And probably could change based on the roles of first and second wives and, yes, how male status plays out and how it influences the life of the wife.
We don’t have legal polygamy but in many places there’s not much stopping people from living in an unmarried multi-woman household with a man (or vice versa). But it’s not a very common arrangement, and it’s interesting to think about why.
But it's fascinating to think about the second level "why": what made people encode monogamy and heterosexuality into their cultural canons (including their mainstream religion)? Was it property and rules about property? Was it to maximize the number of children, so that the group/tribe/kingdom would be militarily stronger than the neighbor? Or maybe it was to prevent some sort of very specific and concrete problem, real or perceived, that arose from tolerating free love, and that we today have no clue about?
I dunno about heterosexuality being encoded[1] into cultural canons, but for monogamy it's actually quite simple: violence.
Do you really want half your testosterone-fueled 18-28 year old males unable to attract a mate? There'll be continuous fighting to kill of the excess males.
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[1] As far as heterosexuality goes, it's not "encoded by wilful intention" so much as "this is the default". IOW, most people are happy going with the default, so if you make something opt-out, the majority won't opt-out. Same for opt-in. This is why countries that have opt-out organ donors have more organs donated, while countries that have opt-in organ donations have a fraction of he opt-out countries.
Defaults matter.
This is nonsense. Non-monogamy is relinquishing exclusivity. If a man can have multiple women, but a woman can't have multiple men, it's just a different form of oppression.
Monogamy is possessiveness, and possessiveness is what drives violence.
Violence about having an exclusive mate could be a purely cultural construct, reinforced from childhood. I can say that I always, personally, considered the idea of controlling a person abhorrent, as much as I found uninteresting the idea of orbiting my intimate life around a single person with special and very high privileges over whatever I do and think, including outside of bed. However, all my relatives were very insistent that I should date girls and marry. 100% culture, 0% nature. Of course, this is just a single data point.
The heterosexuality part being the "default" is a bit naive, because it ignores the lengths to which some people go to force their kids to be heterosexual. Again, anecdotally, my father sired two gay sons, who had to go to great lengths to have a less traumatic life. Sometimes I suspect my father wasn't that hetero himself, and was only ensuring the next generation inherited his cultural legacy/trauma.
I could consider an argument that a majority (heterosexual) imposes a cultural canon on a non heterosexual minority. But the problem with that is that we don't really know if that majority/minority split would exist without the very strong cultural conditioning. And, as I said before, I don't really believe that homophobia is something the Canaanites invented out of spite. Most likely, it was a cultural trait that conferred advantages to groups, particularly after the agricultural revolution locked human population in a cycle of growth and war for land--but that's just a pet theory of mine.
There are even theories (read the controversial book "Sex at Dawn" if you want the details) that our current cultural canons about sexuality run against what was our nature for hundreds of thousands of years.
up until just 2-3 centuries ago, people did not think about these questions in a self-deterministic way, i mean they trusted the ancestors to sorted out most of the things over the centuries, and they were not suposed to take huge social/cultural reforms, only minor adjustments. did not even have so huge view on the spacial and temporal panorama of different cultures and societies over the whle word like us today. today even just binging up this statement makes people angry like "oh those silly old people. they _unconditionally_ obeyed to whatever their parents and superiors told them. this is the way to opression and tiranny, etc, etc. not like us! we are truely grown ups today. humanity is out of the dark child days. now! now disagree to _everything_. default is «i deny»". i mean … who do you think want to fool you? i think, on average, parents wants to leave the well-tested and proven-to-be-stable fundamental ideas about the world to their children. and those dont change very often; the more fundamental the less changing world-properties are.
but changes in society started to accelerate, so came social and economic revolutions which all want to redefine as much as possible. with really big improvements in the sociology, antropology and other culture-related disciplines, people started to believe that we are watching ourself from the outside, so able to manipulate the norms and the law to "make society better". only noone has the same definiton what is "better".
