Navarro
Well-known member
A fascinating article debunking some poorly-sourced arguments made in favour of "free love".
Personally the most important part is found here:
Explaining Monogamy to Vox
“Why would humans all around the world invent a rule that’s so difficult to follow, and treat breaking as such an enormous betrayal?”
quillette.com
Personally the most important part is found here:
There is a reason why anthropologist Joseph Henrich describes normative monogamy as “sexual egalitarianism.” It’s not that a monogamous marriage itself is unique—across the vast majority of societies, the majority of marriages have nearly always been monogamous—the key difference is primarily in the way normative monogamy acts to prevent polygyny, through social norms and legal enforcement. The main alternative to monogamy throughout history has not been an egalitarian, polyamorous free for all, but rather a relatively small number of elite males having multiple, sometimes even dozens, of wives. There are rare examples of polyandry being practiced, as I described here, but they are generally restricted to very specific socioecological conditions (such as a highly skewed sex ratio, high male mortality, extended male absence, or among brothers to maintain land inheritance) that don’t often co-occur.
In the Ethnographic Atlas, 85 percent (1041 out of 1231) of societies are coded as practicing at least occasional polygyny, with 15 percent (186 out of 1231) practicing only monogamy, and less than one percent (4 out of 1231) practicing polyandry.
Towards the end of the video, we hit aggressive levels of self-parody, when the narrator implies that the idea of sexual selection represented a Victorian-era conspiracy by patriarchal male scientists, and that monogamy is a “made up construct” and a “way to enforce gender roles”.
Yet, as Henrich and his colleagues persuasively argue, “In suppressing intrasexual competition and reducing the size of the pool of unmarried men, normative monogamy reduces crime rates, including rape, murder, assault, robbery and fraud, as well as decreasing personal abuses.” Henrich et al. sum up their argument, writing that:
We propose that the unusual package of norms and institutions that constitute modern monogamous marriage systems spread across Europe, and then the globe, because of the package’s impact on the competitive success of the polities, nations and religions that adopted this cultural package. Reducing the pool of unmarried men and levelling the reproductive playing field would have decreased crime, which would have spurred commerce, travel and the free flow of ideas and innovations.
Normative monogamy seems to have important group-level benefits, and tends to reduce the kinds of harmful behaviors associated with greater intrasexual competition, among both males and females.