Thirst Satyrday for Eros: Erotic complications of a polygamous household

A product of Wasatch Brewery

A view from Salt Lake City

By Morris Dean

[Like Wednesday's column about Salt Lake City's street nomenclature and yesterday's limerick, playing off "Deseret," today's column was conceived in Salt Lake City, during our visit to Temple Square and admiring the two principal houses lived in by Brigham Young (1801-1877).]

My father-in-law told my wife when she was young (and years before I met her) that in a hard-scrabble economy such as he had experienced in Indiana and Missouri during the Depression, a family needed lots of children to work on the farm.
    Mr. Warren didn't add, as he might have, that a particularly hard-pressed man could produce more children by employing multiple wives in the endeavor, and the wives could also work, when they weren't too pregnant – one complication of which for the wives, of course, is that they might spend a good deal more time working on the farm than romping in the sack with their husband, who would have been much in demand if he was any good at erogenous pleasuring.

Statue in Brigham Young Historic Garden, less than a block from Beehive House (see below)

    And, unless their husband had uncommon vigor and a short refractory period, a high demand for his services could be a taxing complication for him.
    As noted above, we visited Brigham Young's two main houses, at the northwest corner of the intersection of State Street and South Temple. They sit side-by-side facing South Temple: Lion House on the left & Beehive House on the right (both built in the decade after the Mormons arrived in 1847).

According to various researchers, Young probably had 55 wives all told, becoming a polygamist in 1842 on the recommendation of Joseph Smith Jr. (1805-1844), the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and the author of the Book of Mormon^* (1830). According to John G. Turner, author of Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet, Smith told Young "that plural marriage was a divine commandment that would bring a select number of righteous men tremendous blessings for eternity."
    So, contends Turner, "lust or sexual attraction was not the reason for [Young's] entrance into polygamy." In fact, upon being exposed to Smith's teaching, he "briefly resisted...later explaining that it was the only time in his life that he 'desired the grave.' Once he accepted it, however, he accepted it wholeheartedly."
    Apparently he did. A complication of Young's particular arrangement is that, again according to Turner, "he married women who were already married, some to Mormon men in good standing" - in addition to marrying single women and widows. He may have been "the most oft-married man in 19th-century America." Wikipedia's article on Brigham Young states that "21 [of his wives] had never been married before; 16 were widows; six were divorced; six had living husbands; and the marital status of six others are unknown." And: "At the time of Young's death [1877], 19 of his wives had predeceased him, he was divorced from ten, and 23 survived him. The status of four was unknown....In his will, Young shared his estate with the 16 surviving wives who had lived with him; the six surviving non-conjugal wives were not mentioned in the will."
    These "marriages" were not necessarily the usual sort of thing – cohabiting in a domicile. Turner goes on:

After his first plural marriage, Young married three more times before Smith's 1844 murder. Young did not live with any of his additional wives, and they bore him no children during these years. During the year after Smith's death, Young married around 15 women. Celestial marriage became more of an earthly reality now, as Young began to have children with several of his wives. His rate of marriage peaked in early 1846, when he married nearly 20 additional wives in the church's Nauvoo, Ill., temple. Shortly thereafter, Brigham Young headed for the American West, bringing with him many of the women who had married him over the previous four years.

    In Utah, apparently, Mr. Young's "polygamous household" was not singular (in the numerical sense, if quite singular otherwise) and no doubt entangled with many complications peculiar to the founder of a city and the precursors to the University of Utah and Brigham Young University, and the first governor of the Utah Territory. He was without doubt a man of enormous energy. In fact, Lion House seems to have been named after him; "Young was dubbed by his followers the 'Lion of the Lord' for his bold personality." –Wikipedia

But what about a polygamous household more to an average human scale? Fortunately for anyone with a pronounced interest in polygamy, which I confess I have not – one wife is quite enough for me, thank you – there are two TV reality shows that you can investigate.

• My Five Wives, according to Wikipedia, "documents the life of a polygamist family, which includes patriarch Brady Williams, his five wives, and their 24 children. The family began the series living in an undisclosed city outside of Salt Lake City, Utah, due to fear of prosecution for polygamy."
  
  
  
• Sister Wives, again according to Wikipedia, "documents the life of a polygamist family, which includes patriarch Kody Brown, his four wives, and their 17 children."
  

    From a satellite's perspective, looking down on a humanly overpopulated planet, you can see a huge complication of polygamy in the statistic of 41 children (24 + 17) from nine wives (5 + 4), or 4.6 children per wife. It would be interesting to have the statistic from a valid population size, but polygamists aren't exactly open about what they're doing. (Kody Brown, the patriarch of Sister Wives, "believes his polygamist arrangement is legal because he is legally married only to one woman, and the other marriages are spiritual unions. The series led to the Brown family being investigated for possible prosecution." –Wikipedia)
    But contributing to the problem of overpopulation may not be a complication just of polygamy. According to a 2012 Pew Research survey ["Religion & Public Life Project"], "Mormons in the current survey report having had 2.6 children on average, compared with 1.8 among the general population." (The general population isn't quite replacing itself, for a population decline, whereas Mormons are replacing themselves significantly more than one to one.)
    According to Wikipedia's article on Lion House, Brigham Young "ultimately fathered 57 biological children by more than two dozen wives." So, in regard to producing a surplus of human beings, Young led the way not only to the valley between the Wasatch Range and the Great Salt Lake but also to laying up in Heaven those "tremendous blessings for eternity" by which Prophet Smith may have meant all those relatives that Mormonism promises you will be reunited with in the After Life.
    Now there would be a complication, if the Mormon dream ever actually came to pass....
_______________
* Full title: The Book of Mormon: An Account Written by the Hand of Mormon upon Plates Taken from the Plates of Nephi

Copyright © 2014 by Morris Dean