> It's not women choosing to marry the man with the most power or wealth, it's cultural and religious forced marriage, on threat of ostracism, familial disgrace or much worse.
No, I get that – my point is, there's not much difference between social pressure to marry someone wealthy because you were not raised to be a breadwinner and thus would starve if you didn't marry up, and social pressure to marry someone in high social standing because you'd be ostracized otherwise. Social pressures that prevent women from gaining power and thus being forced to marry to get it, are not that different from social pressures that explicitly force women to marry powerful men.
> Yes, it is a problem caused by patriarchy, they tend to be highly patriarchal societies, the ones where men routinely have more than one wife.
Which is exactly my thesis: patriarchy is the cause, polygyny is the symptom. Applying a band-aid of normalized monogamous marriages to ensure mates for low-status men (as the GP insinuated) addresses the symptom, and ignores the cause.
(You see the same thing with prostitution BTW – prostitution is "bad" because it places desperate women in a position where they are taken advantage of by clients. But banning prostitution doesn't fix anything – you still have women who see no other earning potential than selling sex. The real problem is patriarchy that creates such a large class of women with no independent earning potential in the first place. Fix that, and the problem of prostitution-from-desperation diminishes greatly.)