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Notes -
Apropos of a very small, tangential discussion on the main culture war thread, what are the borders of polyamory?
For me personally, I don’t think of any variation of one man/x number of women as actually being polyamorous in the current year sense. It’s all just gradations between patriarch with +1 wife, or a mistresses situation, or a full on Ottoman seraglio.
I can’t say I base this on much more than vibes, but modern polyamory seems to connote at least one additional male in the mix, and probably something that tends towards more even mixes of men and women.
I feel like it still counts as modern polyamory if the one-man-harem situation involves the women openly having lesbian relationships with each other and/or additional outside women. And I want to emphasize the "openly" part, the lesbian activities being openly acknowledged rather than something others maybe suspect but turn a blind eye to.
I personally suspect that this is not actually a modern innovation on harems per se, and that the reason we don't have extensive records of it in the ancient world is that it was considered irrelevant trivia, not that it was considered forbidden. Contrary to male homosexual behavior (which is likelier to be an outright aberration that natural selection simply has trouble weeding out, comparable to mental illness), it seems like the most obvious context that female homosexual behavior would evolve for - particularly given that women are much likelier to be bisexual than men.
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