What if human beings practiced polyandry?

A new word, is it not? It is because, unlike polygamy, it is not often practiced among people we know, and if it is, a paltry 1 percent of them do it.

This is where a woman is married to more than one man. In Nepal, for example, there is a society where two or more brothers marry one woman.

The form of marriage, known as fraternal polyandry in anthropological parlance, is one of the world's rarest forms of marriage but is not uncommon in Tibetan society, where it has been practiced from time immemorial.

What if we juxtaposed it with our current world, where a woman is legally married to several men?

Well, religion, especially Christianity, insists on monogamy even though there is no theological grounding to it and the Bible is silent about it.

Just like other norms that society has placed on the shoulders of women, such as female genital mutilation, I tend to think that men, out of their selfishness, created monogamy and polygamy to ensure that they kept the women below them.

In other words, female genital mutilation was intended to deprive women of sexual pleasure.

The insistence on monogamy and polygamy while deleting the notion that a woman can be married to more than one man is a man’s creation.

Anyway, this is only my opinion. It is not an anthropology paper, though it fits the description.

Here is what would happen if it did happen that polyandrous marriages would occur: There would be less infidelity, as we see today, since a woman has the number of men she needs (and officially).

What would happen? While females are at risk of losing protection and provisioning from a male partner, males are at risk of losing sexual access to their female partner, or worse, of being cuckolded and providing resources for children that are not their own.

Jealousy may lead to mate-protecting behaviours, including coercive constraint of female sexuality through the threat of male violence, and this may be due largely to paternity uncertainty.

Studies have suggested that sexual jealousy functions to defend paternity, and since men are more jealous than women, we would expect a very serious cultural explosion where people would kill others.

What I am trying to do here is to imagine the unimaginable.