Legalised polygamy a good option

By Anne Taylor

The Courier-Mail

November 18, 2008 04:25am

WITH the introduction of "alimony payments" to mistresses, the comedy of equality of the sexes is turning into a farce.

There can be no equality; the sexes are simply different. During sex, a woman sometimes conceives; that's her downside. Her upside is that while she's bearing and rearing her infant(s) she and her infant may legally demand protection and financial support from the biological father. That's his downside.

Monogamy suits a wife and her children for practical reasons, but modern middle-class and upper-class women have gone beyond the practical. They want continuing romance, excitement, and a fulfilling career.

The women in the lower echelons have no choice but to work, as they have done since the Industrial Revolution. No flowers and wining and dining, boardrooms and glass ceilings for them.

Let me relate a "true confession".

I was deserted by my husband in 1970, and left with two infant sons. I was a middle-class housewife, totally naive about my rights and about government benefits. Unaware that I was entitled to a Deserted Wives' Pension, I went to work.

First I obtained factory work, but the meagre wage was impossible to live on with rent and child care to pay. It probably still is for single-income parents. Spare a thought for factory workers, you politicians and feminists.

I battled my way back into the clerical workforce I'd been in before my brief marriage, but I didn't have the equal pay and the childcare subsidy working mothers have today. The stress carried me off to a psychiatric hospital.

Those institutions were not what they are today. I came out hardened and bitter and wanting only to protect and nurture my sons at all costs.

I accepted the advances of the first presentable man who offered me his protection and became his mistress. Until my sons were of an age for me to go to work with ease of mind, I then had a succession of "protectors" who all told me the same story.

I could have been sceptical, except that my own husband had been a genuine cad. These men said their wives had lost interest in sex, criticised them, nagged them, constantly tried to "change" them.

I am reminded of a quote: "A man marries a woman thinking she won't change, and she does. A woman marries a man thinking he will change, and he doesn't."

I'd grown up in a household of men who never said a word if I left the toilet rim down, and explained to me once patiently that if I didn't like wet towels on the floor, it only took me a moment to pick them up as opposed to five minutes to find the culprit and complain. Thereafter they turned deaf ears to my complaint.To me, these men whose wives nagged about their thoughtlessness and laziness were gems. They provided for their wives, and most of them still loved them despite being mystified and disillusioned.

One of them asked me plaintively: "What does she want from me? She told the marriage guidance counsellor that I never remember wedding anniversaries and never give her flowers, so I got a standing order at the florist to deliver her flowers on our anniversary and Valentine's Day. The very first bunch of flowers she got she threw them at me."

Do you see what you're dealing with here, you fluffy-headed females? You're dealing with brains that are programmed differently from yours.

In the meantime let's just accept it, the way our mystified menfolk accept and are enchanted by us.
Women talk a lot about "communication" and "empathy". But it's men who communicate concisely and precisely, and I suspect women have an airy-fairy idea of empathy, or there would be far fewer divorces.

Once upon a time I put forward the idea of legalised polygamy as the answer to broken marriages, fatherless children, and women wanting to have children and still be part of the workforce.

The idea was that working wives could help provide financially, while the stay-at-home mums could provide child care.

With the present madness of Family Law legislation upon us, I put forward the suggestion again as being more sane. If all the wives, mistresses, de factos and girlfriends of any particular Lothario were to co-operate for the sake of their mutual children, instead of pulling against each other and the father, we might get some stability back into society.

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