Monogamy and Freedom
August 5, 2023
FROM “In Defense of Monogamy” by George Gilder (Commentary, 1974):
The sexual liberals purport to be the “open,” the “creative,” the “genitally liberated” facing the “repressives,” the “paranoids,” the “anal compulsives.” The liberals are against power games and for the sharing of love. They are for “universal kinship,” in Alex Comfort’s phrase, and equality.
Why then is there such a disparity between this hopeful vision and the reality of the single “liberated” life? The reason is that the removal of restrictions on sexual activity does not bring equality and community. It brings ever more vicious sexual competition. The women become “easier” for the powerful to get—but harder for others to keep. Divorces become “easier”—but remarriage is extremely difficult for abandoned older women. Marriages become more “open”—open not only for the partners to get out but also for the powerful to get in.
Monogamy is central to any democratic social contract, designed to prevent a breakdown of society into “war of every man against every other man.” In order to preserve order, a man may relinquish liberty, prosperity, and power to the state. But if he has to give up his wife to his boss, he is no longer a man. A society of open sexual competition, in which the rich and powerful—or even the sexually attractive—can command large numbers of women is a society with the most intolerable hierarchy of all. In any polygamous society some men have no wives at all; denied women and children, they are in effect deprived of the very substance of life.
Monogamy is egalitarianism in the realm of love. It is a mode of rationing. It means—to put it crudely—one to a customer. Competition is intense enough even so, because of the sexual inequality of human beings. But under a regime of monogamy there are limits. One may covet one’s neighbor’s wife, one may harbor fantasies of teeny boppers, but one generally leaves it at that. One does not leave one’s own wife when she grows older, to take a woman who would otherwise go to a younger man. Thus a balance is maintained and each generation gets its only true sexual rights: the right to a wife or husband and the right to participate in the future of the race through children.
It is not a ruthlessly strict system. Many divorces occurring among the young are relatively harmless. There is a place in the system for some philandering. But the essential rules are necessary to a just and democratic society. A breakdown in the sexual order will bring social ills and injustices far more grievous than the usual inequalities of money and power.
