and rape, even after controlling for such obvious factors as economic development, economic inequality, population density, the level of democracy, and political factors in the region.

The authors are, of course, talking about polygyny, not an egalitarian polyamory. But the evidence is strong that, for the vast populace, an egalitarian polyamory would result in far more polygyny than it would polyandry. It's just the way human beings are; maybe you're not that way, but you're an individual, not a statistic: the majority are that way, and we should no more wish otherwise than we should wish the rise of the new soviet man. Polyamory free from stigma's overall effect would be to benefit most women and a few men, leaving many men and a few women bereft.

Miller and Kanazawa do add:

The other key ingredient is the promise of 72 virgins waiting in heaven for any martyr in Islam. The prospect of exclusive access to virgins may not be so appealing to anyone who has even one mate on earth, which strict monogamy virtually guarantees. However, the prospect is quite appealing to anyone who faces the bleak reality on earth of being a complete reproductive loser.

It is the combination of polygyny and the promise of a large harem of virgins in heaven that motivates many young Muslim men to commit suicide bombings.

Now, some people will sputter that there have been women suicide bombers. Sure there have; there have also been women serial killers. But they are statistical noise compared to the waves of young male kids throwing away their lives daily as guided missiles.

Just something lovely with which to start your day.

Comments

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

I gather that the 72 virgins are not even sound Islamic theology.

And it's not so long ago that serial polygyny, arising from the dangers of childbirth, was a factor in Western societies. But there were more dangers for the men too: horses can be dangerous without even trying.

Maybe, instead of robotic killing machines, we should be trying for robotic Real Dolls to airdrop on the madrassas (Feel free to run with that idea--do Pendorian AIs want to get laid?)

[(Anonymous)]

There were -- and are -- different dangers for the men. Up until relatively recently, women were largely unaffected by combat unless they were camp followers or were on the losing side of a war of conquest -- and even then actually killing women in a sack was relatively rare, making combat injuries a largely male cause of death. However, in a culture that has established polygyny, military expansion is a way both to reduce the 'excess' male population and provide an outlet whereby men can earn sufficient status to successfully compete for women -- or acquire women directly. But with the elimination of territorial conquest as an outlet, the imbalance builds back up to where the associated pressures make it easier for inculcation of particular aspects of a faith to distort their world-view to the point where they will throw away their lives in the unshakable belief that they will get in the afterlife what they have no hope of acquiring in this one.

Paul Chafe referenced this characteristic of polygynous societies in the prologue to his Man-Kzin Wars novel Destiny's Forge: "... and kzin males compete strenuously both for females and for the resources to support them. A high proportion of kzin male deaths are due to challenge duels resulting from this competition, and in the adult population females outnumber males in a ratio of between two to one and three to one. In other words, between 50 and 75 percent of male kzin kits can expect to die in combat. Of these, most can expect to die at the hands of older and more established kzin, although among those Great Prides involved directly in the Man/Kzin wars almost 50 percent are killed in combat with humans or other species. Combat death among males begins in late adolescence and rises to a peak in young adulthood, declining steadily thereafter. This single fact dominates the entire kzinti social structure, and in fact the entire Patriarchy is built around the requirement to redirect the aggression of young males outward to prevent them from completely destabilizing the hierarchy. It is this high death rate that allows the extended polygamous mating structure that is the core of kzinti social life."

[solarbird]

Okay, so, if we take this as read, where does this leave China, given its (reported) 1.3:1 M:F ratio, in about 15 years?

[fallenpegasus]

Utterly fucked.

Or rather, their neighbors are in Trouble.

[hydrolagus.livejournal.com]

Looking increasingly stupid when they claim that there's no homosexuality in China.
Pockets of polyandry might break out in the subcultures. A chunk of Seattle geek/pagan culture does that due at least in part to a male-heavy ratio. Assured paternity via exclusion stops working but guys still get laid, so it depends on where the pocket's priorities lie.
Mail-order brides?
And the above-described social instability as poorer men have more difficulty finding wives than richer men.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

A total hairball, I suspect. They're already experiencing massive public disruptions and mob protests, mostly over how industrialization has poisoned the water and air. Put the sex ratio into the public awareness as "You're never gonna get a girl," and we're gonna have to toss gyndroids at them real fast or they're going to be screwed.

[nbarnes.livejournal.com]

I think I agree with fallenpegasus (who knew?). They're going to resolve their oversupply of young men the traditional way; invading someone and getting most of them killed.

NICE ISLAND Y'GOT THERE

[solarbird]

SHAME IF SOMETHIN' WAS T'HAPPEN TO IT

It's Not Just Polyamory....

[abostick59.livejournal.com]

Nationalized health insurance provides a safe haven for terrorists!

Re: It's Not Just Polyamory....

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Heh. These are the same guys who gave us the theory that "Blondes evolved in frigid wastelands because light-colored hair is a marker of youth and fecundity, and since women in frigid wastelands spend most of their time covered from head to toe it was one of the few markers that men could readily and eagerly select for, so the genes for it became more widespread."

Re: It's Not Just Polyamory....

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

I recall seeing a "come to Norway" tourist video -- a pretty good guide really to what there is in the whole country -- and it including the mis-summer sking on the mountains.

Young, check.

Blonde, check.

Bikinis...

Apparently, they buy a lot of sun-screen.

Let's say polyamory was perfectly legal...

[mikstera.livejournal.com]

it would not necessarily follow that most people would be willing or able to have stable, multiple-partner relationships, the ones that would supposedly leave undesirable men further out on a limb than undesirable men are now.

I'm not buying this as an argument against polyamory.

And then there's the Slavery Myths of Gor.

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

I think I must be a bit slow this week. Look st the fictional world of Gor, with it's large number of female slaves. The hero is a high-status individual with access to more women than you can shake a stick at, yet there's no seething underclass of frustrated young men, not are there many old women.

The simple answer is that the author did too much thinking with his balls when he set the whole thing up. Historical slavery has, if anything, been taking the men out of the marriage markets more than the women. In the world of Gor, you must have something killing off a lot of men, without straining the economy--they still need farmers, for instance--or the birth ratio must be skewed.

And all this is quite aprt from whatever personal squick factor might be attached to the Gorean model.

[amythis.livejournal.com]

In Europe in the Victorian era, there was a "surplus" of women. Lizzie Borden excepted, it did not lead to single women becoming serial killers (nurses and governesses more likely), and there wasn't a marked rise in polygyny. There was a sexual double standard of course, but I don't think that was simply because there were enough women to divide up into "ladies" and "whores."

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

This ignores the fact that in our society, sexual relationships are voluntary -- no one can be legally forced into sex or marriage. Thus, the degree of wealth or status required to have multiple wives would be much greater in a hypothetical polygamous America than in Islamic cultures, where women are virtually slaves. This also, of course, ignores the possibility of polyandry --- or even group marriages with multiple men and multiple women emerging.

My opinion is that our monogamous tradition is so strong that, even if polygamy were legalized, there would be only a tiny minority of practicioners, and hence its large-scale effects on society would be close to nil.

Bride Stealing Already Happening In China

[(Anonymous)]

Unless, I am entirely mistaken, the NY Times has already done an article on bride stealing in China whereby women from large towns or told about jobs in villages, come to the village to work, and get married off. There is also some concern about India and the MidEast where the technology of detecting gender in the womb has been combined with abortion to skew the female to male ratio. It has gotten so bad in India that a law has been specifically written that says that doctors may not detect the gender of the child for the purposes of aborting females but it is still happning because of the greater want for male children. Should be interesting in about 10 - 15 more years.