[Rain Man]

I'll address individual issues, starting with family structure.


If men greatly outnumbered women...


I don't think that core family structures would be that much different than they are now, other than the fact that we'd have a lot of wandering bachelors. More powerful men would have wives, and less powerful men wouldn't. Would this give females more power in the family or not? It's a tough question. Women could become "prizes" and would trade any power for what would undoubtedly be a comfortable life (no poverty other than maybe cases of true love). Or they could become power brokers and use their relative scarcity to create matriarchal power structures. However, I'd lean more toward the first outcome, in part because there would still be lots of women competing for the "best" men and in part because they would be a small minority. Perhaps I'm projecting historical shadows on that, though. You'd probably reverse fidelity roles a bit, though, with husbands becoming less "wandering" and more protective of the relationship, while women would be more likely to wander.

Maybe you'd have some guys getting together in some sort of "bachelor civil unions" just for companionship and standard of living. My guess is that gay behavior would be quite acceptable and no one would give it a second thought.

If women greatly outnumbered men...


I think core family structures would be a lot different. I think that families would consist of one man and multiple wives, and with children being born to all of them we'd have little tribal villages instead of families.

The bigger question is power. Would women have greater control due to their greater numbers? In this situation, would we have a matriarchal structure where the guy is just the "pet" in the clan, playing a critical reproductive role but otherwise being a secondary member of the tribe, or would he be the ruler of the clan?

I think an easy assumption is that women wouldn't have much power because they'd be in great supply, so you'd see lots of "divorces" as guys traded in wives for newer models, because they'd be less loyal other than cases of true love. However, I think that the opposite might occur. I think women would control the clans, and they would control if a woman gets kicked out or not, or at least have equal control with the man.

In fact, another plausible scenario is that the men aren't even permanently attached to clans. The women would be in stable clans, and the guys would rotate between clans as they and the women saw fit. In this case, then, you wouldn't have the permanently exiled female bachelor civil unions like you'd get in the other scenarios. The unions would exist in group form, but with men entering and exiting them over time.

That's my family structure theory.