Modern Polygamy

Polygamy, Polygamy, or Polygamy

In my years of talking with people about polygamy, it has often seemed that in our understandings of “polygamy” we were talking about different things. After a great deal of reasoning, I have concluded that we were indeed speaking of different things.

When a woman has sex with a man, she enters one of three relationships with him. She becomes his wife, his whore, or his conquest. She gives herself, sells herself, or submits out of fear, a victim of rape. She is an intimate friend, a businesswoman, or a slave.

Every one of these relationships can and do exist within both civil and “spiritual” marriages, under the identical word, “wife.” Polygamy merely multiplies the good or the evil of each relationship, according to the number of women involved with the particular man.

When a woman loves a man and unites with him in a family relationship, her sexual act is a gift to the man she has chosen to become one with. It is her greatest desire, motivated by virtue, by her selfless love for him. She gives herself to him, body and soul, surrendering herself to her tender emotions without thought for herself or concern that she might be hurt. Her desires are to her husband, caring more for him than she cares for herself. His dreams are hers, his desires are hers, his goals are hers. She never leaves him or gives up on him, for in her heart she belongs to him.

When a woman has goals and desires of her own that take precedence in her life over what she feels for anyone else, she views a man as the means to get what she wants, and she uses sex to manipulate him. She may marry the man under civil law and even by the law of her church, but is she is not really a wife, but a harlot. Her “family” relationship endures only as long as she gets her payoff. Her relationship is not based upon emotional but upon physical values, and endures only as long as those values do. She is in the relationship to serve herself, and while she may become emotionally attached to her husband, her attachment never goes beyond what she may feel for a dog, horse, or other pet, the animal always being expendable when it ceases to fulfill the purpose for which it was acquired, when the cost of keeping it exceeds the benefits.

You have heard accounts of women and girls having sex with men under threat of being harmed themselves or having a family member harmed or killed if they refused. Their sexual act was neither a gift nor a sale, but an involuntary act of submission out of fear. It was an act of slavery, a conquest by her master.

If a girl is “given” by a “prophet,” against her own choice, to a man she does not know or love, and stands in threat of being shunned by friends, family, by the only world she has ever known if she does not climb into bed with this man and spread her legs for him, is she a wife or is she a victim of rape, submitting out of fear? You may call her a wife all you want, you may insist that she has entered a family relationship, but for my part, I will maintain that she is a victim of slavery hidden under the guise of “family.”

In thinking of polygamy people seldom consider these differences in relationships. They lump all three relationships under the one word, yet these are very different situations. One is a harem of sex slaves, used according to the pleasure of their owner and master. Another is a private brothel serving a common “john.” And one is a plural family, wives devoted to each other and to a common “house-bond,” “or husband.”

Now I love discussing these subjects, but in my experience most men look excitedly at “polygamy” with thoughts of abundant sex and female servitude, themselves being the gods of their own grand dominions. I want no part of it. This world is full of people seemingly incapable of comprehending anything more in the relationship of a man and a woman than a penis and a vagina, people who hardly ever rise above animal lusts or the profits available in buying or offering sexual pleasure for a price. Show me liberty, show me love, show me tenderness, compassion, caring, selfless devotion. Show me personal sacrifice for the happiness of others and I will show you family, be it a man and a woman, or a man, ten women and forty children. The love only multiplies with the giving.

--Sandra Szymanski