Is polygamy natural? Can it cause war?
Polygamy
In the 21st Century polygamy still occurs in Moslem societies. We are told it is normal, natural… but is it?
First, what are some of the principle mating strategies in the animal world?
There is the ever popular F&F (Fuck and Forget). The male and female encounter each other during a time when they are both sexually receptive. There is little or no courtship and what courtship there is seems limited to trying to communicate one of two messages: “I won’t hurt you” or “Don’t hurt me.” They mate. Sometimes repeatedly. When the urge fades they separate. That’s it.
F&F blends into “You got to FIGHT (for your RIGHT, to PAAARRTAY).” It’s a male thing. The female is still practicing F&F but when there is more than one male present they will fight over who will get to service the female. When there are a number of females present, all willing to mate, this fighting escalates into terrific battles between many males. Think elephant seals on a beach. As the largest and most aggressive male wins the most battles and the most mating opportunities each generation produces larger and more aggressive males. Males only compete with each other. Females tend to be infinitely promiscuous, willing to mate with any willing male. At the end of mating season the genders separate.
Then there is the rock star strategy. The female controls the mating. She chooses and it’s all about the art, all about the beauty the male can make with his body, his song, his dance, his decorating. Sometimes this beauty is independent of conscious male effort. Think the Bird of Paradise, the Peacock, the Banty Rooster. It’s the female who is really the artist. Her choices makes this art down through the generations as she paints the male in the most beautiful colors imaginable. Like the rock star, these males provide no support for their offspring. The males are playing F&F. It is the females who are playing something more. Then in many species the males get involved in the art. They add song and dance. And, in the case of Bowerbirds, interior decorating. They stand where the female can see them and display their colors, their dance, the beauty of their song and females line up for the chance to put out for the best of them. Like they were rock stars.
Then things get a little more complicated. Behaviors evolve in which the male provides more to the female than a chance for anesthetic appreciation.
“I’ve got a nice piece of land here”. The female is given access to feeding territory guarded by the male.
“Let me Take You to Diner” - Helpmate behaviors evolve and the males start helping to rear the young. During courtship in some species, the male will feed the female, perhaps to prove that he can be relied upon to feed future offspring.
Lastly, “I LOVE YOU”. During courtship, and often throughout their lives, the male and female show love toward each other. They stay near their partner, groom and coo and generally act lovey-dovey. This love behavior has evolved to show that the male can and will love both his mate and his offspring and will be loyal to them both. The female’s protestations of love show that she will be likely to be faithful as well. This is not a useless promise. In Northern Michigan some years ago a downed male eagle was found by hunters. He had been shot through the wing and it was all but gone. But he was alive. And well nourished. The hunters stood back and watched and saw his mate coming to feed him. Love. It can mean the difference between life and death.
Birds are an old lineage. They, being tiny dinosaurs, have been around longer than we have. They have been around long enough to develop approaches that combine all the strategies. Male birds of some species play all the notes, communicate all messages : I’m pretty, I sing good, I have a nice territory, I’ll help with the kids, AND I love you. The thing about this strategy is that it means one mate. Sometimes one per life and never more than one per mating season. But birds have been around a long time. Long enough to learn to lie and deceive so sometimes they do some two-timing. The males and sometimes the females will have extramarital flings. They try to keep such matings secret. A female that sees her mate copulating with another female will attack that female and try to drive her out of their territory and the male gets an earful as well. Males rarely provide any food for the offspring of such matings so the female must provide all the food and care to keep her clutch alive. Occasionally the male will desert his primary mate for his extra-martial liaison but that is rare. Females sometimes screw around as well. If a male that sees his mate copulate with another male he will generally provides less food for the next clutch. But these relationships are not polygamy. They are affairs.
Human polygamy has two forms. In one form the male has multiple mates and such mates are veritable prisoners/slaves. Frequently such women are not allowed to even leave their homes. In old China they were deliberately crippled to keep them helpless and then their disability was sexualized. In the Moslem world women were frequently genitally mutilated so they could not enjoy sex, thus making it less likely they would be unfaithful. In some Moslem societies women are still not allowed to leave home.
Such marriages are expensive. The man must support not just his children but his wives, wives who can provide little or no help for their husband or children. Clearly this kind of polygamy is limited to the wealthy, to a man who has enough income to provide for his sex slaves and their children. It must of necessity be a rare form of polygamy. I know of no analogy to it in the animal world.
In fact I know of no polygamous bird or mammal where the male provides totally for the support of his females and their offspring. Indeed, there is only one animal where the male totally provides for the female and offspring, and this only for a short period of time. The hornbill. Hornbills nest in cavities in trees. The female, with the male’s help, seals herself into this cavity using mud/and or feces. There she lays her eggs and incubates her young. The male brings her and the young food. Depending on the species and the conditions, the female may stay in the nest till the young fledge or she may break out much earlier. The young reseal the opening and then both parents feed them. This turns out to be a very effective way to protect the young. Depending on the species of hornbill, they successfully fledge young in 62 to 92% of nests. Some large hornbill species only produce one young a year (always the sign of a successful species). Since two parent can always provide more food for the young than can one, the extra benefit of having one parent protecting the young at all time must more than offset the reduction in food supply. A male hornbill only has one mate. All its time is devoted to providing food to his mate and offspring. No time for fooling around.
There is another kind of polygamy, the kind widely practiced in Africa south of the Sahara. In this kind of polygamy the man takes multiple wives and does not support them. They support him. In most of Africa women grow 80% of the food, they tend livestock and gardens, pick fruit, gather wood, carry water, cook the food, take care of the children and the households. Women typically work longer hours than men. http://www.unfpa.org/intercenter/food/womenas.htm
In some African tribes a wife is considered married to the husband’s family and brothers may share their wives sexually. http://www.wfn.org/1997/11/msg00162.html
This form of polygamy is found in nature. In the lion pride. The males of a pride are often brothers, they share the females of the pride and the females do most of the hunting and the males most of the eating. The only thing the male lions are good for is fighting off other male lions that try to take over the pride. Other than that the males are pretty useless. So you could argue that this form of polygamy is natural.
What does polygamy say to a woman. It says, you, woman, you, my wife, you are not enough for me. Your love, your body, growing our children under your heart, caring for them and for me, you are not enough. You are insignificant. You are not sexy enough, pretty enough, sweet enough, young enough. You are not enough. You are only one woman, and therefore not human, and therefore not enough.
In polygamous societies, a woman must accept this. The wife generally has no right to divorce, not even if her husband beats and abuses her and her children. She is his property. She has few, if any, rights. So she must accept it. Her husband may bring another woman into her home, embrace that woman, smile at her, kiss her, have sex with her. Because his first wife was not enough. As a result there are more children and now the husband’s resources, no matter how great or how small, must be divided between wives, between the children of different wives. In some places that means that some of the children will starve or be deprived of medical care or education. Because their mother was not enough. How the women in those marriages must blame themselves as they watch their children suffer because their mother was not enough. Such women are rarely allowed to work outside the home or farm. Even in societies where woman can work, the money they earn often belongs to the husband and will paid to him and not to her. He can spend the money she earns on other women, other wives, on the children of other women, even if her own children sicken and die. How that must tear at a woman’s heart. And this is called “normal,” “natural.”
Polygamy is generally hated by women. But polygamy is also very hard on men despite them thinking they would love it. For every 104 male babies born there are only 100 females born. This is the normal sex ratio in the human species. In polygamous societies women are generally considered to have little value therefore girl children may be subject to infanticide and even if they are allowed to live they are often given less food and less medical care than their brothers. As a result girl children die in childhood more frequently than male children so the sex ratio of woman-hating, i.e. polygamous, cultures becomes even more unbalanced. Also affluent men are able to take more than one wife and so large numbers of men are left without any opportunity to form a family. In such societies many men’s only opportunity to have sex would be with prostitutes, through adultery or by rape.
The Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints (FLDS), a small polygamous sect in Colorado City, Arizona, shows the basic problem of polygamy. In the last 5 years the sect’s “prophet”, Warren Jeffs, has banished about 400 teenaged boys from the town, usually for little or no reason. This is a necessity in any polygamous group. In any peaceful polygamous society there will always be a large number of surplus males who are without wives. Do the math. Given the normal sex ratio of 104 males to 100 females, for every man who has two wives there must be one man who has none. For every man who has 4 wives there must be 3 men with none. Jeffs dealt with that problem by expelling a large number of young boys. This allowed older men to take the teenaged girls as mistresses. I say mistresses since there was no legal marriage between them and no attempt to make such relationships legal. Some of the girls forced into such liaisons were underage and many of the boys expelled from the community were even younger.
http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2006/07/06/lost_boys/
Jeffs was able to get rid of his surplus males by sending them into a larger non-polygamous society. This is not possible when the entire society is polygamous. In Cannibals and Kings Marvin Harris discusses the polygamous Yanomano tribe of the Amazon jungle.
…33 percent of Yanomano male deaths are caused by wounds received in battle. Moreover, the Yanomano practice an especially brutal form of male supremacy involving polygany, frequent wife beating, and gang rape of captured enemy women.
The Yanomano also practice female infanticide which results in an extremely unbalanced sex ratio. In the most intensive war zone the juvenile sex ratio averaged 148 males to 100 females. In one village it was 260:100. But in another village outside the intensive war zone the juvenile sex ratio was 109:100. In that village conflicts with neighbors and the general severity of warfare were reduced. The extreme shortage of women, worsened by the practice of polygamy, was the primary source of strife. Because of the shortage of women, Yanomano raid other groups and capture their women. The other groups raid in return trying to retrieve their women and capture others. This continual war makes males more valuable as warriors so more baby girls are killed which increases the shortage of women which makes more war and raids necessary in order to obtain women. Sort of a Catch-22. There are also many intra-group conflicts over women as single men try to seduce women within the group. The primary cause of villages splitting was conflicts over women.
During the Islamic invasions Moslem societies must have been somewhat similar. Polygamy reduced the number of woman available. One ruler had 14,000 concubines. And for each man with 14,000 women, there must be at least 13,999 men with none.
I blamed the Islamic system of pillage as well as the desire to spread Islam for causing the Islamic invasions of the middle east, Africa, Europe, and Asia. Maybe there was another factor: The lack of available women in Islamic societies due to polygamy and concubinage. This must have left many poorer men with no opportunity to marry. Their only chance of having a family would have been to join the Islamic army, fight and capture a woman or women or to obtain enough booty and/or status to buy or marry a woman on their return home. If they survived. This was the reason slavery was so different in Islamic countries than in the west. In the west slaves were primarily used for forced labor. In the Atlantic slave trade there were two males for every one female. But in the Islamic slave trade there were two females for every male. Females were used a sex slaves and for domestic work. The shortage of available women in most Islamic societies must have made the importation of female slaves very lucrative. (Islam’s Black Slaves by Ronald Segal)
So polygamy sets up most men and women for lives of unhappiness. Since women are forced into a type of reproduction that is against their emotional, financial and genetic self interest, cultural mechanisms have developed down through the centuries that force them to tolerate it. This has been done by genital mutilation, foot binding, stoning, beating, etc. Not a pleasant way of life and one without freedom. Such societies are also very unpleasant for males at the lower end of the status continuum. While females end up as sex slaves and brood mares, surplus males end up as cannon fodder, outcasts, or alone.
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© Alllie 2006
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