Posted on 09/04/2014 6:09:56 AM PDT by wagglebee
Early 20th century photo depicts Samoan girls preparing for the 'ava ceremony.' Wikimedia Commons
If Alfred Kinsey of the Kinsey Reports was the “Father of the Sexual Revolution,” perhaps no one woman can be more accurately called the “Mother of the Sexual Revolution” than Margaret Mead.
Margaret Mead was a young anthropologist who set out to help anthropology professor Frank Boas of Columbia University prove a very specific thesis: that a person’s upbringing and environment shaped a person’s actions to a greater extent than genetic factors did. Together with another young scholar named Ruth Benedict, Mead set off to research the indigenous peoples of Samoa, spending nine months there—and the result of their time there was her 1928 book Coming of Age in Samoa.
The so-called revelations in this book left many in the academic world both thunder-struck and ecstatic. Margaret Mead described an idyllic island Eden in which people lived in an almost utopian harmony, with very little competition with one another, a distinct absence of class, and, most importantly, no draconian moral codes that restricted people’s sexual behavior. Rather, teenage Samoans had many sexual partners and were encouraged to engage in this free love South Seas hook-up culture. As Margaret Mead wrote admiringly, a young Samoan girl, “thrusts virtuosity away from her. … All of her interest is expended on clandestine sexual adventures.” Christian morality and natural law, it seemed, were nothing but a hoax.
It is mind-boggling to realize when looking at the body of “scholarly work” produced by people such as Margaret Mead and Alfred Kinsey that brought about such cataclysmic changes in traditional sexual mores that most of this work was shoddy research and wishful thinking.
The impact of this book, much like the impact of the Kinsey Reports several decades later, cannot be underestimated. According to one historian (writing in Ted Byfield’s epic history of Christianity The High Tide and the Turn), “This would prove the most highly circulated anthropological book ever written. It became required reading for all first-year anthropology courses, and played a key role in shaping sex education, criminal law, government social policies, and the popular view of acceptable sexual conduct.”
Or as John Horgan put it in the Scientific American, Mead’s book “posed a challenge to Western sexual mores, which according to Mead inflicted needless suffering on young men and women. The metatheme of Coming of Age and all Mead’s subsequent work was that the way things are is not the way they must or should be; we can choose to live in ways that make us happier and healthier. Her writings helped inspire feminism, the sexual revolution, the human potential movement and other countercultural trends during the 1960s.”
It is mind-boggling to realize when looking at the body of “scholarly work” produced by people such as Margaret Mead and Alfred Kinsey that brought about such cataclysmic changes in traditional sexual mores that most of this work was shoddy research and wishful thinking. (Just as Alfred Kinsey was revealed to be a pansexual hedonist, Margaret Mead’s daughter later revealed that her thrice-married mother had many sexual relationships with women, including her fellow anthropologist Ruth Benedict. When she left for Samoa in 1926, Mead informed her husband that, “I’ll not leave you unless I find someone I love more.”) Yet academic communities, eager for any shred of “evidence” that could disprove Christianity and ensure that God was indeed, as Nietzsche declared, dead, seized onto Mead’s work as yet more proof that Judeo-Christian values were outdated at best, and damaging at worst.
Mead’s work, much like Kinsey’s, has been definitively revealed to be a hoax. Mead set off with conclusions she needed to prove, and simply found the information she needed to substantiate those conclusions, never living with one Samoan family or learning the language in her entire nine month stay. Her information on the sexual culture of the Samoans, it turns out, came almost entirely from two young girls. Mead, working on several projects at once, found herself running out of time to interview adolescent girls. So instead, she decided to befriend two of her female Samoan companions, win their trust, and then obtain from them the information on Samoan sexual culture that she needed. She did not realize that by asking the sensitive and explicit questions she was asking, she was breaching Samoan code of etiquette—and the girls responded by playfully feeding Mead precisely the type of information she wanted to hear. Mead was triumphant, feeling sure that her friendship with these girls had led her to discover the real truth about sexual customs in Samoa. The girls thought the joke they had played on the nosy Western anthropologist was quite funny. Little did they realize that their playful joke would end up informing entire fields of academic study in North America, with decidedly unfunny consequences.
When Dr. Derek Freeman decided, years later, to follow up on Mead’s research and travel to Samoa himself, he found that virtually all of her conclusions had been wrong. Samoans held to a very strict, if not puritanical, code of sexual ethics. There was no South Seas hook-up culture. He even tracked down the two girls Mead had based her analysis of Samoan sexual practices on. As Byfield puts it: “He found these individuals, by now elderly women, and reminded them of Mead’s visit. They began to giggle in embarrassment, he reported, recounting how they had told that white lady such awful lies and stories, not expecting her to believe them. They were sorry now to have so misled her, they said.”
Many in academia, seeing the foundation of so much of their worldview threatened, have savaged and personally maligned and slandered Freeman and other Mead critics. But most of them are now forced to admit that her work on the Samoans was fatally flawed. Unfortunately, our culture has already heeded the wishful thinking of Margaret Mead to such a great extent that much of the damage she has caused cannot be undone. The Sexual Revolutionaries have claimed that with the overthrow of traditional morality, we have freed ourselves to love one another better. I find it sadly ironic that they have backed these claims with the shoddy, self-serving research of people like Alfred Kinsey and Margaret Mead, who did not believe in such quaint and outmoded traditions as fidelity. As time has proven, we have made a tragic mistake by heeding their words.
Like everything else the left puts out, the "sexual revolution" is built on a series of outright lies.
Freepmail wagglebee to subscribe or unsubscribe from the moral absolutes ping list.
FreeRepublic moral absolutes keyword search
Wouldn't that word be virginity -- not virtuosity, which means great skill?
The Globull Warming of its day. All they needed was a way to monetize it.
The two girls sounded like fun people! It wasn’t their fault, of course, that they were changing the course of history. Which just proves how dumb Mead was - to believe two little girls. But then as we learned during the Child Care Rape hoaxes of the 1980s: kids don’t lie.
yeah let’s call fornicating like rabbits an advance in human culture great idea /sarc
Sounds very like modern western Islamic studies. Start with the premise that Islam is the religion of peace, and work to prove the thesis.
Disregard all history and current events, and come to a learned consensus. Once consensus is reached, all debate is moot.
[ The two girls sounded like fun people! It wasn’t their fault, of course, that they were changing the course of history. Which just proves how dumb Mead was - to believe two little girls. But then as we learned during the Child Care Rape hoaxes of the 1980s: kids don’t lie. ]
Mead to me seems to be a whole hearted believer in the whole “Noble Savage Myth” which is a complete myth...
The same thing happened to Jeffrey Masson, who wrote The Assault on Truth in 1984 that found gaping inconsistencies in the work of Sigmund Freud, in particular Freud's patronizing dismissal of his patient's claim of having been sexually abused. He thought it imaginary and famously called it "penis envy." We now have abundant proof that child sex abuse does happen far too often, and it is most certainly not imaginary. But how many Americans have heard of Jeffrey Masson and his painstaking research as director of the Freud archives?
Take the work of William Norman Grigg, Medford Stanton Evans and the historian Arthur Herman, all of whom have carefully analyzed the claims of Joseph McCarthy as revealed by a release of The Venona Papers after the fall of the Soviet Union, and found that he was, indeed, deeply accurate about Communist infiltration of our government. How many Americans have heard of any of these men, or read their works? Yet almost every adult knows the slur, "McCarthyism" as the equivalent of an absolutely unfounded slander, and you still can read that word in the MSM whenever anyone calls out a Democrat.
This is totally consistent with the leftist "reverse scientific method":
Much to Mead's chagrin, Samoans are the most religious people on the planet. I believe something like 96% of them belong to a church and most of those attend regularly.
Best of all, there is not a single mosque on their islands.
A lot of people want to find a culture in which “free love” results in good social order and happiness, but they never find it. When they claim to have found it (as some men studying isolated Amazonian tribes have), it turns out that they consider gang rape of young women, infanticide, and similar factors to be consistent with good social order and happiness.
Roger that. For proof, one need look no further than the recent Hippie Generation Part II ... Occupy Wall Street.
Excellent point. Filth, drugs, rape ...
Hey, Dr. Kinsey--Big Duke Henderson & His Orchestra (1953)
I do not dispute any criticism that this author makes of Mead, but one cannot excuse our society’s complicity. You can lead a horse to water, etc. Our social mores have crumbled, but Mead had no way of forcing that outcome.
Placemark.
Freep-mail me to get on or off my pro-life and Catholic List:
Please ping me to note-worthy Pro-Life or Catholic threads, or other threads of general interest.
The Salem Witch trials also proceeded on the testimony of two young girls. The main difference is that, when they saw what they had done, the prosecutors, John Hathorne and Jonathon Corwin, repented. Margaret Mead, as far as I know, has not done so.
I’m not surprised at all.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.