Monogamy vs. Polygamy

Will the Based Marriage Arrangement Please Stand Up?

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A few days ago someone messaged me with the following scenario that had gone viral:

Instantly the problem stared me right in the face so I gave my take on why this guy took it so badly. Then I looked through the Twitter replies. On the female side was confusion. “Why is this an insult? She told him she wants to marry him.” So we have a comprehension problem there. On the male side, the overall take was something like, “she just told him ‘I’d settle for you’.” Right, but there’s a lot more underneath the surface worth digging into.

The first thing to note is that we are at one end of an extreme. Coming out of it, but still nowhere near the historical norm. We have had rigorous socially enforced monogamy for centuries now. Has that changed since the 1960s? It certainly has. Marriage rates have halved since the 60s, but oddly, during the Leave It To Beaver 1950s that decline was even sharper.¹ In fact, the marriage rate increased over the 1960s, reaching a local maximum in 1970 and then it tapers off steadily up to about 2010 when it levels off.

Women’s Marriage Rate, 1900–2018:

Monogamy is not quite unheard of in mammals, but polygamy is the norm,² where a small fraction of the males have all the offspring. Exclusive sexual partnerships are not what most primates are evolved for, we are evolved to have harems. But at some point humans developed monogamy, probably because human infants’ long development gave pair-bonding couples an advantage. Monogamy did something interesting: it allowed parentage to be reckoned through the male, which laid the building blocks for male cooperation beyond the level of the band.

But clearly we have not had monogamy exclusively since then because the human genome tells us this. Many times we have gone through a genetic bottleneck where the number of male ancestors has been severely constrained. There is a cycle of monogamy and polygamy, and we are just coming out of a monogamy peak. This season of monogamy began just after the High Middle Ages, which seems strange because Christianity prescribes monogamy, but in ruder times polygamy was simply not acknowledged. We had de jure monogamy, but de facto polygamy, until about the Early Modern period.³

Now, back to our poor sap from reddit. Let’s call him Melvin. (Apologies to the Melvins out there.)

The polygamous arrangement is what we may call our “ancestral environment”, after the long, pre-human period in which it was no doubt the norm. Melvin from reddit was insulted that he was not the hookup guy, because the hookup guy is who women prefer ancestrally in terms of reproduction. In the ancestral environment, they would also marry him. In the world of polygamy, the husband and the hookup are the same. It is an important part of male self-image that each man believes he would clean up in this world.

In a world of monogamy though, the partner and hookup diverge. In terms of reproduction, women tend to prefer stable, generous, and by necessity somewhat less exciting and dominant men. This is what she called him. She implied that he would be an incel in an ancestral environment.

However, that environment was challenged for a reason. Our ancestral environment is extremely unstable because of its sexual inequality, and at some point a primordial Caesar promises sexual redistribution in exchange for loyalty, which he then parlays into Collegiati consisting of Melvinii, in whose name he topples Rex Chaddus Julius Thundercoccus. This large-scale male cooperation furnishes the building blocks for civilization, which rises to unfathomable heights only to weaken the genetic stock, thereby creating the unstable environment in which Rex Chaddus can start assembling his harem again. And on the cycle goes.

We here have written articles describing fatherhood as the ultimate legitimating principle. Even so, we like to think we are realistic about patriarchy. Monogamy enshrines patriarchy and promotes cohesion, but it is dysgenic. There’s a reason why sexual egalitarianism isn’t a thing in the wild.⁴ So it helps build civilization, but at the expense of long-term genetic health. Eventually, dysgenics catch up with us and we’re back to polygamy, which is chaotic but eugenic. Hard times breed good men. And then we come back to patriarchy. Monogamy is a religiously ordained good. But nature has other ideas.

The women who responded to the reddit post prefer Chad because their lizard brain tells them to. But under conditions like those of the last 400 years, they actually opt for Melvin, who was insulted, quite rightly, by his girlfriend telling him that he is no Chad. Women don’t understand this because their preferences are transparent to them. If they were not thus transparent, women would understand the need for rigorous control over their sexual preferences in order to keep society from deteriorating into a bloodbath. Women are shielded from understanding why Melvin got upset because it is too much to ask anyone to understand such a thing.

Contrary to popular dissident opinion, we have been in a hyper-monogamous bubble even for the majority of our lifetimes. We are only just now emerging from that bubble as things come apart and patriarchy is smashed. This will only get worse unless patriarchy is re-imposed.

1. https://www.bgsu.edu/ncfmr/resources/data/family-profiles/schweizer-marriage-century-change-1900-2018-fp-20-21.html

2. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/human-monogamy-has-deep-roots/

3. Dutton, Breeding the Human Herd, p. 67 et seq.

4. https://new.nsf.gov/news/animal-attraction-many-forms-monogamy-animal