Religions > Atheism > Sex & Consequences: An Anthropologist Vindicates The Traditional Family
| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"words of truth" |
| Date: |
27 Dec 2005 05:57:04 PM |
| Object: |
Sex & Consequences: An Anthropologist Vindicates The Traditional Family |
http://www.amconmag.com/2003/07_28_03/cover.html
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:
Among the Etoro, a tribe of about 400 living by hunting and small-scale
gardening in the Stickland-Bosavi district of Papua New Guinea, from
around age 12, every boy is "inseminated" orally more or less daily
by a young man who is assigned to him as a partner. Late in his teenage
years, an Etoro boy is formally initiated in an event involving many
male sex partners, after which he becomes an "inseminator" rather
than an "inseminee." In due course, the former older male partner
often marries the younger man's sister.
Somewhat similar customs are reported for many other tribes in the
remote mountains of New Guinea, and these cases collectively serve as
proof that it is not beyond human ingenuity to channel homosexual
behavior into a social system. But what kind of social system? For the
Etoro, it is one that radically discounts the value of women as mothers
and wives. Etoro men defer marriage as long as possible and, when they
do marry, are concerned mostly with the advantages to be gained from
reinforced links with their male in-laws. The Etoro, as it happens, put
significant obstacles in the way of heterosexual behavior. Husband and
wife, for example, are permitted to have sexual relations only outside
the communal household and only under conditions that rule out about
two-thirds of the calendar year. The birth rate, unsurprisingly, is
very low.
Does the behavior of a small tribe in New Guinea have any bearing on
the debates in contemporary America about "respect" for homosexual
lifestyles? Perhaps not. After all, requiring homosexual behavior is
far from merely permitting it. 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.
Why this should be so is a complex question, involving both biology and
the underlying nature of human society. A short answer is that
heterosexual marriage is shaped by the complicated interplay of marital
sex, pregnancy, child-care, and the sustained dependence and
interdependence of husband, wife, and children. Male homosexual
relations, because they are sterile and because they channel relations
of male dominance, are built on a narrower base of sex, subordination,
and control.
Can it Work Here?
Vermont already has approved "civil unions," and as I write it
looks very much as though the Massachusetts courts are about to give
the United States some form of officially sanctioned "gay
marriage." Many of its proponents say gay marriage is just the
extension of a civil right to an unfairly excluded minority, and that
liberal-minded argument sounds convincing to large numbers of
Americans. I, however, am skeptical. The anthropological record, as I
read it, shows that if a society treats male homosexual behavior as a
fully legitimate option, it will end up not with a more expansively
defined system of marriage, but with a dual-track system in which
"marriage" is reduced to a bare transactional relationship, while
male homosexuality will flourish according to its own dynamic.
As a social scientist, I am perfectly prepared to admit that American
society can normalize male homosexuality and that "gay marriage"
moves us in that direction. Other societies have run this experiment,
and, in a fashion, it "works." If America normalizes male
homosexuality through gay marriage, our culture is not suddenly going
to become exactly like the Etoro, or the Big Nambas of the northern New
Hebrides, or other such tribes. Rather, we will follow out the
biological and cultural logic of homosexuality in our own fashion. The
general results, however, are predictable on the basis of the
ethnography: heterosexual marriage will be weakened; the birth rate
will decline; the status of women as mothers will further erode; and
young boys will be a much greater target of erotic attention by older
males.
To say these things, I understand, is to excite vigorous disagreement
from those who advocate gay marriage as just a step in the proper
expansion of civil rights. 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.
In any case, the American experiment in "gay marriage" looks to me
all but inevitable. We will see for ourselves in the next generation or
two who is right.
Plural Marriage
The advocates of making America safe for plural marriage or polygamy
are less visible than the advocates of gay marriage, but they certainly
exist. A substantial percentage of Americans now believe that the
government "has no business" enacting or enforcing laws on what
adults do "in the privacy of their bedrooms," and those who believe
this have already ceded that, in principle, polygamy is a legitimate
option. What concern is it of the government whether a man has more
than one wife or a woman more than one husband, provided that all the
partners enter into the relationship of their own free will?
In this sense, polygamy is a good stand-in for the larger attitude that
sexual relations and marriage are a "private" matter in which the
larger community should have no say. That libertarian ideal applied to
sexual relations is based on profoundly false assumptions about human
societies. The relations between men and women in the family and
between parents and children always have far-reaching social
consequences.
In the United States, polygamy is illegal and relatively uncommon but
nonetheless practiced by a few. The best-known examples are those
50,000 or so breakaway Mormons who reject the 1890 Mormon-Church edict
that ended the practice of polygamy begun by their prophet Joseph
Smith. Smith had cited biblical precedent and divine revelation for
adopting polygamy, but the institution provided an expedient solution
for a movement that initially attracted many more female converts than
male. As the Mormons became a self-reproducing community in their own
right, polygamy made less functional sense and continued only on the
remote fringes of the movement.
Even so, Mormon polygamy follows a pattern thoroughly familiar to
anthropologists. In societies where a man is permitted to have more
than one wife, typically a minority of men actually do so; the members
of that minority marry not just twice but several times; some of the
co-wives are often sisters or cousins; the age difference between the
husbands and wives is substantial and typically greater with each
additional wife; and new wives are often teenagers. Polygamy
(technically "polygyny" when it is a man with several wives) in
other words is a system by which powerful older men assemble a
household of young desirable women. Polygynous marriages almost always
are part of a system of arranged marriages in which the women have
little or no say about the matter.
That does not mean that the wives in a polygynous household are
necessarily unhappy. For every Lu Ann Kingston, the Mormon woman who
recently testified about being pressured at age 15 to become the fourth
wife of her 23-year old cousin, there are many others who accept the
situation and take pleasure in the fellowship of their co-wives.
Polygyny, in fact, is a perfectly workable way of arranging human
affairs. But it has highly predictable consequences that most Americans
would find unacceptable.
We probably don't want to embrace a system that shunts young girls
into motherhood before they have an opportunity to get an education or
that leads to fathers arranging the marriages of their teenage
daughters.
But surely we are in no danger of heterodox Mormons imposing their
system of polygyny on Methodists in New Hampshire or Baptists in
Florida? No, we aren't. But polygyny has a brand-new set of
apologists who have emerged all over the country in a little-heralded
movement called "polyamory." The polyamorists might be thought of
as a fetid blossom of the Swinging Sixties' free-love movement. They
favor a redefinition of marriage as a combination of any number of men
and women who join together in a kind of group family. Polyamorists
expect and encourage sexual relations within this tangle to be both
homosexual and heterosexual. And they are very far from any thought
that their licentious groupings would provide an avenue for the
emergence of a patriarch with a retinue of teen-wives.
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.
This is not a "slippery slope" forecast. It is more definite than
that, since we know for a fact that everywhere and at every time human
societies have made plural marriage an option, this is what happens.
Given a free market and no rules against plural marriage, human beings
will find themselves in a hierarchy dominated by older men with
multiple younger wives.
But why? Why wouldn't the polyamorist utopia of coupling, tripling,
and quadrupling emerge instead? Or at least some tame version where
most people are monogamists, but a fringe avails itself of the new
option? The answer lies in something anthropologists don't like to
talk about: human nature. The human sexes accommodate fairly easily to
a dominant male hierarchy; human males are biologically primed to seek
sexual variety; and the systems of reciprocity on which all human
societies are based lend themselves very easily to dominant males
consolidating their status by taking young wives.
There is a lot of argument in anthropology over these matters, and, for
the moment, I would prefer to avoid a more strenuous attempt to explain
why polygamy tends to crystallize in one particular form. What matters
is that we have studied many hundreds of human societies, large and
small, and in doing so have a pretty clear picture of polygamy as an
institution. One version of polygamy, polyandry-the marriage of a
woman with more than one husband-is very rare. (Various Himalayan
tribes and the extinct culture of the Marquesan Islands in the Pacific
provide examples.) But polygyny is common. Ask an anthropologist why
and you are bound to hear a lot about the numerous variations and
particularities that distinguish one case from the next. But in the end
you will still have this essential truth: polygamy is inseparable from
older men imposing themselves on young women.
Nor do the consequences stop there. A society in which older men
collect younger women creates a series of follow-on problems for itself
in matters such as dealing with a large number of youngish widows who
missed getting an education and have few marketable skills; disputes
over inheritance among the children of co-wives; and a large cohort of
young men who find it much more difficult to find wives of their own.
Young men competing for an artificially limited number of young women
tend to be extra aggressive. Hence it is no surprise that polygynous
societies are often violence-prone.
Would the United States be an exception? Possibly. Perhaps our emphasis
on "companionship" in marriage and the ideal that spouses love one
another would tame the spirit of male domination that polygamy
typically unleashes. But I doubt it.
The Libertarian Illusion
Recently, Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) provoked an outcry when he
observed, "If the Supreme Court says you have the right to consensual
[gay] sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have
the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right
to adultery, you have the right to anything." Among the replies
posted on the Internet, I noted these:
"Bigamy, polygamy, incest, and adultery-could you please tell me
what, in a practical sense, is wrong with these from a 'public
policy' point of view?"
"What principled case can be made that any
private-between-consenting-adults sexual expression should be
off-limits?"
"If all laws against consensual sex in the privacy of one's home
are unconstitutional or should be-which seems to be the position of
Santorum's critics-I can't imagine why laws against adultery,
incest, polygamy, and (possibly) bestiality should be spared from this
sweeping claim."
As the editorial page of the New York Times saw it, Santorum
"equate[d] homosexuality with bigamy, polygamy, incest, and
adultery." Well, no, he didn't equate these practices, but Senator
Santorum did enunciate a context for thinking about the broader
implications of treating "sexual expression" as something that
ought to be of no concern to society at large.
The anthropological evidence is overwhelmingly on the side of those who
argue that large social consequences follow from a society's
decisions about which sexual practices are legitimate. The rules that
govern marriage and sexual relations are, directly and indirectly, the
basis of family life and have enormous influence over the formation of
good (or bad) character in children. Marriage channels the primary
relations between the sexes and the generations, and it is the template
for most other relations in society. This is true not just in the
United States. It is true everywhere. Alter the rules of marriage, and
society will reshape itself around the new situation. But it doesn't
necessarily reshape itself in the ways that the reformers hoped.
The sexual privatizers imagine a society in which adults can seek their
pleasures without interference and somehow children will get born and
properly raised. It is a sheer illusion. A society that doesn't
restrict human sexual relations in effective ways is a society that
doesn't have much interest in reproducing itself. People left to
their own sexual whims will sometimes form stable families, but that is
the exception, not the rule. 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. A society that abandons
the effort to restrict and channel human sexual urges into approved
forms loses control of the strongest emotional/biological force known
to our species and invites a progressive dissolution into unconnected
or randomly connected individuals.
It is indeed possible to have a viable society that puts a very low
value on women's reproductive capacity. All the society really needs
is a reliable way to attract new members. It can do that by raising
children, or it can encourage high rates of immigration. Increasingly,
it looks like we are choosing the latter.
The dream of unfettered sexual expression is very powerful. The advent
of effective birth control and abortion on demand, along with a
revolution in attitudes towards pre-marital sex and cohabitation, and
the de-stigmatizing of out-of-wedlock birth, divorce, pornography, and
homosexuality have gone very far towards creating a popular view that
we can create a society in which sexual behavior has no public
consequences. But, in the end, this is merely a fantasy.
Forms of "sexual expression" are, at a deeper level, modalities of
social relationships that do have very real public consequences.
Whatever a society accepts as legitimate "in the bedroom"
inevitably becomes a choice affecting the status of husbands, wives,
children, and many others. In this sense, every society in effect
chooses to have a strong version of marriage in which husbands and
wives are bound by public expectations of good behavior or it chooses a
weak version in which people work out their dissatisfactions and hurts
in private and walk away from the marriage when they can't. Likewise,
a society chooses to respect women as mothers or treats them primarily
as income-earners. It chooses to create families that invest love and
attention in their children or alternatively to treat children as a
luxury good. Society chooses whether children will be the focus of
adult sexual interest; and it chooses whether it will cultivate
families that care deeply about education or delegate the whole task to
strangers, and so on. If we indulge the fantasy that "sexual
expression" is only an individual matter of no valid concern to
society at large, we choose our high rate of divorce, our ambiguous
regard for motherhood, our unhappy children, and our poor schools. It
doesn't seem like an especially good choice.
Of course, you don't really need an anthropologist to see that a
breakdown in social rules governing marriage and the family has
disastrous consequences. Consider some statistics: 1.35 million
children in the U.S. born outside of marriage in 2001-33.5 percent of
the total; 947,384 divorces in 2000, excluding those in California,
Colorado, Indiana, and Louisiana, states that don't count divorces;
by age 14, 14-20 percent of American girls and 20-22 percent of
American boys are "sexually experienced"; about five million
Americans are addicted to drugs, and 52,000 die each year from their
addictions; 15 million new cases of sexually transmitted diseases occur
in the U.S. each year, a quarter of them among teenagers; about 100,000
American children engage in prostitution, and about 85 percent of
street prostitutes report being incestuously molested by a male
family-member as a child.
The breakdown in the family is also a sadly familiar part of everyday
life for most us. Who doesn't know a single mom struggling to do her
best for her children but inevitably coming up short? Who doesn't
know of couples sundered by the small difficulties that, in previous
generations, would have been taken in stride? And you don't need an
anthropologist to sense the transformation of America from a
family-friendly culture to a culture of me-first.
But if you want to see where these social trends are leading,
anthropology has some answers. Humanity has been experimenting with
ways to organize itself into viable social groups for many millennia.
Almost any combination of sexual partners has been institutionalized
somewhere and often in multiple places. We can and should read that
record as a realistic check against the dreams of consequence-free
sexual liberation that have seized the imaginations of so many of our
fellow citizens.
___________________________________________________
Peter Wood is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Boston
University and the author of Diversity: The Invention of a Concept.
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| User: "Paul Duca" |
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| Title: Re: Sex & Consequences: An Anthropologist Vindicates TheTraditional Family |
27 Dec 2005 07:56:33 PM |
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The biggest consquence of sex on your terms...is being stuck with
you in YOUR "Heaven".
Paul
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| User: "Ike" |
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| Title: Re: Sex & Consequences: An Anthropologist Vindicates TheTraditional Family |
27 Dec 2005 10:00:06 PM |
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"Paul Duca" <p.duca@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:BFD75B01.28E36%p.duca@comcast.net...
The biggest consquence of sex on your terms...is being stuck with
you in YOUR "Heaven".
Paul
What? He wants us to go to heaven to have sex with him?
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| User: "Ike" |
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| Title: Re: Sex & Consequences: An Anthropologist Vindicates The Traditional Family |
27 Dec 2005 10:00:06 PM |
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"words of truth" <wordsoftruth@hoshmail.com> wrote in message
news:1135727824.577710.259500@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
http://www.amconmag.com/2003/07_28_03/cover.html
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?
I don't get it. I couldn't get past the boring questions.
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| User: "Mark K. Bilbo" |
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| Title: Re: Sex & Consequences: An Anthropologist Vindicates The Traditional Family |
27 Dec 2005 10:33:01 PM |
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In <a5osf.1266$M%4.478@newsread3.news.atl.earthlink.net>, "Ike"
<accordiondocxyzxyzxyz@mindspring.com> wrote:
"words of truth" <wordsoftruth@hoshmail.com> wrote in message
news:1135727824.577710.259500@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
http://www.amconmag.com/2003/07_28_03/cover.html
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?
I don't get it. I couldn't get past the boring questions.
Don't bother. The author is a complete idiot. Especially here:
"A society that doesn't restrict human sexual relations in effective
ways is a society that doesn't have much interest in reproducing itself.
People left to their own sexual whims will sometimes form stable families,
but that is the exception, not the rule."
You have to wonder. How *did humanity survive those hundreds of thousands
of years before Peter Wood came along to force them (unwillingly of
course) into forming families and having children?
So, apparently, before the period we tend to refer to as "civilization"
(with all the rules and laws and governments) we went extinct as a species.
Wait a minnit...
--
Mark K. Bilbo
--------------------------------------------------
So much for that "storm of the century" excuse
http://makeashorterlink.com/?A3992495C
NO held hostage by oil corporations,
ANWR demanded as ransom
http://makeashorterlink.com/?J5C92195C
White House balks at spending on US citizens,
needs more billions for Iraq!
http://makeashorterlink.com/?G1D93595C
(Tell me again how much we spent bailing out the S&Ls?)
http://www.nola.com
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| User: "Mark K. Bilbo" |
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| Title: Re: Sex & Consequences: An Anthropologist Vindicates The Traditional Family |
27 Dec 2005 10:38:50 PM |
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In <1135727824.577710.259500@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>, "words of
truth" <wordsoftruth@hoshmail.com> wrote:
http://www.amconmag.com/2003/07_28_03/cover.html
Sex & Consequences
An anthropologist vindicates the traditional family.
Skippy, you may want to run like hell from this guy.
Oh, I notice he breezily dismisses an entire hemisphere in searching for a
culture he figures he can use to scare the readers and make them go
"ewwww." But I digress.
He says:
"Among the Etoro, a tribe of about 400 living by hunting and small-scale
gardening in the Stickland-Bosavi district of Papua New Guinea, from
around age 12, every boy is 'inseminated' orally more or less daily by
a young man who is assigned to him as a partner. Late in his teenage
years, an Etoro boy is formally initiated in an event involving many male
sex partners, after which he becomes an 'inseminator' rather than an
'inseminee.' In due course, the former older male partner often marries
the younger man's sister.
"Somewhat similar customs are reported for many other tribes in the remote
mountains of New Guinea, and these cases collectively serve as proof that
it is not beyond human ingenuity to channel homosexual behavior into a
social system."
Um, you know what he just said? Without, apparently, realizing it?
He just said...
If it's socially acceptable, most all (if not all), males are capable of
homosexual behavior.
You really want to agree with that?
--
Mark K. Bilbo
--------------------------------------------------
So much for that "storm of the century" excuse
http://makeashorterlink.com/?A3992495C
NO held hostage by oil corporations,
ANWR demanded as ransom
http://makeashorterlink.com/?J5C92195C
White House balks at spending on US citizens,
needs more billions for Iraq!
http://makeashorterlink.com/?G1D93595C
(Tell me again how much we spent bailing out the S&Ls?)
http://www.nola.com
.
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| User: "lancemiller" |
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| Title: Re: Sex & Consequences: An Anthropologist Vindicates The Traditional Family |
28 Dec 2005 06:15:44 AM |
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It's suspicious that the stories/data used are of far way and, for most
readers I assume, exotic cultures. I believe this gives more latitude
for abusive extrapolations since most readers will not be able to
counter the arguments
due to their lack of direct experience with this tribe or culture.
A major fault in the original post is in a lack of distinction between
a monotonic culture and a pluralistic culture. Since the original post
is so focused on the USA, I'll keep my focus there also. I've lived on
the East Coast, West Coast, Utah, and Alaska.From what I've seen this
country is pretty darn diverse. Floridians and Alaskansare from two
different planets, when it comes to the way they live.
A single tribe with a dominant sex pattern is a different line of
discussion from a
"should the USA give certain legal rights to same-sex marriages?". To
connect the tribal monoculture, their sex practices in this case, and
proceed to a look at US society one would need to say something along
the lines of "should the USA make everyone do X with their Y while
having sex?" - a statement which has a patent on fallacy and absurdity.
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| User: "Parsifal" |
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| Title: Re: Sex & Consequences: An Anthropologist Vindicates The Traditional Family |
28 Dec 2005 02:52:42 AM |
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Why is it that every fundie on this discussion group is a sexual
maniac? All they think about is sex, all they write about is sex...
Look at J Young and his recent "sex and gerbil"-posting, or Words or
truth with his nonsence about gays or polygamy...
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| User: "Dan Clore" |
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| Title: Re: Sex & Consequences: An Anthropologist Vindicates The TraditionalFamily |
28 Dec 2005 05:24:12 PM |
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words of truth wrote:
http://www.amconmag.com/2003/07_28_03/cover.html
Sex & Consequences
An anthropologist vindicates the traditional family.
One certainly hopes that the magazine's editor added this
without the author's knowledge. An anthropologist would
surely know better than to refer to one sort of traditional
family as "the" traditional family.
By Peter Wood
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.
In the sense that most individuals remained heterosexual,
that is correct. But not in the sense that berdaches (a term
also used for women as well as men) were considered abnormal
in a negative sense. In fact, in many American Indian
societies berdaches were especially honored.
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.
This generalized claim does not appear accurate from my own
reading, though true in some cases. (And why the false
assumption, again, that "gay marriage" necessarily means
male homosexuals rather than women?) And, of course, one
could compare this practice to the similar practice of
unequal age in heterosexual couples.
--
Dan Clore
My collected fiction, _The Unspeakable and Others_:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1587154838/thedanclorenecro/
Lord We˙rdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/9879/
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
Strange pleasures are known to him who flaunts the
immarcescible purple of poetry before the color-blind.
-- Clark Ashton Smith, "Epigrams and Apothegms"
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| User: "G*rd*n" |
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| Title: Re: Sex & Consequences: An Anthropologist Vindicates The TraditionalFamily |
28 Dec 2005 09:27:12 PM |
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words of truth wrote:
http://www.amconmag.com/2003/07_28_03/cover.html
Sex & Consequences
An anthropologist vindicates the traditional family.
clore@columbia-center.org:
One certainly hopes that the magazine's editor added this
without the author's knowledge. An anthropologist would
surely know better than to refer to one sort of traditional
family as "the" traditional family.
WoT seems determined to expose a host of earnest
conservative or traditionalist writers to ridicule
by posting their most fatuous articles. Although Wot
is a troll or a spammer, he (?) does provide us with
rare glimpses into mental and cultural hinterlands
which we otherwise would probably never see.
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