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By *yclop OP Man
over a year ago
belfast |
Polyandry, Polyamory, and aspects of Cuckoldry are ancient societal norms; it is Monogamy which is the aberration. Monogamy (and worse polygynae) are mechanisms devised by the worshippers of the old Sky Gods and later of "The One True God", to subjugate women; to destroy their ancient position in religion, the community and the home; to turn them into chattels, wholly defined by their man, dominated and controlled by him.
Human-kind are “built” for multi-partner sexual relationships. Human males have two different sorts of sperm. Type 1. (the lesser part of the ejaculate) are the fast swimmers who's sole job is to get to the egg and fertilise it. Type 2. (the greater part) are the “fighting sperm” whose job is to block, ensnare, entangle and disable the sperm of the woman's other partners before they can get to the egg. Women can be shown to have more interest in multiple partner sex when they are ovulating, giving them a biological advantage. While they seem to pick stronger, more masculine, more symmetrical partners at that time, the real genetic selection takes place in the tussle between the sperm of her various lovers, This is an evolved reproductive strategy that maximises the chances of her conceiving and bearing a healthy child. (New Scientist)
There had been countless millennia in which "marriage" did not exist. Then throughout the whole of the Neolithic period, with the development of farming and proto-industrial production, It was women who owned the agricultural land and owned and ran the family homes. Men did dangerous jobs away from home, fighting, hunting, large scale herding, flint and mineral extraction, and trading by land, river or sea. It is generally accepted that groups of men who were brothers or considered themselves to be brothers banded together to maintain one family home and one wife between them. These are the formal origins of polyandry, where a woman can have more than one husband. The eldest child was considered to be the eldest brother's, the second of the second's and so on. At least one third of these men were killed in their teens and twentys through dangerous employment abroad; they died in the certainty that their wife and her children would continue to be looked after. Think of the sedentary Eskimo, who lives in a lodge during the brief summer and an igloo during the long winter, and tends to have two, three of four wives. He and his family are largely dependent on the itinerant hunters for much of their food supply, just as the hunters are largely dependent on their sedentary brethren for shelter. The “householder” clearly holds his wives “in trust” for the greater unmarried male community, issuing the famous invitation “would you like to laugh with my wife”. This is an even older tradition than that of the Neolithic Farmers. Polyandry still exists in parts of the world today.
The Neolithic farmers, being primarily interested with the fertility of their land and livestock worshipped the Earth Goddess as a true Fertility Religion, where we will all be pleased to note, having sex was the ultimate sacrament. Indeed the rural community has always been the basis of fertility worship. The Goddess was one, She was the Earth its self, all living things were born of Her sacred womb, and returned thereto when they died. From the time the earliest farmers penned their first livestock and discovered the connection between sex and reproduction, the Goddess could no longer give birth by parthenogenesis (without male assistance) She had to have a sexual consort. Each village adopted their local ancestral hero who was believed to have invented fire, or wine, or beer, or the wheel, or some such, as a minor godling. The Goddess was one but Her little consorts were many and subservient. The little godlings were venerated by the men, and since their main occupations were hunting and herding, these were also seen as totem gods representing the animals hunted and herded by them. Their permission had to be asked before the animals under their protection could be chased down or slaughtered, we need not be surprised that most of these godlings were depicted as having the horns and hooves of the animals they represented. Every sexual act was an act of sympathetic magic, demonstrating to the Gods how they should continue to make the Earth fertile. Formal orgies occurred on propitious days, the spring sowing, the cutting of the first sheaf, the harvest etc.. All the nubile women in the community, suitably undressed, pursued the men across the fields, catching them, throwing them down on their backs, raping them, and leaving them for dead as they went on to chase down the next. These local rural acts of sacred worship, continued unabated well into Christian times.
The steppe nomads from the Eurasian Plains first developed the idea of the supreme "Sky God". The first "civilizations" came about as a synergy between these two competing ideas. If we must insist on talking about the "pearls of civilization" then the Neolithic Farmers were the great fat oyster with their food surpluses and trade, the steppe nomads provided the barbaric misogynistic leadership grit. The fertility cults of the Earth Goddess were diminished, and while society's ruling elite embraced marriage, both monogamous and polygynous (that other half of polygamy where men had more than one wife) and caused history to be written embracing the supremacy of both Gods and men. The peasant farmers still practised their fertility rites and their loose interpretation of marriage throughout the Classical and much of the Christian period. Despite all the formality of Roman worship and the prevalence of its male deities, a Roman landowner visiting his farm would be expected to take his wife into the middle of a field and at least pretend to have sex with her while all the farm workers watched, as a blessing on the land. In medieval times the Christian parish priest might have led the villages "merry beget", perhaps best described as large scale dogging participated in by the entire village. As people began to adopt surnames, Merryman and Greenwood were amongst names adopted by people of uncertain paternity after these events. As time passed and self-righteous Christian monogamists were berating people for sticking to the old customs, especially men for allowing their wives the freedom to do so, they suggested that those men incapable of enforcing the "One True God's" abomination of women, should wear the old godling's, the cuckold's, horns.
Greek, Roman, Jewish, Christian and Islamic societies have traditionally allowed women to be murdered and mutilated out of hand by their husband, father or brothers, for bringing the monogamous ethic into disrepute. Many Moslem men still indulge in this misogynistic frenzy even today, it's called honour killing. Since all our long standing traditions come from multiple partner relationships, and particularly polyandry, men are probably jealous because they have been told it is the right thing to do. They have been told that women are their property and they must keep them in line. A woman who betrays her husband by allowing another man to "look upon her" may in some cultures deserve to die. Male jealousy is a shadow cast upon society by the malign monogamous ethic. It justifies all sorts of cruelties, total subjugation, denial of legal standing, burning at the stake, stoning to death, and three million girls every year in Africa alone surgically mutilated to prevent them from enjoying sex, so that they will be less likely to cheat on their husbands (female circumcision). We must not be surprised that as women are freed from servitude in the west, better supported and loved, they become just as gloriously promiscuous as their men, and rightly so.
Of course jealousy is not an equal opportunity emotion. Women have a "nesting imperative". Our female ancestors for millions years have needed a safe place to carry, bear and nurse their children. These places were generally built, protected and supplied by the men. If a woman today, has only one primary partner, rather than the several she might have had in the past, the risk of loosing him (and the nest) to another woman may become a serious consideration. We have probably met the couple dogging, she will take on twelve men on a picnic table, he is not allowed to touch another woman. And the swinging couple where she can do what she wants, but he can only have another woman in a vanilla same room swap, under her supervision. The men should think about this, maybe some will need to put the house in the wife's name!
So, to summarize: sharing the woman you love with another man/men is a beautiful, and entirely ethical thing to do. Our ancestors have done it for countless thousands of years. Monogamy is a much more recent trend, should be seen as the aberration, and is its-self merely an "ethic", part of a belief system; it has no standing except where men seek to "own" and subjugate women, and the subjugation of women is part of that belief system. All a woman's relationships should be loving and supportive. The secondary partners should have a duty to support the primary relationship, just as our imagined ancestral home had a pecking order amongst the band of "brothers" who shared their wife in common. Jealousy and the feeling of humiliation is unnecessary and must be seen as a shadow cast over this idyll by the later aberrant, indeed malign, monogamous ethic. And finally, sharing the woman you love, occasionally, with complete strangers just gives the vicarious thrill of somehow taking the exercise to its extreme. |
