A Vote for Polygamy

Men, if we can just hang on a little longer!

Another hundred years, the demographers say. With the aid of the antibiotics and Geritol, some of us may make it.

The demographers (you fellows at M.I.T. know who they are) say that if present climatic, cultural, and population trends continue, mankind may be forced to abandon monogamy and return to an older and more practical form of social-sex organization--polygamy, or polygyny, to be demographically correct. And the psychiatrists are adding that it can't happen too soon as far as they are concerned--"Man is by nature polygamous," says Dr. Louis Berg, "and there's no point any longer in deluding ourselves that he's anything else."

Matter of fact, monogamy is nothing more than a rather recent experiment in sex relations, a kind of crazy idea dreamed up by some fanatical barbarians when they were getting ready to run over the rich, civilized, polygamous Roman Empire. They fastened their aberration on Christianity and Judaism when they took over down south, but it didn't put down very deep toots in either of those faiths and has since been laughingly rejected by Mohammedans, Buddhists, and residents of Southern California. As recently as 1675 the English thought seriously of ditching it, a bill being introduced into parliament in that year to repeal the Act of king James, which made it a felony to marry a second husband or wife if the first was still living. "One Horse, Bull, or Ram, having each of them many females, do promote increase." argued the advocates of Repeal. But after a year's debate Repeal was defeated, largely on the testimony of a quack doctor who spouted some nonsense about polygamy leading to a decrease in man's "genital liquor."

The end of the ignoble experiment in monogamy may be near, the demographers say, for the following reasons:

1. There are too many women in the world, and their numerical advantage over men is increasing.

There are two million more women of marriageable age in the United States today than there are men of similar age. Anybody who thinks these two million healthy, red-blooded young American women are going to keep on docilely accepting a system that imposes celibacy, childlessness, and sex solely pour le sport of some carefree bachelor or philandering married man as their inevitable and natural lot, ought to have his cranium checked with a Geiger counter.

It's bad in the United States, but it's worse elsewhere. In war-depleted Europe, the girls are advertising openly in the newspapers for men, any age or condition, for any kind of a relationship from a Sunday afternoon in the woods to a permanent shack-up with or without wedding bells. The pre-war population of Berlin was 4,338,756; today it's 3,199,938. London boasted 4,013,400 citizens in the city proper before the Blitz as over against 3,363,000 today. 80% of this decrease is male. In Rhodesia there are 10% more women than men. This can't go on, the girls say. You're damn right it can't. Let's be fair!

2. World population has to be stabilized.

It was Malthus who pointed out the relation of population to the available food supply, and modern demographers say that we are getting into a danger zone where the always-delicate balance between population and available food may be seriously disturbed. They liken the "population explosion" today to that which took place almost two thousand years ago when the monogamous barbarians erupted from the "Northern hive" to inundate the Roman empire. Oddly enough, the experts say, it is under monogamy that "population explosions" occur; polygamy (we'll use the vernacular) tends to diminish population growth. They point to Turkey and China as illustrations: for centuries the Turks were comfortably polygamous under the mandate of Mahomet that every man could have four wives (provided he had enough stamina to make a weekly visit to each), while the Chinese were limited by extreme poverty to monogamy. Under polygamy the population of Turkey remained stable, never outstripping the food supply. But the poverty-stricken, monogamous Chinese exploded to hell and gone, gobbling up the food and filling the canals with the bodies of unwanted babies.

It was the French essayist and demographer Montesquieu who first pointed out that polygamy works against population increase by placing the husband in the position of "un athléte destiné à combattre sans relâche," whose exertions keep his virility low. Moreover polygamy, employing numbers of eunuchs and female servants, withdraws a large percentage of society from procreational activities. And it is obvious that a husband making a single weekly visit to each of six wives is unlikely to achieve the procreational output of six husbands constantly on the job with an equal number of women.

3. A moderating climate is diminishing the inhibitions of cold-weather puritan morality.

Good old Montesquieu also noticed the connection between climate and the social institutions of mankind. There is little puritanism in the warm, lovely isles of the South Pacific; the Trobriand Islanders, for instance, are completely and joyously polygamous, and anthropologists say they are the happiest, best-integrated people in the world, without a trace of the neuroses and anxiety states that afflict the inhabitants of colder and more monogamous climes. These natives even converted the frozen-faced missionaries to their idyllic way of life, transforming the first sober soul-savers to invade their atolls into relaxed, happy, drunken polygamists. Today the effect of climate on sexual customs can be observed in Southern California, where a system of pseudo-polygamy flourishes quite openly all the way from Twenty Nine Palms to Point Loma.

The gimmick here is that the climate of North America is definitely moderating. In Montreal, subzero temperatures have been only half as common in recent years as they were at the end of the Nineteenth Century. The mean temperature for March has risen nearly four degrees. The snowfall, which averaged 130 inches in the 1880's, now averages only 80 inches per year. Boston, Washington, and other East Coast cities report comparable changes in climate. Weather experts say that the process of amelioration will continue because the jet stream that undulates around the earth five to eight miles up has changed its course and is now pulling warm tropical air (and hurricanes) up the East Coast. In time Long Island should have about the same climate as Cuba. With a lot of America's surplus women living in the Northeast, that section of the country should be an Atlantic Bali in another hundred years, when the trade winds have thawed through the native cold and relaxed the Puritannical tensions.

The demographer H. Fielding cites Burma as a good illustration of the effect of climate on sex customs. In that dandy little country, he says, the women "have the hot love and daring of men," and are "impulsive and full of passion." They live for love, he says, and the women make the first advances. They're polygamous for the most part, and celibacy is unknown. Everybody in Burma is in love with love, and it keeps them cheerful and healthy, along with the cheroots they smoke and the betel nuts they chew. There is absolute equality between men and women, and if there is a weaker sex it must be the male, because Burma is the only country in the world where there are more monasteries than nunneries. Tibet is another nice little hunk of real estate, with both polygamy and polyandry being quite O. K. with the government and the church (Buddhist), but it's a little colder in Tibet. Tibet is more progressive, though, its government hiring mediums as advisors so that the ruling Lamas know what's going on in both this world and the next.

4. Church opposition to polygamy is lessening.

It never was as strong as some people make out, anyway. All of the Old Testament patriarchs were polygamous; Abraham had Sarah and two lesser wives, Jacob had two wives and two concubines, and Solomon had seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines (I. Kings 2:3). Havelock Ellis says that "in no part of the world is polygamy so prevalent as in Christendom" (Vol. VI, Marriage), and the history of Christianity is full of examples of organized polygamy. The Anabaptists were officially polygamous; so were the Mormons until their rights under the First Amendment were outrageously violated by the United States Supreme Court. The church has winked at polygamy on some occasions and actually suggested it on others; Pope Gregory II, in 726 A.D., ruled that the husband of a wife physically unfit for conjugal intercourse could take a second wife if he wanted one; in 1455 Pope Nicholas V granted Henry IV of Castille a dispensation to marry a second wife on condition that if, within a fixed time, he had no issue by her, he should go back to his original mistake. Clement VII proposed the same solution to Henry VIII of England, but Henry lacked the guts to take him up on it. At the Tambaran Conference of African Churches in 1938, polygamy was one of the chief topics of discussion, some of the African converts pointing out that it was practiced by the kings and patriarchs of the Old Testament and not specifically forbidden except for bishops and deacons in the New Testament--so why couldn't they have more than one wife? Islam, they said, had no such silly taboos, and was making a lot of headway in Africa. As a protest against monogamy, which they rightly refuse to view as scriptural. African Christians are split into more than eight hundred separate sects, the majority of them practicing polygamy. And the House of Lords took a long step towards the revival of polygamy in England by ruling (Dec. 17, 1947) "procreation is not the essential purpose of matrimony."

5. The male is by nature varietistic.

The psychiatrists are facing up to this immutable fact of nature today and it's time everybody else did. Even the conservative Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, commenting on Chastity, observes that "at least 50% of the sexual intercourse in western nations is carried on outside the bonds of wedlock." Kinsey, of course, puts the percentage of nonmarital sex much higher than that. Balzac, in his Meditation V, says that "each night should have its menu. There is a devouring monster that marriage should instantly combat; its name is habit." It's almost impossible to get the variety in menu required by the average man from one woman, although certain females who have made a study of such matters do pretty well at it. Montaigne sums it up in his Essays (Book 2, ch. 15) when he says: "I was fain to turn out into the paddock an old stallion, as he was not to be governed when he smelt a mare; the facility presently sated him as towards his own, but towards strange mares, and the first that passed by the pale of his pasture, he would again fall to his importunate neighing and his furious heats as before."

A prominent Reno attorney told Dr. Louis Berg that "of 1396 divorce cases I have handled, only 201 women were willing plaintiffs. The others were bullied, bribed, nagged, or coerced into coming here from all over the country by husbands who wanted the freedom of cohabiting with other women."

But of course!

A by-product of the restoration of polygamy would be a diminution of professional prostitution and its accompanying evils. Under polygamy, with a man's natural varietism completely satisfied at home and for free, why should he spend time, energy and money on greedy harlots? Under polygamy, prostitution might cease to be a sordid racket and become again what it was in the great days of Babylon--a fertility rite of beauty and meaning. The Code of Hammurabi permitted polygamy and wives were bought in wholesale lots at public auction, with the buyers permitted close inspection of the merchandise before purchase, a system infinitely preferable to the present pig-in-a-poke method. The great historian Herodotus comments favorably on the sacred prostitution of women at the Temple of Mylitta, the Venus of the Babylonians. Once in her life every woman in Babylon was compelled to sit at the gates of the Temple of Mylitta until chosen by a man. The women sat in rows, and the men walked up and down, making their selections. When a man saw something that looked good to him he threw a coin in her lap and said "May the goddess be auspicious to thee." The couple then retired to the back room of the Temple. For some of the plainer women, Herodotus observes, it was a hell of a long wait, or words to that effect. They sat there for years.

6. Monogamy is a flop.

We've almost given up on monogamy in the United States; our divorce rate is about 40%. In California there are five marriages for every three divorces. In Texas, there are five divorces for every five marriages--a real horse race. Illegitimacy and immigration are all that keep the Lone Star State on an even keel. Our real system is crypto-polygamy, or under-the-counter sex varietism masquerading as easy divorce.

What do we get out of monogamy? Nerves, that's what we get. Anxiety states. Manic-depression, schizophrenia, hypertension, premature impotence, venereal disease, and more than two million frigid, frustrated female shrews. Too many people and not enough food. Meanwhile the happy, healthy, well-adjusted inhabitants of the Trobriand Islands and the African jungles have lots of women, a nice climate, and plenty to eat. No television, of course, but with a half-dozen sloe-eyed, bare-bosomed, lithe-limbed, dusky sweethearts with gardenias in their hair and love on their minds lolling around the hut, who needs John Cameron Swayze?

With the demographers and the psychiatrists sounding the death-knell of monogamy, it won't be long until the polygamous utopia of which all men dream will be a reality. When that day comes, wars will cease and the earth will blossom like a rose.

We can hardly wait.