Abstract
Controversially, psychologist and public intellectual Jordan Peterson advises “enforced monogamy” for societies with high percentages of “incels.” As Peterson’s proposal resonates in manosphere circles, this chapter reconstructs and briefly evaluates the argument for it. Premised on the moral importance of civilizational sustainability, advocates argue that both polygamous and socially monogamous but sexually liberal mating patterns result in unsustainable proportions of unattached young men. Given the premises, monogamous societies are probably justified in maintaining their anti-polygamist social and legal norms. The case for imposing stricter sexual norms on socially monogamous but sexually liberal societies is weaker, however, as male involuntary celibacy in those places isn’t as directly caused by male intrasexual competition, and since less intrusive social interventions are more likely to ameliorate “the incel problem.”
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Notes
- 1.
Dan Bilefsky and Ian Austen, “Toronto Van Attack Suspect Expressed Anger at Women,” New York Times, April 24, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/24/world/canada/toronto-van-rampage.html.
- 2.
Mack Lamoureux, “A Brief History of ‘Incel,’ the Misogynistic Group Allegedly Cited By Toronto Van Attacker,” Vice, April 24, 2018, https://www.vice.com/en/article/pax9kz/a-brief-history-of-incel-the-misogynistic-group-allegedly-cited-by-toronto-van-attacker.
- 3.
Nellie Bowles, “Jordan Peterson, Custodian of the Patriarchy,” New York Times, May 18, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/18/style/jordan-peterson-12-rules-for-life.html.
- 4.
See, for example, David Futrelle, who writes
You can’t solve the problem of aggrieved male entitlement by engineering some weird and at least semi-coercive program of “enforced monogamy” built on the assumption that men inherently deserve some sort of access to women’s bodies—regardless of what the women inhabiting these bodies want. You can’t rid the world of violence born of aggrieved male entitlement with a “solution” that reinforces that sense of entitlement.
“The Dark Corners of the Internet that Spawned Ideas Like ‘Enforced Monogamy,’” Vice, May 25, 2018, https://www.vice.com/en/article/d3k3ex/jordan-peterson-enforced-monogamy-incels.
- 5.
Jordan Peterson, “On the New York Times and “Enforced Monogamy,” Jordan B Peterson blog, https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/media/on-the-new-york-times-and-enforced-monogamy/.
- 6.
Christina Sewell, “Removing the Meat Subsidy: Our Cognitive Dissonance Around Animal Agriculture,” Journal of International Affairs, February 11, 2020, https://jia.sipa.columbia.edu/removing-meat-subsidy-our-cognitive-dissonance-around-animal-agriculture.
- 7.
In addition, and too-often ignored, is the fact that asteroids are inevitable and grave environmental threats, and cannot be identified and diverted by anything other than an advanced civilization—one quite a bit more advanced than our own. David J. Eicher, “Why the Asteroid Threat Should Be Taken Seriously,” Astronomy, n.d., https://astronomy.com/bonus/asteroidday.
- 8.
I’ll use “mating pattern” as a catchall term to cover not only “marriage patterns” (discussed in the next section) but also patterns of sexual behavior, along with the concomitant norms for each.
- 9.
Justin McCurry, “Record Numbers of Couples Living in Sexless Marriages in Japan, Says Report,” The Guardian, February 14, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/14/record-numbers-of-couples-living-in-sexless-marriages-in-japan-says-report.
- 10.
Because of space constraints, I will not discuss polyamory here. Suffice it to say that I believe that, although polyamory-acceptance may indeed lead us down a slippery slope to polygamy acceptance and legalization for reasons of philosophical or legal consistency, and although I think (for reasons discussed just below) that polygamy should remain illegal and socially unacceptable in societies that are currently monogamous, polyamory itself is orthogonal to polygamy, and anti-polygamy legislation does not (and should not) infringe on polyamory.
- 11.
Miller is not being uncharitable here: one book he assigns in his groundbreaking “Polyamory and Open Sexuality” course on the topic, Mark Michaels and Patricia Johnson’s Designer Relationships (Jersey City: Cleis Press, 2015), advocates for complete social neutrality between monogamy, polygamy, polyamory, or any other mating arrangement in order to allow people to choose what works best for them, and is dismissive of any social critiques in the very brief passages where social impacts are considered at all.
- 12.
Geoffrey Miller, “Polyamory Is Growing—And We Need To Get Serious About It,” Quillette, October 29, 2019, https://quillette.com/2019/10/29/polyamory-is-growing-and-we-need-to-get-serious-about-it/.
- 13.
Cf. the controversy generated by Robin Hanson’s post “Comparing Income & Sex Redistribution,” Overcoming Bias blog, June 26, 2018, https://www.overcomingbias.com/2018/06/comparing-income-sex-redistribution.html.
- 14.
Joseph Henrich, “Polygyny in Cross-Cultural Perspective: Theory and Implications,” affidavit S-097767 submitted to the Supreme Court of British Columbia, Canada, July 15, 2010. Available: https://stoppolygamyincanada.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/joseph-henrichs-research-paper.pdf.
- 15.
Joseph Henrich, Robert Boyd, and Peter Richerson, “The Puzzle of Monogamous Marriage,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 367 (2012): 657–669.
- 16.
Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2020).
- 17.
Henrich, “Polygyny in Cross-Cultural Perspective,” 26.
- 18.
David Buss, “Sex Differences in Human Mate Preferences: Evolutionary Hypotheses Tested in 37 Cultures” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 12, no. 1 (1989): 1–14.
- 19.
Robert Trivers, “Parental Investment and Sexual Selection,” in Sexual Selection and the Descent of Man, 1871–1971, ed. B. Campbell (Chicago: Aldine, 1972), 52–95.
- 20.
See for updated research on mating strategies pt. 3 of David Buss, Evolutionary Psychology (New York: Routledge, 2019).
- 21.
Henrich, “Polygyny in Cross-Cultural Perspective,” 40.
- 22.
See, for example, Emily Crookston, “Love and (Polygamous) Marriage? A Liberal Case Against Polygamy,” Journal of Moral Philosophy 12 no. 3 (2014): 267–289, esp. 283ff.
- 23.
In fairness, Crookston’s (see supra) concern is a moral injury, not a material one.
- 24.
William Jankowiak, Monika Sudakov, and Benjamin Wilreker, “Co-Wife Conflict and Co-operation,” Ethnology 44, no. 1 (2005): 81–98.
- 25.
William Tucker, Marriage and Civilization (Washington DC: Regnery, 2014), ch. 8. That said, I know a Cameroonian noble woman who procured additional wives while her high-status husband was on a lengthy trip abroad, as she needed more help in their fields. When he returned, she informed him about his new wives, and it is a running joke in that household that these junior wives called her “husband.”
- 26.
Henrich, Boyd, and Richerson, “Puzzle of Monogamous Marriage,” 665–666.
- 27.
Henrich, Boyd, and Richerson, “Puzzle of Monogamous Marriage,” 661–663.
- 28.
Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, Homicide (New York: De Gruyter, 1988).
- 29.
Henrich, Boyd, and Richerson, “Puzzle of Monogamous Marriage,” 661–663.
- 30.
“We find,” say two researchers on the question,
statistically significant relationships between polygyny and an entire downstream suite of negative consequences for men, women, children, and the nation-state, including the following outcomes: discrepancy between law and practice concerning women’s equality, birth rate, rates of primary and secondary education for male and female children, difference between males and females in HIV infection, age of marriage, maternal mortality, life expectancy, sex trafficking, female genital mutilation, domestic violence, inequity in the treatment of males and females before the law, defense expenditures, and political rights and civil liberties.
Rose McDermott & Jonathan Cowden, “Polygyny and Violence Against Women,” Emory Law Journal 64, no. 6 (2015): 1767–1814. Available at: https://scholarlycommons.law.emory.edu/elj/vol64/iss6/4.
- 31.
Gary Becker, A Treatise on the Family (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 56ff. See also Robert Guest, “The Link Between Polygamy and War,” The Economist, December 19, 2017, https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2017/12/19/the-link-between-polygamy-and-war.
- 32.
Anika Rahman and Nahid Toubia, Female Genital Mutilation: A Guide to Laws and Policies Worldwide (United Kingdom: Bloomsbury Academic, 2000), 5–6.
- 33.
Walter Scheidel, “A Peculiar Institution? Greco–Roman Monogamy in Global Context,” The History of the Family, 14 no. 3 (2009): 280–291.
- 34.
Henrich, “Polygyny in Cross-Cultural Perspective,” 17–19; Henrich, Boyd, and Richerson, “Puzzle of Monogamous Marriage,” 666–667.
- 35.
Cheshire Calhoun, “Who’s Afraid of Polygamous Marriage? Lessons for Same-Sex Marriage Advocacy from the History of Polygamy,” San Diego Law Review 42 (2005): 1023–1042; Polycarp Ikuenobe, “The Monogamous Conception of Romantic Love and Western Critiques of Polygamy in African Traditions,” Philosophical Papers 47, no. 3 (2018): 373–401; Andrew March, “Is There a Right to Polygamy? Marriage, Equality and Subsidizing Families in Liberal Public Justification,” Journal of Moral Philosophy 8 (2011): 246–272.
- 36.
Peter Ueda, Catherine Mercer, Cyrus Ghaznavi, and Debby Herbenick, “Trends in Frequency of Sexual Activity and Number of Sexual Partners Among Adults Aged 18 to 44 Years in the US, 2000–2018, JAMA 3(6) (June 12, 2020): 1–15.
- 37.
“Demographics of Inceldom,” Incelswiki, accessed November 2, 2020, https://incels.wiki/w/Demographics_of_inceldom#Young_incels_in_the_U.S.
- 38.
Christopher Ingraham, “The Share of Americans Not Having Sex has Reached a Record High,” Washington Post, March 29, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/03/29/share-americans-not-having-sex-has-reached-record-high/.
- 39.
Kate Julian, “Why Are Young People Having So Little Sex?”, The Atlantic, December 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/the-sex-recession/573949/.
- 40.
Although more sexually active men also consume more pornography, there is reason to believe that, for many men, porn consumption serves as an adequate-enough substitute for sex such that they are disincentivized from seeking out relationships. For more on this debates, see Jean Twenge, “Possible Reasons US Adults Are Not Having Sex as Much as They Used To,” JAMA 3(6) (June 12, 2020), https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2767063; Philip Zimbardo, Man Interrupted (Newburyport, MA: Red Wheel, 2016).
- 41.
“In the elaborate incel taxonomy of participants in the sexual marketplace, I am a Becky, devoting my attentions to a Chad. I’m probably a “roastie,” too—another term they use for women with sexual experience, denoting labia that have turned into roast beef from overuse.” Jia Tolentino, “Rage of the Incels,” New Yorker, May 15, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-rage-of-the-incels.
- 42.
Bowles, “Jordan Peterson, Custodian of the Patriarchy.”
- 43.
“Roy Baumeister,” Incelwiki, https://incels.wiki/w/Roy_Baumeister; see also an online discussion by psychologist Todd Grande on the incel-sexual economics connection, “Sexual Economics Theory vs. Feminist Theory: MGTOW, INCEL, & Science,” June 17, 2019, https://youtu.be/M1R_pRxj9Zg.
- 44.
Roy Baumeister and Kathleen Vohs, “Sexual Economics: Sex as Female Resource for Social Exchange in Heterosexual Interactions,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 8, no. 4 (November 2004): 339–63.
- 45.
Roy Baumeister, Kathleen Catanese, and Kathleen Vohs, “Is There a Gender Difference in Strength of Sex Drive? Theoretical Views, Conceptual Distinctions, and a Review of Relevant Evidence,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 5, no. 3 (August 2001): 242–73.
- 46.
Roy Baumeister, Tania Reynolds, Bo Winegard, Kathleen Vohs, “Competing for Love: Applying Sexual Economics Theory to Mating Contests,” Journal of Economic Psychology 63 (2017): 230–241.
- 47.
Baumeister and Vohs, “Sexual Economics,” 350ff; Mark Regnerus, Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); Steven Rhoads, “Hookup Culture: The High Costs of a Low ‘Price’ for Sex,” Society 49 (2012): 515–519.
- 48.
Roy Baumeister and Kathleen Vohs, “Sexual Economics, Culture, Men, and Modern Sexual Trends,” Society 49 (2012): 520–524, 523.
- 49.
Baumeister and Vohs, “Sexual Economics, Culture, Men, and Modern Sexual Trends,” 521.
- 50.
Baumeister and Vohs, “Sexual Economics, Culture, Men, and Modern Sexual Trends,” 522ff. For more discussion of male overrepresentation at the poles of accomplishment, see Roy Baumeister, Is There Anything Good About Men? How Cultures Flourish By Exploiting Men (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
- 51.
Kristina Durante, et al. “Ovulation Leads Women to Perceive Sexy Cads as Good Dads,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 103 no. 2 (2012): 292–305. For layman summaries, see Mary Duenwald, “For a Good Time, Well, Don’t Call Dad,” New York Times, Dec. 2, 2003, https://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/02/science/for-a-good-time-well-don-t-call-dad.html; Lawrence Josephs, “How to Pick a Daddy Type,” Psychology Today, Apr 18, 2020, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/between-the-sheets/202004/how-pick-daddy-type.
- 52.
Regnerus, Cheap Sex, 85–88.
- 53.
Regnerus, Cheap Sex, 87.
- 54.
Anonymous, “Tinder Experiments II,” Medium, March 24, 2015, https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-guys-unless-you-are-really-hot-you-are-probably-better-off-not-wasting-your-2ddf370a6e9a.
- 55.
Aviv Goldgeier, “What’s The Biggest Challenge Men Face On Dating Apps?: A Q&A With Aviv Goldgeier, Junior Growth Engineer,” Hingeirl, n.d., https://hingeirl.com/hinge-reports/whats-the-biggest-challenge-men-face-on-dating-apps-a-qa-with-aviv-goldgeier-junior-growth-engineer/.
- 56.
Bradford Tuckfield, “Attraction Inequality and the Dating Economy,” Quillette, March 12, 2019, https://quillette.com/2019/03/12/attraction-inequality-and-the-dating-economy/.
- 57.
Richard Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (New York: Penguin Books, 2009).
- 58.
See Rhoads, “Hookup Culture” for a longer critique. Indeed, it could appear at times that sex and relationship education is almost designed to undermine the psychological wellbeing and reproductive futures of those it’s meant to serve.
- 59.
See psychologist Alexandra Solomon’s “Marriage 101” course at Northwestern, or Boston College’s Kerry Cronin’s recorded talk “Hanging Out and Hooking Up,” February 9, 2015, https://youtu.be/60K2-LEDPyg.
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Demetriou, D. (2022). Virgin Versus Chad: On Enforced Monogamy as a Solution to the Incel Problem. In: Boonin, D. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Sexual Ethics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87786-6_9
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