1470 



HORMONAL REGULATION OF BEHAVIOR 



to whom he may never speak again (Nav- 

 ajo, Reichard/ 1928) . In central Tibet 

 (Prince Peter of Greece, 1948) , where poly- 

 andry is practiced, a group of brothers may 

 share their father's young wife, their step- 

 mother. These extreme variations all serve 

 to emphasize the fact that, like the relation- 

 ship between father-daughter, the mother- 

 son relationship, especially in its locus in 

 the relationship of the older woman to the 

 mature son, is one with which human so- 

 cieties have to come to terms. (Urbaniza- 

 tion, combined with the development of 

 societies containing many millions of in- 

 dividuals who are no longer held together 

 throughout life in small closed systems, 

 necessarily involves very different ways of 

 handling the early prohibitions which are 

 still maintained within the biologic family. 

 Emotional maladjustment in individuals 

 which accompanies faulty learning of cul- 

 turally expected organization of emotion is 

 undoubtedly one such adaptation (Bibring, 

 1953).) 



I have discussed the various biologic 

 checks on premature sexuality and repro- 

 duction, the hymen, the frequency of ado- 

 lescent sterility, incest regulations, and the 

 possible inverse relationship between fe- 

 male sexual desire and ovulation. With the 

 development of a social recognition of phys- 

 iologic paternity, the purposeful avoidance 

 of pregnancy becomes possible. This has 

 taken a variety of forms: postponement of 

 marriage, which leaves the chronology of 

 sex acts in the hands of the female; imposi- 

 tion of long periods of sexual abstinence for 

 all males in the community (of which the 

 12-year-long periods, reported for Menta- 

 wei, are an extreme form (Loeb, 1928)); 

 the imposition of specific taboos during the 

 period of lactation, which may involve only 

 the lactating wife or may extend to other 

 wives also (Arapesh, Mead, 1935) ; devoting 

 a part of the population of one or both sexes 

 to a life of celibacy; the use of contracep- 

 tives designed to prevent conception while 

 l)ermitting acts of copulation; alternative 

 forms of attaining sex satisfaction and vari- 

 ous measures of interrupting a pregnancy 

 once initiated, by abortion or infanticide. 

 Here again, the evidence is overwhelmingly 

 in favor of there being insufficient biologic 

 indicators to guide man in his search for a 



means of reducing population. Mutually in- 

 compatible institutions exist side by side, 

 as in the cases of female infanticide and 

 polygamy (Eskimo) or in the beliefs about 

 the hygienic necessity for intercourse and 

 beliefs about the hygienic desirability of 

 spacing children (U. S. A.). It can only be 

 concluded from present evidence that, in 

 spite of the variety of biologic checks on 

 fertility which render Homo sapiens rela- 

 tively infertile, no sufficient automatic 

 check^^ on the birth rate is provided bio- 

 logically which is compatible with the spe- 

 cific resources of any human society. 



So far, we have been concerned with those 

 patterns of sex behavior which assure that 

 men and women will marry and rear fami- 

 lies and that their sex desires will not be- 

 come so unmanageable as to disrupt this or- 

 derly process of reproduction and child care. 

 But man, like other mammals (Carpenter, 

 1942), has capacities for types of sex be- 

 havior which do not lead to the formation 

 of permanent unions and the production of 

 children — for auto-eroticism, for sexual play 

 with a partner of the same sex, and for adult 

 forms of polymorphous perversity, in which 

 the object of his sexual behavior is a matter 

 of indifference to him (Mead, 1934a). The 

 insistence in the clinical and experimental 

 literature on animal behavior that special 

 conditions are necessary if individuals are 

 actively to prefer "perverse" behavior (be- 

 havior other than heterosexual behavior 

 capable of producing offspring) must be 

 placed in the whole context of human sex 

 l)ehavior. There is no more reason to insist 

 that sexual preference for own sex^^ is 

 learned than that heterosexual behavior is 

 learned. But most human societies are so 

 constituted that it is heterosexual behavior 

 that is learned. Beach (Ford and Beach, 

 1951) has presented persuasive arguments 

 in favor of regarding same-sex behavior and 



^°This statement is made with recognition of 

 how complex any such automatic check would be. 



^"The word homosexual is misleading because 

 it fails to distinguish between sex activities involv- 

 ing a member of the same sex and a highly de- 

 veloped preference for love objects of the same sex, 

 often involving disturbances in sex identification, 

 transvestism, repugnance toward members of the 

 opposite sex, obsessive and promiscuous pursuit of 

 members of the same sex, etc. See Hampson and 

 Hampson. also. 



