Things To Remember When Writing Harem Stories? [closed]

Keep in mind basic sexual psychology differences between men and women.

It depends on the era, and culture. With the caveat that nothing applies to everybody and you can find some 15% of just about any population that is non-typical, I will speak in generalities for a broad question.

Across all eras and cultures, including my own American culture, the one pretty consistent "feature" of a man that attracts many girls is the appearance of power and wealth, often manifested as fame in modern life, or high social status (elected office, or running a large company). Battle prowess is also high on the list.

It is why the fantasy husband is a young Prince in Shining Armor: High social status, high wealth, able to defend.

In the psychology of both men and women, sexual attraction is driven by the suitability of their partner for mating. For males, they (subconsciously) seek a woman that will bear many healthy children.

So men (in all eras) have an ideal woman that is young, healthy, and without flaws (flaws can indicate disease or a poor immune system). However, "healthy" depends on the perceptions of the culture; a few hundred years ago thinness could be a sign of disease and insufficient nutrition, so fatter women with larger breasts were considered the ideal of beauty.

Beauty itself (being pretty) has been shown by numerous psychological experiments in recent decades to be primarily driven by perfect facial symmetry and "average" measurements of facial features within the culture; it means the most beautiful men/women have symmetrical faces, and nothing of the dozens of measurable sizes is too big, too small, too far apart or close together. "flawless" means perfectly average! (which is difficult to achieve on every feature, so perfectly average, or even close to it, is rare).

That in turn has been found to be a good predictor of life health and a strong immune system and lack of disease since conception. Beauty implies both good genes, and a healthy dose of lucky circumstances in avoiding common diseases or lack of nutrition in the womb, etc.

The ideal mate for a woman (subconsciously) is a good provider (wealth) and defender (battle) with high social status that elevates her within her own tribe / city / society / country. Of course in her ideal the man is also fit, strong, symmetrical, tall (another indicator of health throughout gestation and childhood), but these are icing on the cake. The most important feature, to provide for her and her children, is wealth and status. Battle prowess is still important in cultures where violence is common, but in much of the modern world that is completely unimportant, and wealth and high social status can simply hire the muscle to meet this requirement.

As far as jealousy amongst the women is concerned, that does not seem to be as fundamental to women as it is to men. Although monogamy is common in most of the world, remember that a few hundred years ago polygamy was the standard and most women, in part by their own writing from the time, were comfortable with that. There are modern examples of polygamy, even in the USA (though the male is not legally married to all of his 'wives'), and it is advocated by multiple major religions (and prominent in the Bible).

Men have always been jealous of female infidelity. For a man, putting love and trust and DNA testing aside, there is no way to be certain a child is his own seed, short of personally imprisoning his mate. (He might know it is not due to some heritable genetic trait he does not have, like skin or hair color). Obviously for woman (putting high tech surrogacy aside), any child they birth is their own, and they know if they have been faithful to their husband. Thus, centuries ago, the use of chastity belts and the subjugation of women.

But women demanding monogamy from men is a more cultural phenomenon, something they have been raised to expect and demand. This means a man can likely find women that do not mind being a member of the harem as long as the man has the resources for, and is committed to, providing for them and their children for life. Remember what they subconsciously seek: resources, protection, social status, life security. So although the super majority of women in modern society may be looking for love and physical attraction, there is always going to be some small subset for whom the psychological basics are more prominent.

Which is why famous rock stars and sports stars and actors can have groupies or dozens of girls that know they are not exclusive and don't care very much. Which is why, even without sexual harassment, rich young men can do the same, or rich old men, or men with fame and high social titles in general.

I am not saying jealousies cannot be a big (or main) plotting factor in a harem. I would tone down the "monogamy" type of jealousy and focus on the "status" type; to be the husband's favorite wife, jealousy that one woman is chosen by him more than any other. For example, in some diaries of women of status in centuries past, that their husbands had mistresses was known to them and not a large concern of theirs. In most cultures several centuries ago, men (particularly wealthy high status men pursued by women) were thought to be emotionally incapable of resisting the sexual advances of women.

However, what they did worry about was if their husband's gifts to these mistresses became extravagantly expensive (like apartments to keep the mistress in) signaling a threat to their own status, treatment and resources. So, the woman's objection was not about their husband bedding some young mistress or three. The woman's objection was to any erosion of her own status and value in the eyes of her husband.

To forestall debate in comments: As I said, nothing is universally true in any era. The above is based on extensive reading of my own in non-fiction psychology and history, but ultimately my take-away from this is my own opinion of what to "keep in mind" if I were writing about a harem situation, how to make the male character a plausibly attractive partner, and how to make the females plausibly comfortable being one of many wives. These are obviously hot-button topics, if you disagree with my opinion, feel free ignore it. This is how I would write it.

posted over 6 years ago

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Amadeus‭

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