truth dancer wrote:The very thought of these young girls, (think beehives and mia maids) having to contemplate the idea of marrying older men, often in their forties, fifties or sixties sickens me to no end.
Now, please, it is not that there is anything wrong with older men... (smile), it is just that young girls are not interested in friends of their fathers or grandfathers as a husband.
These girls are/were completely deprived of the normal, natural tendencies and joys of a young women, in exchange for being one of many sexual partners to an older man
It is all so repulsive and cruel.
~dancer~
Sarah Pratt found it disgusting too.
[quote]
http://www.i4m.com/think/sexuality/polygamy_sex.htm
Sarah Pratt
Sarah Pratt insisted that the first wife "should be it, and resented her husband's affections toward his other wives. Being away from home on church assignment was a hallmark of dedication for Mormon males, and during the years 1839-68, Orson Pratt was absent from his home for a total of nearly eleven years. Thirteen children were born during this period. Death took many, and other hands than Orson's usually buried them.
Ultimately Pratt's preoccupation with church work and his habit of marrying much younger women dealt a fatal blow to his relationship with Sarah. After returning from England in early 1868, the fifty-seven-year-old man began courting a sixteen-year-old girl who would become his tenth wife on 28 December 1868. At fifty-one, Sarah could no longer bear children, and she had come to resent bitterly Pratt's relationships with women younger than their oldest daughter. In an 1877 interview she lashed out at him. "
Here was my husband," she said, "gray headed, taking to his bed young girls in mockery of marriage. Of course there could be no joy for him in such an intercourse except the indulgence of his fanaticism and of something else, perhaps, which I hesitate to mention."
Sarah castigated polygamy as the "direst curse with which a people or a nation could be afflicted. It completely demoralizes good men, and makes bad men correspondingly worse. As for the women—well, God help them! First wives it renders desperate, or else heart-broken, mean-spirited creatures; and it almost unsexes some of the other women, but not all of them, for plural wives have their sorrows too."[/quote]