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Comment by astral303 | Hacker News Reader

Isn't the problem exacerbated by the traditional monogamous relationship structures? Why must there be a pairing and nothing else? Why are there only two choices of "unmarried men" or "married men"?

Article's terms like "competing for brides" betrays a certain "ownership of women" mentality, IMO.

So when we talk about cultural attitudes leading to this "missing women" problem, we can't disregard the cultural/societal context of two-person marriage as the only way.

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This is a really interesting topic.

I think that there are two ideas that combine to create a requirement for traditional monogamous structures - 1) Land Ownership and 2) The family as a power-wielding unit (not just immediate family but extended family)

Land is power, in Asia and everywhere else. It's advantageous for a family to get more land. Also, it needs people to take care of/improve the land. The best way to do this is to have a son who can earn more land, bringing it into the family, and then marry a young girl who can create more members of the family to work and repeat the process.

Now, here's where competition for brides comes into play - it is in the girl's best interests that she picks a mate with lots of land/power, since that means her offspring will be better off, and she will also probably have a better life. So potential suitors will compete to show they have better resources. This is really in the girl's interests - she has the power here.

So why doesn't a girl work herself? Well, in much of Asia, hard labor is still dominant. Men are much better at physical labor than women. With the advent of more IT-related jobs this is starting to change, but men are still in higher demand for jobs than women.

Thanks for this perspective!

It's fascinating to me to contrast this with the dominant American nuclear family paradigm. The family as a power-wielding unit is not the part of the American Dream. And so there's no incentive to build such extended families. A nuclear family strikes me as a much more expensive way to live, however.

But really, how many of us would want to live with our extended family? (A significant percentage would not, I reckon)

Much of the pressure for an extended family is the lack of rule of law and the need to have people close to you to watch your back. When people become more comfortable that they will not be treated arbitrarily, that pressure relaxes.

Awesome insight!

I would guess, having not studied the topic at all, that the tendency toward monogamy (or at least punctuated monogamy) long predates what you're talking about. It seems to me that people who are careful about insuring who they have children with will be much more successful at passing their genes on than people who are not so careful, and thus there ought to be some selective pressure for at least punctuated monogamy.

Why polygamy is bad:

Shorter versions:

http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2012/01/the_p...

http://huntergatherer.com/good-reasons-why-polygamy-is-a-bad...

Much longer, more academic and legal arguments:

http://news.ubc.ca/2012/01/23/monogamy-reduces-major-social-...

Court of British Colombia's 355 pg reasoning:

http://www.courts.gov.bc.ca/jdb-txt/SC/11/15/2011BCSC1588.ht...

Many of those arguments also apply to serial single mothers.

True. But the findings of that study, of serial monogamy, may not be politically kosher. Hence why I can't really find any.

"One-to-many marriage really bad idea", news at 11.

It's funny to me that these articles study it through this lens of marriage, unquestioned. I suppose it's easier to model exclusive relationships.

There's no need to claim that monogamy is morally superior to believe that a gender imbalance is undesirable. That's like saying "well why should most people only be attracted to members of the opposite sex?" It's not a matter of should. It's just a fact that most people do, and that this is probably a rather strong instinct (with obvious evolutionary explanations) rather than an easily-changeable cultural coincidence.

Women seem to prefer sharing an alpha male with other women, than have a harem of losers. Because of that, I think it would increase the mismatch.

There's really no such thing as an alpha male, the term is nonsense taken from some old bad science on wolves and misapplied on humans.

Read it as an 'attractive male' then.

No thanks.

No self doubt (despite their being controversy and some that support alpha male classifications) can be interpreted a number of ways.

http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/going-ape/galleries/al...

National Geographic have a different view to your extremely confident statement. There are those that support and reject your assertion. I'm not so quick to dismiss.

It's been debunked, fact; there is no controversy, it was even called bad science by the original scientist who published the original research on wolves. Nat Geo, if they're still running that crap, is not above relaying old bad information just like anyone else, it takes time for bunk science to exit the public consciousness. This is no different than the brain 10% thing people still believe, it's simply non-sense people don't know is non-sense just as this alpa-male stuff is.

Read the moon is a harsh mistress. They had very interesting solution to severe gender imbalance. From just a normal married treesomes to line marriages ( a commune with seniority).

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