Polygamy is one perversion that’s never bothered me.
Any man that wants to take on two or more wives is going to get what he deserves.
Amen brother!
Until you're paying the bills for birth defects from inbreeding from people who didn't know they were related.
This is a show about two couples, who swap partners on and off.
Polygamy is not a perversion. It is a cultural practice that arose in many societies, including the ancient Hebrews. Many of the patriarchs in the Old Testament took more than one wife. This was licit.
At a certain stage of development, polygamy is a healthy adaptation. The classic case would be cultures characterized by constant raiding, feuding and low level warfare. In many times and places, this produced very high mortality among young men, on a sustained, chronic basis as opposed to infrequent, episodic imbalances arising from particularly bloody wars. (The loss of a generation of young men in a war causes a different set of problems, though normally of a temporary nature.)
If a significant and chronic gender imbalance is the norm, what is to be done with all the young widows, many with children, as well as the never-married young women living in small villages in which many of the young men have been killed?
Polygamy provided an honorable place in society for these young women. It also kept them in the childbearing cohort, which was essential for the survival of small groups.
Polygamy, however, becomes maladaptive when the constant warfare recedes and the gender ratio stabilizes. Hypergamy is one negative consequence; abusive and predatory behavior by the aggressive alpha males is another. A large percentage of the young men will be shut out of the marriage market. Islam sought to solve this through jihad, which killed off huge numbers of surplus men, and also gave sanction to the stealing of women from the victims of conquest. And mass sex slavery. Islam is largely a reaction to a fundamentally maladaptive sexual culture.
On a less dramatic scale, the “lost boys” problem in the surviving polygamous Morman sects is another clear example. Older high status men grab multiple wives, picking the most desirable young women. Or they marry them off to favored sons. The young men who don’t make the cut are driven from the community, the Mormons having given up on raiding wagon trains to steal women.
Polygamy is maladaptive in modern societies. But the rejection of polygamy is a principled cultural response designed to give everyone a fair chance at marriage, family, and everything that flows from that.
A perversion is a misdirection of a natural instinct. The choice between polygamy and monogamy is not hard wired. It’s a matter of cultural adaptation to the conditions that exist.