Why do some rich guys think polygamy is their preserve?

…as answered on Quora…

There is a major difference in the sexual “economies” and “strategies” of males and females throughout the animal kingdom. Each species has “figured” out its way to handle the differences. Human beings have come up with a number of distinct patterns. Polygny is one of them. For reasons of basic biology, it is a much more natural a fit than polyandry — which nevertheless has occasionally occurred.

Men produce an overabundance of sperm to fertilize women’s small number of eggs. This is a radically unequal investment in genetic heritage. A man can sire hundreds, even thousands — technically millions — of babies; a woman, at best a handful. If a woman wanted to increase her genetic inheritance, having many “sperm donors” would be of little help. It is more rational — and, over the life of our species, this is how it tends to work out — to invest in a man or two to feed and protect her and her children. A man seeking to increase his progeny can collect more wives — or mate with many women he invests in not at all.

So, those men who want to increase their standing in the world — who want to flex their wills to power by siring many multiples of children — increase their numbers of wives.

Men tend to think in a “polygamous” fashion more than women because of that basic inequality: abundant sperm vs. scarce eggs.

There is nothing very mysterious about this.

The major wrinkle, in our time, is that to a remarkable degree the costs of child-rearing have been socialized. Women need not marry to raise children. “The village” raises the child, through subsidies such as public schools, public school breakfasts and lunches, SNAP, Section Eight housing, Medicaid, and much more. This and widespread use of contraception, abortion, and even infanticide allows women to ape typically male-desired promiscuity patterns — having many sexual partners — without inordinate discomfort, though it is worth noting that many of the professional feminists who push for these measures tend to be married and sport fairly stable marriages, merely using their ideology to export aped male sexual styles onto poor women, often to their ruin.* It is a weird and I think rather sick bit of moral gamesmanship, but most folks disagree.

And it is worth noting that women, as a class, are net tax consumers, and men, as a class, are net taxpayers, and this merely mimics the one-on-one marriage system of old, where men went out into the world to secure resources that women spent on setting up house and raising children. And to that extent polygamy has been socialized, with a mass of make taxpayers supporting a mass of female state aid recipients. Sociologist Herbert Spencer, linked above, had an old-fashioned term for the dominant sexual style of today, “promiscuity,” which he defined as “indefinite polyandry joined with indefinite polygyny.” Marriage is a more “definite” social institution, in his terminology, while today’s tax-based child-rearing system is far less definite, since much of the responsibility for raising children has been shifted from actual parents and guardians onto taxpayers, the courts, bureaucracies, and government functionaries.

It is a cruel joke upon both sexes, if you ask me, but no one asked me — the question was why men with great resources think that polygamy is their prerogative, in effect asking why rich men favor polygyny more than rich women favor polyandry. The answer should be obvious: cheap sperm vs. scarce eggs, coupled with the opportunity costs associated with rearing children, both of which have gone into the (observed) sexual division of labor of our species.

The subject is almost boring in its simplicity and explanatory power. What is interesting is how things change (and do not change) when the costs of raising children get socialized. Which is why I brought it up. Even if no one asked me.

* The puzzle of what I call the WWWWs — “The Woke White Women of the West” — in their bizarre, moralistic anti-white racism runs parallel to their defense of socialized child-rearing even while they themselves tend to adhere to the older, individualistic structure for their children, is fascinating. My guess is that their cult of Woman Power forces them into their strange cognitive dissonances, but my extended, high-octane speculations on this matter must be dealt with elsewhere.