Instead of considering polygamy a slide into ancient barbarism, a new movement for polygamy will inevitably portray itself as pro-women. Some women will claim that it frees them from the doom of being some schlub’s one-and-only. Others may find it frees them from trying to become “everything” to the demands of a high-status partner. Some may enjoy both of those freedoms at once. And does anyone believe today’s “high-status males” are more likely to be wife-beaters than jobless males?
What Rauch is ultimately arguing is that bourgeois society is superior to the furies of unrestrained sexual desire and conquest, or to more adventurous societies that admit polygamy. Rauch is actually in the position of a civilizer. And on this I agree with him totally. That is precisely what makes him more open to arguments of marriage traditionalists for strengthening norms of monogamy.
But it sets him against those who, like Dan Savage, argue that legal same-sex marriage will improve all marriages generally by breaking the institution away from patriarchal norms of wifely fidelity and tight gender roles.
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