I was posting a bit sloppily. There are two senses of “stable” I have in mind.
The stability of who is in the child’s life:
The more people you add, the more likely it is one of them will leave. Not because polyamory makes the relationships less stable necessarily, but simply because there are more people. With two people, only two people need to be happy for stability. With three, you need three happy people, and so on.
The stability of the bond between a child and a parent:
I think of a relationship like a skill. It takes both work and time to be strong/skilled. With two parents; there will be about 50% of one-on-one time with each parent (in the ideal scenario). With three parents, 33%, with four, 25%, and so on. A strong/stable parent-child relationship takes many hours and a lot of hard work. As we add parents, that becomes more difficult to achieve.
I think you mean “way more common than we tend to think”? It is overwhelmingly more common to be raised by the two-person model. Like, thousands of times more likely I would guess.
Whether it’s a plant or animal species, domestication involves controlling reproduction. We domesticate ourselves. That’s what patriarchy, nuclear family, marriage is about.
Actually, I think it’s directly tied to a woman’s desire to see that her child is cared for and a man’s desire to know that his genes are being passed on.
Very unlikely to be directly tied to those things, I’d say. Like, shapely hips get me going, but it’s not because I’m thinking “Ooh, she could bear healthy offspring.”
Hot anarchist take: The reason men wanted to control women and reproduction and know who their children are is because of property. Property is the root of patriarchy.
That is pretty funny. It’s actually one of my pet peeves being in the community. There is a lot of cross over with the airy-fairy aura new agers. They are always trying to sell me on some new anti-science non-sense.
I’ve been giving this some thought and I have gone all in on Trump winning in 2020. Here’s why:
They’re inevitably going to ask the time-honored and important question “What is one nice thing you can say about your opponent?” In 2016 HRC took the only possible answer, when we were talking about four mostly anonymous kids and one who could afford expensive stylists and plastic surgeons.
What the hell could the 2020 nominee say, “Good on him for not letting his pre-teen vape and for basically forgetting the Tiffster exists. Forty percent of his kids are not complete dumpster fires of humanity.” That’s the best answer to that question?
The right answer to the question: “So I’m really struggling to answer this question… because my opponent is one of the single least likable people I’ve ever heard of much less met. I can think of something nice to say about practically anyone, because I’m a politician for heavens sake… but my opponent is a malignant narcissist who has done probably irreparable damage to this country… this country that I love as much as I love anything. So I just can’t.”
I’d nearly be inclined to flip it and say “He was the first to realise people don’t actually care all that much about this kind of fake-niceness in their candidates” and leave it at that.
