19 ms·
> maybe strict monogamy will soften as a norm. Polygamy is already the norm in the West, only it's serial polygamy instead of parallel one, i.e. you're suppose
by fab13n 11y ago
> maybe strict monogamy will soften as a norm.
Polygamy is already the norm in the West, only it's serial polygamy instead of parallel one, i.e. you're supposed to dump your previous partner before picking the next one. But most people enter most relationships being very open to the idea that it won't be lifelong, and that other partners will be part of their sexual, sentimental and patrimonial future: this constitutes polygamy, irrespective of the order in which you have sex with the several partners you plan to have.
Will insistance on serial polygamy soften? I'd say that the forces seem aligned for this to happen:
* reproductive control was the main reason for historical control over people's sexuality. With reliable contraception and easy paternity tests, those incentives are dramatically weakened.
* don't underestimate homo sapiens' urge to practice polygamy: historically we've had to punish adultery by gruesome death, it still routinely causes financial ruin in the US, yet people always kept committing it! They're still willing to wreck their own children's family and well-being, in exchange for some renewal in their sentimental and sensual lives! This urge seems to me at least as strong as the gluttony epidemic, which turns many Westerners into impotent, morbidly obese wrecks, one hamburger at a time.
* Exposure accelerates acceptance. Internet is bound to make affairs more and more visible, and as a result, we'll get used to them.
As for modesty, even before Internet, the list of which body parts / positions were naughty evolved fast and flexibly, within decades (think miniskirts, sleeveless tops, bikini, monokini, Frei Korper Kultur, or conversely, the comeback of islamic female garbs in middle eastern countries). With Internet as a great accelerator, we'll soon be mildly too bored to Google sextapes of our acquaintances. I known I already feel that way about celebrities. First time patrons of naturist resorts typically report nudity-induced awkwardness to last about 1/4h :-)
- rue 11y ago‘Serial polygamy’ means a sequence of multiple simultaneous relationships. You mean serial monogamy.
- fab13n 11y agoI meant it as an electrical engineering metaphor, where you can string devices in parallel, or in serial one after the other, but where with a few adaptations both can lead to the same practical result. Besides, my whole point is that this behavior constitutes a variant of polygamy, not a variant of monogamy, so I stand by that term. That there's a "serial monogamy" idiom describing it (I just discovered it thanks to you and Google, I'm not a native speaker) is tellingly disingenuous IMO.
- rue 11y agoI don’t know, I think it’s less useful to read ‘lifelong’ into the word monogamy. It simply describes the number of simultaneous relationships—whether it lasts for a week or forever is another dimension.
- netcan 11y agoI think you're splitting hairs a little, rue. In fairness, fab was splitting hairs with me. What I meant is a softening of the monogamy using the currently normal relationship model as the definition. What he meant is that the definition of normal monogamy has changed anyway over the past few generations. Courtship became relationships, which really became marriage-like partnership. He's right. What we call monogamy would not have held with our great grandparents. They would have objected to the serial partnerships much more than the infidelity which at least we have the decency to try and keep secret.
- fab13n 11y ago> infidelity which we had the decency to try and keep secret. Moreover, infidelity was about sex. It might also have cost a bit of money, going to mistresses and bastards, for wealthy male adulterers, but it didn't affect patrimonial rights. Neither could the mistress be promoted as new wife, to the detriment of the incumbent one. The idea that marriage is first and foremost a love affair is a fairly recent one, and coincides with its demise (explosion of divorces, monoparental families...) The lifelong marriage was a patrimonial affair.
- smtddr 11y agoI thought of it as how a CPU appears to be running several programs at the same time in a home PC, but we know the OS is actually switching between all the processes at an extremely high rate. :)
- angersock 11y agoIt's not a variant of polygamy, though. If you were a polygamist and only ever had one partner at a time and weren't looking and courting others then you would be, de facto, practicing monogamy. If I had a spouse, to whom I was devoted, and they were hit by a bus and killed, and then I had another spouse, who was killed by a falling meteoroid, and then a third spouse, who died of an aneurysm, and finally a fourth who left me because of a reasonable fear of death-by-misfortune--I would still be considered monogamous. Yours is a very tortured interpretation of what polygamy is.