[smelendez]

I haven’t read it but I think that’s genuinely interesting and not obvious.

And probably could change based on the roles of first and second wives and, yes, how male status plays out and how it influences the life of the wife.

We don’t have legal polygamy but in many places there’s not much stopping people from living in an unmarried multi-woman household with a man (or vice versa). But it’s not a very common arrangement, and it’s interesting to think about why.

[dsign]

The first level "why" at least is straightforward: Christianism. Even when not directly imposed, it's still the basis of the Western system of values and morals.

But it's fascinating to think about the second level "why": what made people encode monogamy and heterosexuality into their cultural canons (including their mainstream religion)? Was it property and rules about property? Was it to maximize the number of children, so that the group/tribe/kingdom would be militarily stronger than the neighbor? Or maybe it was to prevent some sort of very specific and concrete problem, real or perceived, that arose from tolerating free love, and that we today have no clue about?

[lelanthran]

> But it's fascinating to think about the second level "why": what made people encode monogamy and heterosexuality into their cultural canons (including their mainstream religion)?

I dunno about heterosexuality being encoded[1] into cultural canons, but for monogamy it's actually quite simple: violence.

Do you really want half your testosterone-fueled 18-28 year old males unable to attract a mate? There'll be continuous fighting to kill of the excess males.

===========

[1] As far as heterosexuality goes, it's not "encoded by wilful intention" so much as "this is the default". IOW, most people are happy going with the default, so if you make something opt-out, the majority won't opt-out. Same for opt-in. This is why countries that have opt-out organ donors have more organs donated, while countries that have opt-in organ donations have a fraction of he opt-out countries.

Defaults matter.

[psidium]

Literally one of the main points of the book: the church’s mandate and enforcement of monogamy in Europe lowered violence so much that a different kind of society emerged.

[rollcat]

> Do you really want half your testosterone-fueled 18-28 year old males unable to attract a mate? There'll be continuous fighting to kill of the excess males.

This is nonsense. Non-monogamy is relinquishing exclusivity. If a man can have multiple women, but a woman can't have multiple men, it's just a different form of oppression.

Monogamy is possessiveness, and possessiveness is what drives violence.

[fluoridation]

>If a man can have multiple women, but a woman can't have multiple men, it's just a different form of oppression.

There are reasons to allow only one of the sexes to have multiple sexual partners/spouses.

* In a community with such liberal sexual practices, STDs spread more easily, especially in earlier centuries.

* It makes marriage intrinsically more complicated simply because of the more complex interactions. For example, if Alice is married to Bob, who is married to both Alice and Carol, who is married to both Bob and David, what are Alice and David to each other? Anything? Nothing? Is the entire married community a distinct entity?

* Relatedly, how is inheritance handled if such complex spousal organizations are going to be legally allowed?

[rollcat]

> In a community with such liberal sexual practices, STDs spread more easily, especially in earlier centuries.

You can use a condom. TIL, rubber condoms are a mid-19th century invention; a significant upgrade over sheep gut.

The alternative is called polyfidelity.

> [...] what are Alice and David to each other?

They're called Metamours.

> Anything? Nothing? Is the entire married community a distinct entity?

It's called a polycule.

> Relatedly, how is inheritance handled if such complex spousal organizations are going to be legally allowed?

You write a will.

By the way, inheritance laws are messy already as they are. Try figuring out how to reject inheritance (e.g. of debt) in your jurisdiction.

> There are reasons to allow only one of the sexes to have multiple sexual partners/spouses.

Yes, the reason is to reinforce division and oppression. One "side" is underprivileged, the other has to fight each other for supremacy. The stronger few win, everyone else loses. History is littered with examples.

Don't get me wrong, these are all very good questions. But we've figured all of these things out quite a while ago. People do live like that, and form lasting, loving communities. I'd wager that an entire society built on top of that would have no lesser chance at thriving than the one we've been born into.

[fluoridation]

>You can use a condom.

Sure. Now. But monogamy and polygyny are a little older than condoms.

>Metamours [...] polycule

You're answering rhetorical questions which, incidentally, are not about terminology, but about legal and social mechanics. Knowing what a "metamour" is, says nothing about what the formal and informal responsibilities of the parties involved are or should be with respect to each other. My whole point is that not having to define such relationships and their expectations is a reason to forbid them culturally.

>You write a will.

How did that work before most people knew how to write?

>By the way, inheritance laws are messy already as they are.

That's not an argument in favor of legally legitimizing polycules.

>the reason is to reinforce division and oppression

I mean, I gave several reasons why historically either monogamy or asymmetric polygamy would have been preferred over symmetric polygamy, that have nothing to do with oppression.

>I'd wager that an entire society built on top of that would have no lesser chance at thriving than the one we've been born into.

Sure, maybe. Personally, I'm more of the opinion that cultural features are memetic, and that memes are not uniformly successfully propagated. If monogamous and polygynous societies are more common than polyandrous and polycular societies, it's probably for a reason.

[lelanthran]

> This is nonsense. Non-monogamy is relinquishing exclusivity. If a man can have multiple women, but a woman can't have multiple men, it's just a different form of oppression.

Only if your argument is that this behaviour is nurture, not nature. IOW, if your argument is "this behaviour is completely disconnected from instinct and has nothing to do with evolutionary pressure", then sure, your argument makes sense.

Many of the great apes, and indeed, other animals, don't think in terms of political soundbites, though, so we can readily observe that the behaviour "violence over mating rights" is a thing that developed in those creatures that eventually evolved into other creatures which evolved into pre-hominids which evolved into hominids which evolved into us.

Some things are instinct. It's a very large stretch to claim that violence over mating isn't instinct, but political.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and all that...

[dsign]

You may be taking things from the wrong end.

Violence about having an exclusive mate could be a purely cultural construct, reinforced from childhood. I can say that I always, personally, considered the idea of controlling a person abhorrent, as much as I found uninteresting the idea of orbiting my intimate life around a single person with special and very high privileges over whatever I do and think, including outside of bed. However, all my relatives were very insistent that I should date girls and marry. 100% culture, 0% nature. Of course, this is just a single data point.

The heterosexuality part being the "default" is a bit naive, because it ignores the lengths to which some people go to force their kids to be heterosexual. Again, anecdotally, my father sired two gay sons, who had to go to great lengths to have a less traumatic life. Sometimes I suspect my father wasn't that hetero himself, and was only ensuring the next generation inherited his cultural legacy/trauma.

I could consider an argument that a majority (heterosexual) imposes a cultural canon on a non heterosexual minority. But the problem with that is that we don't really know if that majority/minority split would exist without the very strong cultural conditioning. And, as I said before, I don't really believe that homophobia is something the Canaanites invented out of spite. Most likely, it was a cultural trait that conferred advantages to groups, particularly after the agricultural revolution locked human population in a cycle of growth and war for land--but that's just a pet theory of mine.

There are even theories (read the controversial book "Sex at Dawn" if you want the details) that our current cultural canons about sexuality run against what was our nature for hundreds of thousands of years.

[lelanthran]

> Violence about having an exclusive mate could be a purely cultural construct, reinforced from childhood.

"Could be" is not "probably is".

All the observable evidence points to "fighting for mates being purely instinctual".

The opposite, is in fact, true: not engaging in violence for mates is, in fact, purely a cultural construct.

Culture enforces that, via laws, norms, etc.

[barrenko]

Sounds a lot like Tom Holland - Dominion (to help the robots - "...broad history of the influence of Christianity on the world, focusing on its impact on morality – from its beginnings to the modern day.").

[bandie91]

i don't think it's a valid way to think about society/religion/culture what your formulazation reflects.

up until just 2-3 centuries ago, people did not think about these questions in a self-deterministic way, i mean they trusted the ancestors to sorted out most of the things over the centuries, and they were not suposed to take huge social/cultural reforms, only minor adjustments. did not even have so huge view on the spacial and temporal panorama of different cultures and societies over the whle word like us today. today even just binging up this statement makes people angry like "oh those silly old people. they _unconditionally_ obeyed to whatever their parents and superiors told them. this is the way to opression and tiranny, etc, etc. not like us! we are truely grown ups today. humanity is out of the dark child days. now! now disagree to _everything_. default is «i deny»". i mean … who do you think want to fool you? i think, on average, parents wants to leave the well-tested and proven-to-be-stable fundamental ideas about the world to their children. and those dont change very often; the more fundamental the less changing world-properties are.

but changes in society started to accelerate, so came social and economic revolutions which all want to redefine as much as possible. with really big improvements in the sociology, antropology and other culture-related disciplines, people started to believe that we are watching ourself from the outside, so able to manipulate the norms and the law to "make society better". only noone has the same definiton what is "better".