Polygamy makes men live longer?
Something of an interesting result was presented recently: that polygamy makes men live longer. This sounds like a cue for the old joke really: having multiple wives doesn’t in fact make you live longer, it just makes it seem that way. However, there’s another thing wrong with the analysis.
A new study from a British university seems to suggest that men who are polygamists live longer than those with just one wife - 12% longer, in fact. But before we rush off to the wife market (or “Yates’s Wine Lodge”, as it is called over here), we should consider the possibility that the scientists have got things the wrong way around.
In societies where polygamy is common, it is the most fit, healthy and affluent men who have more than one wife. Women are disinclined to get themselves hitched to men who are likely to croak within a few years or months - they do that only in the West, where the laws of inheritance are somewhat different.
So it is not the case that having lots of wives enables men to live longer - they would have lived longer anyway, even without the profusion of ghastly wives whining at them all day long, telling them to put up shelves in the mud hut and stopping them smoking in the bedroom.
It is more accurate to think of these multiple wives instead as a sort of progressive tax on happiness, designed to spread the load of human misery.
Apologies for the somewhat misogynist tenor of that particular report: you wouldn’t be all that surprised to learn that this specific journalist, a certain Rod Liddle, has recently been though a somewhat tempestuous divorce? No, you wouldn’t would you….
But in his basic point he is of course correct. Causality runs the other way. In a polygamous society of course it is only the alpha males who get the multiple wives and we all know that alpha males live longer than betas anyway.
August 27th, 2008 at 9:35 am
Some say polygamy reduces the rate of HIV infections, which would increase lifespan. According to some, as seen in this article, http://www.aegis.com/news/pana/2001/PA010211.html, men simply cannot remain faithful to one woman, and often this means they cheat and sometimes contract HIV and bring it home to the wife. As Kenya’s education minister put in such charmingly chauvinistic terms: “if a man had 10 submissive and faithful wives he would solve the two problems of AIDS and lack of spouses” (apparently, there are more women than men in Kenya, and an unmarried woman is a sad thing to see).
But then again, the article points out that many oppose polygamy because they believe it actually was the cause for the spread of the AIDS epidemic, because “a man cannot sexually satisfy all his wives.”
Tim adds: There’s a book out there, “The Wisdom of Whores” which looks at HIV around the world (and the bureaucracy that goes with it). One of the points she makes is that HIV in Africa really is different, as people tend to have several ongoing sexual relationships at any one time. As opposed to the serial monogamy more likely elsewhere in the world. It’s a big difference and polygamy could, as you say, either increase or decrease infection rates….depends upon whether those in that polygamous marriage are faithful inside it or not.