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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.
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.
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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