What is your opinion on what Jordan B. Peterson has to say about monogamy? Do you believe that the advent of “choice feminism” has made women/society worse off?
What is your opinion on what Jordan B. Peterson has to say about monogamy? Do you believe that the advent of “choice feminism” has made women/society worse off?
Peterson's gist is that he wants "enforced monogamy", meaning that social norms should be tailored to celebrate monogamy as the best relationship style (as opposed to, say, "ENM")
2. Past, and neighboring societies were flexible about marriage. Tove mentions the success of the West, but this began in the High Middle Ages, where chastity outside of marriage and fidelity after marriage may have been an *ideal*, but what went on in bathhouses, rustic villages like Montaillou, and brothels, was widely tolerated. In Japan (at least recently) there was a sense that extramarital sex with a prostitute was not really cheating. Discretion was valued, but people commonly strayed.
3. I may be totally monogamous, but I also know I'm a clear exception. Numerous features of human biology, including the size of the penis, the shape of the glans (optimized to scrape competitor's semen out of the vagina) and the size of the testes (optimized to beat rivals with sheer volume of ejaculate) suggest that since arising from the chimps, our evolutionary history is *more* promiscuous, not less. Surveys show that people have large numbers of sexual partners, half of marriages end in divorce, and cheating is rare, but hardly uncommon.
And isn't it rather contested that human penises are designed to scrape away the last visitor's sperm? The article above says that human penises look rather like monogamous animals' penises to their shape.
Details aside, I thought like you when I first heard about polyamory. Great idea, I thought: so much better if people can be open about what they are doing anyway. But now that non-monogamy gets increasingly accepted, I think that evidence, or at least circumstancial evidence, is piling up against it. Without any idea to guide people how to organize their relationships, people have fewer relationships, it seems. So with time, I have become much more forgiving toward the monogamy ideal for society at large. It has its obvious flaws, but until I see anything better I will be a cautious supporter.
I should revisit this topic when I'm not ill - I didn't mean to imply humans have larger testicles than chimpanzees, and that's really the way my last post reads. But at the same time your source glosses over substantial differences in penis shape between the species. The chimpanzee penis is filiform and completely lacks a glans. Such a penis is poorly adapted to sperm competition compared to that of the humble human.
I want to clarify that I'm really not trying to promote polyamory as a best relationship style, either. Most people have high levels of negative emotionality, and it takes a tolerant psychology to manage jealousy in a polyamorous relationship. But there are also a lot of people who struggle, and fail, to make monogamy work; the failure to live up to something that is seen as normal and idealized as a moral obligation adds insult to injury. So there's a difference between saying that monogamy can't really be held up as an ideal (which I am saying), and saying alternatives should be idealized instead (which I am not).
Just leave them be! Humans have too much trouble with sex; they have too much trouble with everything.
No, that source is not very good, I just enjoyed the graphics. The text also says that foragers are always monogamous or serially monogamous, which is ljust mot true at all because there was an entire continent of foragers called Australia where people were polygyny was widely practiced.
I think that it would be better to say that monogamy is good rather than saying that infidelity/poly is bad. If people forego polygamous temptation and focus their energies on building a good relationship with their partner and raising children together, I think they are worthy of some kind of... badge of honor. I think calling people boring/unnatural/lacking imagination or whatever for doing that, as some poly peolke do, is not fair. But also, if some people agree with each other to lead polygamous lives in any way and that works for them, that is great too. Live and let live.
If you agree with live and let live, maybe instead we are disagreeing about "socially enforced monogamy" means. At the second link Sheluyang Peng gave above, Peterson writes:
"The dangerousness of frustrated young men (even if that frustration stems from their own incompetence) has to be regulated socially. The manifold social conventions tilting most societies toward monogamy constitute such regulation... Normative monogamy seems to have important group-level benefits, and tends to reduce the kinds of harmful behaviors associated with greater intrasexual competition, among both males and females."
I don't interpret terms like "normative monogamy" as live and let live. When I read this, I immediately think about divorcees shunned from church congregations, men with STIs refusing to get tested to avoid social stigma, and pregnant young women ejected from their parents' homes: https://sleepbaby.org/im-pregnant-and-my-mom-kicked-me-out/
It looks like this package is a bullet that Jordan Peterson is willing to bite for the sake of decreasing violence.
I think "socially encouraged monogamy" is a much nicer phrase than "socially enforced monogamy".
In general, I think you are bringing up a question that is both very interesting, important and difficult. I'm complaining that Western females compete in a toxic way through conspicuous beauty measures and casual sex offerings. But in other societies, females compete just as toxically over who is the most virtuous.
Finding a way to decrease a certain kind of competition without just replacing it with another kind of competition is equally difficult as important.
Yes, I agree with Peterson (and with his source, Joseph Henrich) that monogamy was a great step forward and probably is a factor behind the success of the West.
In theory, ethical non-monogamy could have led to two outcomes:
1. People have more relationships because the ban against polygamy is taken away
2. People have fewer relationships because they don't know what to expect from each other.
In the real world, all the evidence points to alternative 2. I think that non-monogamous norms have failed on the empirical level. I don't think it is dangerous for society if some people decide to experiment with alternative relationship patterns now and then. But I think it hurts society a lot when the vast majority of people lacks a framework for how to be together.
What is your opinion on what Jordan B. Peterson has to say about monogamy? Do you believe that the advent of “choice feminism” has made women/society worse off?
Can you be more specific about what Peterson said? Or, do you have a link?
Yeah:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAIAJ0X4Bwk&ab_channel=ChrisWilliamson
https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/media/on-the-new-york-times-and-enforced-monogamy/
Peterson's gist is that he wants "enforced monogamy", meaning that social norms should be tailored to celebrate monogamy as the best relationship style (as opposed to, say, "ENM")
For a counterpoint: Not really. Or at least, there are three reasons to be flexible about monogamy.
1. The is-ought problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem
2. Past, and neighboring societies were flexible about marriage. Tove mentions the success of the West, but this began in the High Middle Ages, where chastity outside of marriage and fidelity after marriage may have been an *ideal*, but what went on in bathhouses, rustic villages like Montaillou, and brothels, was widely tolerated. In Japan (at least recently) there was a sense that extramarital sex with a prostitute was not really cheating. Discretion was valued, but people commonly strayed.
3. I may be totally monogamous, but I also know I'm a clear exception. Numerous features of human biology, including the size of the penis, the shape of the glans (optimized to scrape competitor's semen out of the vagina) and the size of the testes (optimized to beat rivals with sheer volume of ejaculate) suggest that since arising from the chimps, our evolutionary history is *more* promiscuous, not less. Surveys show that people have large numbers of sexual partners, half of marriages end in divorce, and cheating is rare, but hardly uncommon.
I mostly agree, except about those details about penises and testicles: Chimps have bigger testicles than humans, despite being slightly smaller. For some reason I read this yesterday: https://theconversation.com/why-did-humans-evolve-big-penises-but-small-testicles-71652
And isn't it rather contested that human penises are designed to scrape away the last visitor's sperm? The article above says that human penises look rather like monogamous animals' penises to their shape.
Details aside, I thought like you when I first heard about polyamory. Great idea, I thought: so much better if people can be open about what they are doing anyway. But now that non-monogamy gets increasingly accepted, I think that evidence, or at least circumstancial evidence, is piling up against it. Without any idea to guide people how to organize their relationships, people have fewer relationships, it seems. So with time, I have become much more forgiving toward the monogamy ideal for society at large. It has its obvious flaws, but until I see anything better I will be a cautious supporter.
I should revisit this topic when I'm not ill - I didn't mean to imply humans have larger testicles than chimpanzees, and that's really the way my last post reads. But at the same time your source glosses over substantial differences in penis shape between the species. The chimpanzee penis is filiform and completely lacks a glans. Such a penis is poorly adapted to sperm competition compared to that of the humble human.
I want to clarify that I'm really not trying to promote polyamory as a best relationship style, either. Most people have high levels of negative emotionality, and it takes a tolerant psychology to manage jealousy in a polyamorous relationship. But there are also a lot of people who struggle, and fail, to make monogamy work; the failure to live up to something that is seen as normal and idealized as a moral obligation adds insult to injury. So there's a difference between saying that monogamy can't really be held up as an ideal (which I am saying), and saying alternatives should be idealized instead (which I am not).
Just leave them be! Humans have too much trouble with sex; they have too much trouble with everything.
No, that source is not very good, I just enjoyed the graphics. The text also says that foragers are always monogamous or serially monogamous, which is ljust mot true at all because there was an entire continent of foragers called Australia where people were polygyny was widely practiced.
I think that it would be better to say that monogamy is good rather than saying that infidelity/poly is bad. If people forego polygamous temptation and focus their energies on building a good relationship with their partner and raising children together, I think they are worthy of some kind of... badge of honor. I think calling people boring/unnatural/lacking imagination or whatever for doing that, as some poly peolke do, is not fair. But also, if some people agree with each other to lead polygamous lives in any way and that works for them, that is great too. Live and let live.
If you agree with live and let live, maybe instead we are disagreeing about "socially enforced monogamy" means. At the second link Sheluyang Peng gave above, Peterson writes:
"The dangerousness of frustrated young men (even if that frustration stems from their own incompetence) has to be regulated socially. The manifold social conventions tilting most societies toward monogamy constitute such regulation... Normative monogamy seems to have important group-level benefits, and tends to reduce the kinds of harmful behaviors associated with greater intrasexual competition, among both males and females."
I don't interpret terms like "normative monogamy" as live and let live. When I read this, I immediately think about divorcees shunned from church congregations, men with STIs refusing to get tested to avoid social stigma, and pregnant young women ejected from their parents' homes: https://sleepbaby.org/im-pregnant-and-my-mom-kicked-me-out/
It looks like this package is a bullet that Jordan Peterson is willing to bite for the sake of decreasing violence.
I think "socially encouraged monogamy" is a much nicer phrase than "socially enforced monogamy".
In general, I think you are bringing up a question that is both very interesting, important and difficult. I'm complaining that Western females compete in a toxic way through conspicuous beauty measures and casual sex offerings. But in other societies, females compete just as toxically over who is the most virtuous.
Finding a way to decrease a certain kind of competition without just replacing it with another kind of competition is equally difficult as important.
Yes, I agree with Peterson (and with his source, Joseph Henrich) that monogamy was a great step forward and probably is a factor behind the success of the West.
In theory, ethical non-monogamy could have led to two outcomes:
1. People have more relationships because the ban against polygamy is taken away
2. People have fewer relationships because they don't know what to expect from each other.
In the real world, all the evidence points to alternative 2. I think that non-monogamous norms have failed on the empirical level. I don't think it is dangerous for society if some people decide to experiment with alternative relationship patterns now and then. But I think it hurts society a lot when the vast majority of people lacks a framework for how to be together.