They're where sultans keep their wives

Usage examples of harems.

At such a time, reflect on how your bliss is made paradoxically possible by precisely those features of your physiology that distinguished your remote ancestors as they languished in harems, or as they rotated among promiscuously shared sex partners.

Among the minority of adult male mammals that do offer their offspring paternal care are polygynous male zebras and gorillas with harems of females, male gibbons paired off with females as solitary couples, and saddleback tamarin monkeys, of which two adult males are kept as a harem by one polyan-drous adult female.

The large harems that spring to mind at the mention of the word polygamy, such as those of recent Arabian and Indian royalty, are possible only in the state-level societies that arose very late in human evolution and that permitted a few men to concentrate great wealth.

The result is our human social system of nominally monogamous married couples, or occasionally of harems of women committed to one affluent man.

Twenty-three species—including other human societies, plus gorillas—have harems of females controlled by a single adult male.

But if we now look at humans and our closest relatives, the chimps and gorillas, we find all three types of mating system represented: harems in gorillas, promiscuity in chimps, and either monogamy or harems in humans (see figure 4.

Other evidence suggests that the Missing Link lived in harems, so that gorillas and some human societies may just have retained that mating system.

We thus conclude that promiscuity or harems, not monogamy, is the mating system that leads to concealed ovulation (see figure 4.

In essentially the same way, features of reproductive biology—such as concealed ovulation, boldly advertised ovulation, monogamy, harems, and promiscuity—have repeatedly changed function and been transmuted into each other, reinvented, or lost.

Here the seals hauled out, and the old bulls guarded their harems, while the young bulls hauled out by themselves.

Jordan says that paths are left between the harems, and that as long as the holluschickie keep strictly to the path they are unmolested by the masters of the harem.

We watched him travel slowly inward, threading about among the harems along what must have been the path.

Each year five hundred Babylonian youths joyously undergo castration in order to serve in the harems of the Great King and his nobles.

Because of this eccentricity, Indian harems are guarded by very old men and women.