Polygyny is just a specific subset of polyamory
This is precisely what I’m objecting to and disagree with. Polygyny throughout human history was roughly never an arrangement of legal or moral equals, but founded generally on sociopolitical traditions that treated women as property or prizes. To suggest that the prevalence of this state of affairs is attestation of how natural what we in the modern era call ‘polyamory’ is strikes me as misleading or inaccurate — it is attestation that dominant males who had achieved a monopoly on local violence were able to ... (read more)
It does seem a bit of a slippery slope / misleading to equate polyamory too cleanly with polygyny. The latter was certainly widespread throughout human history but also often associated with misogyny or outright abuse or mistreatment of women, as well as rigidly hierarchical or authoritarian sociopolitical structures.
One perhaps lesser known aspect of monogamy is that historically it’s actually a marker for increasing societal egalitarianism, for precisely this reason, and likely a stronger societal solution in terms of collective happiness to the tricky and sometimes dangerous problem of single men vs broadly hypergamous culture.
Well, "loving...with the full knowledge and consent of all partners involved" would almost certainly rule out a majority of traditional polygyny, which as we've already established correlates strongly with misogyny and inequality both generally and between genders. This is the point I'm driving at, which is that traditional polygyny was on balance neither loving nor often consensual but a function of elite males who had achieved a monopoly on violence building harems by force. This seems to be at odds with the letter of the definition and even more so with... (read more)