More Wives, Less AIDS

by Ariel Goldring

A new paper by Georges Reniers (Princeton University) and Susan Watkins (University of California‐Los Angeles) suggests that polygyny is associated with lower HIV transmission rates:

HIV prevalence is lower in countries where the practice of polygyny is common, and within countries, it is lower in areas with higher levels of polygyny.

Proposed explanations for the protective effect of polygyny include the distinctive structure of sexual networks produced by polygyny, the disproportionate recruitment of HIV-positive women into marriages with a polygynous husband, and the lower coital frequency in conjugal dyads of polygynous marriages.

In other words, men with several wives are generally older and consequently have less sex. At the same time, the men who want to have a lot of sex tend to be young and unable to find a partner.