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Polygamy vs. Polygyny vs. Polyandry, Legality, oh and the "No-Sex" Class

Mon, 2008-04-21 11:18 — figleaf

The Associated Press’s Jennifer Dobner, via The Seattle Post-Intelligencer says the recent raid on the “Yearning for Zion” Ranch in El Dorado, Texas, has prompted polygamists to start talking more to the press.

Plural-marriage families exist mostly in the shadows, said Mary Batchelor, a co-founder of Principle Voices, a polygamy advocacy group. She said families typically don’t speak publicly for fear they’ll be prosecuted for bigamy or lose their children to state authorities. “It’s scary, but ultimately, we decided to speak up and let the chips fall where they may,” she said.

Read the quote in context here.

Technically I believe they’re talking to the press because defense lawyers for their (sometimes literal) masters are instructing them to, but in all events it’s probably not a bad thing that they’re coming at least partly out of the “shadows” (a.k.a. closet) to talk about what, exactly, it is they do.

And can I just say I think it’s probably a good thing for the same reason I think prostitution should be more openly discussed? Because what happens in the shadows has this ugly, festering, stinking, soul-sapping, child-abusing, incest-begetting, human-trafficking, other-crimes-ignoring tendency to stay in the shadows.

Because there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with “plural marriages.” Assuming they’re really just plural — i.e. anyone can marry multiple people and not just privileged, overbearing, dictatorial child-abusing, minor-daughter-swapping “family patriarchs.” And assuming they’re really marriages, with all the restrictions — i.e. can’t be your 12-year-old cousin even if your brother owes you for that business loan; i.e. all partners have a right to affirmative consent to marriage; i.e. all partners are legally and socially completely equal in the eyes of both state and church, with full intra-family “votes,” full inheritance rights, full community-property rights, and so on. Oh yeah, and full legal recognition under the law.**

Instead, as we’ve seen with this 100-year-old cult that’s not just in Texas but all over the intermountain west, we see the same behavior we see with other pandemic forms of “victimless crime” such as illegal immigration, prostitution, and cannabis production: constant erosion of respect for other laws and mores, an inability to work with police to curtail that erosion, and a “big umbrella / inner sanctum” dynamic where practitioners can be swayed to tolerate increasingly egregious behavior as long as it’s in the approximate domain that unites them.

The point being that if “sister wives” were able to go to talk to police and child-services groups without having their own children taken away from them they might be less inclined to tolerate when their husband brings home “cousin wives,” “niece wives” and “early-middle-schooler wives.” Or when he starts beating them for not letting him “excommunicate” their middle-school age sons or swapping away their daughters to other men old enough to be their grandfathers.

(It’s the same with illegal vs. legal farmworkers who are more able to report illegal spraying, or illegal vs. legal street prostitutes who are in a better position to report when prostituted children, trafficked sex workers, or violent predators appear in their areas.)

—-

Oh, and since it’s very easy for readers to balk when someone talks about the benefits of legalized polygamy let’s make sure we clearly define our terms.

See, for instance, Dw3t-Hthr commented in an earlier post

The problems rest with exploitative patriarchal polygyny. And heavily with the ‘exploitative’, more moderately with the ‘polygyny’, with the patriarchal being one of them things.

The fact that every discussion of polygamy I’ve seen assumes that it will be polygynous, as if women are incapable of desiring multiple partners, is one of those things that I get Sarcastic about on occasion. There’s a lot of “women are the intrinsically monogamous class, only men will have an interest in polygamy if it’s legal, thus polygamy will exploit women by giving them all fractional men” subtext of a lot of these discussions.

Yet another area where the dominant paradigm elephants its way into the discussion. (And why do I suspect further contemplation of “plural marriages,” the idea of which still personally vaguely creeps me out, would yield further otherwise unnoticed paradigm-driven assumptions?)

[** In other words (sorry Rick Santorum) just like anyone else who wants to get married provided they’re of age and of legal “sound mind and body.” —fl]

Mon, 2008-04-21 14:16 — 2099 (not verified) #permalink

I wouldn’t say women are intrinsically monogamous, but the numbers or ratios make women with multiple husbands as a societal norm improbable over a life time.

The older I get, I begin to see plural marriages as a solution against singleness.

[It’s a good point, Five. My mom lives in a retirement community and she says pretty much everyone fools around but nobody gets married. The men are pretty outnumbered so yeah, there might be some situational overlapping. —fl]

Mon, 2008-04-21 14:49 — 2099 (not verified) #permalink

I actually wrote about the FLDS recently. Well, ranted about. The post’s at http://lettersfromgehenna.blogspot.com/2008/04/seven-potato-or.html.

The anthropological fact is that polygamy (in whatever form) has generally occurred in cultures that are terrible about their treatment of women. (The polyandrous culture I’m aware of is one in which a woman marries entire sets of brothers so the scarce land is not subdivided.)

There are cultures that run things differently, though I don’t know much about them — my favorite is the Amazonian tribe that believes that babies are accreted from sperm contributions, and that hybrid vigor is important, so a woman will select a variety of fathers for her child (each of whom will, of course, provide her with some selection of their food, thus improving the health of the child, proving the point). I don’t know how that tribe is on male/female treatment aside from that one, point, unfortunately; I haven’t looked into it with any depth, and I’ve forgotten the name now.

But basically, the culturally-legitimate polygamous models have pretty much all been rooted in women-as-property. And a lot of people can’t shake that, even when aware that monogamous models have also, probably just as frequently, been rooted in women-as-property.

And the exceptions are obscure, or sensationalised in that kind of tabloid-romance way. (And how many multiple-adult relationship systems go invisible because, like Tilda Swinton and her partners, the people involved figure it’s their business and not anyone else’s and don’t make any drama about it?)

I mean, it’s reasonably common knowledge in parts of the polyamorous community that the creator of Wonder Woman was in a stable long-term triad, but I don’t think outside of there and the comics community people would know – and those who encounter the trivia would likely file it as ‘weird behaviours of famous eccentrics’ rather than something ordinary people might have as part of their lives. The people having multiple relationships on a reasonably egalitarian basis fly under the radar most of the time.

[I think the trick is that until recently there just haven’t been egalitarian models. Which just means polyandry’s just one more thing folks who are into it will have to create basically (since traditional polygamy probably isn’t the best model) from scratch. Thanks, Dw3t. —fl]

Mon, 2008-04-21 18:08 — 2099 (not verified) #permalink

I’m hardly an expert on polyamory, but from what I’ve seen, it seems like that when you have one man and two or more women, they quite often are all in a relationship with each other and live together (though not always). Whereas when you have one woman and two or more men, or two or more of each, then it seems to be much more common that they mostly don’t live together and are not involved with all of the other members of the group. So any legal concept of “group marriage” would have to account for that somehow. Example: Woman A is in a relationship with Man B, Man C, and Man D. Man B is not involved with anyone other than Woman A, though he is aware of the others and doesn’t mind. Man C is involved only with Woman A and Woman E. Man D is involved with woman A and has “secondary” relationships with a few other people (not mentioned here) of both sexes. Woman E is involved only with Man C, is aware of Woman A, but is not really aware of anyone else. In such a situation, if they all wanted to get married to the ones they loved, does it really make sense for all of people A-E to be considered married to each other?

Dunno, just throwing that out there. Apparently it gets messy like that sometimes.

[Well, I think the problem is that everything based on traditional arrangements is going to be sort of one-sided, while people willing to buck the trend in one dimension is likely to bust them in others as well. Over time you might see more FMM domestic arrangements if people were really interested. There are some though… but usually kind of quiet. Thanks, Nightfall. —fl]

Mon, 2008-04-21 19:35 — 2099 (not verified) #permalink

I distinguish between ‘group marriage’ and ‘multiple marriage’.

‘Group marriage’ is something that I don’t understand at all, though I know people who do that sort of thing. (I can only form romantic relationships with individual people, which I recognise as one of those my-cognitive-limitation things.)

I know very few group marriage setups, and they have no gender bias. (One included four people, too, not just a triad.)

My own immediate family is two legally married couples and the heterosexual connections thereof; we occasionally vaguely noodle at the concept of moving in together.

I find the notion that marriage should be transitive kind of weird. It’s like the Geek Social Fallacies applied to intimate relationships.

For legal stuff, I would love to see things operating on the level of household rather than presuming that marriage+resulting children is the only real household structure; this doesn’t just benefit the tiny number of cohabiting poly families, but a whole bunch of traditional family structures and other groups.

[When I say they need to be egalitarian I don’t mean they have to be some kind of big pile up. Each individual sort of ought to form whatever his or relationships ought to mean on a personal level. But in terms of legal recognition it can’t end up looking like the old “he legally owns everything” or “senior husband calls all the shots.” Everything else should probably be up to the individual “marriage” or contract whatever you’d want to call it. Thanks, Dw3t.

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