1454 



HORMONAL REGULATION OF BEHAVIOR 



mythologic and religious symbols may 

 throw light on the carriers within our very 

 rich literary and folk tradition of the pos- 

 sibilities of behavior which is officially dis- 

 approved at the present time. See also 

 Bettelheim's illuminating discussion (Bet- 

 telheim, 1954) of spontaneous rituals among 

 disturbed adolescents which compare in de- 

 tail with ceremonies reported from New 

 Guinea and Australia and provide ex- 

 amples of womb or vulva envy of as great 

 strength as the more familiar and often 

 reported penis envy among girls in western 

 society where the male role is heavily pre- 

 ferred for sociologic reasons (Brown, 1958). 



Almost any item of human behavior may 

 become involved in establishing a child's sex 

 role, and similarly those items on which we 

 depend, especially sex gender in third person 

 pronouns and differentiation of names and 

 clothing, may be completely absent. There 

 are many peoples where male and female 

 names are not differentiated and where 

 there is no sex gender in the language. There 

 are peoples where boys and girls are dressed 

 exactly alike, and peoples where perhaps 

 children go without clothing so that the ana- 

 tomic differences between the sexes are con- 

 spicuous from infancy. There are peoples 

 where males are permitted to be naked but 

 girls must be covered, so that among the 

 Manus, when asked to draw a boy and a 

 girl, no genitals were drawn but girls were 

 differentiated from naked boys by fiber 

 aprons. Activity levels may vary, so that 

 girls, boys, and women climb coconut trees, 

 or girls, boys, and men go fishing. Where 

 boys are classed with women until initia- 

 tion, as in latmul, a strong tendency toward 

 a female posture may be found in pre-ado- 

 lescent boys and girls. Where girls are 

 classed with men until betrothal, as in 

 Manus (Mead, 1949b), a strong tendency 

 toward male posture and behavior may be 

 found in both boys and girls. 



To explain adequately (]Mead, 1935, 

 1949b) the variety of behavior found, it 

 may well be necessary to invoke all the 

 forms now recognized, including constitu- 

 tional type, which when culturally institu- 

 tionalized may mean that a mesomorphic 

 woman, for example, is thought of as mascu- 

 line, or an endomorphic or ectomorphic 

 male is thought of as feminine. Excessive 



emphasis on constitutional sex typing in 

 small populations or in groups which recruit 

 their members from outside, like monastic 

 orders, the circus, the theatre, the merchant 

 marine, may result over time in establishing 

 what look like hereditary patterns of simi- 

 larity or contrast between the men and 

 women in a group, which is partly due to fa- 

 vored breeding or to continuous selection. 

 A disregard of constitutional preference by 

 sex may result in favoring a type with low 

 sex contrast, so in Bali any exaggeration of 

 secondary characteristics of either sex is 

 disliked — pendulous breasts in women, 

 hairiness in men are combined in the evil 

 mien of the witch in the theatre. Balinese 

 are typically ectomorphic, with little muscle 

 development, narrow hips, small breasts in 

 women, and slightly overdeveloped breasts 

 in men. 



To the extent that genetically determined 

 constitutional type becomes involved in as- 

 signment of sex role and attainment of psy- 

 chologic sex, the possibilities of varieties 

 of spontaneous inversion of gender choice 

 increase. This is conspicuous in American 

 culture on the very simple variable of 

 height. Tallness is a male characteristic, 

 and small men and large women are likely 

 to be regarded, and to regard themselves, 

 as somehow less male and less female, than 

 is the case with tall men and small women. 



Historically there has been an increase 

 in role inversion at periods of high civiliza- 

 tion, in cities as opposed to rural areas 

 (Westermarck, 1921). Although there may 

 be as much casual homoerotic behavior l)e- 

 tween adolescent boys, among sailors or 

 other isolated groups of males or females, 

 among the illiterate and those who share a 

 meager tradition, and this may increase in 

 prison, armies, etc., genuine role inversion, 

 where ideas of love and passion and prob- 

 lems of identity enter in, seems to be charac- 

 teristic of high levels of civilization. It is 

 possible that much subtler aspects of con- 

 stitutional sex typing enter in, and compli- 

 cate a child's identification with the parent 

 of the opposite sex, involving such matters 

 as type of imagery, preferred sensory mo- 

 dalities, types of cognitive function, etc., 

 which are not conspicuous as individual 

 differences among primitive peoples or the 

 lower economic groups in a complex society. 



