Why would a matriarchal society practice polygyny?

Question

In an alternative world, matriarchal society is dominated in every way that women always are number 1 position, such as empress, queen, chief, etc. Men can only become the number 2: vice president, advisors, etc. You get the idea.

But there's a strange thing they practice polygyny. You would think a matriarchal society would practice polyandry. But no, only 1% have multiple husbands. Even then it's for special circumstance and high ranking and nobility do it.

In that society, 44% of people practice polygyny.

I know this isn't much. But what would be a good excuse for these practices? Excluding that men are secretly running the world.

Answer 1

The Real Marriage is Between the "Wives"

From a genetic point of view it makes sense that only a small proportion of the males get to breed with most of the females. Namely the most genetically fit males with the greatest chance of successful offspring. The remaining males are expendable and can be used for example as soldiers without compromising the species' future.

You are asking for the social point of view. How can we have a situation where females are superior yet often share a husband? The answer is the relationship is not a collection of husband-wife unions with equal partners. Rather it is a collection of woman-woman unions, with the male serving as the second-class partner. He is a stable way for them to have children, rather than wasting energy looking for separate men, and perhaps fighting over the same man to have their separate children. Rather they will choose a man at the start as the genetic father, and that child will have several mothers.

The man is not a husband in the conventional sense of "life partner". Rather he is a designated friend-with-benefits. His position as a fellow human being might be just as high as them. But his position in the family is lower. If they want children he will be the genetic father. He might or might not help his wives raising the child, depending on what the wives want. If he displeases the wives he might be demoted and replaced.

Typically one woman will "propose" to another and the marriage between the two women is the big celebration, with the man playing only a minor role. If each woman has a man already they have to discard one of them. Sometimes neither woman has a man and they find one later.

Families with three women usually form when a two-woman household "proposes" to a third woman. This entails another marriage celebration.

Bonus: DWKrauss points out how, in this setup, there is no requirement for a sexual relationship between the wives. It is much more important to marry someone you are happy to raise children with. On that note it might be common to marry a sister or other relative, since you will have similar ideas of how children should be raised, and find a man outside the family. Genetically this is a good idea since it means the child has genetic material from both mothers regardless of who birthed it.

Answer 2

War (and privilege)

In this society, women are the leaders, generals, strategists. Men are the front-line troops. Leaders are valuable; grunts are expendable. If a queen has the forces to win a battle decisively, well and good. But if it takes sacrificing large numbers of troops to win, she will do what is necessary.

"I poured out the blood of my armies like water." - Empress Jadis of Charn

In a warlike society with this attitude, male mortality will be higher than female mortality, leading to a population with more women than men.

Now, each woman would prefer to have her own husband, or perhaps multiple husbands. But the population imbalance makes it impossible. The nobility use their power and privilege to marry as many men as they please. Everybody else has to settle for what they can get.

In this society, the family name is passed on through the mother. As in many real-world societies, people attach great importance to keeping their family name alive through their offspring. Most women, therefore, place a high priority on bearing children, and to bear children, you need a man. Sharing a husband isn't ideal, but it's better than remaining unmarried and childless.

(It is possible to have a child without being married, but women who go this route are typically looked down upon: it implies that they are so poor they couldn't even afford to share a husband.)

Answer 3

Men are deemed inferior, therefore those few decent ones which happen to be found are used to improve the species, and their only task is to fecundate as many women as possible.

Each chosen one is given as husband to many wives, so that their offspring can produce valuable people.

For the more technically advanced nations the man is reproduced in the same way as race horses are: their sperm is used for artificially inseminate as many women as possible, without physical intercourse. In this way, technically a man has many wives, but practically none.

Answer 4

The best of the best

Although it's easy to think from a human society perspective, there can be cultural differences in a human like society that request different ways to mate. One way this can be different is the drive of women to get the very best.

The woman are choosing for the male, not the male for the women. It is accepted for the male to have sex with multiple woman, as it creates the best offspring. Depending on the society there can be a lot of subtle differences. There can be protectionism of the male, where the women that mate with the male decide if he can have more and who can be added to the group. There can be a free for all, allowing any woman to choose that husband. The woman can also have a tight bond between anyone who has chosen the same husband.

The importance here is choice. Societies can look a lot like each other, but differ in how the mates are chosen. In the above examples the men are completely left out. In our own patriarchal society however you do see that women can still choose a lot themselves in many societies. Even in some harem situations, although rare. A matriarchal or patriarchal society doesn't mean there is no agency in the non dominant sex. It just means that the dominant party often has more to say.

The woman have first say, initiating most of the romantic or reproductive relationships. That can make them dominant, even if the men can decline the advances. But if you want to drive the point home, remove all agency from the men.

Answer 5

There are hardly any males.

It is an accident of the genetics of this population. Male babies are very rare. Perhaps there is one for every 40 or 50 female babies. Males are so rare that there is not a specific male gender, gender meaning the cultural construct. This society definitely has culturally defined roles because that is what makes us human. But there are none that correspond to chromosomes - genetic males are considered to be the same as the females, except there is one thing that they can do that the females can't, and sometimes they do it.

Answer 6

Rapid population growth.

Men and women play an asymmetrical role in reproduction: men make their contribution at conception and then are largely superfluous outside a support role, while women are biologically committed throughout the pregnancy (and even beyond, e.g. nursing) and are unable to begin another until the last one is finished. Because of this, men are capable of producing children MUCH faster than women: a man with 10 wives can have 10-20 kids per year, while a woman with 10 husbands can still only have 1-2 kids per year.

If this society has a desperate need to grow its population as quickly as possible, either to recover from some massive catastrophe or out of a need to fill newly-acquired territory, it might make sense to pair politically, socially, religiously, or biologically important men with many women, to produce children as quickly as possible. The only requirement would be a reason why some men are more valuable (or available) than others, to explain why a symmetrical 50/50 population leads to an asymmetrical marriage arrangement.

The nature of the population crisis and the male selection process could be anything, but for a few examples:

• The world is ravaged by a virulent disease which only some people are immune to. Facing a downward spiral of population size, the High Priestess has allowed individual men with immunity to be "shared" by multiple women from important families that need to produce heirs who can survive into adulthood.
• After discovering the Hyperspace Network, the United Federation of Women have begun sending colony ships to habitable worlds. For efficiency, each ship carries 1,000 women as the primary crew, and 50 men to ensure viable population growth for the new colony. After a few generations the gender ratio will naturally even out, but for now each man will be required to impregnate multiple women in order to reach a self-sustaining population size.
• After a devastating war that saw over half the young men die on the battlefield as grunts for their ambitious female commanders, the Empress has declared that each remaining man must take at least two wives to ensure the next generation and secure the future of the Empire.

In every case, socially-inferior men are being paired with multiple female partners, all in pursuit of rapid population growth.

Answer 7

They evolved differently and have fewer men (a variation of Willks answer).

Our society has about 50/50 births of men and women. By the time puberty is over there are somewhat more women than men due to the high mortality rate of male puberty. Subsequently a large portion of men take one woman to be with and the remainder (tries to) have offspring with the "extra" women.

Your society is matriarchal, their structure could have changed to reflect this. If women can "share" one man without the need for competition the need for men goes down. In our society the support the man gives in taking the risky food gathering and child support is a great boon in child survival. In your society the women would provide support and childcare for one another, reducing the need for men once more.

There are so few men necessary that they started being born in lower and lower numbers.

Answer 8

Men do all the lethal work.

They fight as soldiers, they work with dangerous chemicals, they tot around bales on the wharf and get thrown in and drown -- etc. etc. Now, while the vast majority of people who die on the job are male in our society, perhaps there are particular reasons why jobs are so much more lethal in theirs. Perhaps there is large scale warfare, or relentless fights with monsters, or contaminated lands that still must be used.

Additionally, women want only excellent men to father their children. This gives the men a powerful motive to take on risky jobs to show their skills and their courage.

Furthermore, the one set of women who get no benefit from a man is his family. Many of them die in their cradles, sometimes from neglect, others from malice.

Answer 9

Men are like slaves

(there are real-world societies that work somewhat like that, but in reverse)

Men are expensive.

Wealthy women have a lot of them and use most of them as a workforce.

Less wealthy women have one (the official norm, but not really a frequent occasion) or just own "shares" of one.

Or they have none.

Renting men is common and there is a competitive market of attractive men that are seen as a status symbol.

Answer 10

In all but the shortest-lived Utopian socialist societies, having lots of "things" is a sign of status.

In patriarchal societies, a way for a rich man to display his power/wealth/virility is to practice polygamy. This "works" because one man can impregnate a lot more women than women can bear and raise children.

So... why would a matriarchal society practice what seems to be a sign of patriarchy? Because men are still men: bigger, stronger, more violent. Thus, to pacify them, the matriarchy decided:

1. practice polygyny to keep the men happy, and
2. kill the weak baby boys, so that there wouldn't be an excess of men unable to find a mate.

Answer 11

Hypergamy.

In the real world, it is widely attested that many women prefer a man who is "higher up" than they are: physically, socially, monetarily, and intellectually; this is called "hypergamy". You can see this reflected in things like the marriage choices of men and women with university degrees vs those without (women with university degrees marry "down" much more rarely than men with them do); IIRC there have also been studies that (heterosexual) women in modern Western societies tend to have more sex than (heterosexual) men do, because many of the high-status men have sex with lots of women, while the low-status men have little or no sex. It has been argued in various Red Pill/manosphere venues that the revealed preference of sexually-liberated women is for them to share high-status men, rather than monopolizing a low-status man.

I've seen it argued that this occurs because of reasons of evolutionary psychology; because of the biology of pregnancy and the heavy costs it imposes, it's in a woman's best interests to obtain the best genes available, to ensure the survival of their offspring - and that because the women who acted this way got a relative advantage over those who didn't, their genes became more likely to propagate.

Naturally, this social structure creates a large underclass of sexually-frustrated men, which in turn results in social instability that has been argued to result in patriarchal societies with monogamous marital norms having a competitive advantage over those societies that stray from this norm; those that strayed from it and remained relatively stable have typically been in situations where low-status men might be funneled into the military, where they might be able to hope to acquire foreign war-brides (though this is unlikely in a female-dominated society where kidnapping foreign women is likely to be frowned upon).

Answer 12

Most of the answers here focus on choosing a partner as a genetic fitness decision. For most of human history, in most places, this has not been the primary concern of the ruling class. Consider how many noble families have resorted to inbreeding, to their great detriment, just for the sake of retaining power within their dynasty (looking at you, Habsburgs).

The rules surrounding how many partners a person can have in the ruling class is almost always an issue of power. The rules of marriage govern the production of heirs, the movement of wealth and political power. A marriage can join the wealth of two families into a powerful dynasty, or it can split up the wealth of a powerful dynasty into smaller less effective units.

Answer 13

The men are the glue to alliances.

Suppose that women are the number ones, i.e., all the lords of the realm are female. So, how could Lady-Lord A and Lady-Lord B symbolically cement their alliance? The method of choice from history would be to marry their children.

However, both Lady-Lord A and Lady-Lord B could marry the same guy. Then the actual lords are united in marriage a trois, in constrast to their offspring. Furthermore, the offspring of Lady-Lords A and B would be blood-relations. (Policital) Marriages may end, but being blood-related never ceases.

The husband of Lady-Lords A and B would be a mutual super-envoy, since he has the most privileged access to both rulers.

Answer 14

To eliminate the notion of fatherhood

Real power in a matriarchal society would flow from mother to daughter, and the notion of motherhood would be strong. The notion of fatherhood would be weakened by the fact that the offspring could be from any man /husband. Men would be isolated. Respected, yes, but only as individuals. Ephemeral, and heirless - not like the chain of daughters.

Answer 15

Elephant-like society.

Females form closely connected pairs that raise the child elephants together (alternating their fertility periods). Few such pairs along with their children may form a large group with a strong (of course female-top) hierarchy.

Adult male elephants live either alone or in homosexual pairs of old and young.

Older males almost always have a priority in mating, so majority of the offspring for a certain span of time and areal shares the same father.

Answer 16

Hive society

You could model this off the way that a beehive or any colony is set up. The vast majority of bees or ants are female, but most of them are non-reproducing workers. Only the queens are able to lay eggs and produce offspring. The male drones have basically one job, which is to seek out queens in order to mate with them. The difference between a queen and a worker is whether they are fed the royal jelly while pupating - an honor reserved for only a small percentage of eggs. The difference between male and female eggs is whether or not they have been fertilized. A queen will lay eggs even if she has not mated, but these will all be exclusively female, mostly non-reproducing workers. She can only produce male drones if she has been fertilized by a male drone. This necessitates any males to go out and seek queens, often in other hives, because they will not mate with their own hive's queen. (Even an insect will avoid incest - despite those words being anagrams...)

Now to apply this model to a humanoid society, the only change you might want to make is that with these insects, the male is generally killed and eaten after mating - you might want to skip that part, allowing these drones to travel around from queen to queen. (And in this case a queen isn't necessarily the ruler of a whole country, but merely a small group, sort of like little city-states - you might have a hierarchy of regular queens, high-queens, empresses, etc. Give them whatever names you want at varying ranks, duchess, countess, whatever.) You might also allow your males to mate with non-reproducing worker females, but this would be just for recreation and not reproduction. The point being that males would be considerably less common, and a bit of commodity, but only for the purposes of mating. The queens (by any name) are the ones in charge. Some males may be given the honor of queen-consort, mating exclusively with the highest queen in charge, but most would be free agents, consorting with multiple lesser queens (and possibly some workers on the side just for fun).