MB-
It’s a fascinating topic, yeah. Ultimately there’s not a practical way to have large amounts of children with high quality women and have those children be well bred/stable/emotionally secure in Western culture; this path is closed. You can still opt for volume, but you’ll sacrifice quality.
Historically there were options in most cultures for extremely high value men (e.g., top 1% of wealth, power, etc.) to take multiple wives, with generally the first wife being the highest quality one and the head of the group of wives, and secondary / tertiary / etc. wives being younger and lower quality, and subservient to the chief wife. This is still the case in much of Africa and the Middle East, but it’s mostly not done elsewhere currently.
The problem with trying to build a long-term multi-partner arrangement in Western society where all the girlfriends/wives all know about each other or even live together with you is that social pressure conspires to tear the arrangement apart. Even if your girls are ecstatic when they’re with you and they’re best friends with the other girls, as soon as they step outside everyone they meet, from neighbors to coworkers to family, start telling them it isn’t right and they’re being taken advantage of and they should never stand for this, etc. Then they come back, there’s a big blow-up argument, you calm it down and get them happy again, and then it starts all over again the next day. Over time, you get tired and let your guard down a little or don’t have the mental energy to devote full-time to maintaining the arrangement, and the women rebel.
This is why the men who want this lifestyle form cults or sects and branch off from their host cultures, isolating their women and families away from television, movies, other people, etc. Western culture is highly woman-focused right now, and it’s very much focused on telling women they can have whatever they want, should never have to share anything, and should never settle for anything other than perfection. It’s also focused on making all men out to look and sound as similar as possible to one another – in a time when everyone is special and equal, there’s not as much perceived value difference between the wealthy, powerful, super attractive man and the broke surfer bum living on food stamps. Objectively, there’s an enormous gulf, but everything in society is telling her there’s no difference between these two men and they both need to treat her equally, and this makes it impossible for her to see enough difference to justify a socially disapproved relationship.
In Africa / Middle East, it’s understood that if a man becomes a wild success, he may take on additional wives. The earlier wives don’t always like this (or sometimes they do – someone to help around the household, or someone to boss around), but there are things people don’t like in every society, yet tolerate. If the man is not successful, older wives may leave the husband when he takes on a younger wife, provided they are in societies where women can operate and support themselves fine on their own.
In Asia, it’s understood that if a man becomes a wild success, he’s going to have mistresses/affairs, and possibly extramarital children, and this is permitted but only so long as he keeps a lid on it and it does not get back to his primary family and does not affect the social standing of his wife or legitimate children.
In the U.S. and Western Europe, it’s basically assumed that a man who’s a wild success will operate the same way as a man who’s not a success at all… it’s a sort of willful delusion. That’s why every time you see a big shot Hollywood actor or big name politician or sports star have an affair come to light, it’s this huge shock: the public can’t believe a man would act this way! Obviously he must be a Very Bad Man (or, if he owns up to it and promises not to do it again, it may have just been a Very Foolish Mistake). Certainly it has nothing to do with powerful men being different animals with different mating strategies than powerless ones. There is still some degree of understanding that the drive for more sex is a major contributing factor in driving men to amass power, but this understanding is much less strong in the West than it is in Asia, and there are people who legitimately find it incredibly shocking that a powerful man would want more than one woman.
So in the West (and most of the world), a man is forced to make a choice: pick one higher caliber woman and create a stable family, or engage in a succession of relationships that flame up and fall apart, and make lots of babies with lots of women.
Even for a man who’s rich, the limitation is parenting. The father role is extremely important to how a child turns out, so the quantity vs. quality decision ultimately comes down to do you want a lot of risky bets with a high chance of leading to low quality (uneducated, unambitious, unskilled) children, but some chance of one of your children being a star (that one kid who, despite an unfavorable childhood, or perhaps because of it, spinning adversity into dream-fuel, becomes super accomplished)… or do you want to have fewer, higher genetic caliber children, and invest more of your resources into them and train them and parent them a lot more closely?
In a multiple-wives household, you could rely on older children to parent the younger ones, which makes this setup a lot more stable. Then you only have to focus on parenting the first few children well, and let them train and guide the younger children, who will train and guide the ones younger than them, with you stepping in to correct mistakes or provide oversight overall. This arrangement’s also much easier from a parenting perspective because all your children are there under one roof. If you do the prolific thing in the West, you have to have children with one girl, then have children with another, the first one gets upset and leaves you, the second one becomes your main girl, you have children with a third, the second one becomes upset and leaves you, etc. So you have lots of children, but they’re all split between different households and they can’t help raise each other, and you only see them several days out of the week. It’s a much less efficient model for raising quantities of children, and essentially forces a man to choose between high quantity but low quality, or high quality but low quantity.
Why is it this way? One-man-one-woman partnerships are more favorable for social stability. There are a lot of angry, unproductive, leftover men in societies where some men get many wives, because that means other men get none, and that anger gets translated into violence (case in point: the Middle East). Generally speaking, you need high male die rates over a prolonged period of time (whether from warfare or disease) for public multiple wife arrangements to become accepted. Otherwise, women will fight against it.
The compromise many men make in the West (and you’ll see this one a lot if you study historical Europe as well – they did it this way in Medieval times, and they did it in Rome) is to have one high caliber wife, make children with her, raise them, and then once they’re out of the house divorce the wife and marry a younger woman. Then make new children with her. There’s no way to describe this that doesn’t sound horrible and cold, but it’s the process most successful men who want children with multiple women engage in in these societies. They sacrifice some quantity for higher quality children, yet still breed with multiple women in this way. If the woman could accept the nature of powerful men and the society did not struggle to rein in its powerful men, the first wife would not have to leave to make way for a second one, but these societies do not allow that arrangement.
There’s also divorce with younger children, which is another compromise, this one leaning more towards quantity. A man gives marriage and the hope of a long future together to get a higher caliber woman, makes a kid or two with her, and then they divorce (frequently after she catches him cheating – it’s the West, all men are the same, and she shouldn’t have to stand for that, she thinks; time to go). He then repeats the process numerous times with other women. Many Hollywood actors go this route; if you read their Wikipedia bios you’ll see “Marriage – 1 child, divorced; Next marriage – 2 children, divorced; Next marriage – 1 child, still together”, etc.
Chase
