Palerider wrote: ↑Thu Jan 10, 2019 5:51 pm
2bizE wrote: ↑Tue Jan 08, 2019 7:24 pm
alas wrote: ↑Tue Jan 08, 2019 3:43 pm
I really don’t want to contemplate either of your questions.
I can understand that. My question is serious though, not the normal wiseass cracks I make.
I would guess there's no way to know on question number one unless you had access to some old family secrets. SOMEONE probably knew way back when but would that type of info survive??? Kind of doubt it.
Regarding question number two, I would assume that Brigham learned early on that there should be "moderation in all things"....
OK, taking the questions seriously, because, hey who doesn’t wonder about things like this?
What we know is limited, so some of this is just guess work.
But their knowledge of sexually treated disease was really limited. They did not know germ theory, so had no idea how certain diseases spread. But we have to assume that Mormons were people too and just as vulnerable as the rest of the population to getting such diseases. But would they have known it if they did have it.
I think one reason virgins were preferred over the millennia was that men who only had sex with women who were virgin at the first time didn’t give the men disease and over time things that keep us healthy become inborn preferences, sort of like instinct. We know them without knowing them. It is like without knowing about bubonic plague, humans do not like to live in places infested with rats and mice. There is an instinctive aversion to rats. In the same way, men who preferred young virgins would have healthier lives, wives, and children, so would more likely pass on their genes into the next generation. I don’t think it was just about the women being young and fertile, but also being pure and disease free.
So, even though some wives got passed from man to man to man, polygamy was really closer to monogamy because the men were supposed to marry virgins, and as long as none of the husbands also went to the brothels, and only had sex with women with limited sexual experience, the STDs would be avoided.
Now the single men who frequented the brothels, I am sure many of them had and passed along STDs, but since disease was still very mysterious, we really don’t know what the men had.
Consider, we really don’t know what BY died of. And we have written history of him being sick, but was it appendicitis or arsenic poisoning? There are theories. We look back at people like this and sometimes we can figure out symptoms and match it up with a disease. Other times, there is no record of their symptoms. Another famous man, Edgar Allen Poe, he died of something unknown at the time. But enough was recorded about his illness that many feel he died of rabies, but there is no record of an animal bite, and at the time, they didn’t know enough to ask.
About question #2, I don’t think there was any pressure on him to have sex any more than he wanted. We know he didn’t bother visiting any of his wives he didn’t want to. So, I think the idea that a man married polygamously would have lots and lots of sex is just bunk. Why would he have any more than he wanted. He had no obligation to keep his wives happy. So, I am pretty sure the men never suffered any discomfort from too much or forced sex.
It was not like the scene in Little Big Man where his wife brought her “sisters” and said how their husbands had been killed and they had no man to hunt meet for them and since he was such a good husband and provider, could he please take these women to provide food in the cold winter months. He says yes, but then his wife and all the new wives expect him to service them sexually, so he drags himself from one bed to the next trying to make them all happy.
The men were under no obligation to even visit the wives, let alone satisfy them sexually.