We all know that polygamy is not a new phenomenon. According to Richard Wright, author of The Moral Animal: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology (1994), many human societies throughout the ages have been polygamous (see sidebar [below]).

In America, conservative Christians and politicians often couple polygamy with gay marriage as a threat to the sanctity of the institution. The hasty condemnation of these marriages as “wedlocks of evil” gives me pause. After all, I am a supporter of gay marriage. I’ve seen that it works here in America. So can polygamy work?

For Isis Aquarian, polygamy didn’t just work for her and her family, “it was pretty awesome.” Aquarian was a member of a 1970s commune in the Hollywood Hills founded by natural foods restauranteur Jim Baker. Baker’s restaurant, founded in 1969, was called “The Source,” and it was a magnet for hippies and celebrities on Sunset Boulevard. Eventually, servers and cooks of the restaurant moved into a mansion together and Baker (also known as Father Yod) took thirteen wives. Aquarian loved it. On a story on NPR’s Day to Day she told Jennifer Sharpe how “it worked perfectly. We never had a problem as far as our energy with him.”

Similarly, on another NPR program, Weekend Edition Saturday, Pauline Bartolone found a Muslim family living in San Diego who was very thankful for their polygamous lifestyle. Hasana said of her relationship with her husband Ali and his second wife Asila, “I like it, in terms of getting a break—not having to be with the man 24/7.” She calls Asila, “a lifesaver.”

But it’s one thing for a man to split his time with two women, and quite another for him to split his time with thirteen. Aquarian admits that the energy of twelve other wives didn’t always jive with Baker’s legal wife. As Aquarian says, “She never signed up for that…She stayed but she always had a problem with it.”

Robin’s attitude harkens to the feelings of Barbara Dutton Henrickson, the legal—albeit fictional—wife of Bill Henrickson in the HBO series Big Love. Barb and Bill got married in college and ten years after their first child was born Bill married Nicolette. And then
he married Margene. Although Nicki and Marg knew what they “signed up for,” Barb often resents getting her husband only two nights a week, plus the change.

Big Love may be overly dramatic (Ali and Hasana laughed at it when it came on the air), but its portrayal of the polygamous compounds of Utah raises a disturbing point. In the reports coming out of Eldorado, the mainstream media is mainly focusing on child brides and abuses to young girls. But the polygamous system is also harmful to boys.

In a telling scene from Big Love, a fourteen-year-old from a polygamous compound, Rhonda Volmer, is scolded for flinging some woo at a boy her age. Rhonda is promised in marriage to the sexagenarian leader of this compound—Nicki’s father—Roman Grant. The fourteen-year-old boy in this picture has no chance competing for Rhonda’s attention—Roman is fierce and he is a “prophet.” He may be forced out of the compound because he won’t be able to find a wife.

In Eldorado, social workers are finding young males forced out of their communities because of competition with other (often older and more powerful) males. The boys who are kicked out of polygamous communities of the Southwest are called the “lost boys.” The problem is that lost boys become lost men.

In his Essay on the Principles of Population (1826) Thomas Malthus taught us that when natural resources diminish, competition for those precious resources grows. If each man had three wives, a lot of men would find themselves out of luck. As we are already beginning to see in China, whose one child policy has increased the ratio of males to females, the artificial limitation on the amount of women leads to almost certain social disharmony. Political scientists call these large groups of unmarried young men “bare branches,” and they are just as lost as the lost boys.

Valerie M. Hudson and Andrea M. den Boer write in their 2004 book Bare Branches: Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population, “bare branches are more likely than other males to turn to vice and violence.” Hudson and den Boer project that by 2020, in China and India, “bare branches will make up 12 to 15 percent of the young adult male population.”

I don’t think polygamy is evil. I think that it can work in some circumstances—perhaps if it is only two women to a man. But while it may work in individual homes, if you scale polygamy to a critical mass and do the math, one quickly realizes that a functioning polygamous society is a myth.

Polygamy/Polygyny
When talking about polygamy, it’s important to distinguish polygyny from polyandry. Polygyny, the practice of one man having multiple wives, is fairly common throughout human history. Polyandry, the practice of a woman having multiple husbands, is “vanishingly rare” according to Jonathan Rauch, a columnist for National Journal.