Polygamy, chastity, and sexual pragmatics
So! The other day I asked a question about abstinence before and after marriage. The general consensus both here in comments and elsewhere boiled down to "figleaf, are you mental?" (Short answer: if I'm going to go around reading about Augustine then probably yes.)
Well, via Amanda Marcotte and Self-portrait as... the question comes up again, this time in the context of polygamy.
Maggi, who belongs to a Mississippi-based group of practicing polygamists, wrote this account in an internet chatroom of her life as a "sisterwife" in one of the more extreme polygamist groups
We all live in the same house. We have a bunk-bed double on the bottom and single on the top. Husband, first wife and the "ON" wife sleep on the bottom and the other two "OFF" wives sleep above. We find this very intimate as we all are sleeping in the same bed though on different levels and we can still feel and hear what is happening when sex happens in our bed.
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Sex, now that is the big one. In our household we have one week (but only on six days we can have sex with him) sleeping with our husband and three weeks off. Our first wife has the Saturdays with our husband in addition to her week so she gets four extra days with him in each cycle. That's why she sleeps on the lower bunk every night with the "ON" wife. In reality we have sex in an average week about two to three times in the six days we can have sex with our husband. Though it's not totally satisfying (two or three times a month) for us we do find that having a week with our husband is the better method then the one-night method used by others.
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As for sex, no we don't get very much actual sex, ie, our husband entering us, but he does work very hard and sometimes quite late so a wife cannot expect him to perform every night.
So there you have it! Polygamy not only leaves the male polygamist worn out it seriously deprives his partners.
Mark Twain discussed this a century and a half ago
Solomon, who was one of the Deity's favorites, had a copulation cabinet composed of seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines. To save his life he could not have kept two of these young creatures satisfactorily refreshed, even if he had fifteen experts to help him. Necessarily almost the entire thousand had to go hungry for years and years on a stretch. Conceive of a man hardhearted enough to look daily upon all that suffering and not be moved to mitigate it.
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Now if you or any other really intelligent person were arranging the fairnesses and justices between man and woman, you give the man a one-fiftieth interest in one woman, and the woman a harem.
Letters from the Earth
Note: lest you think the "sister-wives" could always take matters into their own or each other's hands...
No, we don't have physical relationships between sisterwives because its not permitted in our religion. We sleep with our arms on top of our bed covers so it doesn't happen. And in any case if any wife was foolish enough to try all would feel it in our bed; a simple rule - no touching or kissing in bed or at any other time between one woman and another sisterwife and another.
Anyway I think it's the first discussion of polygamy I've ever seen that acknowledges the possibility of women's libidos, let alone the sexual dissatisfaction that's going to be inherent in almost any polygamous relationship.
Good points about the pragmatics of polygamy. I tend to see polygamy as pragmatically a less optimal marriage system, in a lot of ways, but possibly the most honorable choice available for some individuals, under particular circumstances and in particular polygamous societies.
[I do think polygamy doesn't have to be as egregiously abusive as, say, the typical American-Southwest situations, which friends in the area say amounts to child slavery even more than it amounts to child rape. I remember hearing about one "polygamous" household that was, effectively, a 70's era women's collective with a shared male roommate (he wasn't the household dominant.) And then there was a local separatist community where everyone who wanted children used the same sperm donor (via artificial insemnation.) The point being that it doesn't have to look the way it does in Utah, Mississippi, the Middle East, or the Old Testament. Hmm. I haven't thought about those people for years. But yeah, as you say "under particular circumstances." Thanks, Lynn. --fl]
I have been in both MfM and FMF threesomes, and this is about the biggest pile of steaming bullshit I've ever heard. I mean, why not just circumscise the women like they do in Africa and be done with it?
The purpose of sex when it's not to procreate should be everyone's MUTUAL pleasure.
Don't even get me started about justifying no lesbianism based on your religion.
[Well, the best I can do is say, through clenched teeth, that their arrangements appear to be consensual. And, unlike certain other American polygamist cultures they're all consenting *adults!* I can therefore tolerate what they're doing, whether I like it or not. Thanks, Tom. --fl]