1468 



HORMONAL REGULATION OF BEHAVIOR 



ending at menopause with the possibility of 

 many years of postmenopausal life, is again 

 distinctively human; at least no instances 

 have been reported for any primate species. 

 Many societies recognize the postmeno- 

 pausal period by giving old women the li- 

 cense of men, permitting them to hold male 

 office or to use language and to make jokes 

 which would be regarded as improper for 

 women of child-bearing age. In some so- 

 cieties menopausal hemorrhages are recog- 

 nized. The Samoans recognize menopausal 

 psychic instability, but they could have 

 learned of it from Europeans, since it was 

 reported 100 years after the beginning of 

 European contact. Diminution or augmen- 

 tation of sex pleasure is variously expected. 

 Occasionally, sexual pleasure is regarded as 

 even greater for those past the child-bear- 

 ing period (Jemez, Harper, n.d.) ; European 

 culture has tended to equate the menopause 

 with loss of capacity for sexual pleasure. 



Menstruation may be an occasion for 

 avoiding all sexual contact or an occasion 

 for increased activity. The fear of menstru- 

 ation as a period of supernatural danger to 

 a man's capacity to hunt or fish or make war 

 is widespread; sometimes, however, these 

 powers are reversed, and only the blood of 

 a menstruating woman can effect a cure of 

 some dread disease. Taboos that keep 

 women away from food preparation or re- 

 quire that they feed themselves with special 

 precautions (Ford and Beach, 1951; Ploss, 

 1902) may be compared to the attempts in 

 human society to keep the mouth and food 

 separated from excretions of any sort, on 

 the one hand, and to the feeling that it is 

 necessary to protect individuals against ab- 

 sorbing through food the dangers associated 

 with the mysterious ciualities of the body, 

 especially those which involve any shedding 

 of blood, on the other. Thus, it is not un- 

 usual to find such identifications as the use 

 of similar protective devices for girls at 

 first menstruation and boys at ear-piercing 

 or scarification, and of women who die in 

 childbirth and men who die in battle, whose 

 blood together makes the red in the sunset. 

 Finally, in any discussion of the cultural 

 patterning of sex activity it is necessary to 

 take into account the attitudes toward 

 death, as these involve the relationships be- 

 tween body and soul and between the living 



and the dead. Birth, marriage, sex, and 

 death may be identified in intes de passage 

 (Van Gennep, 1909) through which each in- 

 dividual passes, or they may be treated as 

 highly antithetical events, so that the preg- 

 nant woman must be protected from the 

 newly married, the aging from the springing 

 sexuality of the adolescent, the newly wed 

 from the mourners. Each individual who 

 participates in a ceremony for one event 

 learns also something about another; that 

 brides wear white and widows black or that 

 both brides and widows wear black, that the 

 bride must never see a corpse or that she 

 must be wrapped like one and lie as if dead 

 for hours, that no preparation must be com- 

 pleted for the newborn infant for fear it will 

 cause its death, or that one of the first acts 

 of a newly married pair is to make prepara- 

 tions for their funerals. 



These parallel or contrasting treatments 

 of moments of high emotion in human life 

 are among the most important cofigurative 

 methods by which human beings learn the 

 pattern of sex behavior. The tie between the 

 living and the dead spouse has received wide 

 elaboration; long periods of mourning, espe- 

 cially for the widow, are enjoined in many 

 societies; the widow may be slain on her 

 husband's funeral pyre or she may be for- 

 bidden ever to marry again ; marriage with 

 a widow may be surrounded with a great 

 variety of precautions. Among the Arapesh, 

 male potentiality for great anxiety about 

 any other male who has shared the same 

 woman was complicated into complex be- 

 liefs about avenging ghosts (Mead, 1935). 

 Other solutions of the problem are found 

 when the widow is married by a male of the 

 social group of the dead man, so that the 

 brother or cousin takes the dead husband's 

 place. Clinical research on the response of 

 individuals to grief has revealed the psycho- 

 logic basis, ambivalence toward the dead 

 (Cobb and Lindeman, 1943) and identifica- 

 tion with the dead, for the extreme patho- 

 logic depressions sometimes found in mod- 

 ern societies where there is no longer a 

 collective ritual within which the individual 

 can act out the situation of bereavement. 



Another problem which every known hu- 

 man society has met, the solution of which 

 seems essential to the existence of society 

 as we know it, is the problem of sexual at- 



