Some notions on Polygamy

Polygamy is defined to be the state of being married to more than one person at a time. It is a practice that has been prevalent in many cultures through the past up to the present. Looking at marriage from a cultural point of view, we realize that procreation is the most integral aspect, to the point that the wonderful sexual sensation is undermined. Many cultures have been circumcising the female and this makes them lose a great amount of sexual excitement, and actually some records show that the reason behind circumcision of female was to make a girl not experience sexual pleasure which may push her to seek something extra-marital.

It is well known that men have been dominant over women for a long time that marriage was in most cases controlled by men and till today the same goes on in many cultures. This is what made polygamy to be mainly a practice of men rather than female and at the same time the biological make up of men gives them the priority to be polygamous, while female can hardly be polygamous. Looking at the issue from an evolutionary perspective, we realize that the male in most species seeks partners to make the most of their genes to be passed to the next generation so they seek mates and indulge in sex for pleasure and procreation, yet some other aspects are still not clearly understood. We humans, have a more developed prefrontal cortex and we appear to be the only species that consciously thinks on many steps and aspects of life. We are the beings that ponder the big questions of life and also choose mates based on many reasons today.

With this, I can say that how people look at polygamy shall differ on how people look at the purpose of marriage. People who think that marriage is only commitment and procreation shall accept the idea of polygamy because polygamy will allow you to procreate more and blend your genes in more than one partner, and in cases that one wife might be impotent, one can still procreate by the other partner, and all under the veil of marriage. People who look at marriage to be a bond of many dimensions, a bond that involves love, care, respect, mutual development, mutual helping, experiencing novelty together, growing together, experimenting the sweets and bitters of life together, believing in finding yourself in the other (and many other issues) and one should be fully committed to one person for the whole life and feel all feelings only towards her are rare in this world, and this are the ones who don’t accept polygamy and at the same time avoid to be part of any extra-marital relationship.

One might object that these people are rare, pointing at the western culture, but if you look closely at the western culture you shall realize that there are so many differences. The western culture regards marriage to be a responsibility to live with a person but in most cases they are rarely committed. We see people who indulge in sex from when they hit puberty and they keep on having new partners and breaking up till they pass 30 years of age then they consider the idea of marriage. Yet some still continue to have extra-marital sex but they don’t marry those people. Nowadays, we came to learn of terms that can be hardly accepted by people who truly know something about commitment and sacrifice. Terms like “having sex for fun out of marriage” for the reason of change, or a term like consensual sex. These are terms that are absent in the Arabic world, at least publicly. In the Arabic culture, a man who is truly committed to marriage will hardly seek sex out of his marriage. With this, we can understand why polygamy is higher in the Arabic world and lower in the western world. There is an incident that happened in Tunisia a while ago, when Tunisians started to allow the French culture to take over their Arabic one. There was a man who had a wife and he was able to convince her to allow him to have another wife. He then married the next wife, but since it wasn’t allowed in Tunisia to have more than a wife, some people who knew this man reported him to the court. As he was prosecuted, the defendant’s lawyer tried many ways to show the court that this second girl is not his wife but she is just his girlfriend. The point was that if it was just a sex relationship with a girlfriend then he would not face trial but if she was his second wife then he would be punished and this shows how flawed is the double standard we acquired from the western world and many people are accepting these issues blindly.

I think that if one just seeks sex and procreation in a wife then that person will also accept the idea of polygamy, but if one thinks that marrying a girl is not for the mere goal of having sex and procreating, then one shall have a higher level of commitment and try to maintain a wonderful long-term relationship with his only wife, and at the same time avoid being part of extra-marital relations. In addition to this conclusion, one also must not compare the Arabic culture with the western world, because in the western world one can easily find sex without getting into the responsibility of commitment and marriage and it is well known that many orphanages are in the part of the world that accepts sex out of marriage because children are procreated without the presence of two people who are ready to take care of that child and be parents of it.