Polyandry vs. Prostitution

[lemur]

Both polyandry and prostitution allow women to maintain relationships with multiple men. In polyandry, husbands are often brothers or otherwise view and treat each other with respect and love as family. While this may not be the case in prostitution, the prostitute has more control over which men she keeps in her clientele with no risk that her mates will bond together to criticize her, etc. So while both forms of heterosexuality allow women to have multiple relationships, they may have different consequences for men, women, and children. What are your thoughts?

[Marat]

Similar issues are raised by both polyandry and polygamy.

 

More primitive societies are often characterized by two features: the entire village rather than the biological parents brings up the children, and there is sexual promiscuity. This is so extreme among the Kalahari Bushmen of Southwest Africa that they never even developed the notion that intercourse has anything to do with childbirth, since there was no way to draw specific connections in the general free-for-all. So this marks the extreme of multiple partners for everyone, yet with some stabile structures in place for child rearing. At the opposite end of the spectrum is the modern, Western paradigm of the monogamous relationship, with children reared by biological parents who are required to stay with each other in a stultifying lack of variety that destroys sexuality, limits the range of deep, affective relationships, and encourages folie a deux,

 

Each arrangement has its pluses and minuses as a form of social organization. The more narrow and stabile the partnerships are required to be, the greater the emotional and life-planning security. There is also the psychological benefit of a long-term relationship, which produces its own peculiar sort of knowing and relating to another human being, with its good and bad aspects. These benefits exist for both parents and children.

 

But the downside of these narrow and stable relationships are also evident. People need a variety of sexual and emotional connections, so there is enormous tension between the hard boundaries of these small, confining social units and the natural inclination of people to being open to form important human connections with everyone. Spouses cheat, children run away, and social disruptions ensue when the units fall apart.

 

So why does our society opt for the narrow, stable unit system of social organization? Engels thought it was because of the need to stabilize the control over private property, but there seem to be more factors involved, in that nomadic cultures typically have both private property and polygamy, while agricultural societies and their industrial soceity offshoots have monogamy. I would guess that the more rationalized, bureaucratic, and economically organized a society becomes, the more it needs small, tightly-ordered, stable units as its building blocks, so monogamy becomes predominant.

[Moontanman]

I don't know about you Marat but i think I'm a bit of a Wiener,,,,,

Edited June 6, 2011 by Moontanman

[Marat]

"Wiener" in German means "resident of Vienna," where I lived for a few years, so I guess I too could proudly claim in Kennedyesque tones, "Ich bin ein Wiener!"