Sunday 3 February 2002

Pic of the day: Of course, it's not all sweetness and light ... (Screenshot from The Sims, more exactly Hot Date expansion pack.)

Legalize bigamy!

Pet peeve revisited. Long time readers will know my stand on this. Long time readers will also know that I don't speak for myself here. While I, like most men at least, am slightly "poly-curious", I don't have any prospects. Besides, I tend to love one person more than any other at any time. Actually, for years and years. But this isn't about me in the slightest. Actually it is not quite about love either, though it does tie in. It is about redressing an imbalance in our society.

***

In the wild, human males are more likely to die an early death than the females are. This is good and proper: The un-interrupted survival of one female is more important to the offspring, while males may come and go somewhat more freely. So males are not only more prone to diseases from conception onward, but also grow up scatterbrained and risk-taking. There are many more males conceived, some more born, but at the onset of maturity (such as it is) the numbers are evened out. For adults, there are consistently more women than men, unless society does something drastic to keep the number down. (Few societies are that stupid, but it does happen. In India, for instance, there have been traditions of widow burning.)

The normal way of things is that there are somewhat more women than men. Is this a problem? Yes. Women may be better at living alone, but that does not mean random individuals should be pressured into doing that.

There is the obvious thing about sex. I mean, sexual intercourse and the activities most closely connected to this. As a rule, men are more hungry for this, while women are more hungry for food. In both cases, it is because society set unnatural limits that the body does not agree with. This is not just a problem for the lonely man-less women who don't get any. It is also a nuisance for the women who have a man who always bothers them wanting more. Some guys are simply not cut out to have just one woman. Instead of having them randomly go on business trips, it would be safer and more emotionally fulfilling to let them have two wives. This is also how some societies in the past have arranged it. The Bible allows it, but somehow our Christian values don't allow that anymore.

But as I found out in my late thirties, sex is not the only thing that pulls a man and a woman together. I'm not talking about love and romance, either. To the scientific mind, romance is right up there with Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. No, I am talking about the complementing mindsets of men and women.

Whether by nature or nurture, men and women tend to think and feel differently. And these differences tend to complement each other, fill each other out, make each other more complete. The same way two eyes give a deeper and sharper sight than just one, so does the masculine and feminine viewpoint differ just enough to see the same things slightly differently. Of course, this necessitates some kind of communication, which is where it often stops. But when it works, it works well.

In conclusion: Wherever possible, each man should have his own woman and each woman her own man, if they so wish. It is certainly not society's job (much less the police) to keep them apart. If by nature's design this means some men will have more than one wife, then that's her problem.

***

There is a reason for all things. And there is a reason why monogamy has been triumphant, at least officially. The reason is partly military and partly economic.

In bronze age societies, polygamy was a question of status. The rich man could have more women, just like he could have more cattle, donkeys, slaves and houses. The king would have lots and lots of wives, to show his exalted status. Meanwhile, ordinary well off men might have two wives, the less well off only one. And, here's the rub, some would have zero. By accepting harems, there was a definite risk that these would pull out too many women from the marriage market, as it were. And a man without a wife is unfit in war and dangerous in peace.

In war, a man fights in truth not for the king, but for his children. Such works the human mind, that both attacker and defender knows this, and the fighting morale of a man defending his home is far superior to the attacker. But a man defending someone he is jealous of is another matter entirely. He is not much better than an enemy, and less reliable.

As we can see in the inner cities of America, single men are not the easiest to integrate in the workforce either. For these reasons, societies that just happened to encourage monogamy gained an advantage. Women were pressured into bonding with a less desirable man alone, rather than sharing a more desirable man with other women. This was just peachy for the lower-class men, of course. The dramatic advantage to them richly outweighed the inconvenience for the women.

Today, society has the surplus to allow non-standard families. We have a goodly number of actual singles, of both sexes. We have serial monogamies that just get more and more serialized. We even have homosexual cohabitation, for pity's sake. It is high time we legalize a harmless, Biblically endorsed, variant of marriage.

In Scandinavia, we have had marriage-equivalents for same-sex couples for years now; this has not led to busloads of former hetero people suddenly changing sides. There is no reason to believe that we would suddenly see the fabric of society unravel because we allow bigamy. Most of us were raised to have a preference for one-on-one love anyway, and will probably be like that till we die. Just give the few others their human righs back, OK?