Will There Be Less Prostitution if Polygamy is Legal?

I think what the muslim really claim is that when polygamy is legal then prostitution will go away. That is very obvious because things that people do that used to be called prostitution is now called marriage.

However, that’s misleading. The issue is government still interfere in all kind of marriage whether polygamy and monogamy and that would still make most people worst off. It’s not the poly that’s the issue. It’s the “gamy” and government’s “blessing”, “interferences”, and “regulations” that comes with marriage that prevents people from maximizing their selfish interests.

The short answer is yes. To add more details:

1. Men want many women
2. Men want many women temporarily
3. Women prefer rich men
4. Women preference for life long monogamous relationship is often far less than her preference for richer men.
5. It’s natural that rich men grab many women and pay women for short term sexual relationship. People will do this. Period.
6. In monogamy culture, it’s called prostitution (prostitute, sugar babies, mistresses, etc.)
7. In polygamy culture, it’s called marriage (polygamy, contract marriage, etc.)
8. So yes, obviously, there is less prostitution in polygamy culture. The same thing is just not called prostitution anymore.
9. There are other factors that exaggerate this even more

I think #4 is the most controversial statement. It’s not that the girl that mainly wants to be the only one. It’s every other males that don’t want the rich man to get more and more and more and more.

“Which woman would not rather be John Kennedy’s third wife than Bozo the Clown’s first?”

• L. Betzig – Female Evolutionist Don’t know where I get the quote. Most likely Matt Ridley’s book. Here is another site that have that quote http://www.quora.com/Quora/Is-it-fair-for-Quora-to-make-money-from-our-answers/answers/790230/comment/589248

“Far from being laws to protect women, anti polygamy statutes may really do more to protect (less desirable) men”

Matt Ridley – the red queen http://www.amazon.com/The-Red-Queen-Evolution-Nature/dp/0060556579

Pressure to prohibit prostitution is bigger in polygamy culture than in monogamy culture.

In monogamy culture you get one wife anyway no matter how rich you are. In polygamy culture, success means the difference between having many wives and having none or even death along with all your families.

Also in polygamy culture, you can have many mates within marriage without having to do it outside.

More stringent laws against prostitution combined with legalization of getting many women, within marriage (instead of prostitution) naturally means less prostitution.

So yes, that muslim is correct.

Before the relationship where men have several mistresses is called prostitution. Now, they call it marriage.

Some would say, but polygamy is different. The girls are doing it for a long time. Great. The muslims also have this contract marriage. So before if you rent a woman for 1 hour we call that prostitution. Now if we rent her for 1 hour we call it a form of marriage.

So yes, less prostitution because it’s now called differently. Then what? If we look at the words it’s technically correct.

However, I don’t see how that leads to any “improvement” or any real significant different for most people.

If anything most people are worst off because now the mullah rather than they have the power to choose their mates.

Perhaps some background.

Relative to monogamy, polygyny creates greater fitness variance (the distance between the “winners” and the “losers” in the reproductive game) among males than among females because it allows a few males to monopolize all the females in the group. The greater fitness variance among males creates greater pressure for men to compete with each other for mates. Only big and tall males can win mating opportunities. Among pair-bonding species like humans, in which males and females stay together to raise their children, females also prefer to mate with big and tall males because they can provide better physical protection against predators and other males.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200706/ten-politically-incorrect-truths-about-human-nature

So basically, women do prefer certain males (in this article it means big and tall though for humans wealth matter more than just height), than other males.

The idea that men are not equally capable to attract women is not controversial. Not all of us are equally sexy.

Things start getting more controversial when we see the natural conclusion that desire to pick “sexier” people can often override desire to have exclusive access especially among women.

In other word, many of us, especially women, prefer to share sexier partners than be the only one for less sexy partners.

Males and females are different in one important aspect of the trade off.

Males aim at quantity and females at quality. http://blogs.webmd.com/mens-health-office/2006/06/sperm-its-quantity-not-quality.html http://theamericanscholar.org/the-peacock-problem-by-long/

If I can choose between 5 most beautiful girls from my high school or 1 miss universe, I would choose the 5 (or more wisely choose the miss universe, rent her out to Bill Gates, and use the money to rent the 5).

If a girl can choose between 5 richest men in her high school or Bill Gates, most would choose Bill Gates. Most beautiful women would rather be Tiger Wood’s 5th mistress than be my wife. Seriously. And that’ the real reason why polygamy is illegal.

Because it’s fundamentally incompatible with democracy. Under polygamy a few men end up with most of the women and most of the children. That means they get to indoctrinate 100 children at breakfast instead of 2-5. It also means that the only chance young men have at getting any action at all is staying in the older men’s good graces. Pretty soon you have entire communities of thousands of people run exclusively by a handful. It would be exactly like the current distribution of wealth in America, except with direct social influence instead.

…

Actually, some states prohibit polygamy in practice regardless of marital status. But that is part of what makes prosecuting polygamy so tricky. Very, very rarely do people head on down to the courthouse with multiple wives to seal the deal. See e.g. Utah Criminal Code 103-51-2. To be fair to your point, one guy who lives with multiple girlfriends is very unlikely to have this sort of law enforced against him. States are more worried about secondary effects of polygamy, like child marriages and sexual abuse.

…

This exactly. Democracy and equality is not possible in a polygamous country. In a polygamous society, men with power and money get multiple wives, and the regular shmoes are left with nothing. I don’t buy the argument that women will have multiple husbands because no matter how far women’s rights has gone, men are simply more driven to take risks and obtain power. And power equals sex as demonstrated by thousands of years of human history.

Someone needs to cite me on this but, I think sociologists have looked at the level of violence in polygamous societies (or societies with high number of single men, which is an inevitable result of polygamy) and the correlation is substantial (http://www.parapundit.com/archives/002217.html cited by AccidentalPedant).

And I would like to add that if polygamy was legal and widespread, pretty much every male on reddit would be literally forever alone. That sounds great doesn’t it?

[EDIT]

Let me add some few points since this is getting some attention. Some people have argued “why can’t women have many husbands”. Like I’ve stated, I think risk taking and power seeking is a genetic trait that is more prevalent with males. This is actually a well studied topic and I’ll just point you to a Google Scholar search of “risk taking males” ( http://scholar.google.com/scholar?gcx=w&q=risk+taking+males&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&hl=en&tab=ws ) And power and money (which males are better at accumulating simply due to their risk taking nature) allows you to be able to support more spouses financially. thelastpizzaslice also points out “Women can’t have hundreds of children with multiple husbands.” I could not have put that more eloquently.

Another argument people have put out is that “Just because its legal, doesn’t mean people will adapt polygamy”. Which I agree within a very short timeline. We were (or most of us I hope) raised in a monogamous society and taught from childhood that this was the right thing, so just because the law changes, it does not mean our mindset can change as well. However, there is no scientific evidence pointing to the fact that human beings genetically desire monogamous relationships. So there is just no telling what might happen 20 or a 100 years down the line. I believe government has the responsibility to do what is good for the overall society even if it limits certain freedoms. In my point of view, the propagation of polygamy is equal to the propagation of enforced celibacy on certain male populations. For every male with two wives, there will be one man with no wife. I simple don’t want to live in a society that’s populated by thousands of angry single men with nothing to lose.

http://vi.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/krdd8/why_is_polygamy_illegal/ These are comments I got from the web when I asked around why prostitution is illegal and why we don’t let rich people to get all the girls. Yes they’re not authoritative. I’ll find more authoritative comments. These comments are typical though.

“I think the REAL issue behind the polygamy laws is because the people who push them are guys not getting ANY and who are jealous that some guy might be getting more than they are. Feminists oppose it, but they generally oppose marriage too, except between 2 women. So what is news here? It’s the old SEX POLICE issue!”

• Anonymous

“Your presentation neglects to consider the alternate effects of your propositions. I have brought up class warfare several times, but I don’t think you realize the effect of what you are proposing. If all women chose only rich and intelligent men, other men would hunt us down and kill us. Can I make it any clearer?”

Eromsnid Flor – Mensan http://ka.uni.mensa.narkive.com/5cNKVa3G/why-we-are-minorities.2

“The arrangement you describe would definitely be disadvantageous to men (even though us dumb guys would probably think it sounded like a great deal). The problem is, for every guy with two ladies, there’d be a guy with none. If you want a stable society, you don’t want too many unhappy guys with no partners.”

• Michael Snyder

So what does it have to do with prostitution?

Difficulty in defining prostitution

It depends on how we define prostitution. Legally it means “sex with incentive”.

As used in this subdivision, “prostitution” includes any lewd act between persons for money or other consideration.

http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/pub/11-12/bill/asm/ab_0651-0700/ab_665_bill_20110831_amended_sen_v96.html

I found that this definition is difficult. What constitute “other consideration”? Who knows.

You can give her flower to get laid. You can promise an option to pay a life time alimony she can exercise at will to have sex if you’re desperate enough. You can bullshit women to have sex. However, if you offer money, it’s illegal.

If other consideration, that includes mowing grass counts, virtually all sex is prostitution. Which is kind of problematic to answer the question.

So, in this answer I will simply use these intuitive definition. Many people will disagree with this definition. However, if you ask people what’s prostitution and what’s marriage then their definition will fit their data more.

1. In prostitution, free market decides the terms. Only what he and she want matter. Period.
2. In marriage, whether it’s polygamy or monogamy, those in power decides the terms.

This definition is also problematic.

We can treat free sex as “super cheap” or “free” prostitution. We can treat marriage as “heavily regulated” prostitution for ease of analysis.

However, I think the question use prostitution to mean prostitution outside marriage where man have sex and somehow end up paying outside explicit approval of his society.

In short, marriage is prostitution where government is the pimp.

Sex outside marriage means jumping the pimp. The most natural way to do it is called prostitution.

For example, in marriage in US, men and women can only pick singles. Here, the will of voters override the will of marrying people. Also recently there are votes deciding whether gay couples can get married or not. Again it shows how voters, rather than the couple, decide whether the deal is ok or not.

In prostitution, you just privately talk to the girl in private place, negotiate the deal, and that’s it. You don’t have to worry about the need, interest, opinion, or beliefs of everyone else. Good for you. Good for the girls. Not good for everyone else right?

Now let’s put it this way. Say prostitution is legal. Then men will no longer need to appease their mullah, government, society to get laid.

A man will only need one person to agree to have sex with him, namely the woman/women he wants to mate with. If all the women want is money and the men is very rich, then that’s it. Deal.

This will happen quite a lot.

http://www.livescience.com/10880-rich-women-prefer-attractive-older-men.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/18/do-women-want-rich-men_n_879760.html http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/08/22/national-review-women-evolved-to-prefer-superior-rich-men-like-romney/

Imagine if women are free to rent herself. Put yourself on the shoe of the mullah. Mullahs will have less bargaining position to get people to do what he wants.

Before Mullah can say, “Bob, you can only get laid if you get married, and that means your brothers need to be suicide bombers to kill infidels and help me wash dishes. Otherwise, I would say the marriage is invalid.”

If prostitution is legal, Bob will only need to get Ann to agree to get laid, which will be cheaper than becoming suicide bombers. Good for Bob. Good for Ann. Bad for mullah.

When prostitution is legal, men that get laid is men that makes the women happy rather than the mullah/voters happy.

In most transaction, both side will be better of if they do not have to care about interests of 3rd parties. Hence, compared mano to mano, prostitution outside marriage will be more common than marriage and more kids will be born outside marriage.

A 23-year-old unwed mother, Tori is the new normal. As The New York Times recently reported, more than half of births to American women under 30 now occur outside of marriage

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/03/a-new-normal-for-the-american-family-kids-outside-of-marriage/254280/

In islamic countries, singles cannot vote, mullah can. So women can only pick men favored by the mullahs, namely muslims, suicide bombers, religious fanatics, etc.

In both cases, they are the same. The holder of political power, do not want prostitution outside marriage. But pressures in polygamist societies are bigger, so less prostitution.