Rob B. Kowalski

This snooty and ridiculous reply is why fewer and fewer people are taking mainstream Christian polemics around sex seriously. How does a woman who hooks up throughout her 20s with random men have any basis to be judging women who decide to be exclusive with the same man? Objectively, which person is participating in more sin and dysfunction: the slut or the sister wife? You think you can sin for years in a way that would have gotten you stoned in the past, but since you turned away from that path (because you aged out, typically), now you have the moral authority to condemn an arrangement Jesus himself never condemned; one that David and others beloved by God participated in? So much spiritual pride, and so little humility. Look - Rob is explicitly pro-polygyny; I'm more ambivalent. While I don't think it is morally wrong (and neither does the Bible), the fruits of forced, traditional monogamy the past 1000 years WERE unambiguously good. Both sexual institutions create structure; the latter creates a higher-trust version. But we are not choosing between these two institutions anymore. Forced, traditional monogamy is dead. Feminists - including those in the Church - killed it. It has been replaced by modern monogamy, which is basically serial monogamy with casual hookups in between. Unsurprisingly, this lack of structure has destroyed trust between the sexes and caused a fertility crisis. So we do not have the choice, realistically, to just go back to how things were. Women are not going to lose their sexual liberties. Any development on that front, to the extent it is socially desirable, would take at least one more generation - and the trend of tech makes it frankly seem extremely unlikely. AI is more likely to if anything enhance eugenic mating (which further empowers at least limited polygyny) at the cost of the social structure, rather than reverse it. What that means is that we have to deal with the mating market as it stands, not as we would like it to be in theory. In other words, when your ship is sinking in the middle of the Atlantic because it has holes in it - it's not useful to say "replace the hull of the ship." You can't do that mid-voyage. All you can do is plug the holes, with whatever you have around you. And as we move into the 2030s, polygyny is going to increasingly play that role. It creates romantic structure and progeny for many women in the midst of an atomized hook up culture that emphasizes selfishness. Since it a voluntary arrangement, it will create less single, resentful women; both reducing promiscuity and improving the birthrate. I also believe it will encourage more higher echelon men to commit to women rather than simply pump and dump them, and it will support your standard monogamous marriage indirectly by creating more clarity around women's' real choices and outcomes. Women will know what their real options are; dead-bedroom discourse will collapse. It is simply better for women who cannot find a man, either due to inclination or bad experiences dating, to share a husband with another woman and have children with him - than it is for her to remain single and hook up with random men. And if she has kids, it is especially better for her to have a present father in her children's life than to be a single mom. So polygyny is not a question of absolute good, it is one of relative good given human nature and the dynamics currently at play in society. The truth, however, is that nothing I or others say on this topic really matters. I am just trying to help people mentally prepare - because whether or not you agree with the concept, it's coming. You will not be able to lecture the men and women who want to have the arrangement; the finger-wagging of formerly promiscuous women on the subject of sexual morality are absurd and irrelevant, as are the sermons from Churches who consistently reward and elevate women who played the field for a decade and "turned to Christ" over the men who attempted to do the right thing from the beginning. There is simply too much romantic disorder and hypocrisy for anyone to speak on the matter of polygyny with moral authority, especially when the Bible is ambiguous on the topic. That doesn't mean polygyny will be a perfect solution, or that it won't have it's problems - even if most plural marriages work well, there will nevertheless be notable public examples of crash-outs - of jealous wives losing it. And it's plausible that in time these problems will either collapse, or at least reduce the appeal of the institution. But we cannot get to that outcome until we experience the arrangement again as a society. The path to traditional monogamy is not trying to go backwards against the current - it's going forward. It lies on the other end of polygyny. The only way out is through.

If more women had the same distaste for sleeping with men who have no real responsibility for them as they do for being in a plural marriage to a good Godly man who is committed to protecting and providing for them, we might be able to get somewhere.

God didn’t reveal polygyny to me when I was chasing tail. He showed me when I stopped—when I surrendered everything and walked in obedience…for years. It’s not about collecting wives. It’s about being capable enough to cover more than one. That’s a calling, not a craving.