Eteraz posted this essay on muslim polygamy in America a while ago:
Now, some of you may be thinking: I want to be such a man. If you do, good for you. Frankly speaking, I have no interest in a multiple wivery. My argument is simple. The first woman that a real man marries should be one that’s more than a handful, ya’ni, she should be a real woman. If she’s not, she’s not a challenge, and a real man only wants challenges. Thus, it becomes impossible to take another real woman because any man, no matter how much of a man himself, cannot deal with two *real* women. But, anyway, regardless of why I don’t want a second wife, let me explain how it is that guys who do want second wives, convince everyone they are deserving.
Since I am neither a polygamist nor an apologist for polygamy, none of what he writes here seems terribly controversial (although I might quibble about the redemptive value of redefining manliness to require feminism). After Short Creek (excuse me, Colorado City) and Under the Banner of Heaven, I have no illusions about the power disparities that polygamy traditionally maintains:
The local slang term for marriageable girls is “poofers”. One day they’re living with their parents, attending school, just being teenage girls. The next day, poof, they’re gone. Marriages aren’t publicly announced or celebrated—often they’re scarcely celebrated at all—and the girls are given minimal advance notice. They just disappear into their husbands’ households: poof! Sometimes FLDS girls from the Arizona Strip are swapped for girls from the Bountiful colony, which makes the girls on both sides of the swap even more tractable.
(By the way, this is scarcely distinguishable from the methods used in the modern-day slave trade. The basic recipe starts when you separate the slaves from everyone who might protect or support them. You physically abuse them so they’re frightened and disoriented. You put them in a controlling environment where they’re powerless and deprived of outside information, and make sure that they don’t have proper ID, access to transportation, or money of their own. You repeatedly tell them that this is where they belong. And then you exploit the hell out of them.)
Once these girls have had babies, they’re stuck. They can’t abandon their children, and they have no more place to go than they did before. They can’t sue their “husband” for support; they were never legally married to him. They may not have a Social Security Number. They may not have a birth certificate. They have minimal education. They’ve been told all their lives that outsiders are sinful, dangerous, and malign. And everyone they know in the world keeps telling them that where they are is where they belong. So they still don’t run. And because they don’t run they have more children, often at a rate of one a year, which leaves them depressed and exhausted.
Eteraz is not talking child-brides, but he is talking control and pressure:
But women come to be snared in other ways. After all, not all girls who become second or third wives are divorcees or widows. Some are converts. To me, the phenomenon of convert women acquiescing to polygamy is the most interesting one. In fact, some of the strongest proponents of polygamy I’ve met have been converts to Islam. I found this so fascinating that I tried to get to the root of this phenomenon. Here is the explanation that I have reached: Many converts come from Christianity, and an American cultural milieu, which defines Islam as part of the East, and as different. When these women actually convert to Islam, its because they are sick and tired of the West, and thus, LIKE to believe the fact that Islam is “Eastern.” These women want to be Eastern – their logic works like this: Since the West has always treated me like crap, the opposite of West must be utopia! Persuant to such logic, then, they embrace polygamy because it is the clearest expression of Eastern relationships. Such women only have to be found, they don’t need convincing.
Still, there are some girls who are neither widows, nor divorcees, nor converts. Yet they too end up becoming second or third wives. How? The answer: Pity and a need for self-worth. Some women grow up depressed, have always been mistreated, or are just plain lonely. The only time they feel good about themselves is when they are helping someone else. Now you know women like this. At college, these are those girls that come into where the boys are sitting, take everyone’s order for what they want from McDonalds and then go and buy food for everyone; and they don’t just do this once, they do it all the time.
Doing stuff for others makes them feel needed; and being needed gives them self-affirmation. When a man who wants a second wife come across such women, all the men have to say to them is “Dear Bla Bla, my life with my current wife has been quite miserable. We do not click at the intimacy level. I was forced to marry her to make my mother happy. I really wish I was given the opportunity to be an individual and to pick my own wife! I pick you! But alas, I cannot divorce her because she’s realiant on me. The only option is for you to be my second wife!” Women who have for too long served other people, want, out of pity, and their own need, to help this poor guy out. And quiet often, acquiesce into becoming his second wife. They don’t realize how horribly they have been manipulated. The sad truth is that they have, almost throughout their whole life, been manipulated like this.
What happens to you when you invest in an unequal partnership?
One commenter argues–as I take it–that polygamy is not inherently sexist:
finally, i say that i am in support of polygamy not because i plan to practice it myself – i personally could not imagine myself married to more than one woman – but because it is a part of our religion, i will not simply treat it with a “salad bar mentality” – it’s fine to pick and choose those items which you like but to toss out the cauliflower entirely simply because you don’t care for cauliflower, is excessive. and i happen to like cauliflower!! so where does that leave me? i think that what needs to happen is a dialog on marriage, polygamy included, so that when/if it is practiced, it is done in an appropriate manner. your points about women who raise objections to being in a polygamous relationship are valid. no one should be forced into something that they don’t want to be a part of (if the woman says no, then “no” it is – end of story). like many things today, education is lacking. i whole heartedly agree that too many men in islam suffer from hyper-masculinity. but should this lead us to condemn polygamy, part and parcel? i think it deserves further examination. again, my $0.02.
Polygamy is not inherently sexist any more than piecework is inherently exploitative. The problem is that it doesn’t offer much protection and therefore holds a great deal of negative potential. It’s an arrangement in which one partner has power over the others. That makes them vulnerable to abuse, emotional or otherwise. Polygamy as one arrangement in a polyamorous set of possibilities carries the same susceptability for the same reasons.
Eteraz, on the other hand, would go so far as to hold off on permitting legal recognition of polyamorous relationships until the problem of polygamy is solved, although he briefly alludes to problems he has with other poly arrangements:
Finally: these days there is a little bit of discussion among the extreme left that polyamorous relationships (of both kinds) should be able to be sanctified by marriage. I oppose this. Unless and until male manipulation of women is done away with let’s not propagate such idiocy. As to where a woman takes on multiple husbands as well, I have a problem with that as well, because it means that the men are being manipulated. Let’s keep marriage between two people. My argument is not based on ‘what will happen to the children’ or to ’sexually transmitted diseases.’ Rather, I am against giving legal sanction to multiple marriages because of its political implications. More marriages mean more divorces, and more divorces mean more intrusion by the State. We already have plenty, thank you very much. I also believe that if multiple marriages are allowed, it will be men who will take advantage of it far more than women — due to their historical position and our society’s financial disparity. As a Muslim I have seen exactly what happens when men get to exercise the right. To the left: you do not want to go down that road.
I’m curious about everyone’s opinions about polyamory as opposed to polygamy. Generally speaking, I’m with Angry Brown Butch:
I suppose the whole thing hits a rather personal sore spot for me, since I am polyamorous. And, while I do not think that polyamory is some perfect philosophy, or that it is easy to navigate without fucking up or hurting people, or that it is inherently better than chosen and intentional monogamy, I also think that chosen, intentional polyamory that is pursued in an open, honest, equitable and kind way is far preferable to societally-enforced, by-default monogamy. Everyone always seems to think that polyamorous relationships are destined to blow up in people’s faces, but hey, monogamy doesn’t seem to have that good a success rate, either.