“Polygamous by Nature” — Or Just Empty by Design?

Opinion | By Oyinna Ogbonna

There is a phrase Nigerian men reach for the moment discipline fails them: “Men are polygamous by nature.”

It arrives tidy, biological, unarguable. It frames restlessness as virility. It turns lack of self-control into heritage. It sells women a myth that their pain is the price of dating a lion.

But watch closely. What we call nature often looks like need. What we call power often behaves like panic.

1. The Mirror Men Keep Asking Women to Hold

Listen to men, online and offline. A recurring confession slips out: “Women make me feel like a man.”

Women do not move through the world announcing that men make them feel like women. Women endure childbirth, widowhood, betrayal, hormonal earthquakes from menarche to menopause, and still report to work. They do not launch a search party for identity every time the house gets quiet.

So when a man says he needs multiple women to feel like a man, hear what he is not saying: Without external reflection, I am unsure I exist.

That is not abundance. That is dependence. That is “I still got it” energy on repeat because the first time did not stick.

2. The Performance vs. The Private Reality

Ask the wives of chronically unfaithful men. Many will tell you, quietly, that the same husband who collects women like titles often struggles with intimacy at home. With presence. With consistency. Sometimes with basic sexual engagement.

The public performance of masculine excess and the private reality are two different countries. The mythology is louder than the marriage.

So we must ask: If a man cannot lead his own body into fidelity, what exactly is he leading? Rent is due. School fees are hanging. Children are waiting. And he is outside defending why men must “taste different soups” — ofe nsala here, egusi there, okra in the next compound — as if appetite is philosophy.

Different soups while bringing gonorrhea home.
Different soups while bringing syphilis home.
Different soups while risking HIV in the bed where he still demands respect and the title head of household.

A whole community peen demanding to be called leader.

3. When Biology Becomes an Alibi for Insecurity

True, some men are wired for non-monogamy. But let us be honest about the rest. For many, multiple partners are not about capacity. They are about outrunning doubt.

It shows up in men carrying deep sexual inadequacies. It shows up in midlife, when routine, fatherhood, and responsibility settle in, and the search for younger validation begins. The whole street knows his movements. He becomes the community penis presented like public infrastructure.

What he calls polygamous by nature is often low self-worth with cultural permission. It is emotional hunger dressed as masculine privilege. It is audacity shielding emptiness.

Because discipline would expose what appetite hides: that he is not in control of the one thing he claims ownership of. His body.

4. The Table They Cannot Sit at Alone

The same gender asking women, “What do you bring to the table?” often cannot sit at any table for long without a woman feeding something in him — ego, comfort, domestic order, sexual reassurance, admiration, or the illusion of importance.

A wife dies and another woman enters the conversation before the body is cold.
A marriage ends and the hunt resumes immediately.

Because stillness is unbearable. Silence might expose too much.

So he calls it logic. Calls it leadership. Calls it superior design.
Yet his first area of failed leadership is his own genitals.

5. The Restless Condition That Runs Nations

Here is the uncomfortable part: When that same hunger is not chasing women, what does it chase?

Fights. Ego battles. Drama. Power contests. Endless noise. Something must always be pursued, provoked, conquered, announced.

As though something restless presses underneath. As though stillness threatens exposure.

This is why the same impulse that cheats on a wife also cheats an economy. The same need for validation that demands multiple women also demands multiple wars. The same emptiness that cannot be settled internally seeks to dominate externally — bodies, ballots, borders.

Look at 2026. Look at the state of the world. Then ask: Can we agree that previous generations of men were not as morally bankrupt, as financially reckless, as emotionally incontinent as many today, because they had a better grip on their peens and their egos?

6. The Wound Behind the Backlash

Let us add the edit: Women having money, voice, and choice did not create male insecurity. It exposed it.

Access that men gatekept for centuries is no longer gated. That triggered an ego wound so deep that many men now struggle to function in relationships without resentment. They long for the power their fathers had over women. So they cry that women have too much freedom, too much education, too much independence.

Instead of becoming better men, worthy partners, many try every debased trick to drag women backward — financially, emotionally, sexually, psychologically. When that fails, some resort to violence. Even femicide.

Governments do it at scale. The same hunger shows up in policing women’s bodies, choices, movement. The same drive to dominate becomes policy. Becomes war.

7. The Contrast We Refuse to Name

Women endure betrayal, abandonment, divorce, childbirth, cyclic pain, postpartum collapse, menopause, and still function. No public panic. No immediate replacement strategy.

Men are spared those bodily burdens. Yet many appear more driven by unresolved internal agitation — the ego demanding significance, the appetite demanding movement, the emptiness demanding distraction, the strange flirtation with risk and collapse. Thrill seeking. All. The. Time.

And this condition is marketed as strength. As natural leadership. As polygamous by nature.

That contradiction deserves scrutiny. Because the loudest declarations of masculine independence often come from men who are deeply dependent — emotionally, domestically, sexually, psychologically — on constant female presence.

A secure person does not need endless women to prove one point to himself.
Repetition is not power. It is pathology with a microphone.

LightRay! Bottom Line:

Call it what it is.
Sometimes “polygamous by nature” is insecurity with a budget.
Sometimes it is low self-worth with audacity.
Sometimes it is a defect — an inability to feel complete without something outside constantly confirming you are enough.

For the average man, that something is women. For the rich man, it becomes status, power, nations. But the root is the same: a hole that no number of bodies, ballots, or battles can fill.

Until men learn to sit with themselves, without needing a woman to reflect manhood back to them, they will keep calling bondage biology.

And the rest of us will keep paying for their hunger. In our homes. In our hospitals. In our headlines.

Oyinna Ogbonna is a gender analyst and public commentator. LightRay! Media publishes this piece as part of its Gender Accountability Series. The views are the author’s. For support on domestic abuse, contact the Lagos DSVRT on 08000333333. For STD testing, visit your nearest Primary Health Centre.