Yep, but I'm not sure who you think is doing that.
LGBT Characters in Trek (Help and no flames Please)
- Thread starter neogothboy74
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Yep, but I'm not sure who you think is doing that.
He was saying that you presented a specific example (polygamous relationships amongst fundamentalist Mormons being horribly exploitative) and then went on to say that it could be possible to have a fair polygamous relationship but it doesn't happen in practice. The latter doesn't follow directly from the former, you would need to present more evidence than just one subculture's application of polygamy in order to come to that conclusion.
Well, yes and no. It's fallacious to assume that that's how polygamy is always practiced, but it's also fallacious to equate it with individualistic crimes like pedophilia that clearly represent deviations from the norm. The polygamy practiced by many extremist Mormon offshoots like Warren Jeff's represents a much more extensive, organized form of polygamy -- it's systematic.
By the same token, however, it's important to remember that those groups do not form a unified community with the polyamorous community. Those groups make it a point to isolate themselves from the rest of American society.
So I think the most reasonable thing we can say is that polygamy/polyamory has two wildly different social groups that practice it in fundamentally different ways, and that the law should intervene to end one (the one built on exploitation, abuse, and violation of consent) but not the other.
Well, considering that multi-partner romantic/sexual groupings are the fundamental basis for Andorian society, I think it's safe to say that Federation law has preserved the right to such marriages from the beginning.
A better question might be, do individual Federation Member States get to allow or ban polygamous marriages, in the same way that individual U.S. states get to allow or ban same-sex marriages in the United States today? I could imagine the early Federation allowing, for instance, the Vulcan government to ban polygamous marriages while allowing the Andorian government to preserve them. Which, of course, would inevitably raise the questions of, what about an Andorian bondgroup that want to get married on Earth or Tellar or Alpha Centauri, and what about the rights of non-indigenous minorities -- say, are Andorian families who re-locate to Earth still married under United Earth law, and can individual Andorians born and raised on Tellar get married as a bondgroup there?
My suspicion would be that, eventually, the Federation Council would be forced to pass a Federation-wide law protecting the rights of all consenting adult Federation citizens to enter into multi-partner marriages of any sort, just in order to protect the rights of members of polygamous cultures which join the Federation.
So is using the exception to describe the rule.
in fact, in human societies where polygamy has been the rule, the vast majority have been patriarchal and the vast majority of those have been massively oppressive to women. this is not a point that is up for debate. it's a fact.
so, yes, any collection of humans can, if they wish, form any attachments they like and can sustain but that's a far cry from the practice itself getting a clean bill of social health when allowed to spread wide.
an thou hurt none, do as thou will. sure. but LOTS of people, tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, generationally, nearly all of them female, HAVE been hurt by this. it's simply ludicrous to assume, in another few hundred years, barring some weird biological catastrophe, that we would have "figured out how to do it right."
Not on a wholesale basis we won't. Not as long as people are people.
Couldn't you apply that same argument to any area of human society which Star Trek postulates Humans have improved upon? Racism, sexism, classism, nationalism, xenophobia, etc.?
In a word, no.
Racism, while pernicious, is a relatively recent human social construct. We did without it far longer than we've had to contend with it so it makes sense we would eventually default to our normal position.
Xenophobia. A lot is made of the so-called basic human tendency towards xenophobia but, in fact, while it is somewhat hard-wired into us, it is by no means a dominant behavior pattern. Proof? We tend to attack and kill each other a LOT less than we make alliances. Hence: civilization.
Classism. Can't say. Some classes are legitimate, based on merit, unique skillsets, etc. Others are based on arbitrary factors that cause trouble.
Nationalism. Again, not automatically good or bad and, also, a relatively new social construct in human history. There's no automatic or predominant negativity inherent in the concept of nation-state just as there is nothing inherently wrong with polygamy or polyamory.
But the track records of both are quite different.
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As opposed to human societies where monogamy has been the rule, the vast majority of which have been patriarchal and the vast majority of those have been massively oppressive to women.
Seriously Geoff, everything you say about polygamy can fairly be said about monogamous marriage in a patriarchal society. If people in the Star Trek era have managed to magically fix all the flaws inherent in monogamous marriage, who says they can't magically fix all the flaws inherent in polyamorous marriage?
Personally, while I'm sure there will always be a minority of people out there who buck the trend and make it work, I don't think polygamy or polyamory will ever really catch on, for a reason far simpler and more basic:
Very few people are willing to share the person they love.
Very few people are willing to share the person they love.
That's a response to a flawed form of relationship in which the lover believes he or she "owns" the beloved. Monogamy creates jealousy, not the other way around.
Sexual jealousy is a learned response, like racism or homophobia or Republicanism. It can be overcome as well.
That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.
I think you're confusing sexual jealousy with romantic jealousy. You're confusing the genitals with the heart.
Maybe sexual jealousy is a social construct. I don't know. Maybe if society were structured differently, people would be able to love one-another and trust one-another but not feel betrayed if their partners had sex with others on the side. I don't know. Maybe, maybe not.
But when I was talking about sharing, I wasn't talking about fucking around. I was talking about love.
Most people, when they are in love, do not want to share their beloved's heart. That's all there is to it.
^Harlan said it best, "Love Ain't Nothing but Sex Misspelled." I think he meant romantic love. The fear is not that the beloved also love someone else, but that s/he STOP loving the lover.
If it's possible to love more than one child, one parent, or one pet, why would it not be possible to love more than one romantic partner?
If it's possible to love more than one child, one parent, or one pet, why would it not be possible to love more than one romantic partner?
I think marriage, as a construct, more and more is of limited value and, in the West at least, roughly 50% of my fellow Westerners agree. That's monogamous, polygamous, straight, gay, whatever. We don't need it and it is slowly going away.
I was with my wife for 15 years, monogamously, before we bothered to get married. We considered it redundant.
I don't think "marriage" will last as a firm social expectation much longer if, in fact, it even exists as one now.
Again, the more rights we have properly ceded to women, the more educated women become, the less we have people clamoring to get married. I do not believe pair-bonding in humans is as firm as it is in other mammals. Not truly hardwired, no. However, "sharing" our mates is even less so.
As we have achieved more and more gender equality, we have NOT seen a growth in polygamous relationships in the West but a falloff of them. This is not an accident. That which doesn't serve women will be the first to go when women are empowered. And, of course, there is no overarching DESIRE in the larger group to have polygamous relationships so there's no large impetus to "fix." It's not an issue that is on the radar like race and gender and faith.
Not sharing mates is NOT a learned behavior. It is prevalent in all human societies in all eras, EVEN in those in which polygamy was the norm. Predominant, in fact. we've been killing each other over not sharing mates since we learned how to murder. This indicates some measure of biological hardwiring.
Anyone who says that has either never really had sex without love or has never really had love without sex.
ETA #2: Another edit. My initial response was to say that most people can't, my thinking being that most would eventually come to favor one over the others. That may or may not be true -- I'm not sure, the more I think about it. But the more I think about it, the more it occurs to me that people can love multiple people at once, but that that's really not the issue. The issue is how those multiple people feel about having to share. Most Humans are hard-wired to pair-bond.
ETA #1:
Seems to me that Desmond Morris's bit of speculation in The Naked Ape that Humans are a species at a transitional phase in its evolution, carrying two contradictory instincts, was probably right. Human beings have a natural instinct to be sexually promiscuous, to want to have sex with different partners. But human beings also have a natural instinct to pair-bond -- to find themselves in love with one particular person whom they favor above all others, whom they do not want to share with others.
Can some people pair-bond with more than one individual simultaneously? I'm sure some can. And certainly most people fall in love with multiple persons over one life-time. But at the end of the day, even if you can love multiple people at once, one of the things that love demands is empathy and trust with another person's heart. And most people, even if they themselves can love multiple people at once, cannot bring themselves to be one of their partner's multiple simultaneous loves. Most people need to be special, unique, to be loved above all potential lovers, in their partner's eyes.
There are almost certainly a rare few who aren't like that, who don't feel devalued if they find out that their partner loves someone else, too. And good for them. But most people just aren't like that. Most people need to know that someone out there cherishes them above others. And I really don't think that wanting to know that the person you love loves you more than anyone else is a social construct. I think that's just how the majority of people are wired.
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Except among those of us excluded from the societal and tax benefits of marriage.
My experience is that there are two kinds of gay male relationships: open relationships, and relationships where one or (usually) both partners cheat. Monogamy is definitely NOT hardwired into most adult male humans.
Marriage of any kind doesn't seem to serve women very well; it's mainly an artifact of men, who want to make sure the child who inherits their property is their genetic offspring.
I don't think the evidence supports your claim. Check out Sex Before Dawn by Ryan and Jetha. It pretty effectively demolishes the myth that humans are monogamous.
I don't think there's conclusive evidence this behavior is hard-wired. I'm not saying it's not widespread and not deeply ingrained, just not hard-wired. If it were, there would be a lot less adultery than we see, from both sexes. Again, I refer to Sex Before Dawn. It's fascinating.
Would we feel this way if we had better self-esteem? How much of this desire to be "special" to another person just reflects a lack of self-love?
ETA: By the way, Sci, I'm always impressed by your ability to engage ideas, even when they aren't in agreement with what you think. Like here. I appreciate the fact that you're really thinking about this, not just jerking knee.
I'm in an open m2m relationship of nearly 16 years, which about 4 years ago acquired a "third' who lives with us. I love BOTH my husband and my partner with all my heart, and I believe both of them love me. This ain't just theory to me, this is my everyday life.
Daddy Todd, I don't think that you mean to sound like you're stereotyping, but it really does sound stereotypical.
Suffice it to say that I've known plenty of gay men in non-open relationships where neither partner cheated.
That's based on the presumption that people can't have competing, contradictory instincts.
Well, that's based on the premise that a lack of self-esteem is something social. And while that's certainly the source of it a lot of the time, I think a lot of those issues are at least in part biological, too.
And, frankly, I do think that most people would still want to be special to someone else even if they had really great self-esteem. I don't know anyone with good self-esteem who doesn't still want to be loved uniquely.
Thank you for your kind words.
And that's great -- and I mean that sincerely, I don't mean it in that sarcastic sense people use.
But I honestly don't think most people are like you, either. I do think that the majority of Human beings have a different kind of emotional need for love than you do. Not better, not worse, but different -- and more widespread.
Certainly it does. And I didn't say humans were monogamous. We do not pair bond in the way, say, wolves do. It's more of an incredibly strong tendency.
In nearly every human society ever, regardless of other variants in ethos, faith, etc. the one-to-one bonding is, far and away, the most desired. It certainly is in bigger-than-tribal communities like nations. There is not a single large human society that has as its organizing central component, polygamous or even polyamorous families. Indeed the oppositional nature of generic "human nature" to poly bonding is precisely why it hasn't caught on. As others have pointed out, most of us are not willing to share our mates, even when the law says we can.
And, again, pairing is even more prevalent in those societies in which polygamy is the official model. I want to make it clear that this is not, to me, a question of morality but biology and, to some degree, sociology.
The evidence is clear.
There is also mounting evidence that children raised in communal homes, without a set of parents who they can identify as theirs, do not adjust well as they approach adulthood and have considerable trouble after.
Such children have emotional problems ranging from minor to major. This lesson was learned, most obviously from Israelis on the Kibbutz who tried this model for a couple of generations and ultimately rejected it because of the problems I've just mentioned.
There are, what, seven billion of us? So, while the vast majority of humans tend towards pair bonding and this tendency has shaped all of our large societies, there will still be a significant number of us who vary. Those numbers, in real terms are large, yes, but percentage-wise they have no value. Barely observable.
So the anecdotal evidence presented here is valid as far as it goes. It's just that it doesn't go very far due to its anecdotal nature.
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