Friday, July 04, 2008

The Polygyny Necessity? Examining the Monogamy Lie.

Using the chart of US population statistics, let's examine what the effect of having men (in general) marry older than women would be.

We know that the ratio of men to women between the ages of 15 and 64 is one to one. If we stop the egalitarian requirement of same age, one to one for marriage which we already know isn't functioning anyway (most women marry older men) there is a significant surplus of women. If for instance men marry at age 20 and onward, discounting for a moment, men in retirement (over age 64) we get an injection of about ten million women into the "wife supply." This would be in keeping with the previously expressed idea that women are ready for being a wife sooner than men were ready to be a husband. The difference actually is the difference between my wife, and I. It's the difference between my daughter and her probable future mate.

The number of men to women is not actually one to one between 20 and 64, it is men - 89,881,041 and women - 90,813,578. Revising numbers upward for the ADDITION of 15 to 20 year old females into the marriage pool and we have 100-101 million women versus less than 90 million men. That's a disparity that can only be taken up by 12 men out of a hundred, taking an extra wife.

Let's examine the effect of the prison population on this number. The Washington Post.

"A record 7 million people -- one in every 32 U.S. adults -- were behind bars, on probation or on parole by the end of last year, a Justice Department report released yesterday shows.

Of those, 2.2 million were in prison or jail, an increase of 2.7 percent over the previous year, according to the report."

The article goes on to point out that 93% of those persons are MEN. That's another 600,000 out of the loop as far as I am concerned. Whether married or NOT, those men should not be married. At least not for a while. As a father I should be able to scope out such potential grooms and take them off my daughter's list.

Then there is the gay population. A rough estimate of the number of gay men versus lesbian women in the United States would add a net gain of about 3 million more women to the marriage pool that could not be addressed by monogamy. So in reality there are probably only 83,000,000 men and about 101,000,000 women in the marriage pool if you start men out at 20, and women out at 15. I imagine the disparity grows as the population ages between 15 and 64.

Mercury News - "Men in their 40s tend to marry women who average seven years younger, and men in their 50s are marrying brides who average 11 years younger, according to England's research. And men in the 60s? They marry women who are 13 years younger.

'In first marriages, men are typically a couple years older than women,' England said. But, 'the older men are when they marry, and it doesn't matter whether it's a first or a second marriage, the more years they marry down.'"

Shall we discuss on top of this natural tendency in the population at large, the disparity of women in the church to men? If you weed out all the "undesirables" you'd probably find who was left in church. It is estimated that among evangelicals ALONE, there are 12,000,000 more women in church on a given Sunday, than men. That might be why in some ways of looking at the statistics, fully a quarter of the women over 15, have never married. According to the same analysis of statistics, about 30% of men never marry above that same age. 70 men to 100 women, if all the women married, would mean perhaps half of all marriages being polygynous. Now that's not so odd after all. About a third of men not marrying, about a third marrying monogamously, about a third marrying polygynously. Half the women in a polygyny, half not.




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