1458 



HORMONAL REGULATION OF BEHAVIOR 



by setting aside certain portions of the popu- 

 lation for lives of celibacy or prosti- 

 tution (Parsons, 1913 j, or by permitting 

 different types of sex activity to different 

 ages (for example, requiring chastity from 

 the unmarried girl but allowing a greater 

 degree of freedom to the married woman 

 (France, Metraux and Mead, 1954j, per- 

 mitting young people to enjoy a great deal 

 of premarital freedom but requiring fidelity 

 after marriage (Dobu, Fortune, 1932), per- 

 mitting unmarried young males to establish 

 homosexual liaisons followed by periods of 

 heterosexual pairing (Wirz, 1922), etc. Situ- 

 ations which vary to an extreme degree from 

 the biologically expected serve to point uj) 

 the requirements of patterning sex behavior 

 under more usual conditions (c/. commu- 

 nities which have achieved either a tem- 

 porary or a permanently abnormal sex 

 ratio: the Mormons during the first genera- 

 tion of the sect, with the compensatory in- 

 stitution of polygamy; the Marquesans with 

 their ratio of two males to one female, with 

 tlie balancing institution of j^olyandry or 

 secondary husbands (Linton, 1939) ). 



In this connection it is necessary to point 

 out that balance and compensation are only 

 potentialities of human societies. We find 

 societies which practice polygamy and fe- 

 male infanticide, as well as societies with 

 the expected association between female in- 

 fanticide and polyandry (Mead, 1937). We 

 find societies with other incompatible sets of 

 aspirations. The ^Mountain Arapcsh fears the 

 more actively sexed Plains Arapesh woman, 

 who is likely to be disruptive domestically ; 

 but each small community desires to acquire 

 as many women as possible, and so run- 

 away Plains women are taken in (Mead, 

 1935) . The American man is reared to value 

 the type of marital sex activity congruent 

 with a high degree of receptivity in a woman 

 who is trained to carry the inhibiting role in 

 premarital contacts between the sexes 

 (Mead, 1949b). This characteristic of Am- 

 erican dating behavior in the 1930's and 

 1940's has now been complicated by the new 

 convention of "going steady" in which 

 Ehrmann (1959) reports a second reversal 

 of courtship pattern among college students. 

 On a date, which is exploratory and ex- 

 ploitive, the young American male initiates 

 as intimate sex behavior as he can, and the 



young American female refuses and tem- 

 porizes; once, however, a steady relation- 

 ship which is expected to end in marriage 

 occurs, the male tends to discontinue his 

 exploitive behavior and the female, with 

 greater trust in the situation begins initiat- 

 ing greater intimacy, putting a new strain 

 on the young male's ability to control his 

 impulses. 



Even sharper discrepancies and reversals 

 may occur. So, in traditional Puerto Rican 

 culture, the ideal male was expected to dem- 

 onstrate his machismo by seducing many 

 women, and all females were expected to be 

 chaste and faithful leaving only the prosti- 

 tute as an unsatisfactory testimony to male 

 l)owers of attraction (Bonilla, 1958) . 



Societies may develop such an intricate 

 interlocking of practices and restrictions 

 that any disturbance within the system 

 produces extreme disorganization. For ex- 

 ample, the Indian system of child marriage 

 correlates with a lack of protection of young 

 unmarried girls from the males of their own 

 joint households, and any delay in the age 

 of child marriage such as may be introduced 

 by Christian practices may endanger the 

 girl who is left unprotected in a home where 

 the Western Christian teacher might feel 

 she is safe. Or a system of sexual ethics may 

 be so linked with the institution of the men- 

 strual segregation tent and a taboo on sex 

 relations during menstruation that the in- 

 troduction of frame wooden houses and the 

 abandonment of the traditional menstrual 

 segregation may help i)recipitate the col- 

 lapse of the entire system of tribal sexual 

 ethics (Mead, 1932). 



A great number of tlie nonindustrialized 

 peoples of the world outside the high cul- 

 tures of Europe and Asia and the European- 

 ized Americas regulate sex relationships by 

 elaborate kinship arrangements in which 

 women in certain categories are the pre- 

 ferred wives of men in certain related cate- 

 gories (Murdock, 1949). The preferred wife 

 may be a mother's brother's daughter, or 

 a daughter of any man belonging to the 

 clan from which one's mother came, or a 

 daughter of any man belonging to the clan 

 from wdiich one's father's mother came, etc. 

 These systems impose demographically un- 

 real expectations on the normal population 

 and may develop in several different direc- 



