Sex and Consequences

The American Conservative ^ | July 28, 2003 | Peter Wood

[Dumb_Ox]

Sex & Consequences

An anthropologist vindicates the traditional family.

By Peter Wood

Anthropology—hometown to cultural relativists and all-night diner for disaffected intellectuals—may not be where you would most expect to find good reasons to defend traditional American family values. But anthropology, in fact, guards a treasure house of examples of what happens when a society institutionalizes other arrangements.

Want to know what it really means for a society to recognize “gay marriage”? Or for a society to permit polygamy? Or when the stigma on out-of-wedlock birth disappears? Care to know what happens to a human community that tolerates sexual experimentation among pre-adolescents and teenagers? Are fathers and mothers really interchangeable? Anthropology actually has a large amount of empirical evidence on all these matters—and many others that are now on the table in the United States thanks to various advocacy movements.

The Leftist political convictions of many of my fellow anthropologists tend to keep them silent about some of the scientific findings that have accumulated over 150 years or so of systematic ethnographic study. But these findings strongly suggest that the family is a bedrock institution and that the kinds of modifications to the family advocated by gays, feminists, and others who speak in favor of relaxing traditional restrictions on sexual self-expression will have huge consequences.

Let’s take an anthropologically informed look at two of these proposed changes to the family: gay marriage and polygamy.

Institutionalizing Male Homosexuality

It is not especially difficult to find examples of societies that are considerably more relaxed about male homosexual behavior than American society has been, at least until recently. Some societies such as pre-communist China and Vietnam officially disapproved of homosexuality while tolerating large numbers of male homosexual prostitutes. Today’s boy prostitutes in Thailand carry on a trade that was remarked on by Western travelers of centuries past. A fair number of North American Indian societies made room for a homosexual “man-woman” (a berdache, as the French fur traders called him) who dressed and acted the part of a woman. But the berdache was an exceptional creature and did not represent anything like normalized homosexuality.

For that, we have to look to Melanesia, where there are perhaps dozens of very small-scale societies in which male homosexuality is given ritual significance and fully incorporated into the life of the community. This happened for example in the New Hebrides, New Caledonia, and in many parts of New Guinea. Here is one example:

Continue

[Dumb_Ox]

An important article, I think. Be forewarned: the article contains some explicit clinical descriptions of sexual activity

[Dumb_Ox]

A few excerpts:

The link between homosexual desire and erotic interest in children is especially contentious. Gay activists and their supporters frequently point out that most child molestation is perpetrated by heterosexual males. And they emphasize that homosexuality has no necessary link to pedophilia: a great many gay men are primarily interested in other adult gay men. I grant both points, but we are also left with the stubborn empirical fact that societies that have indeed institutionalized something akin to “gay marriage” have done so in the form of older men taking adolescent boys as their partners. To imagine that we could have gay marriage in the United States without also giving strong encouragement to this form of eroticism is, in light of the ethnographic evidence, wishful thinking.

But that just shows that the polyamorists are too busy groping toward their particular form of sexual self-expressions to understand the consequences of abolishing monogamy. Eliminate the one-man-one-wife rule and, yes, the polyamorists could openly do their thing but so could a lot of other people. Should the polyamorists have their way, plural marriage would, almost of a certainty, emerge in its classic form of rich older males dominating much younger vulnerable females.

[Lorianne]

Or when the stigma on out-of-wedlock birth disappears?

Or when the stigma is great, there are consequences as well ... such as abortion, infanticide and child abandonment.

Everything has consequences.

[Dumb_Ox]

But the Etoro and similar societies do illustrate something about the logic of homosexual male relations in human societies. When such relations are subject to cultural elaboration they almost always fit into a pattern of initiation into secrets, male exclusivity, and a low status for women.

[Maelstrom]

Harsh...

I guess I'm a conservative first and a libertarian second.

I'm of the opinion that strong social stigma could properly replace government regulation of sexual urges. However, I recognize that I'm trading one regulatory agency for another.

Government power is the single most threat to liberty, but our marriage laws and sexual mores are more necessary than I had previously thought.

[LiteKeeper]

SPOTREP - SOCIOLOGY

[jocon307]

Great post! And great timing, my daughter is taking Anthropology and last night I went to "open school" night and heard the teacher say that "we can really learn a lot about ourselves by studying primitive and even extinct societies." This article really proves it.

Pat's magazine is getting pretty good it seems.

[Pan_Yans Wife]

The mores and norms regarding sexuality and marriage can effectively be addressed and altered, one person at a time. If you stand up for what you believe is moral, others will take notice and perhaps rethink their own position.

The same is true for stopping abortion.

[Maelstrom]

Oh no...I meant something more significant.

It has long been my belief that in a free market, as an expression of costs vs. benefits, the traditional Moral Life as typically expressed in Christian mores would be the most popular because it indisputeably offers the highest quality of life per dollar of consequence.

That belief has been challenged by this article. I'm not ready to give up on that belief, but I do have to reconsider it in light of historical evidence that the best quality and economic choice is not always the choice made at the individual level in numbers too high to ignore.

[jocon307]

Great post! And great timing, my daughter is taking Anthropology and last night I went to "open school" night and heard the teacher say that "we can really learn a lot about ourselves by studying primitive and even extinct societies." This article really proves it.

Pat's magazine is getting pretty good it seems.

[Varda]

bump for later read

[steplock]

"Or when the stigma on out-of-wedlock birth disappears?
Or when the stigma is great, there are consequences as well ... such as abortion, infanticide and child abandonment.
Everything has consequences."


MORALS always have consequences - have good morals and you have good consequences. If you have BAD morals.....

You have nobody to blame except .... Everybody else, since it was never your fault anyways, you were poor, uneducated, a slave to desires, never responsible for your own actions....

[nonsporting]

"Or when the stigma is great, there are consequences as well ... such as abortion, infanticide and child abandonment."

I would venture to guess that we have far more abortions now than in the 50's when the stigma was greater.

(My guess infanticide and C.A. too. Any data?)

[Pan_Yans Wife]

Perhaps we will soon experience our own downfall, much like the Romans did. When a society becomes debased, it loses its ability to protect itself, from within and out. It may just be a matter of time... until then, I'll keep my ideals, and instill them in my children. That is the only hope that I have.

[Technogeeb]

there are consequences as well ... such as abortion, infanticide and

which I suppose can be verified by statistics from the Department of Redundancy Department.

[ExpandNATO]

The link between homosexual desire and erotic interest in children is especially contentious. Gay activists and their supporters frequently point out that most child molestation is perpetrated by heterosexual males. And they emphasize that homosexuality has no necessary link to pedophilia: a great many gay men are primarily interested in other adult gay men. I grant both points, but we are also left with the stubborn empirical fact that societies that have indeed institutionalized something akin to “gay marriage” have done so in the form of older men taking adolescent boys as their partners.

The gay activists are being deceitful. Child molestation is one thing (pedophilia) and erotic interest in adolescents completely another, but both are "children."

[Lorianne]

Agreed, but not my point, as I'm sure you know.

[Lorianne]

Right, which is what unilateral stigma on out of wedlock BIRTH produces, one person for the consequences of the act of two people, and taking out the consequences on the child.

Morals mean taking personal responsibility the consequences of one's actions which is not the same as unilateral shaming and blaming and stimatizing the event of BIRTH ... as we can see from examples such as that of Amina Lawal in Nigeria and countless prior examples of branding children as "illegitimate" over the centuries.

[Lorianne]

Why just choose 10 years? Plus abortion was not readily avaible, inexpensive, legal then. So you can't compare the time periods. Apples and oranges as they say. Other evils were prevalent in earlier time periods, such as taking away children from mothers against their will, poor houses, forced labor, involuntary sterilization ... etc.

Unililateral stigmatizing of women and BIRTH has never produced a good outcome for children or society. All it produced was the enevitable abortion quagmire we're in today. If you stigmatize BIRTH (which automatically leaves out one party involved in "consequences" of their actions), then it's obvious that birth will be circumvented. That's how we got to Roe v. Wade. Inequality breeds inequality, injustice breeds injustice.

[Quix]

THANKS. GREAT ARTICLE.

I particularly found:

"The more we treat sex as merely recreational, the less important we make procreation. De-mystifying procreation—making it just another event that may or may not require heterosexual married parents in a long-term relationship—leads to both low procreation and badly raised children."

VERY potently accurate.

Blessings,