Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

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> By guaranteeing that just about every man is matched with a woman, monogamy brings harmony and social order.

Without a patriarchal women-as-property model, monogamy demonstrably does not actually do that[0][1]; in a non-patriarchal, egalitarian system, removing the monogamy restriction might do that better than having it, even though monogamy is clearly better at that among strongly patriarchal women-as-property systems, where removing the restriction just means adopting polygyny where the more wealthy men have more women just like they have more of any other property.

[0] In the US only a little over 55% of adults are married, and by race only whites and Asians are over 50%, blacks at less than 30%.

[1] In fact, if women opt out of marriage in any significant numbers, and (given same sex marriage as an option) male and female homosexual preference is equally distributed (or female homosexual preference more common), polyandry is necessary to achieve almost-all-men-get-partners.

Calling it a “property model” is totally wrong. It is about two people with moral obligations to each other and to society.

> Calling it a “property model” is totally wrong.

The historical model in which monogamy achieves the goal claimed of guaranteeing virtually all men a partner (and where polygamy, which on such cases is universally exclusive polygyny, does not do so) is a patriarchal, women-as-property model—this is a historically common model but generally not seen in the modern developed world, and in the modern developed world monogamy generally does not have (and generalized polygamy is not opposed to) that effect.

Moral and legal obligations that restrict your choices don’t make you “property”. Property itself isn’t a single, neat concept, but refers to bundles of rights and obligations. By using the word “property”, you’re invoking the mental image of some of the rights associated with physical property, like the near absolute right to destroy and use for your own purposes.

Marriage is no such a thing at all. It’s a kind of relationship with its own peculiar set of moral rights and obligations, like e.g. contracts or torts.

Being required to exercise care so as to not be liable in tort doesn’t make you anyone’s “property”, and neither does a contract to sell them goods.

Monogamous marriage is no doubt a restriction of freedom, just like all of the other rules that govern our society. The argument is whether such restrictions are justified, not making poorly-founded analogies to “property”.

> Moral and legal obligations that restrict your choices don’t make you “property”.

You know, we could debate the appropriateness of the word "property" in the description all day (and I'll get back to that later in this post), but it is, in any case, tangential to the point which is that the utility of exclusive legal monogamy as opposed to tolerance of polygamy in assuring men with partners is demonstrably, empirically only present when comparing systems in which women have a legally inferior, subordinate position, and that whatever social utility can be said to derive from that effect is not achieved by choosing exclusive legal monogamy in systems with more gender-equal ranges of social and economic freedoms and choices.

> By using the word “property”, you’re invoking the mental image of some of the rights associated with physical property

Yes, deliberately so.

> like the near absolute right to destroy and use for your own purposes.

Yes, and in the systems in which monogamy has the effect of providing near-universal guarantee that men get stable partners, that is a very close approximation of the case. Women are disposed of to men by the men in the family they are born or raised in, often in explicit or implicit exchange for other property, and once so transferred the receiving man has relatively impunity to use them at will, including often the right to impose corporal punishment and the right to free sexual use at his whim without regard to her preferences; they universally include widespread legal discrimination against women in economic activity, and often include outright legal bars on women engaging in wide fields of endeavor, and often restrictions on women even owning property.

> Marriage is not such a thing at all.

I didn't ever say marriage, in general, was a relationship in which women were property, I said that the social contexts in which monogamy as the sole legal form of marriage actually produced the outcome that virtually every man was able to have and keep a partner are ones in which women (not just in marriage) are treated more as valuable property than as coequal members of society.

Except one person has no rights and is literally the equivalent to a nice laptop in the eyes of the law.

Interesting that you say it's about obligations to each other yet your original comment focused on making sure "every man is matched with a woman" and lamenting the social hazards that could result from "millions of single men with no prospect of marriage."

You don't seem to have considered the social benefits/costs of monogamy to women. It's almost as though women are an afterthought...

Aimless men turning to antisocial behavior and violence is the biggest threat to society as a whole, but women suffer too in a non-monogamous world. They suffer from being perceived as always available for sex (see the grievances driving #metoo), from their reproductive years being much shorter than men’s, and the results of that. Lifetime monogamy, for example, protects women from being left at 40 when their husband finds a younger girl.

Maybe you think absolute freedom in these affairs is worth it nonetheless, but people before us had good reasons for how they organized their world, and we shouldn’t be so quick to discount it as just flowing from prejudice, ignorance, or evil.

The benefit of monogamy to women is... not being abandoned by their husbands when they get older? Yikes.

Also, your understanding of the #MeToo movement is... misguided. Sexual harassment and sexual assault have nothing to do with how many sexual partners a woman has or whether or not a woman is married. #MeToo is about shedding light on sexual harassment and assault when it has historically been a “taboo” subject to speak about publicly. It’s about letting women who have been harassed or assaulted know they aren’t alone and helping others realize how prevalent the issue is. For example, in this recent thread[1] about a survey of YC female founders you can see how shocked many people were by how common it was.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18221172

For the record, nothing I said is incompatible with what you’re saying. Something can both be the result of a wrongdoer’s blameworthy choice and the consequence of social structure. People don’t have a problem understanding crime in general that way, but for some reason the suggestion that sexual misconduct might have to do with changes in sexual norms is met is treated differently. E.g., there are ways of organizing our society that would make murders much more common. Suggesting that we not organize our society like that does that does not entail the suggestion that the murderers, who wouldn’t murder if the society were organized differently, wouldn’t be responsible for their actions.

And yes, the world is full of people who have been left by a partner for no good reason other than the grass being greener on the other side, including, as just one example, women being left for younger women. There are some well-known instances of this in public life right now. When there is a stronger norm of lifelong monogamy, I think people are more likely to internalize their commitment and stick it out, just like they internalize other norms of rightful conduct. There are, allegedly, fairy tale marriages out there, but most of the older folks I know who have had successful, lifelong marriages will tell you that it wasn’t always easy or what they desired at every moment, but that at various points they stuck it out for the kids, out of obligation, out of love (the commitment, not the feeling).

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