So what does gay marriage mean to you, my overwhelmingly straight and male readers? It means your gay friends can have a wedding and they can inherit stuff and they can be at their husbands’ bedsides....But the actual implications for you are far deeper — and since we live in the new Gilded Age, it should come as no surprise that some men will benefit tremendously while others will be actively contemplating suicide.
Yet the moral reasoning behind society’s rejection of polygamy remains just as uncomfortable and legally weak as same-sex marriage opposition was until recently.
In doing so, they do real harm to real people. Marriage is not just a formal codification of informal relationships. It’s also a defensive system designed to protect the interests of people whose material, economic and emotional security depends on the marriage in question. If my liberal friends recognize the legitimacy of free people who choose to form romantic partnerships with multiple partners, how can they deny them the right to the legal protections marriage affords?
I bolded the last part because it is an essentially inarguable assertion of the right to plural marriage. It’s also an inarguable assertion of the right of family members to wed. Why shouldn’t you marry your cousin, or your sister, or your mother? How dare the State stand in judgment of your desire to sleep with your sibling and inherit his or her property?
In other words, women don’t need marriage any more....
There’s just one little problem. Now that women are no longer forced to marry the men they need, they are increasingly choosing to chase after the men they want. Which leads us to the tired and annoying but not incorrect alpha male/beta male business. Conventional marriage was how beta males got women. They traded security and support for sex and love. But women don’t need that security and support anymore.
The end result of the sexual new order is this: Eighty percent of the women out there are fixated on twenty percent of the men.
It stands to reason, therefore, that some men are going to see the virtue of having multiple wives. Let’s say you are one of the Anointed One Percent with “bases” in New York and Los Angeles. Why not have two wives? Or three? Let me ask you a serious question: Do you know any married woman out there who wouldn’t choose being Leonardo DiCaprio’s fifth wife over marriage to her current husband?
Why not have a $3M home in San Francisco and share it with four other $250k/year earner wives? Why not have access to a rotating group of cars, vacation options, child care? If you are pretty enough and you can bring some money to the table, you’ll be able to do it.
Mark my words. Within a decade, some charming cad in Los Angeles or another place where home prices are in the stratosphere will marry two or three women and challenge the court on it.
As soon as plural marriage is widely accepted, the best men will slurp up the best women.... Seven out of ten men will find themselves out in the cold. Not to worry. They can participate in polygamy, too. You see, if you’ve trawled the bottom of Craigslist and Tinder and OKCupid you already know that there is a particular kind of “polyamory” out there…
…where one woman, usually dressed in vintage clothing stuffed to obscene proportions by 21st-Century cellulite and covered in meaningless tattoos, enjoys the adoring servitude of multiple omega males who will pay any price and bear any burden for an occasional escape from the masturbatory pornucopia set out by modern society for those of us who are too ugly or poor or socially awkward to seduce six-figure riot grrls from the Marketing Dep’t.
As more and more women choose to be some charming alpha’s part-time lover, the remaining women will be able to leverage their assets very effectively, and one of them will eventually decide that she’d like to be married to five Java coders and enjoy a half-million dollars of household income. What can the Supreme Court do but nod its head?
Jan Libourel
once had dinner with the author. I suggest a click and reading the entire piece, but here's a Reader's Digest version.
