One wife for 2-3 brothers: Polyandry custom fading in India | Hacker News Reader

One wife for 2-3 brothers: Polyandry custom fading in India

nytimes.com

28 pointscredo19 comments

Interesting. I've just finished reading Sex At Dawn which explores human sexuality from an evo-psych point of view, particularly the link between us and Bonobos.

I have a healthy amount of skepticism about most evo-psych but the book made a very well argued point about the natural state of humanity being non-monogamous, and that early hunter-gatherer societies were mostly non-monogamous, one variant being the polyandrous kind of relationships described in the article. Though most of the examples had a more free-ranging variant, similar to Bonobo groups where there were very few rules about who slept with whom, regardless of marital status.

Matt Ridley's The Red Queen also discusses this particular culture, being one of the extremely small number of polyandrous (one wife, multiple husbands) cultures ever known to have existed, in contrast to the extremely large number of polygamous (one husband, multiple wives) cultures. Interestingly, in the small number of cultures where it does exist, the men are always brothers -- presumably this is the only way to get the situation to work without the men killing each other and/or children which they suspect to not be theirs.

I haven't read Sex At Dawn, but human mating really has very little in common with bonobo mating. The human drive to pair-bond is actually incredibly strong (even in polygamous cultures the man almost always has one primary wife), and if I recall correctly, nearly unique among mammals (though common among birds).

Actually that's what made Sex at Dawn so interesting, they explore a number of hunter-gatherer societies (Amazon, Africa, China . . . ) and they are predominantly non-monogamous. They might have the concept of marriage, but often it won't be something that is recognizable when compared to the typical modern view. I.e. the marriage ceremony includes having sex with all of the men in the village.

They go on to make a very strong argument about the similarity between us and Bonobos. As I said before, I'm not sure I buy everything but they made a very strong argument.

And yeah, monogamy almost never occurs in nature. Even penguins who are supposedly monogamous only stick together long enough to have kids, then they rejoin the dating pool.

If we really had much in common with bonobos, we wouldn't have a concept of marriage at all. Everybody would be willing to mate with everybody at all times; whereas humans only want to mate with people they're attracted to.

The mere fact that men care whether their sex partners are good-looking tells us that pair bonding is pretty deeply ingrained in our psyches. While females have a stronger incentive to make sure the men they mate with are of the highest quality (since they could be stuck carrying and caring for their kid for a long time), men invest little in mating so in the absence of pair bonding should be willing to mate with any female unless they expect to find a better female in the next few hours. Instead, men tend to be picky about the physical characteristics of the women they're willing to mate with.

I think the conclusion of The Red Queen on this subject was that humans are somewhere between monogamous and polygamous; men are polygamous when they can get away with it (i.e. when they're powerful enough to get away with taking more than their fair share of women) and monogamous when they can't. Women have little desire to have multiple husbands, but do want to mate with the best quality men, so will often marry lower-quality men but have affairs with higher-quality ones.

Strict monogamy no, but pair bonding as a deep-seated instict yes.

The point the book makes is that as we transferred from foraging to farming the entire dynamic shifted. As hunter-gatherers there was not competition for resources and it didn't matter who the genetic father of a child was. In most foraging societies today people don't care about paternity and treat all the children in the village as their own. In several Amazonian tribes they believe that children are made from an accumulation of semen in the mother and husbands often offer their wives to other people in the village.

The shift to farming meant that population density increased and competition for goods meant that wealth began to concentrate. With that there was a reason to ensure paternity. So yes we made a shift, but looking at our existence for the majority of the time that we've existed as a species we can see why we have always had a very tough time with monogamy.

Also, the idea that women have little desire to have multiple husbands is not true at all. Women are just as promiscuous as men are and when given the freedom are more than willing. Again, I highly recommend Sex at Dawn because the views that you're expressing are the exact ones that it addresses point by point.

> in the absence of pair bonding [men] should be willing to mate with any female unless they expect to find a better female in the next few hours

Are you sure they aren't? Craigslist "casual encounters" for the bay area had eight hundred m4w ads today, very few of which seem to have any criteria beyond "female" (in comparison, there are only a hundred w4m ads, and those are fairly selective). And I've seen some scary looking hookers out there who haven't quit for lack of customers. I think many men try to seem more successful or safer by acting more picky than they actually are.

That one "Is There Anything Good About Men?" talk from a few years ago mentions some DNA research that shows that modern humans have twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors (with the corollary being that the average male with an enduring genetic line reproduced twice as often as the average female). If that's true, it's hard to imagine ancestral humans being anything near strictly monogamous.

http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm

So what happens to the "extra" women?

Missing women of Asia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_women_of_Asia

But in a society where women are so valuable that they need to be shared, what's the incentive for female infanticide?

Is it possible that many of the women disappeared into harems of the nobility?

The women are valuable to grown men, they're not valuable to the parents that have to raise them. That's where the infanticide comes from.

It's very sad. In fact, the only state in India where there are more women than men (which is the natural state in most everywhere in the world) is Kerala, the state I'm from. I believe this is because the state has been run by the Communists for most of its post-independant history (which has also resulted in a 99% female literacy rate, again by far the highest in India).

Sometimes we forget about the social benefits communism has provided in certain parts of the world. I have no doubt, for example, that Afghanistan would be far healthier, wealthier and more advanced today if the Russians were not driven out in the 80s.

This is an important point, but I think Afghanistan as an example is a bit misguided. Home-grown (as much as possible) and home-governing communists are usually going to do a much better job than a colonial government of any political orientation, which is what I fear Afghanistan would have ended up as.

I would like to know of a polygynous or polyandrous hacker http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1523224

I created a throwaway account to reply. I'm not even sure this topic is Hacker News but hopefully I can add some insight. I'm a regular contributor here.

Where to start? I'm male, around 30 years old, American, raised Christian, not active in the religion. I was fairly awkward with women and people in general when I was younger, but I put myself through lots of experiences, learned a lot, and eventually became much more social, though I'm still a natural introvert.

I'm seeing women in a few different places. I have one regular girlfriend where we meet during the high ovulating part of her cycle each month, which starts 14 days from the first day of her period. We have our first kid's names picked out. I have another two or three women that are very important to me. All know, though I go light on details to hopefully avoid jealousy.

Thinking about how to set up homes, schooling, and parenting is difficult. I study a lot to learn about it. I intend to support all my children and to grow my family slowly as I can afford to provide. I work a lot, and I try to work smart in addition to hard. I do a mix of work with steady pay and with upside.

All my closest friends know, roughly 3/4ths of them approve. My parents know, they don't approve at all. I'm not sure when I'd go public with this: Just like being gay 100 years ago, it'd break a lot of potential opportunities and meet lots of scorn and criticism by people. I have some professional acquaintances on here who probably won't recognize this. A couple close friends are here too and will likely recognize this is me.

If you have any questions, go ahead and I'll reply when I've got a break in a little bit. I've thought about this extensively over a great many years. Also, if anyone has any bad reactions, or criticisms, or warnings, or think this is bad, then I invite you to share those as well. Actually, it'd be helpful to me in gauging people's reactions, so all are welcome to ask or respond if they're curious.

How is this different than being a dude from the trailer park or ghetto who has 4 kids with 4 different baby mommas?

When you have a family, you can do it with planning, foresight, and an ability to provide for your children and raise them well. Or you can do it without those things, which is usually what happens in the situation you described.

So having a family this way is different from a trailer park the same that a normal couple planning to have 4 kids together that they can afford to provide for differs from a trailer park couple having 4 kids they didn't think about having, weren't ready for, and can't provide adequately for.

It still sounds stupid to me, but good luck.

I am, I suppose, arguably both. I'm part of something that's more like a clan than anything else - there are ten members currently and each person's relationship with each of the others is somewhere between friend and full partner, though most of us are partnered to at least two of the rest (and myself and the strongest personality female partner are both partnered to most of the rest as well as each other - I'm currently writing this sat on her flat's deck in PDX).

This doesn't prevent any of us having partners outside the group, either, although if I expect to emotionally commit to somebody I try to at least introduce them to the rest since these are the people that I trust with my life and my future.

I, personally, seem to have been gifted with a very minimal capacity for jealousy; the other members vary, and it's not really a problem - anything that makes anybody unhappy is taken as something to be understood and resolved by conversation and change. The cross-support possibilities help a lot, especially given that a number of us have fairly high velocity lives and can disappear for days at a time dealing with work (though a number of us are in IT of some form so sometimes we lean on each other for help during crunch times too).

All relationship patterns require lots of effort to work well. All relationship patterns involve drama sometimes. The difference in my experience (I've done monogamy, open - i.e. single emotional, multiple sexual partner, multiple-independent-partner poly, and now clan) is what sorts of drama, what sorts of effort, and what sorts of people. Currently the clan approach is my favourite, but then again at any given time the approach I was using was my favourite.

I don't generally go out of my way to broadcast my choice of relationship pattern, but I also don't go out of my way to not mention it - to refer to one of my loves as my partner without making the existence of the rest clear seems to me to be disrespectful to the other people that I'm in love with. This hasn't, so far, caused a problem with any client to my knowledge when it's come up in social conversation - but even if it did I'd simply stop discussing my life with the person who found it troublesome, it wouldn't make me any more willing to lie about who I love and why if asked a direct question.

I'm not really sure what else I should cover - it's hard to know which things people will find remarkable about your life when you're in the middle of living it. I'll try and monitor replies here though (or I could start a Tell HN in the reddit IAMA style if people preferred)

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