The following is a spoof commendation of ... polygamy, what else?  I sent it to the EU Commission house organ, Commission en Direct, for reasons which will become apparent.  It appeared in the 9th November issue.  Amazingly, there are journalists at the FT who also have nothing better to do than leaf through Commission en Direct.  One of them took it upon his or, just possibly, herself to have some harmless fun at the Commission’s expense.  Or maybe polygamy is just bigger than I thought.  The full text of my missive follows.

One of our colleagues has recently proposed setting up a non-official ‘Singles Group’ in the European institutions. Alas, her project is unlikely to be successful.

The reason is as clear as daylight. There are approximately nine single women to every single man employed by the European institutions. In our august working environment, single women are as ‘thick as the autumnal leaves that strow the brooks in Vallombrosa’. A singles’ group would therefore largely consist of unmarried and divorced females pushing 40 and 50, with the occasional predatory, sociopathic or gold-digging male just to add variety. For as the old adage goes, a single woman over thirty is more likely to be hit by a terrorist’s bullet and simultaneously struck by lightning than to win the heart of an unmarried male who is non-psychotic, over four foot tall and in full-time employment. Men? The great Charles Thomson, founder of the anti-anti-art movement known as ‘stuckism’, perhaps put it best: “A Single Woman … is never more than six inches away from the nearest Rat’.

But let us return to our ‘muttons’: this gender imbalance is partly due to the fact that men are more likely to die at an early age than women and that men are more likely to be homosexual than women are to be lesbian. However, the major cause is that, thanks to natural selection, women in all 4000 societies known to man are hypergamous – they want to mate with males of a higher social status than themselves, with the hunters who bag the big game rather than the puny guys who come home with two sparrows. As in ancient Polynesia, so in contemporary Benelux – replacing ‘big game’ by ‘full-time employment’ and ‘two sparrows’ by ‘temporary employment contract’. While alpha males will quite willingly marry (or even more willingly fornicate with) beta or gamma females, and may even shrink from close encounters with women who are their intellectual equals or superiors, alpha females are very reluctant to form permanent relationships with low-status males. Indeed, most women (alpha or otherwise) would prefer to spend 30 minutes with John F. Kennedy than 30 years with a butcher’s boy.

Unfortunately, because of the gruellingly competitive entrance examinations, the European institutions are pullulating with high-IQ alpha females, including a large number of over-educated executive officers and secretaries with university degrees - in fact, the only non-alpha females one tends to encounter here are the catering and cleaning staff. While some of these alpha females have had the luck to meet Mr Right at the right time, most haven’t – or Mr Right turned out to be Mr Wrong, and ran off with some dutiful Asian or Eastern European girl who is happy to exchange her sexual and other charms for a decent meal and a home with running water and electricity. On the other hand, most of the alpha males (i.e. virtually all males reading this, even including those assholes who think I’m an asshole) were already entrapped in matrimony by the time they were ‘institutionalised’. There may be a handful of non-gay bachelors, but they are probably too busy logging in to ‘Russian babes would like to meet you’ on the Internet to consider joining a singletons club. Indeed, these bachelors are also far more likely to get more bang for their buck if they marry a Russian babe than a spoilt-rotten alpha female who has notions that there may be such a thing as the ‘New Man’, i.e. some sad pussy who is willing not only to change the light bulbs but also to do the ironing and clean the refrigerator.

Besides, there are already quite a number of existing clubs which in some way serve the interpersonal needs of partner-hunting singles. Photo clubs are notorious dens of singledom – but, alas, they attract not only singles, but also male doubles (i.e. married men) who are seeking single women chiefly in order to form a clandestine adulterous relationship of a transient nature. And as every pretty schoolgirl knows, photography both as a hobby and a profession also magnetizes dirty young men, dirty middle-aged men and dirty old men who are seeking a window of opportunity to take some nude shots, i.e. dirty pictures, of the occasional gormless beauty they hope to chance upon.

Cycling clubs are somewhat less likely to be occasions of sin, but in my own experience they also accommodate a large percentage of activist and/or aspiring adulterers and fornicators, despite what one occasionally reads in the popular press about the allegedly adverse effects of saddle pressure on the male sexual drive.

My own modest proposal, until some years ago, would have been to dump monogamy altogether and to officially recognize and promote polygamy – hence fostering a pluralistic society consisting of happy trebles, quadruples and quintuples rather than forlorn singles and smug doubles. In my younger days I tentatively put forward this idea to a number of lady friends, patiently explicating the values of sharing and mutual understanding in the framework of a committed, polyamorous relationship. Why should one girl hog an entire man, when there are so many who would be only too willing to get a bit of the bedroom action and even share the burden of raising a family under the same roof? Is it not better for them to marry than to burn (Corinthians, 7:8-9)? But the response on the part of my lady companions had always been unhelpful, if not to say hysterical.

I am not alone. An old acquaintance of mine once got a heavy glass ashtray thrown at him in a ‘domestic’ triggered by his pragmatic and in many ways innovative approach to resolving the ‘singletons’ problem and simultaneously providing for the sex education of his girlfriend’s younger, barely legal teenage sister. Sadly, even so-called emancipated women can be so narrow-minded and old-fashioned about these matters. So after learning about this incident and mulling it over, I threw in the towel and resigned myself to the fact that females in Western societies are incredibly and incurably self-centred and possessive when it comes to sharing their partners with other, less fortunate women.

On the other hand, many demographers reckon that, as a result of ongoing immigration, a higher Muslim birth rate and the mass conversion of conservative Christians to Islam, the majority of European citizens will consist of Musselmen and Musselwomen by mid-century or thereabouts.

What about an EU-wide referendum on the issue in the year 2050?As a final solution to the alpha female singleton problem, polygamy, after all, may be just around the corner in two generations’ time.