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fromCanada
Joined: 20 Sep 2003
Posts: 48
Location: Ontario
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 Posted: Wed Oct 20, 2004 11:45 pm Post subject: |
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| Everytime I hear about polygamy it's always a man having several wives. I've never heard of a woman having more than one husband in North America. There's certainly no equality in that. Plus, 15 year girls are forced to marry their uncles....yuck. I have to say I do have a problem with the mormon version of polygamy. Their leader is apparently a self-proclaimed prophet of God. (C-U-L-T anyone?). There was a documentary on this the other day on CBC. |
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Chris_Crossley
Joined: 26 Jun 2004
Posts: 1797
Location: Still in the centre of Furnace City, PRC, after eight years!!!
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| Posted: Thu Oct 21, 2004 12:09 am Post subject: Even 9-year-olds are caught up in all this |
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| fromCanada wrote: |
| Everytime I hear about polygamy it's always a man having several wives. I've never heard of a woman having more than one husband in North America. There's certainly no equality in that. Plus, 15 year girls are forced to marry their uncles....yuck. |
That TV documentary programme, which I mentioned in my previous post on this thread, included an interview with a NINE-year-old girl, who was set to become a Mormon polygamist's umpteenth wife (he had at least eight or nine already). Needless to say, she was very nervous about having to talk on camera - to Jerry Springer, of all people - about what she was about to do. This interview did not actually take place in a studio, but in the Mormon family's own home in Utah, with the man and all his wives present.
I personally have no truck with polygamy, yet I do draw the line when it comes to people marrying underage girls, especially as it is a crime, not just to be a polygamist in Utah, but also to have sexual intercourse with a minor. Of course, I have no idea whether the man waited (or is still waiting) for the young girl to come of age before engaging in intercourse, yet, as in many other cultures, whether or not based on religion, the idea of marriage, in part, is to consummate it by having a child.
It still makes me shudder when I think about the frightened look on that girl's face, as she was clearly being manipulated by a man who, quite frankly, deserved to be behind bars rather than be with a family of people whose minds are subject to his absolute control. |
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extoere
Joined: 23 Feb 2004
Posts: 543
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| Posted: Thu Oct 21, 2004 1:16 am Post subject: Polygamy |
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My, one does come across an interesting cross-section of views on these threads.
Poro: Polygamy is illegal everywhere in the U.S., Utah included. The Elders of the Church of Latter Day Saints, when confronted with an ultimatum by the President in the form of the U.S. Army, quickly decided to give up their dreams of conquest and turned instead to spiritual (and financial) empire. In the process, they quickly ascented to U.S. laws, including the acceptance of a ban on their cherished practice of polygamy, and, almost as an afterthought, slapped a few words onto the title of their religion: " of Jesus Christ." How prescient. Of course, the practice still exists in isolated cases.
ntropy: There's also a town in Utah called "Bountiful." And lots of Mormons.
Chris: Jerry Springer, an ex-politician, is to daytime television, what Howard Stern is to morning radio. In a campus poll a few years back, a significant number of colleges listed Springer in a poll of their student bodies as the most sought-after guest speaker. Now why am I not too terribly shocked by this?
thelma: "where all members of the family are equal," you'd soon have chaos. Which, come to think of it, has pretty well happened, at least in modern two-income families.
Valley girl: Increasingly in the US, it's "How anyone could put up with one is beyond me."
Roger: "Women seem to be pretty promiscuous, but .." No buts. But men are often too vain to allow themselves to see it.
Sheep-Goats: California? For "open relationships?" Hell, no need to go that far. There are plenty right there in Asia! Or wherever you are! You must be an ESL teacher. That explains it. You need some phone numbers for Guangzhou? Beijing, maybe? That's right. Beijing!
cheers,
ex |
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Roger
Joined: 19 Jan 2003
Posts: 9138
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| Posted: Thu Oct 21, 2004 4:56 am Post subject: |
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| fromCanada wrote: |
| Everytime I hear about polygamy it's always a man having several wives. I've never heard of a woman having more than one husband in North America. . |
If you confine your topic to the merry young U.S.A., mayube your contention is right: only men have several wives.
I knew an American who divorced his Europid wife over there so he could legally get married to a Chinese one.
But he remained a kind of spiritualne. They had a bunch of kids together, though they lived in two different countries.
Need I add that the man and his American family were practising Mormons?
Why the hell did he have to marry a CHinese woman? Just to spread his funny religion. And through his wife, his religion spread to their progeny; they had twins in their first year!
On the other hand, I am not in agreement with the OP about "only men..."
There have been numerous accounts of polygamous family structures in parts of China, practised by ethnic groups that are not Han-CHinese.
One such case is a nationality (name forgotten) that lives on the mountains of SIchuan/Yunnan, with their highest concentration in Lugu, a couple of hundred kms from Lijiang.
The women marry the brothers of their husbands if and when this is deemed in everybody's interest. This can be the case when there aren't enough women to go around.
Women also own the houses - not the men! So the courting couples sometimes find themselves in the woman's bedroom, but the man returns to his over night.
We also know that Tibetan women befriend their husbands' male relatives. Perhaps they do so because males often don't return from their dangerous nomadic outings in the wild; the family tree must continue to grow, though. Any male relative is apparently good enough to help... |
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Chris_Crossley
Joined: 26 Jun 2004
Posts: 1797
Location: Still in the centre of Furnace City, PRC, after eight years!!!
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| Posted: Thu Oct 21, 2004 5:03 am Post subject: Springer ("Go, Jerry!") and Stern ("Who?" |
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| extoere wrote: |
| Chris: Jerry Springer, an ex-politician, is to daytime television, what Howard Stern is to morning radio. In a campus poll a few years back, a significant number of colleges listed Springer in a poll of their student bodies as the most sought-after guest speaker. Now why am I not too terribly shocked by this? |
Maybe it is not surprising that Springer is so popular amongst the student population. He even had his own equivalent of his show in the UK called - not surprisingly - "Jerry Springer UK", taped, appropriately enough, in London, the city of his birth.
I'm afraid, extoere, that the reference to Howard Stern is totally lost on me. I'm British, so, while I was still in Blighty, I'd never, ever heard of him. I've been in China for three years now, so it still means I've never heard of him.
Still, let's not stray away too much from the subject of polygamy, shall we? |
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Chris_Crossley
Joined: 26 Jun 2004
Posts: 1797
Location: Still in the centre of Furnace City, PRC, after eight years!!!
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| Posted: Thu Oct 21, 2004 5:17 am Post subject: What or whom do women own? |
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| Roger wrote: |
| Women also own the houses - not the men! |
Grammar exercise:
Question: What does this sentence mean? Does it mean:
(a) the women, but not the men, own the houses, or
(b) the women own the houses but they don't own the men, or
(c) ...........?
Flippancy aside, perhaps we ought not to be surprised by any interpretation of this sentence. To us Western types, it still - even in the early years of the 21st century - seems "surprising" that women are allowed to have such power within the family in cultures which have not changed for centuries, considering that males had done as much as possible, even through the law, to keep women from having reins of power for just as long in Western society. The suffragettes certainly set the ball rolling, even if they did risk imprisonment and even death to achieve their desired goal of enfranchisement.
Perhaps (as some people have suggested - including in an EFL text book I once had a peek at) if women had had more power in Western society over the centuries, many of the conflicts, which have racked Europe and other places in the world, may never have happened. Could you have possibly have imagined the two world wars being fought by countries, which had women at their heads? No, nor me. Unfortunately, for millions of people who were around in the 1914-1945 era, this was not the case.
Polygamy with a woman at the head is certainly unusual, but I guess that it would be even more unusual if there was not a single example of a female polygamist in the world. I don't know of any, but it would be the kind of situation that would make for a good article in a women's or even a Sunday magazine, if not the National Geographic. (Has there ever been such an article?) |
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Stephen Jones
Joined: 21 Feb 2003
Posts: 4124
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| Posted: Thu Oct 21, 2004 12:07 pm Post subject: |
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| When a woman has more than one husband, it is called polyandry. |
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Chris_Crossley
Joined: 26 Jun 2004
Posts: 1797
Location: Still in the centre of Furnace City, PRC, after eight years!!!
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| Posted: Thu Oct 21, 2004 2:48 pm Post subject: More than one husband at the same time or ...? |
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| Stephen Jones wrote: |
| When a woman has more than one husband, it is called polyandry. |
Careful how you phrase that, Stephen.
There may be plenty of disgruntled divorced women in the world who have convinced themselves that "when a woman has more than one husband, it is called purgatory" - or words to that (or even greater) effect. |
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Roger
Joined: 19 Jan 2003
Posts: 9138
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| Posted: Thu Oct 21, 2004 2:55 pm Post subject: |
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Thanks for the grammar insight, Chris Crossley! Yes, I was a little hurried... but you got it right.
Not right, in my mind, your allegation that if women had been allowed to own property in the West. I don't think the world would have been more peaceful...
Look at China again: only those minority nationalities practise POLYANDRY (thank you, Stephen), but the Han-CHinese are even more macho than the worst Westerners ever were.
Typically, a CHinese woman becomes a new member of her in-law family - and gives up her membership in her biological one.
Women usually don't inherit from their fathers, boys do. THis is certainly not as good as in the West, is it?
This is also why women in China are so calculating, I guess. |
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Chris_Crossley
Joined: 26 Jun 2004
Posts: 1797
Location: Still in the centre of Furnace City, PRC, after eight years!!!
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| Posted: Thu Oct 21, 2004 3:12 pm Post subject: Property or power for women in past times? |
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| Roger wrote: |
Thanks for the grammar insight, Chris Crossley! Yes, I was a little hurried... but you got it right.
Not right, in my mind, your allegation that if women had been allowed to own property in the West. I don't think the world would have been more peaceful... |
It looks as if your response to my previous thread was a little hurried, too, Roger. I never even mentioned, nor even implied, the word "property" in any way - I said that if women had had more POWER in the West, and I mean political power, then the world might have been more peaceful.
Then again, Thatcher was in charge when she sent the Task Force to get rid of those interlopers, the Argentinians, from the Falkland Islands back in 1982, when Galtieri, seeking to divert attention from his disastrously brutal military rule over his own people, took a desperate gamble ... and ultimately failed. At least, this war lasted just two months and did not require the victors to occupy Argentina, just to take back the "expropriated" land from the invading Argentinians.
Perhaps if the U.S. Virgin Islands or Hawaii were to be suddenly invaded, I think that, for the U.S. President, simply taking them back would not be enough.... |
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Stephen Jones
Joined: 21 Feb 2003
Posts: 4124
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| Posted: Thu Oct 21, 2004 4:52 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: |
| Women usually don't inherit from their fathers, boys do. THis is certainly not as good as in the West, is it? |
In Anglo-Saxon countries, it's normally the cat or dog that inherits. |
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