SEX AND SOCIETY: SEX EDUCATION
As Herskovits’s Dahomean ethnography demonstrates, differential treatment of girls and boys vis-?-vis education and knowledge affects male-female relationships in later life. Unlike Dahomean girls with female instructors to teach them sexual knowledge and the specific techniques of intercourse, the boys have no such educational program. They seem to learn from the girls. One Dahomean man told Herskovits, “Among us Dahomeans it is always the woman who teaches the man”.
Dahomean girls are incompletely prepared for marriage; they need to be groomed, developed, and fulfilled in marriage by coupling with a male. Boys, on the other hand, are naturally designed and prepared for marriage, so it is thought. This leads to yet another question Herskovits might have asked of his data. If the girl has been educated, then will the responsibility for marriage failure be assigned to her, since, after all, she is the “educated” party?
The emphases on sexual technique found in Samoa and Dahomey, and the subordination of females to males in Dahomey and in so many other places, have analogues in American culture. Kemnitzer’s analysis of American culture focuses on the development of the “new sexuality,” a recent move toward liberalization and popularization of sexuality, primarily among young professionals and white-collar workers. Kemnitzer finds that persons who subscribe to the “new sexuality” regard sex as a domain unto itself; sexual performance is emphasized at the expense of other matters. By contrast, in mainstream American culture, the sex act is part of an essentially exploitative institution, marriage. Kemnitzer argues that the “new sexuality” maintains the old forms of social relations in a new guise, even though sexuality is no longer submerged in and encapsulated by broader social relations (e.g., husband-wife, boyfriend-girlfriend).
The argument follows Polyani, finding it necessary in capitalist societies to develop standards by which work can be valued. Sexual intercourse, for these people, is work, which can be judged on a performance scale, rating the degree of competence with which the actors execute their assigned duties. The uniqueness of the action is lost to the extent that the person is lost to the action. Sexual activity becomes, if you will, a labor of love; the world of work has invaded the world of home. As Kemnitzer points out, the technical expertise of the work place is a sorry substitute for the sensitivity and intersubjectivity associated with ideas of the home.
Kemnitzer represents his approach to the “problem” of modern sexuality as a contradiction in culture. This he contrasts with Rollo May’s analysis which attributes “normal anxiety” to a confrontation between the cultural order and human psychic nature.
The paradigm through which May understands sexuality is a modified version of the standard popularization of the Freudian model of hostile opposition between instinctual needs and the repressive forces of culture (Freud). Freud could trace the development of the anal erotic child into an anal retentive adult, an adult whose loss of happiness is commensurate with his or her heightened sense of guilt. If, as Freud asserts, it is the aim of civilization to bring individuals together in social units, it is at an unfortunate and often unhappy cost; the individual’s aggressive and sexual impulses become frustrated in the process. Thus the struggle is on; primary, self-serving, egotistical drives are thwarted by culture, which is both an extension of the basic psychodynamic as well as its natural opposition.
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