this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2025
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Is the main objection to polygamy that having multiple sex partners is immoral or that the whole arrangement is subjugation of women (because usually it's multiple wives not husbands), or some other reason?
Muslim men can have multiple wives (maximum 5 I believe) as long as they can provide for them. Muslim women are only allowed to have a single husband.
The joke is that the school thought that the kid’s family was super progressive meanwhile in reality it was super patriarchal
Thanks, I got the humor, what I'm wondering about is what's the predominant reason people in general object to polygamy, regardless of whether it's Islam or Mormons or whatever.
Just off top of my head.
Inheritance - no explanation needed.
personal time - hard to get quality time and Love is can be selfish.
Issues with accidental incest - my dad side loves cheating. I have lots of half siblings and cousins id never meet all over globe. One uncle had 15ish kids that he knew of. So I dont date my dad's race. Nope train.
The dating market - One less wife available for men leads to anger for those without one. This is why I was told gay men are more accepted in certain cultures than lesbians.
Incels already exist and at the same time the most attractive men have a wife, a mistress, and occasional hookups. So it Wildente necessarily change much. Except the side pieces could have actual rights and more societal respect by becoming wives.
If you want more incels, that's how you get more.
data also shows uneven male to female ratio leads to males being more violent. Specifically against women. Just look at countries with low female to male ratios. Disgusting behavior.
If the male pop was reduced then this argument goes out the window. But that would require a major war or some disease that effects only males.
Men are far more susceptible to be victims of violence, addiction, suicide, incarceration, mental illness, loneliness etc. already.
High male population nowadays is usually caused by elective abortions.
Find me just one example of a Muslim woman with two husbands.
That wasn't the ask though? They were asking about polygamy in general...
It’s an easy one-sentence way to point out the inherent subjugation of women.
And that's why some people object to polygamy. Others object because of the multiple sex partners. I could imagine people even thinking of it as some kind of tax dodge, or socialism, or reasons I couldn't fathom.
If everyone involved consents, should that be anyone else's business?
Consent under duress or desperation is not consent. That’s why I’m pointing out that if the polygamy only ever goes one way, there is an obvious power imbalance that prevents consent from being possible.
You're making a sweeping general statement. Polygamy is just Polyamory taken to vows. There is a problem with a lot of the people that practice polygamy in an unethical way, but not polygamy itself.
That is what the person you responded to said. There is a problem with the cultural of polygamy here because it's done in an unethical way.
That is also what the person you replied to said. They clarified specifically that if both genders are free to practice polygamy in the same way there's no issue.
I'm going to be honest; either I read the comment wrong, or they edited it after the fact. Based on the edit-pencil, it looks like they edited their comment :/
And that can be judged from the outside?
The same can apply to polyandry, or what is said to be polyandry but based on one or multiple people involved ultimately being coerced. Come to think of it, all the people i knew who prided themselves in polyandry had relationships that seemed rather toxic to me.
There is no moral superiority of relationship forms. Whether the relationships are consensual, respectful and just always is individual to the people involved.
Probably depends on who you ask. I'm polyamorous and I think in almost all cases where someone says polygamy and not polyamory they're engaging in an immoral power dynamic. My experience being poly though I'd say most people take offense to the multiple partners thing and polygamy is just what they're familiar with as a concept
This. When I was poly my friends and fam were cool with it, but they're not religious. Every religious person I knew who found out was not too pleased with me.
It's not the multiple partners that are a problem in my opinion (You do you. Polyamory is not for me, but no hate), it's the many-to-one relationships. Even in cases where an immoral power dynamic doesn't exist, you're still setting up for societal shenanigans if it's consistently many women to men, or vice versa, which seems prudent to avoid.
That being said, monogamy in a legal sense has probably only persisted so long because involving more than 2 people would be a massive headache for the courts lol
Probably only works in countries where one "partner" has more rights than others.
A bit of both. The Greeks and Romans had a cultural taboo against polygamy which Christianity inherited, which means that Christians have historically been opposed to polygamy (which was not the case in Pre-christian northern Europe) on moral grounds. There is also the issue that historically polygamy has been associated with patriarchal societies in which men are allowed or expected to have multiple wives, but women are not allowed to do the same. Additionally, it is also culturally associated with treating women as property of the husband. Personally I don't have any issue with polygamy if everyone is free to do whatever but the way most cultures practice it, it's unfair to women. Then again, that could also he said of "traditional" marriage in a lot of monogamous scenarios too.
"one to cook and one to clean" is one of the "joke-y" sayings I heard
Having been on some readings I had not picked up in a second recently, two to poison and be each other's alibi is what went thru my head first lol.
Nothing else to do with the thread. Just the first thought that went thru my head- any rat bastard that lives that shit deserves to be poisoned by both.
These days there is also a tax reason why you can't marry multiple people. It would have a fair amount of tax negatives as well.
If someone supports gay marriage they have no basis for opposing polygamist or incestuous marriages outside of how it subjectively makes them feel. Marriage is historically a religio-cultural institution. Without that context there can be no restrictions that don't also violate foundational secular values such as personal freedom. Secularity and modernism gatekeeping marriage is a hilarious mental gymnastics routine. These days marriage is just something to keep lawyers in business anyway. The government should just get out of the marriage business entirely at this point.
You can oppose both polygamist or incestuous marriage if it's in a context of religious and sexist oppression, which tend to be the case in most instances of those two types of marriages.
I wouldn't have complains about polyamory incestuous marriage of free people. But sadly most of practical cases are not like that.
Your view is an intellectually honest one from a modernist perspective. I would go further though and say that marriage should have no secular existence at all.
I generally agree with you, but I've heard reasonable arguments like
These raise their own questions of how to dismantle patriarchy, or if governments should have a say in our genes, etc. But I don't think they're equivalent discussions.
I think in western culture it might be a bit of both, and also a bit of xenophobia - it's different, so it must be bad. I'd be interested in knowing more too. Very good question.
Mormons used to (some still do) practice polygamy and we had just as much, if not more of a problem with their practices as we do with "foreigners".
From my perspective as another polyamorous person, I think polygamy is kinda fucked up, at least in the ways it manifests today. It's an inequitable power dynamic that relies on the exploitation of women. I'm all about subversion and defiance of hierarchies. Polygamy reinforces those hierarchies
Just to be clear, I see polygamy as bad only because of the women oppression aspect. But the world is a big place and history is long, so I wouldn't be surprised if at some point there was some system that allowed for polygamy without oppressing women. Mentioning mormons - don't you think they can be seen as another weird different group - and therefore be also object of xenophobia? Notice I intentionally didn't use the word racism, what I mean is just the sentiment that people doing things differently than my group must be deadly wrong.
Yeah, there's some aspect of "they're different so they're bad" in LDS history (not without reason, the church did and justified many fucked up things), but the modern polygamous Mormon splinter groups are kinda overlooked for the most part. They're pretty embedded in a lot of smaller towns and cities across southern Utah and northern Arizona (there may be more, it's been a while since I've looked at the topic), and they get very little national attention.
Contrast that with stuff like this tweet that just so happens to play to a lot conservative notions about how "backwards" Islam is.
Depends on whose objecting. This arrangement pretty much only works at scale with a combination of religious brainwashing, inequality between and amongst the genders, and a healthy dose of male mortality especially from war.
Inequality among a gender: For instance if bob and Sam both make 70k 5 women aren't all marrying one or the other in most instances.
Inequality between the genders: Given a complex life path beyond follow in husband's shadow no matter what or become a parish the chance of instability with more people increases with each member added.
So the first obvious person to object to broad enactment of this idea ought to be women raised to buy into this when it's not their best option.
Next is society for such groups brainwashing kids.
Then there is the downside of the enabling inequality. Anyone not on the top end of the financial spectrum ought to object to that.
Women ought to object to the idea that they ought to share.
Men not in the top 5-20% ought to object to competing for the remaining women not attached to high status males. Note this is what incels say they are mad about now but there is so much to unpack re their broken brains and it's just not at this juncture real.
Society should be mad at the very large number of unattached men who normally cause trouble.
Some such societies deal with this by trading women like Pokemon cards and driving off excess men. This doesn't work without wars to kill them off or somewhere to drive them to.
Basically everyone but a smallish minority of men would be worse off which is why this is non existent in modern functioning society.
There little net effect on society with a small incidence of polygomy just like with lead in the water.