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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.
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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