One Judge vs 7 million votes

[frau kaleun]

Originally Posted by UnderseaLcpl

So... this is why societies of polyamorous females don't exist. They die out because they are not efficient in a reproductive sense. Well, that's not entirely true. Unlike any other species, women actually have a built-in mechanism for concealing ovulation so they can mess with the village pool-boy while being married to the village elder. It's a by-product of these marvelous brains we were endowed with. It's also why young couples face the "is she pregnant!?" anxiety. In that way, women can be polyamorous, though they are still limited in their production of offspring.

And I would argue that there have been, and perhaps still are, societies where commitment to sexual relations and production of children with one partner only is neither required nor expected of either sex. People have sex with whoever they have choose to have sex with, whether one partner or many, and a woman may have the children of one man or many different men and nobody really cares.

Saying that there is a biological reason why one system may be "preferable" to another when it comes to the survival of the species is one thing.

To turn a person into a second-class citizen and deny them the rights and opportunities that another person gets just by virtue of having a penis because of some supposed "biological imperative" that is not an imperative in any meaningful sense to the person being denied those rights, is quite another.

The notion of limiting a woman to one sexual partner has as much to do with the patriarchal imperative of guaranteed paternity as it does anything else. It wasn't about having children, it was about making sure that any child that came along was the legitimate progeny of the husband/owner of the woman who bore it. At a time when it was impossible to prove conclusively who a child's father was by any scientific means, the only way to ensure that the child you passed your property and position on to was actually yours was to control the sexual behavior of the mother.

In a patriarchal society where almost everything of value is passed down through the male line, guarantee of paternity is all-important. When a child comes out of a woman's body no one can deny who the mother is - but paternity is up for grabs unless that woman's body and sexuality and ability to reproduce at all are completely controlled by someone else. Combine this with the reality that women were the de facto property of their husbands (if not actually by law) and therefore not to be used for the pleasure or procreative needs of anyone else (even with their consent) and it's easy to see that the social imperatives behind the enforcement of female monogamy need no biological motivation to reinforce them.

In matrilineal societies, or matrifocal societies (not to be confused with a matriarchal society, where the positions and privileges of the sexes are the true reverse of what they are in a patriarchy*), woman typically have far more freedom to choose one partner or many... not because they're "in charge" but because guarantee of paternity is not a vital issue for that society.


*And AFAIK, no one has ever been able to prove that such a society ever existed, which is why the use of the word "matriarchy" has fallen out of favor with anthropologists and historians... it implies something for which they have as yet found no conclusive evidence.