From what I’ve studied on polygamous relationships, some decisions are communal and some are dyadic (based on each couple within a relationship). In my view, children can experience both types of decisions but they also have the experience of other parents, like those of their friends, those on TV, media, etc.
My
study of it came from 1) a father who can’t get his daughter out of a polygamist compound because she’s been blackmailed with being told to leave would mean she’d never see her kids again, and 2) from a girl who was traded off to a guy with only 1 other wife because he donated enough to the church compound to earn the next available girl. She eventually got away, but young girls can sometimes become a currency in these things. Young ones are really the ones who get hurt the most in these.
You see a lot of the girls get promised to other guys when they’re young. So they come into the relationship without all that even voting that you’d expect from a partnered relationship. It’s usually an older guy who can afford more than one wife to begin with. And that guy usually pitches to the younger options.
So yeah. Maybe your perfect ideal might exist. But I’d be willing to bet against it being the average. We’re not talking about a bunch of middle age swingers figuring it’s time for a change. Not in general. And those kinds don’t need legal protection anyway. The people who need protection are the vulnerable young people who can be coerced. Not the guys who like to **** each other’s wives.
You bring up a common but good point about legalities but keep in mind that this is not the same as moral harm. Secondly, laws can be created and formed no matter how complex the issue, and at times it may take trial and error such as the making of our (United States) Constitution and laws which tend to change from time to time or are open to change.
I don’t care. What do meaningless laws mean to manipulative guys with so much temptation on the table? They don’t protect people being blackmailed in vulnerable positions now. So why would I think they’d be the thing to lean on? With no moral standard there’s no community to help draw the line. And there’s nothing to keep the laws from sliding over and over again. There’s nothing to keep a guy from using ideals to keep pushing that bar.
In reality, there will probably never be an equal number of men and women in the world so you will always end up with one gender outnumbering the other. We obviously must think of other options for those left single to do. Secondly if we look at just numbers, I would say that monogamy does not work in China where men outnumber women by the tens of millions. Had polyandry been approved then that would reduce the amount of men that are left single due to the lack of available spouses but here we are applying an inconsistent logic of quantity (availability of spouses) to preserve monogamy at all costs.
lol this is quite something. I mean China basically blackmails people into aborting all extra after the 1st. The culture thinks boys are super special. You end up with extra boys because of it. And a ‘solution’ is to suggest the lower number of girls would just live up the chance to have five guys jumping them every night? Really? Biology is completely against this working.
I mean don’t you think polygamy would more likely just mean rich Chinese guys with extra wives and even fewer girls for the extra guys?
I’d rather believe that people keep rocking back to the extreme out of ignorance or out of bias because they so quickly forget how monogamy used to be practiced, virtually everywhere, in the same oppressive ways.
I know you would. That’s what idealism is. It’s the belief that people will be better than they are if only xyz. But they aren’t. The strong exploit any chink. The average follow the strong. The weak get crushed in the run for the finish line. That’s why morals are usually in play that suspiciously support the weak position. That’s why laws can’t be relied on that can be worn weak by the strong.
Monogamy got stronger because it moved towards a partnership of equals. Polygamy moves things back in the opposite direction.
Divorces and other post marital situations should be handled in a case by case basis just as it is on other complicated cases involving a divorced woman who remarries and is having a custody battle with her ex-husband, etc. Ideally, before anyone enters ANY type of relationship, they should have some agreement on the terms of their relationship before and potentially after their marriage.
They’d be handled case by case, sure. And the absolute hell that would be their complexity would make things take even longer than they do now and cost twice as much.
But in all this, you have not yet explained what the greater good is going to be yet. I mean what is this going to do for society that what we have isn’t already doing? If you want to be a guy with 15 live-in partners you can do that now. You don’t need to weaken laws to make it even easier to exploit. I don’t get it.
