I have a gut feeling that those old bearded polygamous dudes in the 1800s were really lousy lovers. I looked up some quotes from apostles and prophets about polygamy for our blog’s Instagram page this morning and realized that a lot of what these dead guys said about sex sounded … interesting.
This is just a hot take, but the following is my evidence that polygamist men were not very fun to be married to.
Piece of Evidence #1: They didn’t seem to understand that women can like sex, too.
Apostle Orson Hyde believed that having sex just for fun created an inferior set of human beings. In 1857 he explained that lustful desire and sexual excess accounted for the birth of “cripples and idiots”, and “a puny set, a race of helpless, scrubby children”.
The more I read from him, the more I believe he was under the impression that only men had sexual desires and appetites, and not women. If that’s the case, of course polygamy made sense to him! A man could then have ten times as much sex without accidentally producing idiot babies.
This also meant that his wives (who, at least in his experience, never seemed to want to have sex with him) would only have to do it a fraction of the time, and only until they got pregnant.
No wonder Orson thought polygamy was doing a favor for women by not making them have sex as much! (I bet his wives would always say to him, “Orson, do you want me to give birth to a cripple? Go away.”)
Piece of Evidence #2: Those guys never had to learn to please a woman if they were just assigned wives.
Think about the movie Titanic. Jack was very desirable, and Rose’s fiancé was not. They were both attractive men – so why wouldn’t Rose want the rich powerful one who could buy her a yacht? Why would she pick Jack?
You see, the rich fiancé was well aware that he could have any woman he wanted (and yes, he was also a homicidal maniac by the end, but she’d already picked Jack before that part). The fiancé didn’t have to try to understand Rose and listen to her feelings to connect with her, or mutually plan a life that would be fulfilling and joyful for both of them. He could ignore her wants, needs and desires because it didn’t really matter.
Jack, on the other hand – he didn’t have his pick of women, so he learned to act like a human being. (And then voila, he and Rose had amazing sex in a car.)
I bet no polygamist Mormon prophet ever had amazing sex in a car with their 17th wife. (And not just because cars weren’t invented yet.) Sometimes girls had been promised to these men as their future wives since they were children and when they reached age 18 were obligated to say “yes, sure…I’d, ummm… love to have your babies…President Woodruff.”
Piece of Evidence #3: A man who only sleeps with you once every 25th time he has sex will never learn what you like.
I’ve heard before that the most mutually satisfying relationships are generally between people in committed relationships. The newness and excitement might wear off, but the benefit remains that you’re sleeping with someone who knows what you like and don’t like.
If you are one of Brigham Young’s 50+ wives, what are the chances he ever learns enough about your body and what you specifically find pleasurable? And even if he did, what are the chances he remembers it was YOU who really liked something? Half the time I can’t remember which of my three kids likes what type of food the best, and I’m not even running a church in the end times.
Piece of Evidence #4: Teenage girls don’t like old guys (and neither do women in their twenties, thirties or forties).
I was a straight teenage girl for years and thus consider myself a complete expert on this matter. Straight teenage girls are sexually attracted to teenage boys. Unless they are groomed and manipulated, they are not, ever ever ever, interested in having sex with a 62-year-old bearded prophet down the hall from his seven other wives and 35 kids.
Imagine you’re a college aged girl and this is your dating app. Which old guy’s polygamous harem would you like to be part of for eternity?
No girl, in the entire history of planet earth, has ever laid awake in bed at night fantasizing that she might someday be added to the nightly sex rotation of one of those dudes pictured above.
While I don’t know of any detailed descriptions of what polygamous sex was like for girls in the 1800s, I do know the modern experience of former FLDS member Rebecca Musser. (Author of the amazing book, “The Witness Wore Red” and one of the women who helped put Warren Jeffs behind bars.)
In the Netflix documentary “Keep Sweet, Pray and Obey”, Rebecca describes being a 19-year-old woman married to the prophet Rulon Jeffs. She says in episode one, “I remember him rolling on top of me and saying, “Spread your legs”. I felt like… this is everything that we were told was bad. Why is a man doing this, let alone the prophet of God doing this to me?”
Later she explains her tactics to avoid sexual contact with her husband. “I was clever. I knew he was tired, so I’d help him get into bed and I’d rub his feet and get him to sleep. I’d do anything I could to make him fall asleep, and then I would pass by another night without having him touch me.”
Every time I see a genealogical record of a Mormon girl in the 1800s having the baby of an older polygamist man, I remember Rebecca Musser in that documentary, talking about her nights with Rulon Jeffs.
And you know what? All of this makes me not feel bad about making fun of how lousy in bed these old dead guys probably were.
13 Responses
I think you’re right. In support of your point #1, Church rhetoric even to today doesn’t acknowledge women and girls as sexual agents with your own desires. Church warnings about porn, for example, are directed (almost?) entirely to men and boys. Women and girls are warned about “immorality” pretty much only in the context of saying “you need to fend the men and boys off,” rather than with the idea that they might be interested in sex themselves too. And any and all Church discussion of homosexuality is about gay men. Lesbians are entirely off GAs’ radar, because GAs would first have to imagine women as sexual agents whose interests or desires could matter before they got to the step of being able to believe lesbians exist. Anyway, given all these trends that continue to now, I think it’s very likely you’re right about nineteenth-century polygamists, who would be hampered by an even more patriarchal worldview and even less general discussion of sex or women’s role in it outside of being the objects of men’s desire.
“Apostle Orson Hyde believed that having sex just for the fun created an inferior set of human beings. In 1857 he explained that lustful desire and sexual excess accounted for the birth of ‘cripples and idiots,’ and ‘a puny set, a race of helpless, scrubby children.'”
I AM DYING. I’m imagining some teacher saying, “You know, little Johnny isn’t as good at math as his sister” or “that kid of yours is rather clumsy, isn’t she?” And the mom going, yeah, I enjoyed myself a little too much that night. When we conceived, it was missionary position and I didn’t even want to do it, but you can’t say no to your husband, right? I didn’t enjoy the sex at all, so that kid’s a genius.”
I mean, it’s not actually funny. It is almost criminally stupid to realize men knew basically nothing about women until, like, 20 years ago, it seems like. The uterus floated around the body, women were incomplete men (Aristotle and his ideas about women makes me question everything that comes out of his mouth), women also have sex drives. Yikes.
Your second paragraph just made me laugh out loud myself, and I’m sitting in a public waiting room with several other adults and my immediate fear was that they would ask me what was so funny… because what would I tell them? 😂 (They did not ask, phew!)
You probably know this, but in case someone else doesn’t, this idea doesn’t originate with Hyde. In the 1850s people were just beginning to study “idiocy” and it was believed that degeneracy caused mental and physical disability (the Bible claims the same, for the record). They also thought feminism and renting one’s abode caused disability, too, but despite the bad ideas, this time period was the beginning of what we now call special education.
https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/issues/instruction-idiots/#:~:text=The%20proximate%20causes%20Dr.,remoter%20ancestors%20of%20the%20sufferers.
https://www.disabilitymuseum.org/dhm/lib/detail.html?id=1581&page=all
https://academic.oup.com/liverpool-scholarship-online/book/15444/chapter-abstract/170052302?redirectedFrom=fulltext
So by our standards this information is dumb, but back then it was science.
I also think it’s worth noting that based on my observations, the most common polygamous pairings were second wives married after the first wife entered her fifties — menopause — when many women do, in fact, lose interest in sex.
Also, Brigham never had sex with fifty women. The women that agreed to have sex with him were housed in different, larger rooms in the Lion House. Susa Young Gates actually drew a floor plan showing the arrangement.
But I do think you’re spot on about Briggie being bad at sex. A surprising number of his wives only had one child with him. 40 or so wives had 0 of his offspring.
https://www.reddit.com/r/exmormon/comments/podtb7/floor_plans_of_the_lion_house_from_catherine_v/#lightbox
https://www.dialoguejournal.com/articles/determining-and-defining-wife-the-brigham-young-households/
Do you think Orson’s wives found the research about not having too much sex or your kids will be dumb and gave it to him so he’d leave them alone? Ha ha.
2.. I was aware Brigham didn’t sleep with all of his wives, and it’s actually one of the things that makes me the most mad at him! He’d tell women they were to be his wife but not allowed to pursue a romantic relationship outside of their fake marriage.. Meanwhile he could have plenty of other relationships beside her.
And then the butthead would publicly declare that he wasn’t sleeping with that wife – an eternal wife only – she was just an old lady he took in because he’s a saint.
Imagine your husband going out of his way to reassure people he didn’t find you attractive or young enough to sleep with, and he was marrying you out of pity and kindheartedness. (But if he catches you with another man, he’ll put a javelin through your heart.)
Interesting to note that many women’s interest in sex does increase during menopause (if her partner understands her arousal and desire and they work together to make sure her pleasure is prioritized).
To add to all these great points, fulfilling sex depends on emotional intimacy, trust, integrity, and real love (deeper than lust). These things must have all been much harder to access in polygamous marriages, which had betrayal and emotional distance built into them. Some wives said they could only tolerate their situations by looking at their husbands with cold respect rather than love or desire. Sex must have been weird, sterile and dehumanizing at times. I remember reading an account in my family history of a young woman being excited she was a first wife and how these might actually be some romance since she’d be the only one (for thr moment). I like the points you make about whats needed for a reciprocal relationship using Jack and Rose from Titanic! The Keep Sweet sex example is also really pertinent here. Sex sucks when men are bloated with power and ego and don’t treat women as equals.
This. Yes! The emotional disconnect would be such a barrier to intimacy and pleasurable sex.
From the book A House Full of Females, “ “divorces among women married in polygamy, were three times as common as among those in monogamous marriages.”
Bad at sex might be part of that equation. 😉
Awesome thoughts here, Abby!
And then you can move past it just being unfulfilling sexual encounters for the wives of these powerful men (which is tragic enough at that) and realize that in many situations consent wasn’t even possible given the power dynamics – and then we realize what happened was straight up sexual assault on a regular basis for many of these women. (And then dang it, it all turns dark so fast.)
I’m glad they say least could hold their abusers off by the fear that their kids would come out dumb and crippled – and that at least some of them could escape through divorce.
I spoke with an intuitive psychic once about polygamy (BY is one of my direct ancestors via one of the women who advised other polygamous wives to respect their husbands instead and not expect to have any emotional needs met). The psychic told me it felt to her that sex within polygamy felt like rape to the women subjugated to it. That really struck me and I suspect a LOT of women in that system passed on a whopping load of sexual trauma to us, their descendants.
Humor is usually based in truth so this covered both—true and funny. Thank you! Any thinking woman would know that each of your points would have to be true. Women would enjoy sexual relations with these polygamous men as much as cattle would, if these men had those proclivities. Not saying they would though. Either way, women were treated like cattle, so the analogy works.
Brilliant analysis!
Reading William Clayton’s journal is so telling…he was so excited to have more women to sleep with and would ask Joseph for permission to marry someone…to which Joseph would respond, “nah man , I get that one” .