
I Do Not Marry a Married Man - Thevet
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/i-do-not-marry-married-man
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leftyted
This is an interesting interpretation of polygamy. The usual interpretation is
along the lines of "to the rich go the spoils".

But sex imbalances would have occurred throughout history and, questions of
morality aside, polygamy seems like a reasonable solution, at least if women
outnumber men.

I wonder if anyone has tried to investigate a possible correlation between
polygamy and imbalanced sex ratios throughout history.

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eternauta3k
I haven't found a good online source for this, but it's common knowledge that
Paraguay allowed polygamy after a war killed a large proportion of men.

[https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poligamia#El_caso_del_Paraguay](https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poligamia#El_caso_del_Paraguay)

~~~
jokowueu
Heck a few years back a bill was almost passed that would make merrying a
second wife mandatory in Iraq . The government would give financial incentives
and ignore the first wife's wish of not allowing her husband a second wife .
It was revoked after extreme criticism.

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DoreenMichele
So this is primarily about polygamy in Indigenous people's of North America.
It is secondarily commentary on women's rights in those peoples, where women
apparently had more agency, choice and personhood than was typical for women
in Europe at the time. The Jesuits, so keen to spread their faith, often
didn't so much as bother to record the names of the wives because they so did
nit view women as actual people.

Even in developed countries, women continue to struggle towards equal
treatment as full human beings while their complaints often fall on deaf ears
and become some new excuse to heap abuse upon them.

Perhaps I'm saying that wrong. Perhaps my statement merely reflects my own
prejudice at the presumed superiority of _developed_ nations. Maybe we would
have a better world if some of these other peoples had more influence, people
with apparently a better track record of treating women like human beings and
giving them a say in their own lives.

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JohnJamesRambo
Having only one wife wasn’t a commandment and the biblical patriarchs had
multiple wives. This is more about Jesuits and the Catholic church trying to
enforce their own belief systems on someone.

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bobthechef
Taught, yes, but imposed? In any case, you're ignoring important facts, many
of them addressed in a broad view of the Old Testament and the Gospel of
Matthew.

First, in Genesis, the ideal, created union is given as monogamous. Second,
none of the prophets were polygamous. Third, polygamy is usually spoken of
disparagingly and as something having disastrous consequences. Fourth, Mosaic
law also permitted divorce, but that was a divine dispensation that Jesus
lifted and that one existed in the first place because "your hearts were
hard". He goes on to say that "it was not this way from the beginning. I tell
you that anyone who divorces his wife, unless the marriage is unlawful, and
marries another woman commits adultery" (Matt 19:8-9).

Thus, polygamy may have been tolerated for similar reasons, that is, as a
concession to the times, as it were. Furthermore, Maimonides argues that while
the Torah may permit certain behaviors, a synoptic reading would show that it
establishes rules that show these behaviors are wrong.

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scarface74
I’m not arguing from a religious standpoint or whether the Bible should decide
what other people do. I’m just making factual statements....

The biblical great grandfather of the Jews - Abraham - had multiple wives. As
did King David who was put forth as a great, but flawed king.

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k0t0n0
Why I am seeing this on HN?

~~~
ema
Because hackers have a wide variety of interests and often love learning about
things they never heard of before.

~~~
Austin_Conlon
The parent comment reminds me of how often commenters on articles posted by
The Economist wonder why the article wasn't about economics.
[https://www.economist.com/unknown/1843/08/05/prospectus](https://www.economist.com/unknown/1843/08/05/prospectus)

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gbacon
Fry: Everything was going great! Then all out of a sudden, she’s talking about
hanging out. Hanging out?! She's getting way too serious. I’m not a one-woman
man, Leela.

Leela: You’ll be back to zero soon enough.

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bobthechef
Polygamy encourages the objectification of women. Marriage ceases to be a
union of equals in which there is a total self-giving of spouses to one
another. While we has become dull to and ignorant of an understanding of the
essence and purpose of marriage (years before the last two decades, I might
add), it is a union which is unitive and procreative in principle. The unitive
and the procreative are not separable. The unitive is ordered toward the good
of the family (and, of course, by extension society).

While monogamous marriages can be defective in practice, they are not so in
principle. Polygamous marriages, on the other hand, impose these defects in
principle.

There may be a similarity here with hookup culture, that is, a polygamous
culture seems to likewise, though perhaps to a lesser degree, encourage men to
view women as mere instruments of sexual gratification. Harvey Weinstein is in
essence not some exception, but the poster child for our age.

Far from denigrating women as has been falsely claimed by some, the Christian
(specifically Catholic) defense of insoluble, monogamous marriages was one of
many ways in which woman was saved from the disordered predations common in
human societies throughout history.

(P.S. A relatively recent philosophical tract worth reading is the late Karol
Wojtyla's "Love and Responsibility".)

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dominotw
Would you be ok with form of polygamy where a woman has multiple husbands ?

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scarface74
From a moral standpoint no.

I don’t think this would work out as well from an evolutionary standpoint, if
you believe that men are driven to have as many children as possible, a woman
can only have one man’s child at a time. A man can get multiple women
pregnant.

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zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
You understand neither morality nor evolution.

~~~
scarface74
I’m not arguing morality I really don’t care what two or more consenting
adults do. I think the most “moral” thing we can do as a society is to leave
other people the hell alone to live their own life.

