- It seems quite plausible
that polyamory is gonna be
the next sexual minority rights movement.
Currently, of course,
marriage is defined in strictly monogamous terms,
and there are some polyamorous who said
that this is unjust,
and that their relationships
should be legally acknowledged in the same way
that monogamous people's relationships are acknowledged.
But, I think that there is a risk
of rejecting the monogamous model.
Proponents of polyamory
would say that in our species history,
the most common mating model has been the polygynous model:
So when you have one male
having multiple female partners-
that's about 80% of cultures
on the anthropological record have been polygynous,
and then the remaining 20% have been monogamous.
The monogamous model is the unusual one.
We now have very different material conditions
in all sorts of ways.
We have the pill,
we have ways of treating sexually transmitted diseases,
we have technologies like the internet,
and therefore, why should we be beholden
to the mating structures of the past?
This is a brave new world
with all sorts of new possibilities.
I think the problem with that defense of polyamory
is that it overestimates the extent
to which we are really capable
of controlling our Stone Age brains.
Our brains have not kept pace
with the technological change that we've seen.
We still are basically adapted
to the lives of our hunter-gatherer ancestors.
That puts a fairly hard limit
on the extent to which we can completely design utopia
on the back of an envelope.
- 'Salt Lake City, Utah,
and the home of Dr. R.C. Allred,
fundamentalist believer in plural marriage,
the practice and preachment of polygamy.'
- People are free to experiment
with all sorts of mating patterns,
including polyamory.
For some individuals,
that's good.
In terms of the whole society, though,
women and children in particular,
the monogamous system is much preferable,
for all of its flaws.
- 'Monogamous America waits for the answer
to the question:
How many wives?'
- Monogamy makes societies more stable,
more peaceful, more prosperous.
You can compare this quite directly
by looking at certain countries
which have both monogamous and polygynous systems
operating in tandem,
and you can see that there are these differences.
Households with multiple wives
are much more prone to conflict.
Stepchildren, in particular, are much more vulnerable
to abuse by their stepparents.
It's a phenomenon that evolutionary biologists
call the "Cinderella effect,"
described by Stephen Pinker
as the single greatest risk factor in child abuse
ever identified.
We've inherited our monogamous marriage system
from ancient Rome,
which is unusual in having a monogamous model.
But Roman sexual ethics were wildly different:
Roman culture, including sexual culture,
were fairly cruel and shocking.
In the Roman world,
Harvey Weinstein would've been completely unremarkable.
The idea that a rich, high-status man
should have sexual access
to his social inferiors,
in particular his slaves,
was completely unquestioned
in the era before Christianity.
Prostitution was completely permissible.
The sexual double-standard was alive and well,
and the men were basically allowed
to be as promiscuous and unfaithful as they wanted,
whereas women were expected
to protect their chastity fiercely, and so on.
And into this world, in the A.D. 1st century,
comes Christianity
with some very radical, very shocking ideas about sexuality.
The idea that, yes, women should expect to be chaste
but so should men.
The expectation that women shouldn't have pre-marital sex-
this is also applied to men for the first time ever.
Often this was a most unwelcome message
to men of the A.D. 1st century,
but for all sorts of complex historical reasons,
it caught on.
And Christian sexual ethics became the dominant force
in Europe and the colonies for 2,000 years.
And then in the 1960s and onwards,
we end up slowly unraveling the embedded Christian ideas-
and we're still on that kind of de-Christianization course.
I think that often feminists make a mistake
in assuming that there's a binary
between feminist ideas on the one hand
and Christian ideas on the other one,
and that they are necessarily in conflict.
For all of the downsides
of the Christian view of men and women and sexuality,
also there is this fundamental idea
that the weak should be prized and protected,
and the strong should restrain themselves;
which was radical then, and really remains radical now.
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