Polygamy and the Nature of Men
After an intriguing introduction that details how Atahualpa of the ancient Incan empire maintained fifteen
hundred women, Ridley returns to Trivers’ point that the gender most invested in creating and rearing
offspring is the one that has the least to gain from additional mating. “A peacock grants a peahen one tiny
favor: a batch of sperm and nothing else,” Ridley writes. “He will not guard her from other peacocks, feed
her, protect a food supply for her, help her incubate her eggs, or help her bring up the chicks. She will do
all the work. Therefore, when she mates with him, it is an unequal bargain. She brings him the promise of
a gigantic single-handed effort to make his sperm into new peacocks; he brings just the tiniest—though
seminal—contribution” (178-179). We have to assume that Ridley intended for that well-placed pun to be
noticed.
Another interesting point of this chapter comes in a discussion of polygamy versus monogamy. It would
seem, given the male tendency towards quantity and the female desire for quality, that our laws
prohibiting polygamy benefit the woman. After all, wouldn’t everyone like to be that Incan ruler with a
harem of fifteen hundred women scattered around the country?
But the reality is that in polygamous societies, the wealthy and powerful tend to attract all the women.
Leaving the average male with absolutely nothing. Think about our own current society. If a woman could
become a second, third, or fourth wife of Bill Gates, isn’t that life preferable to marrying a bus driver from
Poughkeepsie? “As a Mormon lawyer put it recently, there are ‘compelling social reasons’ that make
polygamy ‘attractive to the modern career woman.’ But think of the effect on men,” Ridley writes. “If many
women chose to be second wives of rich men rather than first wives of poor men, there would be a
shortage of unmarried woman, and many men would be forced to remain unhappily celibate. Far from
being laws to protect women, antipolygamy statutes may really do more to protect men” (186). But for the
wealthy and powerful, having multiple partners is a long-standing historical fact.
“The Babylonian king Hammurabi had thousands of slave ‘wives’ at his command,” Ridley writes. “The
Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten procured 317 concubines and ‘droves’ of consorts. The Aztec ruler
Montezuma enjoyed 4,000 concubines. The Indian emperor Udayama preserved sixteen thousand
consorts in apartments ringed by fire and guard by eunuchs. The Chinese emperor Fei-ti had ten
thousand women in his harem,” (199). These weren’t the only examples of such prodigious appetite.
Researcher Laura Bitzig examined 104 politically autonomous societies and found that “in almost every
case, power predicts the size of a man’s harem” (199). The discussion of a medieval count provides a
vivid counterpoint to the nature of male life in these situations. The count had an elaborate system
established to protect his women and preserve his reproductive efficiency. “Meanwhile, many medieval
peasant men were lucky to marry before middle age and had few opportunities for fornication” (202).
What does this mean for emerging pickup artists? That it sucks to be an insurance adjustor in a bar full of
CEO’s. But although history may not be on our side, the technologies of seduction have been developed
to help even the playing field. Take heart and be encouraged with what your skills can do. Sure, you
might ultimately lose out to that tycoon with the yacht. But you’ll score more than the average frustrated
chump in the same contest. As Ridley said, medieval peasants had few opportunities for fornication, but
they didn’t know how to demonstrate higher value, did they?
