Danjo-hi 1:5 no Sekai demo Futsuu ni Ikirareru to Omotta? ~Gekiomoi Kanjou na Kanojo-tachi ga Mujikaku Danshi ni Honrou Saretara~ - Vol. 1 Ch. 1

[lekhaka]

So I understand where you're coming from, but I feel like you're forgetting some pretty big issues regarding this. The first is that this is a monogamous society, somehow, so 1 man is not getting multiple women pregnant. The fact they have to protest for legalized polygamy is something to note regarding that. If 1 man getting multiple women pregnant is socially stigmatized and I have to assume still somewhat is since they have to protest for it rather than it being a simple vote or natural change in their social structure, then they've clearly had it for quite some time.

It has to have been around for generations if it's something that deeply ingrained in society. With this in mind you realize a man is, in general, only going to have 1 lineage. He's not spreading out his genetics like Ghengis Khan, unfortunately.

In a society that practices monogamy, with a 1:5 male ratio, you are very much depending on the male population to keep you alive because most of the women in your society simply won't breed. Period. In modern day, sperm banks exist so that alleviates that issue for the most part but that's only in modern day. It clearly didn't stop the need for a wider spread of genetics if the story is to be believed, so monogamy wasn't created in the advent of sperm preservation. Meaning this root should logically be deeper in their history.

If their societies were anything similar to ours, then monogamy would have been a thing for centuries (you can find monogamy enforced in old babylonian laws, for example). In a monogamous society, with 1 man per lineage, you would very much need to be the dominant force to keep your society alive and to prevent the men from doing anything stupid that could harm their ability to reproduce AND to protect them from violence.

The second issue I think you may be overlooking is that a lot of what makes men protect and build and grow things and even be the risk-takers that we are naturally, all came from the ancestral need to be the protector, the builder, the grower and the risk-taker. Because the men who did these things were often the ones who managed to reproduce.

There's a hypothesis that monogamy started as a way to protect women from being targeted during pregnancy and child raising, because if you had a husband then you had a protector and provider. But they don't have that luxury with how few men there are, they couldn't logically have that, so where does this desire for monogamy come from? If we swap the roles then that means men would have had to be protected from women.

And I think that makes sense because, and I'm sure I've said this before, what's the easiest way to kill off an enemy tribe if they truly have a 1:5 ratio? Kill their men, they'll dwindle to nothing. Or take their men, and you'll bolster your own economy. So from that perspective, women would have to be the dominant force just as a matter of fact. Women would have to be the warriors and frontliners, you couldn't risk men being killed in combat or stolen away, women would likely have to fight for the few male resources available in their own tribes too.

There's really no two ways about this. If you understand the way humans and society evolved, you understand that all that we know and understand as a society today was built as an adaptation to the way life was back then. Like, those instincts and traits didn't die out. We repurposed them for the modern day, but they're still inside you actively functioning to this day.

Flipping the genders and skewing their ratio isn't a small thing in that regard, they're massive. They have knock on effects on quite literally everything. It's not even crazy to say that if things hadn't been how they were, if the conditions of survival were even slightly worse, humanity as a species may very well have died out. Like, there were something upward of 14 species of human and all but ours died because they couldn't adapt and we just barely scraped by too. Yet the story changes 2 of the biggest core concepts of who we are as a species and thinks we can maintain a sense of normalcy like monogamy. It just doesn't work out if you take it too seriously, which I very often do because I like to think and overthink until I can think no more.

I believe you're making some very unrealistic extrapolations from the ideal concept of monogamy to how it plays out in real populations. There's a few points here:

1. In many premodern cultures there simply wasn't an expecation of monogamy. That's mostly a modern, western thing. Examples of polygyny include islamic cultures (vast swathes of everything outside of the European sphere) to east asia. So for societies that don't enforce strict monogamy a 1:5 ratio wouldn't have the effects you describe. The upper class of polygynous cultures probably already have a 1:5 ratio when it comes to sexual partners so the only variable is how the lower class would be structured. So I could totally see men still being socially dominant because the only difference would be that instead of the IRL lower class of 1:1 ratio, you'd have a lower class of an even more extreme ratio than 1:5. To the upper class it wouldn't matter whether their lower class serfs were male or female so you can easily have the same patriarchal dynamics.

2. Even in cultures with monogamy e.g. Christian Europe, monogamy doesn't in practice mean a man only ever reproduce with one woman. And I'm talking about IRL history here. What actually tends to happen is that men have multiple partners by divorce or widowing. Becoming a widow is especially common when many women die in childbirth. So even in monogamous pre-modern cultures you'd have men who have like 3 wives (not concurrently) throughout their lifetimes if they manage to survive, which is more likely if you're rich and powerful. Which is also one of the reasons that men are incentivized to be risk takers. They have a higher ceiling for payoff.

3. Women are only usefully fertile for at most 2 decades in practice (highest fertility starts at age 18 and goes steeply downhill from there), especially before modern medicine. Rich old men are easily fertile into their senior years until the day they die. If your society has a 1:5 ratio and has monogamy but also allows divorce, you'll probably see a lot of men divorcing after their wives pass the fertile age.

4. So in a fictional 1:5 version, even with something like Christian monogamy, you could still have the men mating with enough women in practice via premarital sex, outliving their wives, divorce, or affairs. Affairs and premarital sex were so common historically even in the IRL 1:1 world that there'd be a whole social class of bastards in many premodern societies. In a 1:5 world where the women are hornier they could easily compensate by initiating more of that.

In general I think you're arguing against well established literature that women are the reproductive bottleneck in human societies, not men, and therefore a 1:5 ratio wouldn't necessarily change much. Not that it cannot, but it doesn't have to. There are also other reasons to think that the ratio may actually benefit men's domination. They hold a valuable resource that scales as much as they wish (unlike a sex flipped version, because female reproduction doens't scale). With more females, the demand goes up, so it actually gives them more leverage, which potentially could be turned into social capital. I can easily see how, if the author wished it, they could argue that men secured a dominant social position by being kingmaker (queenmaker?) by default in every social contest among women.

Imagine if tribal negotiations came down to whether your tribe could secure those breeding males for use by your Queen and her elite guards. The male is more valuable if he's at least somewhat willing, since we wouldn't have artificial insemenation until the modern era, so you can't just milk him once and pass the stuff around. This could produce a tribal environment where males get more leverage and this leaves downstream impacts on human culture.

Like, we haven't been given a history lesson in this series so the author could actually go with whatever they like if they choose to reveal some world building in later chapters. I don't think it's fair to say that they CAN'T. We can't rule out that the author just comes out and reveals that Japan's history in this 1:5 world is different from IRL history and they have a long tradition of polygyny that only got banned by the Americans post-war. Hell, perhaps monogamy was basically a population-control economic sanction the Allies imposed on Japan. Since it's fiction, there's all sorts of possiblities.

And as an aside, the best social science explanation for IRL monogamy as an institution is for the benefit of the men, not women. Monogamy is a kind of rationing of women for the men. Without it, the elite males take multiple wives and creates social friction with a bunch of maidenless young men who are likely to form warrior bands and start revolutions that topple the social order. Of course, this wouldn't be a problem in the 1:5 world...

 

[Hitspark]

I believe you're making some very unrealistic extrapolations from the ideal concept of monogamy to how it plays out in real populations. There's a few points here:

1. In many premodern cultures there simply wasn't an expecation of monogamy. That's mostly a modern, western thing. Examples of polygyny include islamic cultures (vast swathes of everything outside of the European sphere) to east asia. So for societies that don't enforce strict monogamy a 1:5 ratio wouldn't have the effects you describe. The upper class of polygynous cultures probably already have a 1:5 ratio when it comes to sexual partners so the only variable is how the lower class would be structured. So I could totally see men still being socially dominant because the only difference would be that instead of the IRL lower class of 1:1 ratio, you'd have a lower class of an even more extreme ratio than 1:5. To the upper class it wouldn't matter whether their lower class serfs were male or female so you can easily have the same patriarchal dynamics.

Well, firstly, as I pointed out, that we have evidence of Babylon holding Monogamous laws from Hamurabi's code. That was in 1700 BC in the middle east. It is by no means a "modern" or "western" development. I don't know where you got the idea that pre-modern cultures outside of Europe didn't really expect monogamy, many significant cultures did. The Peruvians did it, Egypt did it, the Chinese did it and Indians tribes in asia and native america practiced it as well and so on. Humans have practiced monogamy for a very long time all over the world.

Now it was never uncommon for the rich and powerful to build their own harems, but there were always a significant amount places that practiced monogamy over polygamy in the general population. For example, Egypt was polygamous law but monogamous in culture. They just chose to marry one person and stick with them because that's just what they liked.

So sure, in places that don't practice monogamy, there's no real issue....but the places that did practice are the big issue. Places that would and should cause some historic, drastic change to their world because their people should be dying out because they're fighting tooth and nail to uphold monogamy. But we see no evidence of their world losing those places, which is especially weird because they're in Japan. A place that has roots in China which, again, did practice monogamy.

2. Even in cultures with monogamy e.g. Christian Europe, monogamy doesn't in practice mean a man only ever reproduce with one woman. And I'm talking about IRL history here. What actually tends to happen is that men have multiple partners by divorce or widowing. Becoming a widow is especially common when many women die in childbirth. So even in monogamous pre-modern cultures you'd have men who have like 3 wives (not concurrently) throughout their lifetimes if they manage to survive, which is more likely if you're rich and powerful. Which is also one of the reasons that men are incentivized to be risk takers. They have a higher ceiling for payoff.

If we're going to assume things are similar to our world but reversed and skewed, divorce is unlikely to be an option unless the woman agrees to it or there are some lengthy loop holes the man would have to jump through, if history is to be believed. Even if you do manage a successful divorce, you either walk away with little or you walk away with nothing, some public shame or in some cases, you're executed. Divorce in monogamous society was very much something they tried to discourage because their cultures relied on them. So we can't just assume it'd be as flippant as just going through the motions. In fact, I have to assume that if they're so adamant on being monogamous even when it's clearly detrimental to their society, they're probably even more discouraging towards divorce.

3. Women are only usefully fertile for at most 2 decades in practice (highest fertility starts at age 18 and goes steeply downhill from there), especially before modern medicine. Rich old men are easily fertile into their senior years until the day they die. If your society has a 1:5 ratio and has monogamy but also allows divorce, you'll probably see a lot of men divorcing after their wives pass the fertile age.

So I have noticed something in your arguments and it's that you're making arguments based on modern day real world, while ignoring the implications of the story we're speaking about, only really acknowledging the gender skew in minimal matters. The issue I take with this is that you don't seem to be taking into account that, all of your points are based in a functioning society that didn't live anything like what these people would have to deal with if the premise is to be believed.

Like for example, you're saying that peak fertility is at 18 and declines, but we do not know if that'd be the case for women of this world. In a world of 1:5 men to women, evolution is definitely something you have to take into consideration. It might be that the women who were fertile the longest might be the ones who got to breed, it might be that women who more often birthed more than 1 child were the ones who got to breed (unlikely considering the story but still).

Sure there are similarities to look at, but if you're going to argue for the sake of a conversation and not just to throw words at the screen, then you have to take the stories' premise into account and what that would mean overall. Men would be very unlikely to just divorce their women, remember that in Monagamous societies your partner was very much your lifeline to a stable socio-economic living. It was not a small thing to undertake like it is today.

4. So in a fictional 1:5 version, even with something like Christian monogamy, you could still have the men mating with enough women in practice via premarital sex, outliving their wives, divorce, or affairs. Affairs and premarital sex were so common historically even in the IRL 1:1 world that there'd be a whole social class of bastards in many premodern societies. In a 1:5 world where the women are hornier they could easily compensate by initiating more of that.

That suggestion would likely result in untold amounts of death. In most monogamous societies, if you got caught cheating you were pretty much on death row. In others, you would live with a severe punishment like chopping something off or being exiled. They absolutely discouraged this kind of behavior, however it was easier to hide in a 1:1 society because there are many men around who could potentially be the father.

In a 1:5 society monogamous society, there aren't that many men, so the focus is on you even if you weren't near the woman. Even if your specific society more than a few men to hide behind, they could just wait to see who the child resembles when it's born and find you that way. Best case scenario is that the woman who got pregnant is the one dealing with the harsh penalties and you're put on some kind of lock down.

In general I think you're arguing against well established literature that women are the reproductive bottleneck in human societies, not men, and therefore a 1:5 ratio wouldn't necessarily change much. Not that it cannot, but it doesn't have to.

Here is what I mean when I mentioned something I noticed about your arguments earlier. This isn't a jab at you, this isn't me saying you're a bad conversationalist or arguer or anything, but I do want you to be aware you're doing it.

You're pointing to a living breathing world where none of the issues of a 1:5 society have ever been a thing, only acknowledging the 1:5 ratio in a minor way, such as a comparison of numbers. You're underestimating how much of humans in general is based upon the early human societal evolution. Humans are the way we are, because our ancestors did the things they did. You can't simply point to a woman in a society where women would have to be a dominant force for survival and then compare her to our women who usually don't even have to stress about being beaten up for bad behavior. They're not really comparable. It's like when people mention that it's the female lions who go and hunt but don't mention that's only one species of lion and there are others where the Males do go hunt. Even though they look similar, their environments cause them to act completely different and it's really the same here.

This fact is, in part, even akcnowledged by the author in this very story, because women are physically stronger than men in this series. The MC has yet to truly encounter what that means yet as of this chapter, but if the novels are to be believed and adapted properly, it's going to become a significant factor in the MC's life. So we can't treat the from this story as if they are the women from our world. They're two different sets of lions.

There are also other reasons to think that the ratio may actually benefit men's domination. They hold a valuable resource that scales as much as they wish (unlike a sex flipped version, because female reproduction doens't scale). With more females, the demand goes up, so it actually gives them more leverage, which potentially could be turned into social capital. I can easily see how, if the author wished it, they could argue that men secured a dominant social position by being kingmaker (queenmaker?) by default in every social contest among women.

In a monogamous society, one we should assume is very strict since they were practicing it somehow prior to sprem preservation, the resource of breeding doesn't scale. And in a female dominated world, men wouldn't be the holder of many resources until modern day. And even then, we wouldn't see them being the dominant force because women would hold more resources in general. Powerful men just sex traffick women off the streets in our world, I should assume they'd be no better off in theirs simply because of how few there actually are.

Imagine if tribal negotiations came down to whether your tribe could secure those breeding males for use by your Queen and her elite guards. The male is more valuable if he's at least somewhat willing, since we wouldn't have artificial insemenation until the modern era, so you can't just milk him once and pass the stuff around. This could produce a tribal environment where males get more leverage and this leaves downstream impacts on human culture.

Why would the male be more valuable when he's willing? Forced breeding was a thing in our world so I have to assume in a world where he's a valuable resource, assuming you captured him from an enemy tribe, he could easily just be brought into submission by whoever he was given to. If it's the queen as you suggest, that man isn't going anywhere and his willingness certainly isn't a factor. Assuming men haven't evolved some kind of trait that allows them to shut off sperm production in stressful environments, I'm not sure how they could avoid being seen as tools when taken.

Like, we haven't been given a history lesson in this series so the author could actually go with whatever they like if they choose to reveal some world building in later chapters. I don't think it's fair to say that they CAN'T. We can't rule out that the author just comes out and reveals that Japan's history in this 1:5 world is different from IRL history and they have a long tradition of polygyny that only got banned by the Americans post-war. Hell, perhaps monogamy was basically a population-control economic sanction the Allies imposed on Japan. Since it's fiction, there's all sorts of possiblities.

The problem, in general, is that monogamy as a concept even exists and that people happily practice it. The author has to go through leaps and bounds to make this work and from what I know, there's no (logical) explanation coming through the pipeline. Sure, he can say whatever he likes and it'll work for the story but unless he does some HEAVY lifting in that department it just won't make sense. Again I point out, this is just me being overly pedant. All of this works fine for the story.

And as an aside, the best social science explanation for IRL monogamy as an institution is for the benefit of the men, not women. Monogamy is a kind of rationing of women for the men. Without it, the elite males take multiple wives and creates social friction with a bunch of maidenless young men who are likely to form warrior bands and start revolutions that topple the social order. Of course, this wouldn't be a problem in the 1:5 world...

We don't know how monogamy started, but what we do know is that it didn't really ration anything. Elites almost always had harems, even when the general society practiced monogamy. I don't know of any revolts that happened from such a thing. I do know that if a world has 1:5 men to women ratio, you're probably more likely to have that happen since you're hogging all the resources to keep the general populace alive. In fact it'd probably be in the elites best interest not to build massive harems so they could continue to be elites....and alive lol.

 

[lekhaka]

You're pointing to a living breathing world where none of the issues of a 1:5 society have ever been a thing, only acknowledging the 1:5 ratio in a minor way, such as a comparison of numbers. You're underestimating how much of humans in general is based upon the early human societal evolution. Humans are the way we are, because our ancestors did the things they did. You can't simply point to a woman in a society where women would have to be a dominant force for survival and then compare her to our women who usually don't even have to stress about being beaten up for bad behavior. They're not really comparable. It's like when people mention that it's the female lions who go and hunt but don't mention that's only one species of lion and there are others where the Males do go hunt. Even though they look similar, their environments cause them to act completely different and it's really the same here.

Well we actually both agree that humans will turn out the way they do based on ancestral factors. That's also what I'm arguing. What we disagree is how much those ancestral factors would be influenced by the 1:5 ratio. You're saying the ratio obviously will make women the dominant force. I'm saying that it's not so obvious --we don't really know-- but it might not be enough to change things because there is already a lot of slack in the current 1:1 scenario, that is to say, much less than 100% of the males in 1:1 reproduce anyway. Reducing male population therefore simply eats up that slack before it will produce any changes. How much is that slack? I think 1:5 is actually the interesting case where it's unclear. But to me, 1:1.1 is clearly gonna be pretty much the same as 1:1, while if we go to the extreme of 1:39 I would basically agree with everything you say and more. At 1:39 "human" society would be totally unrecognizable and I don't think even the most unhinged manga author would be accurate in different they imagine it to be. So we basically disagree on where 1:5 falls on this spectrum.

Now it was never uncommon for the rich and powerful to build their own harems, but there were always a significant amount places that practiced monogamy over polygamy in the general population. For example, Egypt was polygamous law but monogamous in culture. They just chose to marry one person and stick with them because that's just what they liked.

That's what I mean by "no expectation of monogamy". That doesn't mean most men in the entire society are polygynous (that wouldn't math in 1:1 anyway), it means men who have the means can get multiple wives and society will not make that too difficult for them. That's how you get a high variance on the rate at which male individuals produce offspring. By contrast women can only have like 7 children max if they're lucky because that's the maximum rate female biology can pump them out before they become infertile.

And you're totally correct that monogamy has been around since humans have existed, but I think what we disagree on is the polygynous side; that also existed, they both existed in the human ancestral environment, it's not all that neatly cut and black-and-white.

If we're talking about real "ancestral environment" like hunter-gatherer societies, they most common thing would be something that doesn't neatly map on to either modern monogamy nor polygamy. Males mostly stuck around the female they impregnated for 2 or more years, during which they raised the child, then it was more likely for them to split up unless they fathered more children with the same female. So basically serial monogamy with maybe like 10 partners in a lifetime for a long-lived (and charismatic) male, not the "married for 40 years" thing which we see in modern society.

Basically, I don't dispute that monogamy has existed in many ancient cultures, but I disagree that it means what you think it means, since polygyny also existed in ancient and modern cultures, sometimes at the same time and place as monogamy! When both sides of the coin exists you can't just point to one and say that's the only one that's relevant in alt-history scenarios.

Why would the male be more valuable when he's willing?

That's the scaling part. If he's willing, it scales. He can insemenate several females a day. If he's unwilling, it's much harder/impossible without modern tech.

We don't know how monogamy started, but what we do know is that it didn't really ration anything. Elites almost always had harems, even when the general society practiced monogamy. I don't know of any revolts that happened from such a thing. I do know that if a world has 1:5 men to women ratio, you're probably more likely to have that happen since you're hogging all the resources to keep the general populace alive. In fact it'd probably be in the elites best interest not to build massive harems so they could continue to be elites....and alive lol.

No, if you look into sociology literature it explains the rationing pretty well. Much of historical violence has been young men going out to strike their own claim because they had no other choice when land and women were all taken. Maybe you don't recognize the symptoms because it's not always framed explicitly as "they can't get a woman". But remember, in those societies women are basically tied to economic status. You can't get a woman because you're too poor to pay the brideprice or you aren't rich enough for a guy to wed their daughter to you even in societies dowries (where the bride's family pays the groom).

Romans, vikings, etc would all go out to try to move up economically in the world before they can find a woman. The young men in those armies are all motivated by the incentive of such rewards from miltary action that they wouldn't see if they sat at home. In those other "polygamous" societies, e.g. islamic ones, where monogamy is the practical norm for peasants but elites have polygyny, it usually doesn't become that way explicitly through law, it's simply that "you take as many wives as you can manage", and most poor peasants can't afford even one wife. So what you actually see is all the married peasants are monogamous because those are the peasants rich enough to have one wife (and we ignore the poors who have zero wives). Then as you move up in the feudal extraction economy you start to get more and more wives.

In the long run, everybody is living in equilibrium. The elites also have as many wives as they can afford, which includes the social cost of upsetting other people. They have as many as they can afford without pissing people off to the point of getting a peasant revolt.

Monogamy is an institution that basically gives a de-jure cap on how many wives you have to reduce this social conflict. Elites still find their way around such things but the official law of monogamy gives the poors something to lean on and feel better about, and a legal tool to threaten any elites that push their boundaries too far.

 

[Kanelel]

At that point the best move is just to switch teams to lesbian. The math is just too harsh otherwise.

 

[Hitspark]

Sorry about the delay, I had a career based existential crisis for a few days. Would not reccomend it.

Well we actually both agree that humans will turn out the way they do based on ancestral factors. That's also what I'm arguing. What we disagree is how much those ancestral factors would be influenced by the 1:5 ratio. You're saying the ratio obviously will make women the dominant force. I'm saying that it's not so obvious --we don't really know-- but it might not be enough to change things because there is already a lot of slack in the current 1:1 scenario, that is to say, much less than 100% of the males in 1:1 reproduce anyway. Reducing male population therefore simply eats up that slack before it will produce any changes. How much is that slack? I think 1:5 is actually the interesting case where it's unclear. But to me, 1:1.1 is clearly gonna be pretty much the same as 1:1, while if we go to the extreme of 1:39 I would basically agree with everything you say and more. At 1:39 "human" society would be totally unrecognizable and I don't think even the most unhinged manga author would be accurate in different they imagine it to be. So we basically disagree on where 1:5 falls on this spectrum.

Right, I believe that with the general mortality rates that come about in ancient hunter gatherer society, they'd need to replace the men to keep them safe. Most people died before reaching their 30s. Like, people underestimate how often hunter gatherer society went to war with each other, but it was a consistent and constant worry. Some people have even described it as "periodic" meaning it was so normal to fight another group for your life that it was seen as just another part of life to deal with, no different than seeing the sun go down or come up. Just life as you know it.

They would even plan out their massacres against rival groups, waiting until the right moment and then they implemented them with incredible ruthlessness. Women, children, it didn't matter who was there, everyone who couldn't grab a weapon to survive was dying. And then if you didn't die from combat, you were dying on hunting trips, if you weren't fishing and if you got hurt and infected (and you were probably getting infected) you had less than a 70% chance of survival. Then disease was also a worry. Like, when I said humans barely survived I wasn't kidding. Our whole strategy boiled down to "Outbreed the danger" and that's really it. Have more kids faster than we can die off, that's the strategy of man.

So, I have a hard time seeing all of the constant death and destruction of early man and seeing how a 1:5 population would functionally survive without women taking the leading roles. Even all that we associate with men is only there because men had to be the ones leading the charge and competing for mates. But in a 1:5 world, you don't really have that luxury so it'd be more likely that women were the ones competing and going through dimorphism. The men might be more likely to pick out who they want to breed with, but they're not going to the front lines of combat or hunting by themselves. There's just too much risk involved in losing the few men you have in your group to outside forces like that.

That's what I mean by "no expectation of monogamy". That doesn't mean most men in the entire society are polygynous (that wouldn't math in 1:1 anyway), it means men who have the means can get multiple wives and society will not make that too difficult for them. That's how you get a high variance on the rate at which male individuals produce offspring. By contrast women can only have like 7 children max if they're lucky because that's the maximum rate female biology can pump them out before they become infertile.

You say that but the number of aunts and uncles on one side of my family is in the double digits. No twins. Don't ask me how, I don't know and I don't wanna know what grandpa was up to. Just know that when it comes to "outbreeding the danger" humans have yet to be topped.

And you're totally correct that monogamy has been around since humans have existed, but I think what we disagree on is the polygynous side; that also existed, they both existed in the human ancestral environment, it's not all that neatly cut and black-and-white.

If we're talking about real "ancestral environment" like hunter-gatherer societies, they most common thing would be something that doesn't neatly map on to either modern monogamy nor polygamy. Males mostly stuck around the female they impregnated for 2 or more years, during which they raised the child, then it was more likely for them to split up unless they fathered more children with the same female. So basically serial monogamy with maybe like 10 partners in a lifetime for a long-lived (and charismatic) male, not the "married for 40 years" thing which we see in modern society.

Basically, I don't dispute that monogamy has existed in many ancient cultures, but I disagree that it means what you think it means, since polygyny also existed in ancient and modern cultures, sometimes at the same time and place as monogamy! When both sides of the coin exists you can't just point to one and say that's the only one that's relevant in alt-history scenarios.

That's the scaling part. If he's willing, it scales. He can insemenate several females a day. If he's unwilling, it's much harder/impossible without modern tech.

I'm not trying to say it existed everywhere more than Polygamy, I do dispute that the idea that it was a recent, more western idea. Anthropologically speaking, humans tend towards monogamy even when practicing polygamy. There's always 1 woman the harem leader always favors above the others and she's the one who gets treated like a queen. But that's aside from what I was trying to point out.

However, the reason I aimed towards monogamous society is because we are in fact looking at a story where Monogamy is enforced in the law and the culture. There are signs that this has been deeply rooted into their society as a way of life, so we have to assume somewhere along their history Monogamy was just the choice for them. And in older Monogamous societies, they fought against work arounds and cheaters and they punished them often very severely. So we can't look at older Polygamous societies and think they're relevant to the story when the story isn't practicing Polygamy (yet). So we have to take into account how Monogamous societies functioned and factor those into our theoretical world, because at some point their society became one of those societies.

And in a world where monogamy is enforced while the gender ratio is 1:5, there is an incredible number of problems with that as a way of life. You're basically looking at total societal collapse in only a few generations, yet somehow they've kept it going for a long time.

That's the world we're working with. A world with a monogamous history in a permenant 1:5 male to female ratio birth rate.

No, if you look into sociology literature it explains the rationing pretty well. Much of historical violence has been young men going out to strike their own claim because they had no other choice when land and women were all taken. Maybe you don't recognize the symptoms because it's not always framed explicitly as "they can't get a woman". But remember, in those societies women are basically tied to economic status. You can't get a woman because you're too poor to pay the brideprice or you aren't rich enough for a guy to wed their daughter to you even in societies dowries (where the bride's family pays the groom).

Romans, vikings, etc would all go out to try to move up economically in the world before they can find a woman. The young men in those armies are all motivated by the incentive of such rewards from miltary action that they wouldn't see if they sat at home. In those other "polygamous" societies, e.g. islamic ones, where monogamy is the practical norm for peasants but elites have polygyny, it usually doesn't become that way explicitly through law, it's simply that "you take as many wives as you can manage", and most poor peasants can't afford even one wife. So what you actually see is all the married peasants are monogamous because those are the peasants rich enough to have one wife (and we ignore the poors who have zero wives). Then as you move up in the feudal extraction economy you start to get more and more wives.

In the long run, everybody is living in equilibrium. The elites also have as many wives as they can afford, which includes the social cost of upsetting other people. They have as many as they can afford without pissing people off to the point of getting a peasant revolt.

Monogamy is an institution that basically gives a de-jure cap on how many wives you have to reduce this social conflict. Elites still find their way around such things but the official law of monogamy gives the poors something to lean on and feel better about, and a legal tool to threaten any elites that push their boundaries too far.

That's hilarious. "How did our empire fall!?" "It was the virgins! The Cherry Boy Army!" history is wonderful.

Back to what we're talking about before, I don't doubt that Polygamy would be the way forward, it's just that somewhere along the line, as I said before, this specific society evolved Monogamy and it's clearly not recent due to the lack of change that they're currently fighting for. You see there is a minimum requirement for how many people in a given population need to reproduce in order for that population to maintain functionality, that number is 50%. If a population drops below that minimum requirement, it begins to collapse. So somewhere along the line in history they stopped reaching that number (because they wouldn't be fighting for legalized polygamy if cultural monogamy wasn't also enforced) through enforced Monogamy and cut off 80% of their society from reproductive ability and yet still somehow persisted until they were able to artificially inseminate.

In a traditional 1:1 society, this isn't that great of an issue since there are more than enough men to go around. But if we're talking about a world in which there is only 1 man to every 5 women, something somewhere should have broken but hasn't and that's the issue I have.

Logistically speaking, their world just doesn't make sense in this regard.

 

[fueledsoul]

The other one seemed much more interesting tbh.

More like a nightmare you straight up be a breeding mule 💀

 

[lekhaka]

Logistically speaking, their world just doesn't make sense in this regard.

So I've caught up with all the chapters of this series now, and most of this is basically solved by the author stating that the 1:5 ratio is a recent development. In chapter 10 page 19 one of the harem girl's mother says that "You have to experience romance while you're still in school, especially now that there's less guys these days". So the author took the simple way of explaining why they still have monogamy in a 1:5 world.

But this need not concern us with our alt-history/biology speculations on how a 1:5 human civilization would actually develop from the stone age...

I think you're obviously correct in that in 1:5 hunter-gatherer society, females would have to do some of the historically male jobs just as a matter of fact due to the lack of male manpower. You probably had to have females in your hunting and war groups because that was the best way to distribute labor and it no longer makes sense to keep females closer to home and waste that labor force.

However, this does not necessarily result in flipped social power dynamics. If we assume males still have a physical strength advantage [1] then it would seem at least plausible that they would still be the leaders of any hunting or warring task force, because even with 1:5 the males are not THAT rare to keep them safe at home instead of using their physical advantages necessary for your immediate survival. From that alone it is not unreasonable to speculate they could continue to capture the elite social power in their society.

Going with that line of speculation, the lead hunter or their elite warriors would probably still be male, after all there are enough boys at home to keep the population going even if a male hunter or warrior died once in a while. And high rates of death due to disease and famine actually make it more attractive, not less, to take some amount of additional risk from hunting/war, because if most of the casualties are from things you cannot control like disease, then the relative risk of dying in combat is only a small difference on top of that, while the payoff could be significant.

[1]: I've seen comments about females being stronger in the world of this specific series. I must say I haven't seen convincing evidence of this yet. The only example is one scene where a younger girl gets on top of the male MC. It's not totally clear that he couldn't push her off simply because she's abnormally strong, or if he's psychologically shocked and can't find the willpower to do anything, or if ya'know, like in real life, most skinny guys don't have the body strength or wrestling skills to lift someone, even a lighter person, who already got them pinned to the ground and is sitting on top of them.

You say that but the number of aunts and uncles on one side of my family is in the double digits. No twins. Don't ask me how, I don't know and I don't wanna know what grandpa was up to. Just know that when it comes to "outbreeding the danger" humans have yet to be topped.

That sounds like is very much a case of modern medicine! Many places have had this huge fertility boom when modern medicine arrived in the mid 20th century and suddenly women and children aren't dying nearly as much as they used to. It usually takes about a generation or more for people to stop doing what their traditional ancestors did, and in the meantime you get abnormally high birth rates because people that statistically would have died now survive.

 

[cksn]

with all that tallposting i'm surprised no one thought about how - on the (false) assumption 1:5 was stable into the past - average male fertility rate must be 7+, and if we accept the absurd premise that polygamy isn't normal, then wives are 100% barefoot, pregnant, & in the kitchen. maybe not in the kitchen since maids can take care of that. informal polygamy or concubinage would make the hypothetical setting much more coherent, but otherwise, wives must be all-in on bearing children while the non-reproductive female underclass fills out the jobs throughout society. a pretty extreme divergence.

you'd have to have some extreme social norms to get the 4/6 underclass to actually do work instead of ruining everything while competing for dick. just like our real world is missing...
no polygamy in such a world is just insane and impossible anyway.

there is no world where women becoming less individually valuable or more numerous would have them being socially dominant, leaders, "protecting" men from a superior position, etc. that's so outrageously contrary to human nature that no selection pressure is strong enough.

 

[Hitspark]

So I've caught up with all the chapters of this series now, and most of this is basically solved by the author stating that the 1:5 ratio is a recent development. In chapter 10 page 19 one of the harem girl's mother says that "You have to experience romance while you're still in school, especially now that there's less guys these days". So the author took the simple way of explaining why they still have monogamy in a 1:5 world.

But this need not concern us with our alt-history/biology speculations on how a 1:5 human civilization would actually develop from the stone age...

I think you're obviously correct in that in 1:5 hunter-gatherer society, females would have to do some of the historically male jobs just as a matter of fact due to the lack of male manpower. You probably had to have females in your hunting and war groups because that was the best way to distribute labor and it no longer makes sense to keep females closer to home and waste that labor force.

However, this does not necessarily result in flipped social power dynamics. If we assume males still have a physical strength advantage [1] then it would seem at least plausible that they would still be the leaders of any hunting or warring task force, because even with 1:5 the males are not THAT rare to keep them safe at home instead of using their physical advantages necessary for your immediate survival. From that alone it is not unreasonable to speculate they could continue to capture the elite social power in their society.

Going with that line of speculation, the lead hunter or their elite warriors would probably still be male, after all there are enough boys at home to keep the population going even if a male hunter or warrior died once in a while. And high rates of death due to disease and famine actually make it more attractive, not less, to take some amount of additional risk from hunting/war, because if most of the casualties are from things you cannot control like disease, then the relative risk of dying in combat is only a small difference on top of that, while the payoff could be significant.

I don't think males would have a physical strength advantage anymore, if we're looking at it from that perspective. Remember that men have only undergone sexual dimorphism for the sake of competing with other males for reproductive rights and taking care of their families. If we assume that men and women both need to act to the same extent then sexual dimorphism will likely fade away. Then if we consider men are the more scarce resource, I don't think it's unreasonable to think that it would be women undergoing the sexual dimorphism that we so often associate with men. In many species where the females compete, they basically behave similarly to how one would expect men, even in terms of size and aggression. Basically I believe in that circumstance, every normal human woman on earth would probably be built like NOI on average.

While it's true men wouldn't be that rare in a 1-5 society, they would still be a more critical resource for any functioning group than the surpluss of women. I think this would be especially true given the rough circumstances of life during that time. Given violence, sickness and disease with these factors in mind, you're looking at a very lopsided sort of societal structure.

[1]: I've seen comments about females being stronger in the world of this specific series. I must say I haven't seen convincing evidence of this yet. The only example is one scene where a younger girl gets on top of the male MC. It's not totally clear that he couldn't push her off simply because she's abnormally strong, or if he's psychologically shocked and can't find the willpower to do anything, or if ya'know, like in real life, most skinny guys don't have the body strength or wrestling skills to lift someone, even a lighter person, who already got them pinned to the ground and is sitting on top of them.

I think it's more explicit in the novel because the MC is very shocked by how strong she is for a little girl. I'll have to catch up to the manga and see how they portrayed it. I pretty much stopped reading it at a certain point.

That sounds like is very much a case of modern medicine! Many places have had this huge fertility boom when modern medicine arrived in the mid 20th century and suddenly women and children aren't dying nearly as much as they used to. It usually takes about a generation or more for people to stop doing what their traditional ancestors did, and in the meantime you get abnormally high birth rates because people that statistically would have died now survive.

This is one explanation for it, yeah. My family is crazy big and I just had no explanation as to why, other than the obvious, so this makes more sense for that coming about.