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A quick post for the new subreddit. Are we headed for a new era of polygyny? Looking at contemporary metropolitan dating markets, both anecdote and data arguably suggests that what I’d call casual open polygyny is becoming a lot more common. By this I mean sexual dynamics in which men and women enjoy casual open sexual relationships, but where the male parties in such relationships have more simultaneous female partners than the female parties have male partners. I think the data supports this kind of polygyny specifically rather than general polyamory as the dominant new model, insofar as it seems that a large subset of young men have few or zero sexual partners and a small subset of men have large numbers of sexual partners, with the SD in number of sexual partners being much higher for men than women. (But of course there are plenty of women who have multiple partners too.)
If I had to guess, I’d say this trend is being facilitated by things like hookup apps, societal atomisation, better contraception, and the decline of religion. But we also perhaps shouldn’t be too surprised — monogamy and polygyny are the two most common stable mating norms both cross culturally and historically (polyandry is exceptionally rare; general polygamy fairly rare).
Still, this trend obviously creates a problem in the longer run, because our society is still largely built around social monogamy: Men and women who form long term partnerships overwhelmingly do so on a one-to-one basis. As sexually actively young people transition from polygyny to monogamy in their late 20s, this leaves a lot of jilted women and bitter romantically inexperienced men, hardly a recipe for a happy long term marriage.
In the long run there will probably be some kind of correction, possibly via polygynous marriages becoming more commonplace.
There will also need to be a correction in terms of norms and expectations. Looking to the future, a significant proportion of young men may simply fail to find a romantic life partner unless they can distinguish themselves in some way. This is already how it works in many stable polygynous societies, but a lot of the resentment of Incels comes about because we’re at a liminal period, where monogamous norms dominate public discourse but de facto open casual polygyny is an increasingly common in the sex lives of young people.
Current American society has an observable antipathy towards a) older men marrying, or simply pairing with, much younger women b) older men practicing polygyny. I’ve come across the theory that this is largely due to these two practices being closely associated with Mormons, since most Americans have antipathy, or at least suspicion, towards Mormons. I find that believable, although I think a) is mostly explained by simple common female sentiment and feminist norms; and not even pro-Muslim woke sentiment can offset b), as the Muslim minority in the US is basically negligible.
So no, I don’t think such a correction is likely. Also, polygyny, where it’s practiced legally, is normally strictly regulated, as far as I can tell, and entails the husband claiming responsibility for multiple women. That’s rather unlikely to become the norm in the West.
What I do think we’ll see are the following:
A) Increasingly shrill propaganda aimed at single men, imploring them to marry single mothers
B) A growing realization among older women that normalized casual sex is detrimental to the female sexual strategy (to be clear, moral/religious considerations will play zero role in this) – consequently, we’ll see more and more middle-aged mothers specifically encouraging their daughters not to sleep around – but still, I think this’ll mostly come to nothing; in my view, femininity and the art of seduction are mostly lost and forgotten, so most Western women have no clue how to elicit long-term commitment from desirable men
C) Rising levels of mental illness among women (millions and millions of women are addicted to social media, and will lose the online attention they are accustomed to as their looks fade – this will have enormous consequences)
D) Single motherhood starting to become normalized among college-educated women
E) Even more propaganda in general along the line of “weak men are screwing up feminism”
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Ah, the air of freedom. And no obscene input lag in the text box!
Somewhat low-effort and speculative, but better put it out there than forget. Just the other day I wondered about the implication of within-Hajnal line (actually applying more broadly across Europe) marriage pattern: that a meaningful and equal proportion of women and men never married and left little to no offspring. Strict monogamy ensures that for every incel or monk out there exists a counterweight in the form of old maiden or nun; differential mortality rates affect this but not critically. Even an undesirable woman won't stoop so low as to marry an undesirable man; and Prince Charming is already taken, and the Church would rather you don't bear his child. This is tragic and self-defeating in a sense, but it also accelerates evolution, by precluding the ability of lower-value genes to survive via daughters.
While Hajnal specificity is often explained just like that, with the role of religious institutions, it may also be related to ancient signatures of greater sexual selection pressure in European populations, which are hypothesized to be downstream from lower rates of polygyny. It's reasonable to suspect that this produces contemporary pro-White trends evident on, say, dating websites.
But there are other, less sexy views on how best to bias human evolution. E.g. Lee Kuan Yew characterized the good old times thus:
We (rather, you) may be returning to the norm for our species. Just as the West has disenchanted the world and succeeded with the Universal Cultural Takeover in the last few centuries, the globalized postmodernity is now de-Hajnalizing the West.
P.S. Some Twitter edgelord I've forgotten (not Uriah, bless his soul) had a thread on the «late stage civilization chick» or something to this effect, mocking a type of a conventionally attractive young woman ubiquitous across nations, populations, clubs and platforms: big butt (usually in tight jeans, with some beige top), duck face, tanned skin, long dark hair, empty stare. It's a deliberate look and not some biological change, of course. But it feels primeval, and a rebellion against the modern world and fragile European beauty ideals.Such women wouldn't appear out of place in a prehistoric tribal chieftain's harem.
Well I hate to think what this sort of shift would do to low value men as a whole, we already have enough tension. But if we could make sexual imperatives align with economic growth, that might not be the worst outcome, in the medium term.
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Why even claim that we currently have a monogamous system? 95% of Americans have sex before marriage and leaving aside whatever small percentage of those people have sex with their fiance pre-marriage but no one else, that means that by the definition we'd apply to most animals we are not monogamous. We just accept temporal rather than simultaneous nonmonogamy, it's fine to fuck lots of people as long as at any given time you're only fucking one of them. A species of wolf that only mated with one mate at a time wouldn't be labeled monogamous.
I don't see any real solution to the problem, just get your shit together gentlemen and don't end up on the wrong end of the cut-off.
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Polygyny among which men? The usual retort is that it is a minority of men who can keep several female partners (can as in 'can attract several women and maintain a poly relationship' not as in 'can physically when taking gender demographics into account').
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Do you have any examples of any current stable polygamous societies?
Polygamy is most common in sub-Saharan Africa, which is not the stablest region in general. Still, according to this article, Nigeria, Senegal and Mali all have rates of polygamy above 20% (where "rate of polygamy" = "percent of people living in a polygamous household") and as far as I can tell all three of those countries are reasonably stable by African standards (if not by world standards).
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I agree with your assessment. As per my understanding one of the few times the blackpill was right and stating it in their own words," Chad fucks a haram, Beta buxx fuck their hsnds."
Tinder and other dating media give women a chance to access the same limited supply of men they are attracted to physically at the top of the dating pyramid.
This has always been the case?
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How well does this square with the conventional wisdom that dating sites have huge gender imbalances?
If there are five guys for every girl, the imbalance will be felt even without any polygyny.
The other big question is what fraction of partnerships are actually derived from this culture, be it skewed or monopolized.
I’d like to believe that hookup apps are not our main way of meeting potential spouses.
It seems unlikely that missing out on Tinder dates is the biggest predictor of romantic success.
Of course, I don’t have much in the way of statistics to support these beliefs.
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There are some claims that polygyny is more common in societies where women are responsible for a greater portion of food production (e.g. see here). Possibly this is because in such societies it is less expensive for men to take on multiple female partners. In some cases a man might even benefit economically from having multiple wives.
This theory is disputed, but it does fit remarkably well with current trends in developed countries. Over the past 50 years, female labor force participation in the US has increased a lot, especially when you focus on jobs with high salaries. In the 1950s, if a man wanted to maintain multiple simultaneous long term relationships with women (e.g. by marrying one and having several mistresses, etc) he would have to be able to support all of them. For all but the highest paid men, this would be impossible. Nowadays, the extra girlfriends all have jobs of their own and can take care of themselves.
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The decline of monogamous norms simply means both sexes returning to their baseline sexual imperatives. Men would prefer to have sex with lots of women, whereas women would prefer to lock down a man who is higher value than themselves. Women aren't really interested in having sex with tons of guys the way guys are interested in having sex with lots of women. The most polyamorous I'd expect an average woman to be is if they can't lock down a high value man, in which case they could bifurcate their sexual imperative by having one primary man as the provisioner and then occasionally having sex with high value men she doesn't have the market value to lock down.
This all has a toxic effect on society. Every successful society has brokered a compromise deal between the sexes where women give up their hypergamy in exchange for men giving up trying to have sex with lots of women. Neither side is entirely happy with monogamy since they both have to give something up, but it's a stable Schelling Point that limits frustration of the lower value members of each sex. Without it, you end up with hypergamous women all competing over the top 20% of men, with the other 80% of men fighting over scraps. This lowers the national birthrate, creates an epidemic of single mothers, and means men don't value the society they live in nearly as much if they don't have kids of their own. Bad times all around.
Solution 1: Abort all but the top 20% (per mildly futuristic machine-learned polygenic score) of men. Gender balance in numbers evolved in a setting greatly different from modern industrial societies; maybe having a gender balance of 1:5 is actually more stable now.
Solution 2: If it's really about absolute quality rather than relative (i.e. women don't actually grade men on a curve), just have full male-side eugenics and make 5 clones of each of the top 20% instead of sampling male embryos from the general population. No gender imbalance, but of course this would lead to further increases in gender pay gap and performance which could destabilise society in other ways.
Solution 0: If quality-based eugenics is so unpalatable, just use abortion or chemicals in the water to shift the gender ratio of children to 1:5. We can change reptilian gender ratios by shifting environmental temperature; perhaps we will find something that works for mammals too.
There's a significant positional element to women's rankings of men, so breeding the top 20% of men 5x each will just result in many of those men falling to the bottom once again.
As for the rest of your post, skewing gender %s is a proposition I actually find intriguing. There's obviously some significant Chesterton's Fence issues with immediately going to a 5:1 ratio, but I think it would be an interesting experiment to start with like a 1.25:1 female:male ratio and see what happens.
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I'm not sure the men getting laid the most are the highest value, exactly.
In traditional polygyny you saw wealthy, prominent men with high status jobs having lots of wives. In this society you see men with good social skills and a willingness to "play the game" having multiple partners regardless of wealth or social status. This in turn both depresses the birth rate and shifts births towards worse situations- as a growing portion of women realize that they will never marry an acceptable man, some number of them refuse to come to terms with not having kids and just breed with whoever happens to be available, with no expectation of paternal investment beyond maybe child support payments.
The only way out of this trap is to reduce female autonomy and make birth control suck more. These will, needless to say, not be getting implemented any time soon. And even if they are, it will probably move society towards traditional polygyny rather than monogamy.
I'm using "high value" as a generic term for the wealthy, prominent, attractive, high status men that women want to be with. They're not necessarily "high value" in terms of contributing to society.
This isn't the only way to do this, we'd just need to reinstitute the compromise of traditional marriage where women give up their hypergamy and men don't try to have sex with tons of women. The compromise initially broke down at the same time that birth control became widespread, but I don't see a reason why we couldn't have traditional marriage and modern birth control at the same time. A much more important change was the ease of divorce, which correctly broke up bad/abusive marriages but which also meant people could freely leave marriages if they got "bored", which functionally reinstituted female hypergamy.
Probably worth pointing out that you also need to reconstitute the 'middle class' as a major social demographic, which is where women can safely marry a guy and reasonably expect to live in comfort and raise kids to an acceptable standard and not experience much 'buyer's remorse' when she looks around at other women's lives. This means she can settle for a guy without feeling like she just settled.
Because in a situation where 10% of the guys are making huge amounts of money, 80% are barely scraping by, I suspect that women won't deign to marry a guy in that bottom 80% so long as she will be constantly wondering if she has a shot at landing one of those 10% guys.
While reconstituting a robust middle class would be nice for a whole host of reasons and is worth pursuing, I don't think it would be particularly important for reinstituting traditional marriage. Traditional marriage had been around for most of Western society's lifespan even when there wasn't really a middle class, e.g. the medieval age.
I would suggest that the conditions of the medieval age made marriage a more necessary institution for survival purposes, which has been almost lost now.
I'd further suggest that maintaining a middle-class standard of living is one of the few likely benefits of marriage in the modern age, so that might make it a necessary condition for the modern age to bring marriage rates up.;
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Indeed. Back in the times of the patriarchy, the normalization of early monogamous marriage basically served as life insurance for women - most of them could safely assume they'll get selected by someone while still young. Now this is gone, and I suspect it plays a large role in demographic collapse.
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Do we have solid statistics supporting this?
Subjectively, I agree. This phenomenon matches what I see among friends and myself. If you hop into polyamorous communities, the modal complaint is a man frustrated that his partner is far more successful than him while he hasn't had any. And it's consistent with the experiences of incels.
But we're pretty lacking when it comes to good statistics about it. There's a now-deletes Hinge post which calculated the Gini coefficients of match distributions (heterosexual women live in a romantic Denmark; heterosexual men live in South Africa). But that is pretty early in the process, just a casual blog post about online dating, and deleted anyway. (Other OLD "studies" are even worse, with the infamous OkCupid post being a solid candidate for the Worst Ever.) There's also the GSS data that show growing proportions, of young women (around 20%) but especially young men (around 30%), who haven't had a sexual partner in the last year. This is better, but suffers from coarse data and small samples.
There's a lack of interest in looking at this too deeply, though. What do we do if we find out this is in fact happening or even accelerating? As you point out, it's an article of faith that a monogamous relationship is in the cards for everyone who wants one. But if it's a myth, what could we do for the men left holding the shit end of the stick, to either arrest the trend or make up for it? Should we? With an increasing remote possibility of a loving relationship, do those men have any incentive to support and engage in society?
I am convinced that having a large cohort of men who simply fail to launch is a very bad outcome, both for them and for society at large.
There was a survey posted in the subreddit 1-2 years ago. The proportion of Finnish young men who've had more than one sexual partners in total has contracted drastically in the past 20 years. (Can't be bothered to dig it up, sorry.)
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Couple this with our society's deepening political and ideological polarization, the dwindling reserves of social trust, and reduction in economic opportunity and you have all the ingredients for civil unrest. Hell, maybe we're already seeing the first symptoms in the form of the BLM riots and the Proud Boy/antifa larping. God forbid they stop looking like larpers and start looking like the IRA.
I'm old enough to remember the late 2000s and the countless public intellectuals pointing to polygyny and economic inequality in the Muslim world as the primary drivers of fundamentalist Islamic terrorism.
See also Eric Hoffer
I wouldn't be surprised if we saw an increase in mass shootings, terrorism, and pockets of radicalism. But those are all really blips in the statistics sensationalized by the media and not relevant for the average experience of most people.
The bigger risk is simply checking out of society. You'll end up with social and economic barbells of men, not necessarily overlapping: an elite class of men, and a broader underclass, while women fall into a more typical Gaussian distribution. Which also suggests that means and medians will be increasingly irrelevant when looking at population statistics.
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I think your view may be skewed from looking only relationships that use hook up apps. I know quite a few people in open or polygamous relationships and from my anecdotal experience those tend to have the opposite dynamic.
If you only filter for people who are in a certain type of relationship, you're filtering out those who aren't in any relationship, which is cutting out a substantial part of the distribution.
Anecdotally, my sense is that men struggle more finding new partners in poly relationships than women do. E.g. on the poly subreddits, you see far more men in newly opened relationships struggling with their partners finding more partners while they themselves can't get a date.
That said, we simply don't have good statistics on this, and poly-identified relationships likely aren't representative of relationships in the broader sense.
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Is this true in any large-scale sense, as opposed to among some small subpopulation?
Our society isn't really built around social monogamy in any sense outside raising children - women can own property, hold jobs on their own, etc, and usually do. Ofc, raising children is important, but on a long enough timescale for that to reduce the fertility rate significantly, AI and other technology accelerating will create much more pressing issues
Even given that 'few men get many women' later applies to casual dating for most people - if the often claimed "they settle down with the beta" afterwards happens, they still get a partner.
Problem is this is not happening anymore, or at least slowing down dramatically. Every year marriage rates fall for all ages, and has been dramatically reducing ever since 1990.
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Sure it is, unless you're willing/able to substitute friends/other relations for things normally expected of a partner in a way that is societally abnormal. Who takes care of you when you are sick, when you get old, when you lose your job, when you need help?
The expectation that you will do this for a spouse is so strong that we wouldn't even say "His wife's income supported him while he was unemployed." It would just be natural that when a household loses one income, the other earner covers basic needs where possible.
Where, "Steve lost his job, so he moved in with his friend for six months" seems like a high, nigh unrealistic level of friendship for most people to have as adults.
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People grow and learn important skills from relayionships. Imagine a world where most men don't have relationships in their 20s, while most women do. Outside of being a crappy experience for those men, even if those men do start to partner in their 30s, they will be developmentally stunted compared to their paired partners and will know less what they want of a partner, leading to lots of frustrations and outcries of manchildhood. That's a strictly worse world than one where people are coming into relationships on an equal footing.
And that's not considering the possibility that the quality of men in their 30s will be made lower by lack of relationships in their 20s than they otherwise would have been, either by dropping out of society or falling into the incel rabbit hole.
... doesn't arranged marriage / getting married quickly for children have this same problem? The main issue is still that 'poly / few men many women' isn't an accurate representation of dating for most of the population, and won't be in the future, at a guess.
They do, and that's a socially recognized failure mode for those mating styles.
I agree that the typical life cycle pattern for relationships is currently something like "a comparatively short period of serial dating followed by monogamy." Particularly in the lower age groups, though, the (low quality) statistics we do have suggest the beginnings of another trend. It's something society should devote resources to publicly tracking so that we at least know the state of the world.
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Yeah, I'd really like some stats on this one. Recent stats - for instance, am I remembering wrong or has the trend in the number of men going on without a sexual contact for a whole year been stalled or even slightly reversed in the most recent years?
The most recent GSS showed a reversal of the trend, but the data is sufficiently noisy (sample size around 200 young men and women) and confounded by COVID that we can't say with any real certainty that the trend has reversed or stopped.
That data will always be weak, because of the documented (and obvious) trend of men and women defining "had sex" differently. What acts count as sex? Does initiation count or only completion? What if one partner finishes but the other does not? Men, statistically, round up; women, statistically, round down. If you don't account for that, you only get trash numbers.
Perhaps, but for GSS the means were close enough to equal, which is what you'd expect regardless of the overall distribution. Either lying is only a small effect, or there's a counteracting effect that masks it.
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