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Notes -
This is a fair distinction to make, if it is indeed correct that the two scenarios can be distinguished in that fashion. Thing is, though, I'm not sure it's so clear-cut.
However, being the first wife of a powerful man is probably worse than being the only wife of an equally powerful man in a monogamous society. Is the loss to the first wife (assuming for simplicity's sake they can in fact be totally ordered by "quality"; otherwise just take it as a stand-in for "the woman the powerful man would have otherwise monogamously married", assuming for simplicity's sake that her counterpart will be in the harem in the polygynous world) worth less than the gain to the second, third etc. wives over being stuck with someone of their rank? Perhaps it is, in which case your argument holds; but perhaps it isn't, in which case women as a group do in fact lose total utility - and then we could further debate whether their total loss of utility is actually less or greater than that of the men who would counterfactually have been paired up.
If we're moving the discussion into the increasingly wishy-washy realm of "utility" instead of using more definite measures, any such questions are probably going to be very difficult to answer.
But I will add that even if I assume for the sake of argument that the entire population of women does end up losing total utility under polygyny as opposed to monogamy, a pretty convincing argument can be made that men as a whole lose total utility as well (even after you factor in the polygynous men) because of the diminishing returns inherent in adding on wives - after all, a single man getting a wife will have a much higher gain in utility than a polygynous man getting his 5th woman, or his 10th, or his 30th. That woman, if paired with a single man instead, is going to result in a greater gain in utility for the single man than the loss for the polygynous man. Correspondingly, if a successful man can monopolise multiple women, his gain from doing so will be less than the total loss experienced by the (now single) men who would've been able to procure a wife under monogamy.
It also seems clear to me, at this point, that then trying to compare "which sex's total loss of utility is more" is something that would be very difficult if not outright impossible to measure.
EDIT: clarity
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