Psychology of sex - Total No. of Records in System :: 2032

THE SEXUAL IMPULSE IN YOUTHMead, in Growing up in New Guinea, describes theManus people of the Admiralty Islands to the North ofNew Guinea as extremely puritanic. They regard sexwith aversion and excretions with disgust, repressing andthe maximumavoiding their manifestations and seekingof secrecy. The children, though carefully trained in physicalrespects, are otherwise treated with extreme indulgenceand left free;but sexual manifestations, includingmasturbation, are slight and infrequent, because there arefew opportunities for isolation. There seemed to be muchsexual frigidity, and the married women do not admitpleasure in married life and seek to avoid sexual intercourse,nor are there any signs of romantic affection.Another picture of youthful sex life outside our ownculture, though this time not untouched by our civilization,is presented by Margaret Mead in Coming of Age inSamoa. Here our civilization has had a considerable dissolvinginfluence on the old Samoan culture, so that whatmight seem a new and artificial culture has grown up andwith considerable rapidity. Yet it has grown up naturallyon what is evidently the foundation of the old Samoanculture, deprived of all but the minimum of its taboosand restrictions, and it seems to work beneficially. Smallboys and girls tend to avoid each other, not by externalcommand but by custom and instinct; yet from the earliestage, owing to the general absence of privacy, they beginto be familiar with the essential facts of life and death,including the details of sex and sexual intercourse. Theyalso have an individual sex life from childhood; nearlyevery little girl masturbates from the age of six or seven,more or less in secret, the boys also, but more usually ingroups, and casual homosexual practices are common; onthe part of growing girls or women working together suchcasual relationships are regarded as[ 10 3]"a pleasantand nat-