Polyandry: Awesome or Not Awesome?

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Tue Mar 31, 2009 6:53 am

So anyway while I was posting in the News that makes you laugh, cry or both thread and I was looking at some of the sex ratios (1.12 male/female ratio, are you FUCKING KIDDING ME?) a thought occurs.

Guys out there, what are your thoughts on wives having multiple husbands? Let's not worry about the legal implications or anything like that, just what are your thoughts on sharing your lady with one or two other guys--or ladies, what the heck. I think it could be pretty cool if you were working with the right people, personally, but so much could go wrong that I don't think it's worth it.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Tue Mar 31, 2009 7:06 am

Works in Nepal.

Seriously though, if we actually adopt a Star Trek model utopia, there will be more men than women. 51% of all eggs fertilized will be fertilized with a Y chromosome. If we don't get those boys killed off in wars or traffic accidents, we will have a surplus of men who will never be able to uniquely marry a woman purely on demographic grounds.

Our choices are: convince more men to be gay, and have an occasional woman take a few husbands. Seriously, those are the only choices if we want every man to get married and we don't want to artificially lower our number of men World War I style.

-Username17

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Tue Mar 31, 2009 7:18 am

you forget the bisexual men, Frank.

Lago wrote:I think it could be pretty cool if you were working with the right people, personally, but so much could go wrong that I don't think it's worth it.

exactly. A polyamourous relationship can either fall apart or work well, it depends on the people, and works best when it's an inclusive relationship rather than a cluster of separate relationships.

Neeeek · Post by **Neeeek** » Tue Mar 31, 2009 7:35 am

Wouldn't bother me all that much. Never figured out the whole "jealousy" thing that everyone else seems to understand.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Tue Mar 31, 2009 8:52 am

As an insidious lesbite who would be doubly impacting the utopia, I'll throw in my 5c*.

I'm the jealous type. I don't like to share. Hell, I don't like to share an ice cream (though I will do so, and basically am resigned to, owning a dog). My girlfriend and I have an arrangement that, seeing as we live on opposite sides of the planet, we're free to do as we will sexually but shouldn't get attached to others. Although she also wants to just hand me over to whoever will accept, because she's selfless enough to want me to be happy.

But I don't want her to find someone else. Note that neither of us have or are even like to, given our terrible people skills, very introverted personalities and only being compatible with a small subgroup (lesbians/bi girls). But if she was getting attention from someone else, although I'd be happy for her, I'd still be very jealous.

So I'm not a fan of poly-anything. Maybe polyunsaturated milk and polypeptide chains. Maybe. But even then, I'm keeping an eye on them. Ultimately, people should try to pair off neatly and let everyone have some love, rather than allowing any greed. And there are better ways of keeping it roughly even:

*Keep a decent flow of toxins and such in the environment so fewer males survive to birth

*War! Hoo! Yeah! What is it good for? Keeping the population, especially of males, down to an acceptable level and giving history teachers something to talk about seeing as that's all history is because no-one seems to care about anything else.

*Genetic engineering: currently people screen for the sex of a baby - only some do, but it can be done. In this future utopia, perhaps people could flat-out decide on the gender and influence the birth - it isn't "If: sex==male then: kill", it's simply "Input: Sex==female"

Not that I believe we'll ever reach a utopia or even last that much longer. In fact, I see Warhammer 40,000 as being a more likely future than Star Trek, barring the Warp, Orks, Chaos Gods and wonky technology.

*As many know, we don't have 1 and 2c coins in Australia, 5c is the lowest.

Draco_Argentum · Post by **Draco_Argentum** » Tue Mar 31, 2009 9:19 am

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Let's not worry about the legal implications or anything like that, just what are your thoughts on sharing your lady with one or two other guys--or ladies, what the heck.

Works for me but I'm bi so theres some bias there. Finding multiple people willing to mutually marry would be a problem and the divorces would be messy if someone wanted to divorce only some of the other partners.

Roy · Post by **Roy** » Tue Mar 31, 2009 11:40 am

Most people are made of Suck and Fail. Finding one exception (to get involved in a 'normal' relationship) is immensely difficult. Finding two, at the same time is fucking laughable. So not only are you drastically lowering your own success rate when you set the bar at 'threesome', but you are drastically increasing the chance of something fucking up because there are more 'working parts', thus the chances of something going wrong increases at a fucking exponential level. Or perhaps faster.

The most likely outcome is A gets jealous of you, or B does, and A and B go spin around fucking each other while leaving you a sad panda. The second most likely is that A or B gets jealous of the other with you, and one leaves, then the other leaves soon after because you've fucked raped the drama threshhold, meaning all you've done is time delay the rest of the relationship fuck up. And ya know the thing about time delays? Just like with a bank account, they fucking accrue interest. Which means when the explosion does happen, the blast radius is fucking bigger.

Count Arioch the 28th · Tue Mar 31, 2009 12:45 pm

I have confidence issues and don't like the idea of competing with other males for mates.

In the old days, I could have put an axe through their head and ended it. In today's world, that action is in fact sharply frowned upon. My skills are more suitable for someone born in the iron age.

Although it wouldn't take very many guys like me to set the male:female ration back to 50/50.

Jinerviet · Post by **Jinerviet** » Tue Mar 31, 2009 1:10 pm

I'm really glad and lucky that my current partner and I are both the sharing type. He's not bi, but I'm realising that I may well be, and my female flatmate is quite hot, so who knows what the future may hold...

eeuuugh · Post by **eeuuugh** » Tue Mar 31, 2009 1:25 pm

Everyone should just let their freak flags fly. I'm a straight white american, but at this point I think the biggest influences on my ideas about sex and relationships have been the novels of Samuel Delany, so I think I could be in a polyandrous relationship. As long as I got along with the other guys, but getting along with people you're in a relationship with is always necessary.

I'm also totally in favor of picking the sex of babies. While we're at it, let's reverse fertility, like I have to take a pill if I want my sperm to function, rather than the other way around. Also, male birth control pill please.

Judging__Eagle · Post by **Judging__Eagle** » Tue Mar 31, 2009 2:31 pm

Short: not likely.

Long: not likely for most people.

Myself, I both am very selective (I go by a list of turn-offs more than anything else, be they physical, mental or just the person's morality and character; I don't actually have a defined set of turn-ons) and I'm pretty jealous. It's lead to an interesting life.

CatharzGodfoot · Post by **CatharzGodfoot** » Tue Mar 31, 2009 3:11 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:Works in Nepal.

Nepalese polyandry is an entire family/social system that's probably better described as 'continuous marriages'. I don't think that it could be naively used as evidence for the immediate viability of polyandry as a common practice in another culture.

That's not to say that polyandry is unworkable outside of Nepal. The closest examples in the US are probably women with multiple "boyfriends" that all provide her with financial support, and possibly aid in child rearing. Some segments of our society look down on such women as "whores" and labels them as "single mothers with unstable relationships". If that kind of a stigma could be removed, maybe you'd see more men and women willing to be in polyandrous relationships.

The legal repercussions would be significant. Even if you saw a decrease in divorce rates, dealing with divorce in polyandrous relationships would be even more of a nightmare.

Thymos · Post by **Thymos** » Tue Mar 31, 2009 4:25 pm

I don't really care what people do sexually as long as there is no coercion.

Polyandry, first cousins, homosexuality, BDSM, as long as I don't have to hear about it I could care less (and by hear about it I mean that keep your business private to a reasonable extent, holding hands in the park of kissing a bit doesn't bothering me, having sex in front of me probably would).

That's if there is no coercion. When you have arranged marriages, are forcing people into these positions and shit, well then we have a problem.

(polyandry wouldn't work for me, I get jealous)

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Tue Mar 31, 2009 7:12 pm

yeah, chalk me up as another jealous type, my last gf and I basically spent the entire relationship trying to wrap our heads around some kind of rule that worked for us, seeing as we are both bi (and yes, part of that, towards the end, was because the relationship was heading toward the ground at terminal velocity and she didn't want to have sex with me and I wasn't getting any), but we were both the jealous type, so...

I guess my jealousy (and possibly bisexuality) is also why I think multiple people in a single relationship, all interacting and attracted to one another works better than non-exclusivity. But that requires that at least two people be bisexual.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Tue Mar 31, 2009 7:39 pm

Okay, so, 51%. Let's fiddle with these numbers for a bit.

Let's say you have a village of 100 people in it. This means that you have 49 women and 51 men, which assuming that you only have male/female pairings two men are going to get left in the cold.

So, there's a couple of ways to go about this:

Make divorce is pretty common incident in your society, so while at any given time there are two dudes eating bachelor chow, the actual names of these guys are random. So guys spend slightly less time being married than women.

Then you have polyandry. This really seems like the simplest solution unless you believe the above, since only two out of the 49 couples have to agree to this.

There's always the option of homosexuality. Though correct me if I'm wrong but I thought that bi/homosexuality is slightly higher in women than in men (according to wikipedia)--but that could've just been sampling error. You know why. So this might just be leaving out people in the cold.

You could convince a portion of your population to get gender changes. I don't know the ratio for transsexualism for male to women so perfect sex changes might fiddle around the numbers in a way we don't want to. And I can't find it on wikipedia at this time. But if all you have to go by is the media then you'd think that it's more common for men than women.

Women have a noticably higher life expectancy than men so that shaves off a lot of wandering bachelors. I mean, even in ridiculously gender imbalanced places like China there are more women aged 65+ than men.

And of course there's always just the option of permanent bachelorhood. They can get some kind of compensation (like a tax credit or a sexaroid) for voluntarily choosing this lifestyle.

Crissa · Post by **Crissa** » Tue Mar 31, 2009 8:35 pm

However, India, Middle-East, and SE Asia are suffering from terrible problems of selective childbirth. Some cities have huge numbers of males because the laws or customs are so onerous against females, they're not wanted as children.

It's against the law in China, and soon will be in India, but is not in several of these countries (think UAE and Saudi) which really doesn't help the whole terrorism thing, once these guys realize they aren't princes with harems.

-Crissa

Judging__Eagle · Post by **Judging__Eagle** » Tue Mar 31, 2009 8:50 pm

Crissa wrote:However, India, Middle-East, and SE Asia are suffering from terrible problems of selective childbirth. Some cities have huge numbers of males because the laws or customs are so onerous against females, they're not wanted as children.

It's against the law in China, and soon will be in India, but is not in several of these countries (think UAE and Saudi) which really doesn't help the whole terrorism thing, once these guys realize they aren't princes with harems.

-Crissa

Hopefully that will catch up with them. Hopefully they realize that their attitudes need to change.

The thing is, there are other factors, like humans having a tendancy towards polygamy. Which is actually really shitty for males, but also a dream of some (I mean, look how many "harem" anime series there are, and love triangles aren't exactly a new thing).

I got the above from an issue of Psychology Today from sometime ... two years ago? I read it in the school library in my first semester last year.

The article also mentions that women benefit more than men do, as they are able to get access to resources for their potential children from men that could be much more fiscally successful. Which leads to questions (for me at least) about economic disparity.

The scary thing is that many polygamous cultures/nations with massive economic disparities also tend to treat their young males like disposable resources. Case in point, nearly every islamic suicide bomber waiting for a harem that they will never have a chance to get while alive (and will not get when they die either).

Yeah, if you just get enough suicide bombers laid and fed, you'd stop a lot of them from using their miracle belts (or w/e they call them). Funny that, people who have the minimum needs for happiness, and a girlfriend/fiance/wife and children, don't want to go kill themselves.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Tue Mar 31, 2009 8:54 pm

I think it's kind of facile to claim that the overriding motivation for suicide bombers is the opportunity to get your freak on in Heaven.

Maj · Post by **Maj** » Tue Mar 31, 2009 10:31 pm

Lago wrote:Guys out there, what are your thoughts on wives having multiple husbands? Let's not worry about the legal implications or anything like that, just what are your thoughts on sharing your lady with one or two other guys--or ladies, what the heck. I think it could be pretty cool if you were working with the right people, personally, but so much could go wrong that I don't think it's worth it.

Men are too emotional. They flip out like ninja and go into a rage when it comes to one woman with multiple partners.

Sorry... Couldn't resist.

In all seriousness, I think that polyandry could work better now than at any other point in history because we have DNA testing - a woman can positively identify the father of her child. Wasn't one of the big purposes of monogamy to allow a guy to know that he's the father of the children he's taking care of? And thus the rights of inheritance were preserved.

Emotionally speaking, I don't think that I, personally, could be polyandrous - I put a lot of effort into my relationships. My husband says he's be OK with it if the other guy were genuinely cool.

CatharzGodfoot · Post by **CatharzGodfoot** » Tue Mar 31, 2009 10:35 pm

Lago PARANOIA wrote:I think it's kind of facile to claim that the overriding motivation for suicide bombers is the opportunity to get your freak on in Heaven.

I don't think the claim is that heavenly booty motivates suicide bombers, but rather that it is a lack of the responsibility that comes with having a spouse and children.

Crissa · Post by **Crissa** » Tue Mar 31, 2009 11:20 pm

Humans have no tendency to polygamy.

Western culture, which is male bought and dominated, has a fascination with having more than the next guy, or fantasies in which they don't compete with the next guy.

Which is why there's little similar polyandry media, except among fan-fiction, which just women playing with dolls who represent freedom to move about in the overarching society.

-Crissa

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Wed Apr 01, 2009 1:47 am

Maj raises a good point there as well - I don't think I could have two lovers, either. Yes, at the moment due to being frightfully undersexed and just not getting the physical and emotional attention/contact/affection needed, I'm interested in just about every girl I come into contact with, but in an actual relationship?

I'd invest too much emotion and effort - trying to make myself look nice for them and do things for them and the other things that couples are expected to do for each other - on one person. Add a second and I'd probably burn out. It's really a good thing I'll never be having children, as I'd not only be wanting attention that the spawn would be sucking up, but I wouldn't want to split my own attention and emotional investment. And the one with neither breasts nor capacity for conversation about exploding robots is clearly going to lose that battle.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Wed Apr 01, 2009 2:41 am

Koumei wrote:I'd invest too much emotion and effort - trying to make myself look nice for them and do things for them and the other things that couples are expected to do for each other - on one person. Add a second and I'd probably burn out. It's really a good thing I'll never be having children, as I'd not only be wanting attention that the spawn would be sucking up, but I wouldn't want to split my own attention and emotional investment. And the one with neither breasts nor capacity for conversation about exploding robots is clearly going to lose that battle.

wait, wait, so breast and capacity for conversation about exploding robots is a "One or more of these" for you?

Count Arioch the 28th · Wed Apr 01, 2009 3:32 am

Maj wrote:
Lago wrote:Guys out there, what are your thoughts on wives having multiple husbands? Let's not worry about the legal implications or anything like that, just what are your thoughts on sharing your lady with one or two other guys--or ladies, what the heck. I think it could be pretty cool if you were working with the right people, personally, but so much could go wrong that I don't think it's worth it.
Men are too emotional. They flip out like ninja and go into a rage when it comes to one woman with multiple partners.

I prefer "flip out like a viking". I could never be a ninja, I look crappy in black tights. But I look fine in iron brandishing an axe.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Wed Apr 01, 2009 7:46 am

Prak: yes, yes it is.

Count: ninjas can wear all sorts of colours. According to a reliable source, they wear white and red, and run through robotic facilities kicking everyone in the face and making things explode with magical fire. Another reliable source states they wear a headband of either red, orange, purple or blue.

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Polyandry: Awesome or Not Awesome?

Polyandry: Awesome or Not Awesome?

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