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I'm sorry if my comment made you want to leave the board, Radagast. I'm really not sure why, but I'm sorry nonetheless.

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However, I think there are a number of flaws in your argument (thank you for labelling the parts in that way, that makes it much easier to speak clearly amongst each other).

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To begin with the question you address: you quote Curan speaking, and then say what Curan said, but what you quote and what you say he said don't seem that related. I don't know what Curan meant, but if he meant to say what you said he said, he said it very poorly indeed, as I don't believe that is the natural interpretation.


He wonders what the underlying cause is for male-biased hunting (ie. "this effect"). "This effect" is naturally the effect that he quotes immediately before that sentence. He distinguishes "this" from "the aforementioned", which makes it clearer. He says that most "answers" to the meme are conjectural. You seem to read this as saying that most explanations of the existence of the meme are conjectural. Maybe he meant this, but it seems more natural to read him as saying that most explorations of the bases for the meme are conjectural - ie, that proferred "underlying causes" are conjectural, which ties in very nicely to him wondering out loud what those underlying causes might be. To me, this is what an "answer" is here - what you say when someone says the belief, ie when you explain why it is true (or false).

Anyway, I don't want to argue over this. I don't know what Curan really meant, and maybe you read it as he intended. But if so, he worded himself very badly (ie ambiguously) and oddly (ie I've never seen "answers" used in that way before). In any case, I hope that explains why I didn't understand what question you were trying to answer at first.

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Getting to the gist of it: Your proposition B is arrantly false. It is false for two reasons. Firstly, (Bi) the only "observable facts" presented in this thread so far show that societies with male exclusive (or virtually exclusive) hunting outnumber those with merely male-dominated hunting by 841 to 14. Perhaps you have other evidence that you are declining to show us, but this invisible evidence cannot be assumed as known by everyone!
More importantly, (Bii), even if it were true, "in most societies, most hunting is done by men; women do some hunting, but appreciably less than is done by men" is NOT in anyway in contradiction with the stated meme, "most societies naturally divide labour so that men hunt and women gather"! (your formulation; Torco's is more or less the same). In ordinary (ie non-formal) speech, the noun without an article refers to a general, average, ordinary, or prototypical referent. This is not the same as an absolute universal quantifier, and this distinction is very important and relied upon.

It is true that the evidence does not support "in all societies, all hunting is done by men and none by women". Your putative evidence, if true, would disprove "in most societies, all hunting is done by men and all gathering by women".

But, returning to your Proposition A, while it may be true that there is the general belief that (A1) "most societies naturally divide labour so that men hunt and women gather", it is emphatically not true that there is general (or even commonplace) belief that (A2) "most societies naturally divide labour so that ONLY men EVER hunt and ONLY women EVER gather". Indeed, I have never encountered this transparantly false and frankly ridiculous belief.

Please note, regarding (Bii): both the actual evidence presented (Ea) and your putative evidence (Ep) support the general belief (A1); even though it is true that (Ep) (though not (Ea)) would conflict with (A2).

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Regarding your Proposition C: I don't disagree, but you are clouding the issue. Yes, we might say (although I'd rather not, because it's metaphysics and innuendo) that there is some vague "association" in our society between women and domestic functions, which underlies and perhaps in some way "explains" some real-world phenomena (or, more realistically, has been used to explain/justify those phenomena). However, I don't believe that this amounts to any belief that women "naturally" should gather food. I don't see food-gathering as within the scope of domestic functions. You mention, for instance, paid employment, but paid employment is not the same as hunting, and domestic labour is not the same as gathering. By definition, neither hunting nor gathering is domestic! So I accept for sake of argument (Ca), that there is an "association" made between women and domestic labour (and likewise with food production, healing, etc), but I have never seen evidence for (Cb), that there is such an association made between women and gathering.

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Regarding your Proposition D: even were we to grant (Cb), this would not be ethnocentrism, only a restatement of the problem. Because ethnocentrism is the background belief that other societies function as our own do, where not otherwise specified. And in our society, a) gathering is not an important function at all, and b) to the extent that historically it has been important, it has traditionally been a male role, if there was any differentiation. So the putative belief that women are associated with gathering is not the ethnocentric basis for beliefs about other societies, as it is not a belief about our society!

In other words, all you have done is move from "women in most societies are associated with gathering" to "women in general are associated with gathering". As the latter is a) not actually believed, and b) would be baffling enough by itself, given that it is not supported by actual behaviour in our society, the latter can hardly explain the former!

In fact, if anything, what you are pointing to here is "ethnoeccentricism" - the belief that somehow because women in many cultures are associated with gathering, there must somehow exist an association between women and gathering in our own society, even though it is not reflected by any social reality!

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Let's summarise. An ethnocentric argument would be:
1. X happens in our society.
2. Other societies are naturally like our society.
3. Therefore, X naturally happens in other societies.

However, nobody believes 1: "women in our society gather food". So you use a proxy, 1b: "women are associated with gathering in our society". Except this isn't true either, so you use a proxy of a proxy, 1c: "women are associated with domestic labour and healing things". But even if you accept 1b, if you plug that into the ethnocentric argument, you end up with "other societies, women are believed to be naturally "associated" with gathering", which doesn't mean that they actually do gather - as demonstrated, if we accept 1b, by our own society! So, as the conclusion is not what was to be produced, clearly the argument is not the one being used.

Moreover, there is no explanatory power even if we accept this explanation. Because you've explained (Q1) "in our society, we believe women naturally do the gathering" by (Q2) "in our society, we believe women are naturally associated with gathering". This is moving from the possibly true to the clearly untrue, but more importantly the "explanation" explains nothing, as it is nothing more than a rephrasing of what we believe, not a motion to a level of EXPLAINING those belief. If anything, Q2 should be explained by Q1!

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But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping
as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh
I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!

Most of my friends tell me I tend to overanalize stuff... and yet even I think this is overanalizing stuff.

So... I'll just go ahead and tell SPSS to gimme some Spearman's rhos on those there variables

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xD I was simply noting that it seems not to be an *exclusively* female occupation in surveyed cultures, and freqs are sweked towards men hunting more than women, which in turn seemed to support, to a degree, traditional notions about 'natural' sexual labour division. Sure chicks hunt.



It made sense to me, tho it might not be Rad's point, as bias. You couldn't be more wrong regarding the last part there, tho'; we can have preconcieved notions about things that aren't in our immediate everyday life. Even people who hadn't seen a black in their lives may think that blacks are inferior, evil, and should be returned to their own damn continent.

Also, doesn't anyone else get some sort of BBT's Sheldon vibe from this conversation?

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But, and I realise this may be radical, thinking something andit being true are not the same thing!

EDIT: I'm sorry, by the way, if I've been too long-winded for people with short attention spans. My culture places a high value on reaching the correct conclusions on the basis of the available evidence; I realise some would rather leap to conclusions blindly and not bother to analyse to see whether they are right.

EDIT EDIT: sorry, that was too curt. It just galls me sometimes that people actively push for anti-intellectualism and see rationality as something to be avoided and mocked. If people want to ignore careful argument, that's their prerogative - and god knows I do that a fair amount myself, since I'm rarely in the mood for it. But when people feel the need to assert their apathy as a virtue and ridicule the application of intellectual effort, I get riled. Culture wars, I suppose.

EDIT EDIT EDIT: sorry again, that was also too curt. I don't know, I think I'm going to leave it here, since it's far too late in the night-morning to summon up tact and explanatory vigour. Plus there's the point that if I explain myself fully, it'll be further ammunition for those offended by idea of full explanation...

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But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping
as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh
I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!

Oh, and I didn't say this sooner, but no te vayas del foro, Rada.

I apologize if the ridiculing intellectual effort thing you felt was due to my comment on the sheldon-like vibe, I didn't mean to be anti-intellectual. Rada thinks that the men-hunt-women-gather meme is originated in ethnocentrism, this is, in our own conceptions about sexual division of labour in HG societies based on our own gender roles, but even if the meme came from there originally, fact of the matter is that it looks like it's true, to some degree... at least according to the evidence from the World Sample thingie here. Rada: you said that ethnographic data indicates otherwise; which data, might I ask?

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Radagast must have a migraine now. Sorry to have caused that. Sal interprets me correctly; my inquiry still stands with not but a few "arm-chair anthropologists" explainations.

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http://rpusa.info/platform.htm
http://www.stardestroyer.net/
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/

Ooh, look how deliciously derailed my thread has become!

I'm way too tired to read through all that now, so I'm going to make some rash conclusions (conjectural?) anyway.

Those debates about the causes of gender differences are always amusing. I frequently have them with my girlfriend. I give an evolutionary explanation to the differences, and she claims that it's really all about social pressure. Then I spank her for talking back to me.

Anyway. Why is there a tendency for men to hunt and women not to hunt? How about:
a) Men are expendable; if a man dies, there can still potentially be just as many children, so the population in the next generation will be the same, but if a woman dies the long-term population is affected. Therefore women avoid dangerous activities, such as hunting and war.
b) Women in primitive societies generally have several children, breastfeed them for several years, and do not live very long by modern standards. This means that women are likely to be dragging children around a large portion of the time, which makes hunting difficult.
c) Women are smaller and slower runners, making them less effective for hunting.
d) Men have a need to impress women, and killing mammoths is arguably more impressive than picking berries.

Not sure that's what you were actually discussing, but hey, no harm in derailing a little more.

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and women don't need to impress men?

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Sure they do, but less so than men. They have less to gain from impressing a man, since she can usually get laid anyway.

It is of course less true for modern europeanised societies, being monogamous and all, but if you go to a bar I still suspect you won't see lots women going out of their way to convince men to sleep with them.

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Which is a fact about courting rituals, not about economics. The ritual in modern Europe is that the woman shows up and expresses invitingness, and men make the approach. That doesn't mean the woman makes the choice - sure, she chooses among the men who approach her, but the man chooses whom to approach. And yes, in modern libertine society, almost any woman can get laid if she sets her standards low enough, but then that's also true for men. If nothing else, it's a lot easier for a man to find a prostitute...

Sexual displays aren't about "getting laid", because that's easy. They're about attracting superior mates. And it's not inherently easier for women to catch superior men than it is for men to catch superior women.

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But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping
as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh
I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!

libertine?




Sheah, right... you, sir, don't seem to know much about women: women have everything to gain from impressing men... or at least it looks like they do, I mean they have this tendency to care so much about grooming and appearance and stuff.

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There was a famous psychology experiment, which you may well have heard of, but it's quite cool so I'll tell you anyway.
A bunch of psychology students walked around on campus and asked random people of the opposite sex one of three questions - either "would you go out with me", "would you come over to my place tonight", or "would you have sex with me". For women, the "yes" answers were roughly 50%, 30%, 10%. For men, it was 50%, 50%, 50%. Many of the men who said no made some excuse, saying for example that they were in a relationship and couldn't say yes.
The idea was of course to test whether men and women would react differently, and the answer there is not surprising.
(Perhaps the most interesting result is actually that the percentages were so high - if you ask a complete stranger for a date, they are actually about 50% likely to say yes. Which is nice to know but maybe not so relevant for this discussion.)

Anyway. I disagree with your statement that almost any man can laid if he sets his standards low enough. Or at least, I think there is a large quantitative difference between men and women, and just how low they would have to set their standards. As the experiment suggests, if an ordinary woman asks an ordinary (single) man to have sex, he will probably say yes, but if an ordinary man asks an ordinary woman to have sex, she will most likely say no.

It's easier to find female prostitutes, yes, but that only proves my point. A woman can find sex anyway, so there is very little demand for male prostitutes.

Is it inherently easier for women to catch superior men? That depends what you mean by "catch". If you mean "marry", then it is not easier in monogamous societies, but for others it generally is. If you mean "have children with", then it is also easier, in any society with a reasonably high degree of promiscuity (or polygamy).

Torco: Yes, it seems that women care a lot about impressing potential partners, if you look at things like appearance. But men try to impress in different ways.
Women buy makeup, men buy sports cars. Women go on diets, men go on duels.

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Fascinating, yet completely useless as evidence. When your data-points are how people have replied to questions, what you learn is how people reply to questions. The whole point of courting rituals is that the ritual is of importance, not just the courter; so trying out different rituals doesn't tell you how much the woman fancies the man, it tells you how in accordance with social conventions the ritual is.
What you have demonstrated is that women (apparently) find random and point-blank sexual approaches less satisfactory than men do; or rather, that they find agreeing to these advances less appealing. This is not a great surprise: women are indeed taught in our society to reject such advances, at least at first, at risk of being labelled "sluts" or similar. So your test only confirms society's PERCEPTION of female sexuality, and the power of social norms - it tells us nothing at all about the real phenomenality of female sexuality, let alone the economics of it!
Oh come on! Firstly, the experiment tells us about what norms people conform to (and it works the other way as well - lots of women will say no because they think they should, but lots of men will say yes because they think they should, too). Secondly - "ordinary man"? "ordinary woman"? No. The experiment is about what happens when a female college student (presumably young; were these tests controlled for attractiveness, btw? Female psychology students may just be hotter than male psychology students, as is after all the case with most science subjects (the men are geeky and nerdy, but the same behaviour in girls is often seen as cute)) asks a horny male college student for sex. I should like to think that the sexual habits of the race as a whole may well be different from those of boys in college!

That doesn't prove your point. Because if it's just about getting laid, then a prostitute is just as valuable as anyone else as a mate.
In any case, you don't need to go to a prostitute. For a start, everyone knows someone, or knows of someone, with a reputation*. Then, if you don't, there are plenty of bars and nightclubs. And if you don't score there, then there are also plenty of places where women go explicitly to have anonymous sex with strangers, and they're pretty easy to find out about. Any of us could get laid tonight if we wanted. Except that for most of us, getting laid per se is not that important.
If the argument is that in primitive cultures women are so tightly bound to a single husband that they are unable to be unfaithful, while men are able to be promiscuous... well, for a start, in a great many societies pre-marital or even adulterous sex is not forbidden for women, or only weakly forbidden. And in any case, it's far from clear that biased sex laws actually convert to biased sexual behaviours.

More importantly, however, this goes AGAINST your point. See, if men can be promiscuous, the genetic quality of each mate is not that significant. You don't have to catch the very best one right now, because you'll have another chance. But if women are forbidden strictly from adultery, then it is vitally necessary for them to attract the best mate going at the first opportunity, since it's the only chance they're going to get! If you only get one mate in your lifetime, you need it to be the best available, so you need to do MORE to be attractive than the man does!


Yeah... wait, let me count a) the number of women I know who wear makeup or have been on a diet, and then b) the number of men who own a sports car or who have fought a duel (wtf?).



*Of course, this also demonstrates how conventions are distorting your reporting. Because at a casual glance, it seems like I know of loads of men who are very open about sex and give the impression they'd "do" anyone they had the chance to do, while almost every woman I know of is fairly demurre and would never do anything like that. But the reality is very different - most guys I know have far higher standards than they claim to have, and many women, I've discovered either from knowing them better or from hearing stories from those who know them better, are rather more amenable to casual sex than they let on. Because what people say to strangers is mostly what they think they ought to say, which isn't always what they actually think, OR what they actually do when approached in the correct manner. Your experiment just shows that going up to women in the street and saying "will you sleep with me?" is not necessary the optimal method of approach, which I think we all knew already. This is because that is not the correct ritual of courtship...

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But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping
as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh
I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!

If that's all, we could shut down every statistics department right away.


There may be some social bias, but unless you can come up with a better experiment, we'll just have to make do. We can't be sure that such experiments are entirely accurate, but we still need good arguments before assuming that they are entirely wrong. This is the same for many questions of human behaviour - we can't be sure that the behaviour we observe is the most "natural", but if we want to guess what the natural behaviour is, and we have no other evidence, it's still the best guess. It would be very interesting to see similar (or better?) experiments in other cultures, but I haven't heard of any.


That's certainly an interesting theory. What would you say that the hot males study? Or does this apply to all university students?


I'm sure the result would be quite different in different cultures; some would get higher percentages, and some lower. But if you can show me any culture - or even any group within a culture - where the women are significantly more likely to say yes, I'd be very interested to see that.


Why are there prostitutes, then?


It's not.
Suppose 10% of men and women are awesome. In polygamous societies, more women can marry an awesome man. If each awesome man marries two women, then 20% of women marry an awesome man, but potentially as little as 5% of men marry an awesome woman.
Similarly, in promiscuous societies, potentially all the women can have children with an awesome man, but certainly not all men will have children with an awesome woman.


Well, you clearly can't have a society where men are more promiscuous than women. But let's look at a society with a high degree of polygamy (and no promiscuity, for simplicity). If a man can have several women, then he has several chances, and needs to care less about each. Right? Well, that would be the case if all men had the same number of wives. But even then, it would only mean that women needed to be attractive only once, and men several times - in total, there's no reason it would not add up to the same amount of need.
But of course not all men can have several wives, so the main thing is: For a woman, her attractiveness affects the quality of the man she catches, but for a man, it also affects the quantity. She can end up with one good man or one that's not so good, he can end up with none or with several. He has much more to gain or lose.

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As long as the topic has drifted anyway, I have a question.

It's about plural marriages.

Background

A common feature of marriage in many cultures (IMO the defining feature of marriage in every culture, but let's not go there) is that at least one party gains one of two rights; either the right of sexual access to the other party, or the right to (at least partly) control third-persons' sexual access to the other party. (E.g. the Christian Western European ideal was "both parties gain both rights"; husband and wife each had exclusive sexual access to the other.)

In the 21st century so far, at least in the American Midwest, that doesn't seem to be what most people want. Ever since the 1920s no spouse has had the right to deny third parties sexual access to the other spouse (see Eadweard Muybridge); and ever since the 1980s neither spouse has had implicit sexual access to the other spouse (see Greta Rideout).

In USAmerica all legal marriages involve just two persons. Up until recently they had to be one man and one woman; or if there was no such requirement, everyone just thought there was.

But many people, even in the U.S.A., form "group-marriages", though they have no legal standing.

As long as there are only two people in the marriage, the idea that one of them always has the right to have sex with the other, or that one of them can prevent the other from having sex with anyone else, is just not popular these days.

Questions

1. In a group-marriage, wouldn't it be more acceptable that the group could insist (however it can express that insistence) that each spouse always (barring sickness and injury and military duty and incarceration and travel-for-work etc.) be (sexually) available to at least one other spouse? Wouldn't it be more acceptable that the group could insist that no spouse have sex with anyone outside the group except with the group's prior expressed consent?

2. When an individual joins a group-marriage, who is marrying whom?

2a. For instance, suppose Alec marries Brenda. There is now a resulting corporate entity, the married-couple Alec-and-Brenda.
Now, Carl gets involved; does Carl marry Brenda and Brenda marry Carl (without dissolving the marriage between Alec and Brenda), and that's it? Or, do Carl and Brenda marry one another (forming the couple Carl-and-Brenda) and simultaneously Alec and Carl marry one another (forming the (same-sex) couple Alec-and-Carl)? Or does Carl marry the couple Alec-and-Brenda and the couple Alec-and-Brenda marry Carl, forming the corporate entity, the married trio Alec-and-Brenda-and-Carl?

2b. Of course the same questions would apply if there were two women and one man. Suppose Brenda and Carl marry each other, forming the couple Brenda-and-Carl, a corporate entity. Now when Debra joins the group, is it just Debra and Carl who marry each other? Or do Debra and Carl marry each other forming Carl-and-Debra while also Debra and Brenda marry each other forming the same-sex couple Brenda-and-Debra?

3. If two (maybe smallish) groups merge, what happens?
For instance, if Alec-and-Brenda marries Carl-and-Debra, is that what happens -- each couple, as a corporate entity, marries the other couple, as a corporate identity?
Or does the man from each couple marry the woman from the other couple -- Alec and Debra marrying each other while simultaneously Brenda and Carl marry each other?
Or does each individual from each couple, marry the other couple as a corporate entity, and each couple, as a corporate entity, marry each individual member of the other couple?
Or what?

4. Assuming my question 1 is answered "yes", and Alec and Brenda and Carl and Debra are all married, each (non-empty) subset of the four married to each other (non-empty) subset of the four (and vice-versa);

4a. If Debra wants to have sex with Evelyn (male or female), and Alec and Brenda and Carl all say "no", should their joint opinion rule?
What if it's just Alec and Brenda who say "no", and Carl can't be reached for comment?
Or if it's just Carl and Brenda who say "no", and Alec can't be reached for comment?
Or if it's just Alec and Carl who say "no", and Brenda can't be reached for comment?
Is that third case different, because neither Alec nor Carl is the same sex as Debra?
Does it matter whether Evelyn is a man or a woman?

4b. What if Alec hasn't slept with any of his three spouses in over a year, and Brenda and Carl and Debra all tell him "Listen, you've got to sleep with one of us, sometime in the next month". Should their joint opinion rule?
Same questions for what if it's just two of the other spouses who insist on consortium.
And again; does it matter if all the spouses who voice an opinion are the same sex as the spouse in question, or all the opposite sex?
Does it make a difference whether the spouse in question is male or female?
Is it less acceptable for the group to insist that a female member participate than to insist that a male member(yes, I see the pun, ha-ha) participate? Is that too much like rape? What if it's only the husbands who are unanimous? Does that make it more like rape, or even gang-rape?
Is it less acceptable for the group to insist that a male member participate, on the grounds that if he's just not interested he won't be physically able to perform? If so, does that problem go away if he can satisfy his obligations by agreeing to be the "bottom" with one of his husbands?

4d. The bigger the group is, the easier it will be to find a quorum (whatever a quorum is) of spouses that include both sufficient members of the same sex and sufficient members of the opposite sex as the spouse whose behavior is in question. In fact the group-marriage may decide something like, the spouse can do what s/he wants to do or not do what s/he wants not to do, unless a three-fifths super-majority of co-spouses, including both a simple majority of the husbands and a simple majority of the wives, decide to enforce the group's rights.
Would something like that be more acceptable?

Other

What subforum should I have posted this on? If there's already a thread for such questions, which thread should it have been on?

I don't understand. Which culture are you asking about? There is no such thing as "group marriage" in an abstract sense, anymore than there is a thing, "marriage". Some of your questions seem to be moral questions. I'm not sure your intentions are sufficiently made clear to address your questions in any substantive way.

I'm surprised that Americans can't deny other people sexual access to their spouse - I thought that was pretty universal in western definitions of "marriage". It used to be grounds for divorce, and the fact that it isn't anymore is mostly because "grounds" are no longer needed. Nonetheless, in the UK, for example, adultery is the main cause of divorce, and nearly twice as common as the second most common cause. Indeed, last I heard, adultery was still illegal in about half of the US - and punishable by a life sentence in Michigan!

Anyway, your questions:

1. The question makes no sense. "Wouldn't it?" isn't a question, it's a pondering. Taken literally, it's nonsense - it poses a counterfactual that is in fact factual (and if it weren't factual, we couldn't answer, because it would depend how many pigs were flying that day). Group marriages exist. If you want to know about their sociology, you should specify which culture you're talking about, as they differ dramatically.

2. It depends. The LORD has not decreed these things clearly, so rules have to be made up by people, who make up different rules depending on what culture they belong to.

3. It depends.

4. N/A.

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But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping
as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh
I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!

Like Sal says, we need to find real examples of group marriage to be sure. But I suppose even without such evidence, we can speculate.
I read some meta-study, similar to the one mentioned in this thread, which compared marriage forms in lots of cultures - percent polygyny, polyandry, monogamy, and group marriages. In their definition, a group marriage was distinct from polygamy. The way I understand the difference (or maybe just the way I personally define it) is that in polygamy one person is married to several other persons, whereas in a group marriage more than two persons are all married to each other.
By that definition, when Debra also joins the group, if she is considered married to only Alec and Carl (and Carl is only married to Brenda and Debra) then it would not be a proper group marriage, but instead a case of both polygyny and polyandry. But that distinction might not be necessary to make; a more pragmatic definition is that any culture which allows both multiple men and multiple women in one relationship can be said to allow group marriage.
The study found that the number of cultures which allowed group marriages was zero. But that is of course only traditional cultures, and does not imply that such relationships don't exist.

If we look at group marriages in the sense of all-married-to-each-other, then they can only be accepted in a culture that allows homosexual relationships. As far as I've understood from other studies like this, many cultures do, but most (all?) of them a) don't consider them marriages, and b) don't have equal homosexual relationships; the partners are distinguished either by age, by power, or by some sort of gender roles. I have heard of some cultures where men can not only have several wives but also several male partners, but they take on a distinctly different role and are therefore not really "married" to the women.

So the only culture (I know of) where proper group marriages could potentially be acceptable would be our very own. And it does exist, even though it is not exactly completely accepted in the mainstream culture.

On a side note, I've been told that there was a suggestion a few years ago in the Swedish parliament that marriages of up to 13 people should be allowed. If I'm not mistaken, it would have made us the first nation to allow two men and two women to marry. Sadly it failed, and our new marriage legislation is only the watered-down version: Gender-neutral, but nothing else is new.
It was also suggested that marriage in the legal sense should be separated from the religious sense. Quite rightly, I think, because other groups of cohabitants (siblings, etc.) should really have the same legal rights as people in a sexual relationship. The smaller churches favoured that idea (because it would allow them to say no to gay couples) but the former state church opposed it, so that failed too.

Thus, the only group marriages I know anything about, and can try to answer questions about, are the legally unrecognised ones that exist in the sexual liberation subculture in our own culture.


1. Most such groups would be rather politically progressive, and would consider the right to sex as a reactionary idea. (That is, unless the relation also happens to have a BDSM component; such relationships are relatively common in the BDSM community.)
As for denying the right for a spouse to have sex outside the group (known as "polyfidelity"), it certainly happens, but I think a person who is okay with group marriage is also more likely than others to accept promiscuity. In other words; no, it is acceptable, but not more acceptable than in monogamous relationships.
(Concerning the observation that those rules no longer hold for mainstream marriages: I think that is definitely just a sign of the legal status of marriage losing power. It's not that we consider violating those rules acceptable, it's more that we don't consider it a matter for the court.)

2. The most common kind of group marriage is that of only three people. In that case, the two of the same sex sometimes consider themselves to be married to each other, and sometimes not. It is probably more common if they are two women, since bisexuality is generally considered to be more common in women. For larger groups (and same-sex groups), I would say that the common view is that they are all married to each other.
But there is another interesting thing to note. In traditional polygamous cultures such as the islamic, it is clearly stated that a man should love his wives equally. But in modern poly/group relationships, a common view is that there is one primary relationship, and then you add on a secondary. If the relationship should not work out, the secondary partner will have to go. But in most cases the secondary partner would probably not be considered married.

3. I've never actually heard of that happening, not to the extent that the people involved have called themselves married. But it is not too unusual for two couples to form some sort of sexual relation to each other. I would say the likely possibilities are
a) the couples "marry" each other, as corporate entities
b) the individuals all marry each other, dissolving the original couples; just like any other four-people group marriage, the same-sex persons may or may not consider themselves married
c) the two members of one couple marry one person in the other couple, making it more or less like a strict polygamous relationship

4. That would be 105 marriages in just four people... but maybe they like wedding parties.

4a. In a group which has agreed to polyfidelity, the norm would be that you have to have the permission of all the other group members. In an MMFF relationship with people who are predominantly heterosexual, it might be that Brenda doesn't care as much about what Debra does, but it would probably not be okay to go against her veto.
But other possibilities exist; if we have a couple+couple type relationship, you might only have to ask your primary partner. In a one-to-many relationship, you might only have to ask the one.

4b. It seems extremely unlikely that any egalitarian group would force any of its members to have sex.

4d. While such democratic structures of group marriages sounds like an interesting idea, I have not heard of anything like that in real life.

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Pace Chuma, the studies I've heard of found group marriage to be rather more common than simple polyandry, though I can't quote any. However, it tends to be very much an aristocratic phenomenon. Eg iirc among the Kaingang only 10% of people are/were in group marriages.

EDIT: incest also has to be considered here. Group marriages are often based on fraternal wife-sharing and/or sororal husband-sharing, so homosexual relationships within group marriages would often be considered incestuous.

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But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping
as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh
I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!

As I have a group-marriage culture, however, I may as well contribute some con-answers while we're here.

1. The matriarch can throw anyone out of her house; but she is obliged by honour to show degrees of leniency to different people, particularly her daughters, so in effect "just cause" must be shown. After abuse and treason, the biggest just cause is failing to labour in the interests of the house - and not offering to do your fair sexual share could well be included in this. But the opinions of the people in the marriage don't count at all, at least officially - decisions are made by the previous generation (until the marriage becomes the ruling generation, in which case the matriarch is the eldest home-born true-woman).

2. People are entering the house, and specifically a cell within that house, although entering the house is what counts. The core of the marriage is one, two or three sisters born in that house. Additional sisters may be acquired, and a number of husbands shared between the women. "Marriage" is really a bad translation. Marriage isn't something like our marriage, a relation between two entities. Marriage is simply how to translate the change of duties that accompanies a change of dwelling place into the house of a woman.

3. Groups cannot merge. It is rare for divorced people to remarry (because they're seen as untrustworthy). The group survives as long as the home-born true-women survive. Once they are dead, the group doesn't exist anymore. The survivors may be adopted into other groups, but this is done on an individual basis (though certainly it must be common for several survivors to be adopted en masse).

4. N/A.

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But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping
as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh
I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!

10% sounds like plenty. I haven't got any source - do you, Sal? It would be interesting to see just how they organise their group marriages. I can imagine that defining marriage can be a little difficult with some cultures, so that might give rise to different answers to whether there are group marriages in the world. The EAC linked earlier doesn't even mention such a category. Also, they have found only four cases of polyandry, so even if group marriage is more common it could be very rare.

As for incest, that's a good point - do incest laws generally apply to homosexual relations as well? The EAC does say that preferentially sororal polygyny is the exception rather than the norm, but as far as I've understood polyandry is usually (always?) fraternal.

Edited for Sal's new post:
Is this a conculture of yours? It sounds a bit similar to mine, actually, but I won't go into that at the moment.

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No, throughout the U.S. adultery has been decriminalized beginning in the 1920s. (I live in Michigan and used to live in Texas; if I'm wrong it's not about either of those states.) And beginning in the 1980s the existence of an established legal marriage no longer implies consent.

Obviously a made-up one that I haven't made-up yet. I intended it to be similar enough to familiar RL cultures similar to the ones we actually live in, that the notion of binding contracts or vows or oaths, and the notion of corporate entities, would have close analogs. I was angling towards asking whether my (previously unstated) idea -- that a marriage was both a set of contracts between each member of the group and each other member of the group, and also a set of contracts between the group as an entity and each member of the group -- made sense; and whether it was similar to anything anyone knew about from any RL culture.

Sorry.Substantive? Is this thread suddenly substantive again?
But I'd say your answers are substantive.

Well, you don't have answer it, especially if it's not a question.
But I'd say you have answered it pretty well, even if it isn't a question.

Have you got a list of such cultures? Even an incomplete list would do, though the more complete the better. References would be nice, and so would links, but don't hold back; whatever information you have is more than what I have.
It would be nice if one (or more) of the cultures in question were similar to one of the cultures I've lived in; or, at least, one of the cultures I (think I) know about.

That's a good start; thanks.
Yes, I've read that often a man's two wives (in cultures where a man can have two wives at the same time) would be sisters, or, if they weren't sisters before he married them, they would become (or be considered) sisters once they shared a husband. Similarly, I've read that often a woman's two husbands (in cultures where a woman can have two husbands at the same time) would be brothers, or, if they brothers before they married her, they would become brothers once they shared a wife.
I don't know of (m)any cultures in which a man can have more than one living wife at a time and also a woman can have more than one living husband at a time, with all of the marriages being considered active.
The question of incest in homosexual relations is worth a thread itself, I guess. If the USA gets rid of all its anti-homosexual feeling, will father-son, mother-daughter, brother-brother, and sister-sister sex, still disgust us? But I don't want to talk about that on this thread, just 'cause I don't want the topic to get re-hijacked so soon.

Thanks, Chuma! Lots of interesting points; and lots of good points.

Among the things I will go ahead and quote:
I was expecting the opposite answer. Thanks.

That whole answer is interesting.

I'd kind of guess that would be what would likeliest happen as a general rule.

You're right! Even if it's between each person and each other person (6 marriages) and between the group and each person (4 marriages) that's a total of 20 marriages.

Thanks.

I'm not sure you're right. Even if you are, what if in a conculture that particular unlikelihood were commonplace instead of unlikely?

Except for the "polyfidelity" example you gave in your answer to 4a which I snipped; but there these issues were settled by unanimity instead of by supermajority or any other such thing as I proposed.

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I've lost track of the quote I intended to reply to; I thought it was in Salmoneus's post, but maybe it was in Chuma's. But here's the reply (I hope someone can figure out what it's a reply to!):

In the event of a "polyfaithful" several-husbands-several-wives group-marriage in which most of the men and most of the women are heterosexual and most of the rest are bisexual, it might be that the couples-relationship between two spouses of the same sex, -- if it were assumed to exist -- would involve obligations other than a right to have sex with one another. For the men, for instance, it might be a matter of mutually-required defense; "your enemies are now my enemies", "I will defend your cause whether you are right or wrong", and/or such stuff. Since in many cultures the marriage-rite between a man and a woman shares much with the blood-brotherhood rite between two men, this doesn't seem farfetched to me.

Also, to all responders; I appreciate that you've actually read studies you can't remember the references to; that happens to me a lot, especially on the ZBB, CBB, and CWBB. But I wish you could remember; and, if that memory does happen to come to you later, I hope you'll tell me. Thanks.

Sal already touched on a lot of this somewhat, but I just felt a need to point somethings out about your explanations for why hunting is typified as male. You said-

This only makes sense if women can comparatively easily find another sexual partner (after her previous one dies in battle), in contrast to men not so easily finding another sexual partner. As far as I know there's no biological imperative that either gender is more or less driven towards monogamy and away from serial polygamy or similar solutions. In terms of socialization, it's true that women could in a particular culture be given more leeway to find other sexual partners, but in many societies concern over paternity of children more harshly restricts female sexuality, disallowing or more tightly regulating remarriage.


There's an interesting confusion of biological processes (breastfeeding) and social relationships (primary child care-taking responsibility) going on here. I think you could maybe argue that breastfeeding creates a physical and social bond between mother and child that influences the social sphere (with children being carried by the mother, not the father), but again that seems like an assumption potentially rooted in a combination of gender essentialism and ethnocentricism.


This is a surprisingly common argument in evolutionary psychology and historical economics - basically meat gets people laid. There might be some truth to parts of it - that, generally speaking people like meat and crave it, so a person who delivers it gets rewarded with sexy times and ends up passing their role down to their children, but it has nothing to do with gender. If anything, this explains how a particular pattern of "men are hunters, women are gatherers" could have been reinforced, not how it was created.

There's a lot of cultural baggage surrounding this point, that men get judged by women (and that the reverse is less common or something). I think feminists probably analyze this as judgment of women being naturalized so it's not seen as sexual selectivity but just plain natural, and I'm tempted to agree. That said, if women are more selective, it makes sense why - they have to carry the child for at least nine months and then there's a very high chance (due to both biological and social pressures) of them having to nurse and otherwise care for it for years. Given those circumstances, it's understandable that they want to be selective - the other partner can much more easily leave. That said, none of this explains why hunting is (supposedly) so universally used as the means of selection.

Lastly, all of this talk of selection assumes a rather modern conception of sexual consent. In the previous bullet point (which I left out because it's only very indirectly tied to these points), you mentioned that men are (we think) generally physically stronger than women, and since we seem to be also talking about a time before state societies recognized crimes like rape, I think it's pertinent to say that female sexual selectivity is only part of the equation. Of course, many of these groups had means of getting rid of unwanted pregnancies, but coercion and continual threats of violence could have easily prevented use of those practices where known and available. Bride stealing and lingering romanticizing of it suggest that many, although by no means all or even most, women in pre-agricultural or early agricultural societies lived in such situations. In short, I don't know that consent played as large as a role as you think it might have.

More on topic: Here's an interesting article on how rarely adultery laws are enforced in the US.

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It goes on in RL marriages too.
In our culture, wives don't want their husbands to share childcare responsibilities.
Most of them say they do; probably most of those who say they do also think they do.
But there's no quicker route to divorce for a father than for him to try to help his wife with the childcare.
If he doesn't try to help, she'll bitch and moan about that, and be perfectly content to do so.
But if he does try to help, everything he does will be wrong. His wife has the vagina and the tits and that makes her the only competent childcare-giver in the house.
And that applies even to help with homework, even up into the child's high-school freshman year.
She may want help, but if so, she wants it from a clone of herself, not from her husband.

Another interesting thing that was recently suggested in the Swedish parliament was that sex should require explicit consent - it should not be enough to not say no, you would have to say yes. I find the idea hilarious.


There are a couple of examples on Wikipedia, if you haven't checked it already.


In the parent-child case, there is also an age issue, and a responsibility issue; don't know about other countries, but around here the age of consent is higher if the adult has a position of responsibility towards the child.


I guess I'm mainly talking about people in (a subculture of) my own culture, where individualism and equality are almost religion. In a conculture, it doesn't sound too strange to me.


What I found a little peculiar was your idea of particular numbers such as a three-fifths super-majority. I would expect families to have simpler rules than that.
If they do have, as you said above, the right to force a member to sex, it seems to me that the most likely is that they have a single leader who decides.


Sounds very reasonable.

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Just out of interest, do you happen to have any other explanations?


Actually, I don't think that's quite true. Suppose we have a completely promiscuous culture - no marriages, everyone can have sex with each other. Even in that case, it is still the number of women that limits childbirth, as I said.
Also, as we can see from the data, most cultures are polygynous, so a woman can comparatively easily find another sexual partner.


I'm not talking about vague things like social bonds - those would only evolve if it was beneficial. But if a woman is pregnant, at least in the later stages, she is probably not very good at chasing mammoths. And if she is breastfeeding several times per day, long hunting trips would also be a problem.

I'm not sure what you mean by ethnocentricism. We can see that there are a total of 0 cultures where women are more likely, or even equally likely, to hunt, so the idea that hunting is a male activity is hardly ethnocentric. There is no section "Sex differences: Childcare", but I think we can guess. On he contrary, the idea that gender roles are strange and unnatural, that sounds like ethnocentrism to me.


And women do also try to impress men, in various ways. They might have done it by hunting too, if it hadn't been for those other reasons. But as mentioned before, their need to impress is slightly less.


We think? If you have any evidence to the contrary, I'm very curious to see it.


That is certainly true. Even pre-hunting humans probably had some sort of control of this sort of thing - if you try to rape a woman, her partner and her brothers are likely to be upset - but it was probably not unusual anyway.

That is of course one reason why men need to be physically strong; it helps them defend their wives against rapists, and it helps them if they want to be rapists themselves. Wouldn't it be more effective if the woman was stronger and could defend herself? Sure, but from an evolutionary perspective it is really the husband who stands to lose the most if his wife gets raped.

We can get even more provocative: It might actually be good for the woman to fight back in general, because that way she can make sure that only the strong men can have sex with her. That could potentially be another reason why men are stronger than women - women who were too strong didn't get laid.
I have my doubts about this theory, I should say, but it's wonderfully provocative.

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