If The Shoe Were On The Other Husband

By Amy Yensi-

Everywhere you turn you see the images. On every channel there is a parade of children getting loaded on to a yellow school bus, dressed as if they walked right off of the set of Little House on the Prairie. During the primetime call-in shows, you get full accounts from a girl who escaped her polygamist compound into American civilization, in addition to an expert psychologist's take on the emotional damage such a lifestyle causes on its female and underage participants.

What is appalling about this lifestyle is not so much that it exists, we've heard about polygamy in America prior to the story's break. The astonishing part is that it goes against the key components of what an All-American family should look like--one man, one woman, and their 2.3 children occupying their one household. Nonetheless, the focus of this post is not to debate back and forth as to whether it is wrong or right. Its been done. I leave it up to everyone to formulate his or her own opposition or approval of this lifestyle.

Let us make it a given that all the benefits of polygamy override any of its negatives. While we are at it, lets cross out any illegal and immoral implications that can also mar the lifestyle's reputation. What we are left with, is a way of life in which people voluntarily create a strong sense community, promote faith and spirituality, make childrearing a central focus of the family, and help fight the depletion of our most precious natural resource, men. For those of us who are open-minded enough to accept that maybe the abuses that occurred during the recent polygamist raid in Texas are very uncommon and as probable as child abuse occurring in a typical American home, there is still an issue that needs to be addressed, sexism. If polygamy is a positive and spiritual setup, how come we don’t see any compounds in which several men are married to one woman?

Every point in the column indicating that maybe it isn’t that bad, is completely delegitimized by the fact that the same religious sects that practice polygamy, frown upon polyandry-one woman being married to two or more husbands simultaneously. The reason I defined polyandry is not because I doubt that those reading this are knowledgeable individuals. I defined it because it is so uncommon, that prior to me doing research for this post, I had never heard of it myself.

Even those who give polygamy the benefit of the doubt, are soon faced with troubling questions after learning the disporportion between polygamy and polyandry. It begs the question: Is it just a façade to cloak and promote the traditional male-female gender roles?—that men have an anamalistic sexual drive that needs to be quenched by a variety of women, while women should be happy to have a man in the house who ‘wears the pants.’

I wonder which one of the wives gets to wash those pants?…