Thoughts from
San Diego on Law, Politics, and Culture

 
Same sex marriage and polygamy
By Tom Smith

Here.

I think arguments over patriarchy should take in account how polygamous marriages typically work. I'm no expert, but my impression is that it really does take a village, and an isolated and coercive one at that, to make polygamy happen. Polygamy, in practice, seems to me essentially a slave trade in underage females, who are bullied and brainwashed by their religious rulers into marrying some nonsense-spouting ogre three times their age. If you rigorously enforced laws that prohibited marriages of women under 18, a lot of polygamy just would not occur.

You aren't going to see several men marrying one woman, because men are, well, men. Several women marrying a single man will be unappealling in any world where girls are made aware of their options. OK, you might see Donald Trump married to several super models, but beyond peculiar cases such as that, it is hard to believe it would ever be more than a fringe occurrence, even if it were legal. Polygamy is a feature of real patriarchy; not the, patriarchy is everywhere sort beloved of paranoid feminists, but the, lock her in the closet for five days with no water sort. If criminal and child welfare laws were enforced, you see little of it.
posted by thomas at 3/19/2006 04:40:00 PM