Monogamy - the social construct of intimately pairing one woman with exactly one man is the far dominating moral compass for westernized sexuality.

 

But why does monogamy exist and why do the vast majority of men crave it?

 

If you ask the general public, Common answers include:

  1. The reduction of sexually transmitted diseases
  2. The importance of a persistent father figure in a child’s life
  3. Religious Obedience

 

Maybe some of these reasons are valid to a certain extent - (although I personally disagree )- none of them are truly the driving factor of monogamous cultures.

 

So what’s the real reason?

Most males of any species - including our own - are ‘betas’ or non-elite sexual competitors. This is not a diss or a sweeping generalization. Since the Alpha/Beta paradigm is based off of comparison, where we define Alpha’s as the top performers (estimated 10-20%) and betas as ‘everyone else’, it is by definition not possible to have a population where most members are alphas.

 

One of the most driving urges in any male - no matter how Alpha or Beta - is a desire to mate. There are many other things in life to enjoy as well, but it is most certainly impossible to have a completely satiated or ‘happy’ male who does not ever have access to a sexual partner.

 

However, in non societal nature like early humans or bonobos monkeys - only the alpha’s have the privilege of mating. Or in other words, 20% of the males get all the sex, and the other 80% get to watch from the sideline.

 

As you can imagine, this was probably pretty a huge fucking bummer and downright depressing for the betas (again, 80% majority of early men). Traditionally the response of a beta man was probably like that of a beta male any other species - risk it’s life at climbing the ranks or ‘wondering off’ to find a new population subset where he could be In the top 20%, and therefore had mating rights. (Fun fact, this is how most male mammals behave when reaching sexual maturity).

 

But then, sometime in history, something amazing happened for the beta man - the concept of societies - or a group of people living together with agreed upon rules.

 

In order for a society to be successful, it’s purposed rules needed to attract a large majority of the people that would provide food, shelter, and protection. Without these providers, a community would be susceptible to famine, natural disasters, and war. Not surprisingly, these provider roles were best filled by the bigger, stronger gender -men.

 

So if you’re following, in order to have a successful society, the rules of the society had to be designed in a way that would be attractive enough to encourage a lot of men to join. Remember that for any naturally dispersed group of people, 80% of the men that needed to be convinced to join were betas, unsatisfied with their inability to find a mate.

 

As a result, one of the most attractive recruitment tactics a potential society could make was any set of rules that promised beta men the Holy Grail that is mating rights.

 

A common manifestation of this was early, simple concepts of monogamy:

  1. Each caveman get one cavewoman.
  2. No sleep with other caveman’s woman
  3. Cavewoman not allowed to survive on own - must have caveman

 

Looking carefully at these basic monogamy rules, we can see that they are very heavily designed in favor of a beta male, and are actually quite a bit of a nuisance for the Alpha who now can only sleep with a fraction of the women he used to, and pretty terrible for women who would rather share an alpha than have a beta to herself or keep her legs closed until an alpha came along.

 

What’s fascinating is that even in 2017, the dynamic remains the same:

 

Monogamy is total bummer for women and Alphas - who are therefor prone to violating it or at the very least unphased by it’s destruction, and betas are doing everything they can to preserve it and are ‘disgusted’ or panicked as society continues to move away from it.

 

In conclusion, and more introspectively, I think a lot of us still transitioning need to realize that the rules we hate women and ‘Chads’ for breaking, are rules that are very unappealing to them to begin with. And of course most importantly, we should take this as yet another reminder that monogamy is an egalitarianism social construct that is very different than the natural way.