Sixteen Volts

I remember, when I was maybe fifteen or so, reading an article about how bad women have it in Pakistan and Afghanistan. According to the article, women are so cheap that a typical man simply discards his young wife should she get ill, and just go purchase another one. I remember wondering how exactly it is possible for a typical man to have several wives this way, being that men and women are born in equal numbers. Probably what happened is that the reporter concetrated on a few highly visible men and just ignored the rest.

Later, this pattern became more evident to me. Whenever I read an article about polygamy, it never mentioned the problem of excess males who get no wife at all. Each of the articles I read about some polygamous community had the exact same content: first explain how all men have it good, then giggle a bit about the sleeping arrangements, then conclude that polygamy is just fine and dandy assuming that women are respected and get to join or not join a polygamous union on their own free will. Of course all these articles were written by female reporters, and as I explained in "There but for the grace of God", women cannot really even conceptualize the existence of lower-status men in the sexual marketplace, who register at most as a vague threat and are invisible at best.

It wasn't until I read Steve Sailer's article "The Problem with Polygamy" that I saw an article to explicitly say that for every man with n wives, n-1 other men are necessarily forced to remain alone. That this was Sailer to first explicitly write this obvious consequence of polygamy is probably not a mere coincidence, considering that Sailer seems to be the only person who has the courage to admit certain truths about many taboo topics. Since then, the problem of "Lost Boys" of the fundamentalist Mormon communities has made the excess male problem too visible to ignore in other articles that discuss polygamy, so perhaps there is some hope. But the problem here is that most people don't seem to consider the excess males to be a problem at all.

I was reminded of all this when the yesterday's newspaper's main headline reported of a Canadian government study that recommended legalizing polygamy in Canada. These days, legalization of polygamy seems pretty big in Internet, for starters all libertarians naturally supporting it. Leftists and progressives are a bit less eager in their support, but since they have already committed to the ideology of "do what thou wilt" with the gay marriage, they mostly seem to reluctantly support it with the requirements that women are not traded to older men in arranged marriages but get to freely choose to join or not join a polygamous union. After all, once you accept the rationale of gay marriage, you really don't have much left to oppose polygamy, except some technical legal details which can be ironed out. The Feminist Initiative in Sweden actually has unlimited anygamy in its party platform, with the quaint proviso that it will not be used for creating harems the way it is used now. It probably won't be long until other leftist parties follow the suit.

I am not at all enthusiastic towards polygamy, since I have a bad feeling that widespread and acceptable polygamy will effectively destroy the Western liberal (in the classical sense: I will never give up the linguistic battle that "liberal" means "leftist") society as we know it, to put it bluntly. In the rest of this article, I will try to explain my various reasons for this gut feeling. So far, the universal misery of the polygamous nations can be explained by other factors in these nations, but surely a civilized Western nation will be able to accept polygamy and still remain a good place to live. This time it will be different, as the saying goes. (It would really be different if it ever actually was different when we hear these words.) So what would happen if, say, Canada, legalized polygamy and it became an widespread and accepted lifestyle choice among the population?

First, the supporters of polygamy allow polygyny, polyandry and even any combination of men and women as a union. This is irrelevant, since that's not how it would go in the real world. With very few historical exceptions, polygamy has always been, currently is and always will be polygyny in which one man marries a harem of several women. (Sociobiology 101 explains why. Polyamorists of course disagree, but I doubt that the author of "A Poly-English Dictionary" was only using his or her imagination.) It necessarily follows that there will be a large group of men who get no wife at all, perhaps one in four men by my rough stetson estimate. These days when high-status men can "get the milk without buying the cow", they don't need to amass as many wives as in earlier times, so this number is fortunately lower than what it would have been a hundred years ago. So perhaps that's where my whole doom and gloom prediction will fizzle, but I wouldn't take the risk of finding out.

Libertarians and feminists will now immediately object that the creation of excess unmarriable men is not actually a problem at all, since no man is entitled to a wife. He'll get one if some woman marries her, and otherwise he won't, simple as that. Indeed. But even though men are not entitled to a wife, they are entitled to try to get one, and I predict that the vast majority of them will. Love and sex are in the middle of the Maslow's famous hierarchy, after all. And once the internal enforcement mechanisms of the monogamy cartel between men disappear, I predict that this competition will turn out to be immensely destructive in all its direct and indirect social effects, when every man deeply understands that he has a very real risk of becoming a loser in a very visible and important zero-sum race against other men, made worse all the time by its vicious cycle nature, when vanishing women make having wives an even more desirable status indicator.

Where the exact tipping point lies, it's hard for me to estimate, but we can start by thinking of the difference between a group 20 men under a poison gas attack when there are 22 gas masks available, and the same group of men when there are only 18 gas masks available. Even though men don't need women as much as they need to live, at some point a quantitative difference necessarily turns qualitative as the system goes through a phase transition, after which all bets are off.

You can try to turn it any way you want, but if there are four unmarried men for every three unmarried women, it is absolutely certain that one of these men will not experience the beautiful thing of experiencing mutual committed love with a woman. And if none of these four men wants to be that man, some form of competition will inevitably result to settle which of the four men gets to be the odd man out. In a civilized society, the male sexual competition for the women's attention is closer to that of peacocks instead of that of elephant seals. But it will still be a competition, and a very intense one at that since very few men would want to lose it.

Of course, it is probably an effective strategy in a competition to be able to successfully pretend that you don't really compete but are "above" such things. I predict that in a polygamous society, we could often read the women and the top half of men sneeringly explain that maybe the real problem of these excess men is that they think that love is a competition, when love and sex are something beautiful and must never be thought of in any kind of market terms. The men who can't afford to be as romantic and idealistic would quickly see through such rationalizations as what they really are. (Right now I can't help but link to the excellent posting "Withdrawing from the Market" by Tjic that explains why the refusal to apply market thinking to sex is stupid.)

Some feminists might counter these problems by saying that the problem is that the bottom fourth of men doomed to loneliness has a bad "patriarchal" attitude of being "entitled" to a wife. So if we could just get rid of the patriarchy, everything would be fine, since these men would just stop competing and causing any other trouble but live happily alone. First of all, such an argument would reveal a deep misunderstanding about what the concepts of "entitlement" and "competition" mean. These two don't go together but are total opposites, since if you are entitled to something, you don't need to compete for it. You only have to compete for something when you are not entitled to it. Therefore less entitlement automatically means more competition, not less. Second, it doesn't even matter if the "patriarchy" (every day I become more convinced that this vapid word refers to all aspects of objective reality that feminists dislike) somehow goes away. If men still want to be with women, you get the same competition again though bit milder, since the status component is weaker. The intensity of this competition would still depend on how much subjective value men would put on its "incentives", bringing all the negative outcomes.

So far we have optimistically assumed that the bottom quarter of men will "know their place", as the good but these days terribly underused expression goes. But they probably wouldn't. And anyone who claims that most men would just be totally cricket in this situation has a far more idealistic view of men than I do. Women, think of the men at the bottom of the women's desirability hierarchy of men and how bitter and misogynistic these men tend to be. (By the way, which came first, constant rejection or bitterness?) Now try to imagine living in a society where one in four men is like that. No, you don't live there right now, you just may think you do because most men are either invisible to you or have been programmed not to express ideas and opinions that women don't like. Clothing that completely covers your appearance and a male relative to escort you whenever you go out would probably feel pretty good in such society.

But even so, the bottom quarter of men structurally doomed to remain alone would not be the one that women and especially the progressives would really have to worry about. It's not like these men ever achieve that much anyway in other arenas of life, and as long as the productive people can move and keep physically away from them, they are not a real threat of anything. The people at the bottom can only be dangerous under a suitably skilled rabble-rouser who tells them who to shoot, but this wouldn't be a problem here, since such a rabble-rouser would benefit from polygamy and thus not work against it. Of course, the rabble-rouser could use the anger and frustration to advance other purposes, which probably wouldn't be pretty.

Were I a woman, the group that I would worry a lot more about is the middle half of men, especially the ones on its lower margins. The men in the middle know exactly how fragile their position is and will do anything to stay afloat, and unlike the losers, these men get things done and many politicians and institutions actively work for them. If you think that e.g. conservatives and their policies are "reactionary" or "patriarchal" today, just wait to see what they would be like in a polygamous society. Somehow I just can't imagine that women's freedom would be that big a concern for most men, seeing that women as a class would essentially be a hated enemy for many men, cold and heartless bitches instead of sugar and spice and everything nice. This is unavoidable, since there is absolutely no way women could be "nice" towards most men. (Just like the proverbial blind men examining an elephant, men get to see women very differently depending on where they stand.)

But let's assume the optimistic scenario in which men keep respecting women's autonomy and choice. As the women enjoy basking in the competition between men and extracting the various benefits for their position while enlisting desirable men to keep the undesirable men away, men can and will start competing against each other in many ways whose consequences will spill over to the women's side. That is, men will start hurting other men to make them less desirable to women and this way raise their own standing. For example, if you think that male incarceration rates are high now, just wait and see what happens when polygamy becomes widespread. And if you the like idea of a welfare state, well, you can forget that one too, as its disappearance makes the poor men lose altogether (think of Jean Valjean) and the poor women shut up and marry up. As for the other possible forms of competition, we can just look at societies where polygamy has been be institutionalized for a long time. For example, why exactly do you think that suicide bombers are always young men, but never middle-aged or old men, as would be reasonable? In this vein, I once cynically thought of a reason why the ruling classes of certain polygamous societies would send battalions of loser men to fight and promptly die against a technologically far superior opponent.

How about the top males who are winners in polygamy? Somehow I think that they wouldn't be as enthusiastic towards women's liberties either, as they would be perfectly aware of what the lower men think of them and their women. Better to separate yourself and your wives from the rabble as much as you can, to eliminate both threats and temptations. "You know, honey, perhaps it would actually be better if you stayed home." I also predict that the top men would be strong proponents of strict religion that keeps the masses under control. It is actually theoretically possible to eliminate all the previously listed problems with heavy religious brainwashing and indoctrination --- perhaps we could imagine a Church which reveres the unmarried men for their "voluntary" sacrifice of abstinence to devote themselves to serve the Church and community better. But I kind of doubt that most of the current polygamy supporters would like this very much, since for any religious control to sufficiently work, it would have to be pretty pervasive.

At this point, we could also examine the polygamy supporters' requirement that child brides are not allowed, but marriage is a union between adults. Unfortunately, child brides are not a bug but an inherent feature of polygamy and naturally follow from the male competition. Let's say that men are initially nice and there is some minimum age for women to marry or enter whatever commitment that is commonly understood to eventually lead to marriage, and men respect this age. Say, 20. Now, if any single group of men suddenly realizes that "Hey dudes, maybe it wouldn't actually be so bad if that age was 19", this group would gain a massive advantage in the marriage market (terminology note: choices + scarcity = market, no matter which way you slice it), forcing other groups of men to follow suit when the race to the bottom begins. In a variation of the classic Tragedy of the Commons. The really "nice" and "enlightened" and "progressive" guys would suddenly find themselves in a position of someone who waits a week until trying to buy tickets to a popular concert, wondering why there seem to be only few seats left, and even those are not that great. Note also that the lower the age of marrying becomes for a woman, the more her parents will be involved in the choice of husband. I wonder what ways a man would cajole the parents' favours against his competitors, and what group of men is typically in the best position to apply these ways? (Rhetorical.)

One more argument often used by polygamy supporters is that even under polygamy, no man would really be doomed to a life without a wife, since some women still don't get married and are in theory thus available, and besides, the existing marriages break up all the time and those women then marry other men. And besides, aren't there more women than men? Well yes, there are, since men die seven years earlier, but unless you really want to argue that young men should marry decrepit old women, this issue is moot. And last but not least, if these loser men really want to marry, couldn't they improve themselves to not be such fucking losers but become more attractive to women?

For anybody who uses some variation of these arguments, very well, be my guest and do so, but I hope you can then accept the exact same arguments about what we should do about e.g. unemployment. You see, people switch jobs all the time, and as long as there is even one minimum-wage job scrubbing toilets available in a town, the unemployed masses there should just shut up and not complain or try to stick their hands in the pockets of people who work. And if they don't like to work for peanuts or are for some reason discriminated against by the employers, well, they should just improve their attitude and try to be more attractive to employers. Right?

There is one more issue which I think is very relevant in legalizing polygamy but which I can't remember seeing mentioned anywhere else. In this era of globalization and jet airplanes, it is one thing to allow polygamy in some dirt poor hellhole, but quite another thing to allow it in one of the richest nations on Earth where even the minimum wage is stratospheric wealth by the world standards and the average working class schlub is unimaginably rich and respectful towards women and thus an excellent catch. Under these conditions, the mail-order bride industry would flourish, as would the prostitution and pornography industries. Right now I would guess that the annual number of mail-order brides coming to Canada is counted in low hundreds (correct me if I am wrong), but in a system of widespread polygamy, it would probably be counted in tens of thousands. This would alleviate the problem here in Canada (for a more sarcastic view of the same topic, see my earlier posting "My suggestion for an immigration reform") by shifting it on the shoulders of men in the Third World. And what could the loser men over there possibly do to us?

Now, as my readers know, I don't really feel that much empathy towards the losers of either sex. But even so, I have to wonder about the inner life of people who see no problem whatsoever in creating a system that structurally guarantees that a large number of men will never find love and get married. I know totally well how incredibly lucky I am to have married a woman as good as my wife and how much better being with her has made my life compared to being alone. Now, you can say anything you want about my insensitivity and you would probably be right, but for crying out loud, you don't get to goddamn posture on any kind of moral superiority over me if you can glibly ignore the suffering of a massive group of men that polygamous society would necessarily create by design.

The only way polygamy could possibly work is if most of the male fetuses were aborted, but such a society would soon collapse from both inward and outward pressures. To bring this essay to an end, let me note that I don't really need to care. I already got mine and have been happily married for more than a decade (I know many leftists will find this unbelievable), and expect to get maybe five decades more. But when I will retire in 25 years or so, it would really suck to do it in a nation where where gangs of young men brandishing AK-47's rule the streets. I would like to avoid such future if possible, thank you.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Saturday, January 14, 2006 at 1:55 PM