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Comment by camillomiller | Hacker News Reader

EA can be the scum of Earth and I wouldn’t be surprised that this kind of group could be as it sounds cultish and self-aggrandizing. But conflating their wrongdoings right away with the refusal of monogamy and the practice of polyamory is so annoying and conservative and plainly wrong. It also implies that these practices are one step removed from harassment, which is infuriating. It’s exactly like conflating homosexuality and pedophilia, just wrong and violent. Shame on TIME for using this story to immediately push their conservative agenda.

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In a perfect world I agree with you, but at some point you have to ask yourself why non-monogamy keeps going out of style after periods of acceptance. Even with a religion justifying it, Mormons gave up polygamy!

I think it's because polygamous relationships lend themselves to manipulative and abusive behavior more easily than monogamous relationships do. Over time that increase in probability of negative outcomes turns into social change and prescription against it.

Mormons gave it up because the US Government forced them to. It was a requirement for statehood for Utah.

Perhaps. I'm skeptical, but I have neither data nor anecdata to support that skepticism, so I won't actually dispute it.

But the problem there is still the manipulative and abusive behavior, not the polygamy. It's absurd to argue against healthy polygamous relationships just because there are unhealthy ones.

A culture where men can have many partners but women aren’t allowed to is inherently ripe for abuse. This is completely different from polyamory.

In fact male homosexuals are about 1̶0̶x̶ 2x more likely to be pedophiles than heterosexuals.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1556756/

> In fact male homosexuals are about 10x more likely to be pedophiles than heterosexuals.

That's not what your source says, it says that the heterosexual:homosexual ratio is 11:1 among those it found to be pedophiles, which is lower than the 20:1 ratio in the general population, implying a higher (but less than 2×, not about 10×) likelihood of pedophiles among homosexuals than heterosexuals.

Fair enough, will edit parent.

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