CULTURAL DETERMINANTS OF BEHAVIOR 



1465 



riage, as soon as the first menstruation lias 

 taken place. Where no overt social inter- 

 ference occurs, young people, maturing at 

 different rates, slowly detach themselves 

 from the younger children's groups or from 

 their association with much older people and 

 l)egin to pair off. Given an upbringing in 

 human society in which children are part of 

 families based on sexual ties, the endocrine 

 changes at puberty appear to provide the 

 necessary triggering of individual activity 

 into the expected pattern. Whether the en- 

 docrine changes would be sufficient to in- 

 duce sex activity in human adolescents who 

 had been reared w^ithout relationships to 

 other human beings and without the explicit 

 and articulate patterns of sex relationships 

 which characterize all known societies, we 

 have no way of estimating. In societies 

 without any means of keeping track of age, 

 adolescents may be permitted to set their 

 own pace or may be subjected to initiation 

 ceremonies which flagrantly disregard phys- 

 iologic puberty; stressing chronologic age 

 groups, as in modern x\merica, introduces 

 an artificial standardization of behavior, 

 grouping together the mature and the im- 

 mature in expected social rituals such as 

 dancing and dating (Mead, 1959). The im- 

 position of such artificial patterns of social 

 readiness and postponement may be pre- 

 sumed to be one of the factors making adult 

 sex functioning a less uniform and reliable 

 matter in the upper classes of complex so- 

 cieties. 



In addition to extreme dependency and a 

 prolongation of maturation in human be- 

 ings, the disappearance of cycles of sexual 

 readiness is a distinguishing aspect of hu- 

 man sexuality. Not only is there no rutting 

 season and no period of heat, but the male 

 is capable of sex relations at any time and 

 the female is inversely receptive, displaying 

 ( at least according to existing data from our 

 own society, collated by Ford and Beach, 

 1951) the least desire at the time of ovula- 

 tion and the greatest desire at the time of 

 menstruation (Kinsey, Pomeroy, Martin 

 and Gebhard, 1953). These specialized hu- 

 man sex responses favor the establishment 

 of family life. Until marriage the male is 

 dependent on the willingness of the female 

 to yield to his advances, so he may be re- 

 fused at those periods when ^he is unrecep- 



tive. (This situation, together with the prob- 

 able period of adolescent sterility following 

 menarche, ]:)robably partly accounts for the 

 low rate of illegitimacy in societies which 

 permit a period of premarital freedom.) 

 However, once the female has set up house- 

 keeping with a male on whom she depends 

 for food and whom she wishes to attach per- 

 manently to the care of her dependent chil- 

 dren, then yielding to his advances in the 

 absence of any positive inclination on her 

 part is the logical outcome. As the human 

 male is capable of penetration in the ab- 

 sence of any physiologic receptivity on the 

 part of the female, her compliance involves 

 no physiologic underwriting whatsoever, 

 other than the absence of a vaginal spasm. 

 There is no evidence that sexual pleasure 

 on the part of the female is a necessary or 

 even contributory factor in concejition 

 (Ford and Beach, 1951). 



A further distinctive characteristic of hu- 

 man sexuality is the capacity of some hu- 

 man females to attain orgasmic sexual 

 pleasure, a manifestation which is absent, 

 as far as observation can tell, among most 

 other species. Elkan (1948, 1950) made an 

 extensive survey of the literature on the 

 subject and advanced the view that the 

 capacity for female orgasm is unnecessary 

 in any species in which the male has a 

 mechanism for maintaining the female in a 

 copulatory position until ejaculation is at- 

 tained. In the case of human beings, the 

 arms serve this purpose. Elkan also believes 

 that the capacity for orgasm in females is a 

 late evolutionary development, present only 

 in some females. Ford and Beach (1951) 

 suggested that the face-to-face position for 

 sex intercourse, the most widespread posi- 

 tion among human beings but an exceed- 

 ingly aberrant one for primates, may be 

 further responsible for a type of clitoral 

 stimulation leading to female orgasm. Addi- 

 tional factors may be the projection on the 

 female by the male of a demand that her 

 feeling match his and the social invention 

 of a large number of techniques for involv- 

 ing the more diffuse eroticism characteristic 

 of the female. Some human societies regard 

 the female climax as essential to the satis- 

 factoriness of the sexual act; in others 

 (Arapesh, Manus, Mead, 1939a, 1949b), fe- 

 male orgasm is unrecognized as a possibility. 



