Letters to the Editor
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Oh, God! No men left??
We should curl up with our diplomas or polygamously marry a Chechen man? No, thanks! I'd rather do like many "superfluous" women following the American Civil War and set up housekeeping with another woman. Surely, she would be better company than either of the "only" other options we're being offered, here.
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This does raise an interesting question
How great would the imbalance have to be before we got down to a percentage of the female population that cared enough to seriously negotiate. I hear that in women's prisons masculinity, or the most convincing simulation they can get, is valued, so at least some women are serious but is there any evidence of real interest in compromise in cases where all the men have not been removed from the situation.
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Polygyny is not good for women...
...because the social conditions it causes are terrible for women.
Under conditions of polygyny, wealthy men can have more wives. If the population distribution is 50/50, this increases the proportion of men who have *no* wives. In a way, it's good for women because if you are a "loser" -- a woman who would have had great difficulty getting a husband in the first place -- polygyny makes a shortage of women that makes all women more desirable, so it is easier to get a husband at all, and easier to get a "good" husband if you don't mind sharing him. And if women were totally in control of their own sexuality and exactly equal to men, that's pretty much how it would work.
But when there's a shortage of women, women become a commodity, because men are biologically capable of "stealing" women, whereas the reverse is not true. (A woman can lure a man away from another woman, but cannot take him by force. A man can lure a woman *or* could kidnap and rape her.) Men who are "losers" -- not particularly desirable to women, or to the people who are actually making the reproductive decisions for the woman, such as her father -- lose out very badly in polygynous societies. Young men and poor men have very little hope of having a close sexual relationship with a woman, and studies have shown that men who do not have a close sexual relationship with a woman, or much hope of obtaining one, tend to gravitate toward lawlessness and violence much more than men who are tied to the larger society by a connection with a woman. Lawless, violent, desperate young men with little hope of getting a wife, or even of getting laid, are much more likely to try to commit rape or to attempt to seduce women they cannot marry (either because they're already married or because they don't have the money or social status to attract a marriage.) And because men have very, very strong economic reasons to avoid being cuckolded, this really is similar to a property crime (whereas adultery in a society with birth control is more an emotional violation than a property crime, and is therefore taken less seriously.)
Naturally, rich men have always been protective of their "property". So they make laws which rigidly control women to keep them away from men (somehow the idea of controlling the men never occurs to anyone; perhaps for the same reason PETA picks on women in furs and not big strong biker men in leather.) Because women are a valuable commodity, families rarely allow women to make their own decisions about marriage in such societies, because there's too much opportunity for the family to benefit by marrying their daughter off for status, wealth or favors (and because the control of women means daughters aren't really useful for much else; they can't themselves gain status or wealth except through marriage.)
So conditions of polygny, when the numbers of the sexes are equal, has a strong correlation with societies which maintain rigid control of female sexuality, and to control a woman's sexuality you pretty much need to control her as a human, which means she has to be defined as a lesser being than a man with fewer freedoms. Look at the societies that practice polygyny nowadays. Are any of them any good for women?
In the Chechen situation, however, the shortage of men means that women *need* to take a more socially dominant position in society. Men cannot be spared to "protect" women by controlling them completely, so female sexuality becomes less rigidly controlled. And while women will compete harder with each other for the "best" men, and men will have a lot of freedom of choice in getting the women they want, the society in general will be much better for women. Unfortunately this condition usually goes with extreme amounts of local violence, because that's *why* there are no men, and that's not good for anyone, but if the men were, say, dying stillborn or miscarrying because the founder population contained a damaged Y mutation, this would be better for women overall, though probably not as good as monogamy at providing women with the men they prefer.
The problem with most analyses of sexual game theory as it applies to humans is that most of the people attempting to do things like determine who benefits in terms of who has freer choice of mate overlook the fact that men can control women and not the other way around, so as soon as you hurt male free choice of mate badly enough, women become commodities for trade and *then* life as a woman really sucks. Women are much, much better off with a society where they must compete hard with each other for men and men have strong free choice of women, because then women aren't the commodities, they can be the purchasers as well and they have themselves freer choice of *all* actions. (Note that in a post-sexual revolution society with relative sexual equality, most men have *much* more opportunity for sex with a variety of women than in a strictly monogamous or polygynous society, because women have the freedom to have sex with a variety of men. Women's freedom gets men laid more often, and well-laid men let women stay free. Also, they are probably better in bed.)