...The merits of polygamy versus monogamy have been debated for thousands of years. Both sides normally assume that men, of course, like polygamy. So, they simply clash over whether polygamy is in the best interests of wives. In reality, however, polygamy victimizes men. You never hear about it because few men want to claim this particular kind of victimhood: that of the sexual rejectee.
I've been following accounts of polygamous societies ever since I saw an article in the early 1980s about a Kenyan man with 150 wives. It set the template for every first-hand description of polygamy that I've read since. The reporter diligently interviewed the youngest wife, who thought polygamy was terrific since it allowed her to marry the richest, handsomest, and most respected man in her village.
He also quoted the oldest wife, who was nostalgic for the days when she didn't have to share her husband with this army of younger wives. Nonetheless, she appreciated her status as her husband's chief of staff. She had 10 senior wives reporting to her, who each oversaw the work of about 14 junior wives as they toiled in their husband's fields. The husband, not surprisingly, thought industrial-scale polygamy was an all-around great idea and recommended that all men should marry multiple wives.
Anti-polygamists would argue, with some justice, that feelings of gender equality are impossible in a family where, simply to prevent anarchy, the man must organize his wives like a military unit with himself as the commanding general.
Pro-polygamists, in contrast, would note that the husband and the junior wives strongly approved of polygamy, while the older wives acquired enough consolations in status to at least find it a mixed blessing. So, since it doesn't hurt anybody badly, who could object?
But who's missing from this picture? Isn't there somebody else affected? This reporter, like all I've seen since him, forgot the existence of the people who were most definitely damaged by polygamy: namely, the 149 guys who didn't get a wife at all because Mr. Marriage-Minded had married 150. I have been looking in vain for 20 years for an article about polygamy that mentioned that for one man to take a second wife means, in the normal course of things, that another man will get no wife at all.
I have come to believe that this blind spot stems from it being virtually impossible for a man to imagine himself as one of the 149 losers, rather than the one big winner. He might prefer one wife to 150, but his male ego can't allow him to identify with all the men who end up rejected and alone. This psychological quirk creates a reality distortion field in the heads of men. Demography is not the sexiest of the social sciences, but one demographic fact that just about everybody knows is that among marriage-aged people there are almost exactly as many men as women. Indeed, among people between the ages of 15 and 64 in the world as a whole, there are 102 men for every 100 women, according to the "CIA World Factbook." Yet, men who favor polygamy almost never believe this basic constant of demographics... |