thumbnail of Sexuality: a search for perspective; Anthropological perspectives of sexuality
Transcript
Hide -
If this transcript has significant errors that should be corrected, let us know, so we can add it to FIX IT+
In our society an older generation goes into a frenzy. If a young man you know that's both his face here and here at the same time it is as confusion and anxiety rising as when boys and girls were much the same clothes and have much the same attitudes toward the world. They do not get the shocked economies the older generation expects and is comfortable with and he struggles to conform to a Michigan State University radio presents sexuality a search for perspective a series of recorded lectures from an interdisciplinary colloquy on human sexuality held on the campus of Michigan State University. The purpose of this series is to provide a comprehensive discussion of human sexuality in its broadest possible perspective. And yet deal with this important and timely topic in an organized informed and rational manner. The lecturer today will be Dr Westen Lebar professor of anthropology at Duke
University. Dr. Le Barre is a noted writer lecturer and anthropologist. He is the author of the recent book The human animal Dr. Le Bard will speak on the anthropological perspectives of sexuality. Now Dr. Westen love. In trying to discuss the problem of sexuality I feel as though I were asked to answer that probably apocryphal quiz question. Discuss the universe and give two examples. Because there are two. Anthropology is the comparative study of man. Is a mixture of biological historical psychological and social sciences. While this often provides broad range opportunities for Enter fertilization it also forces the anthropologist sometimes to be neat about his categories and the location of his subject matter. There are at least
10 levels on which we can discuss human sexuality and these can be put into three major groupings. Primary sexuality names the physical anatomical givens of sex. And these are one histological or cellular sex. That is the x x x y pattern ngs of chromosomes in the individual. Recently there's been some discussion of the super male type with an X Y Y chromosome pattern. This appears with some frequency in the criminal psychopath and anomalous double endowment with why has burdened the individual with amounts of masculine behavioral aggressivity that foredoomed him to a life of crime. Gonadal said that is whether the sex glands produce eggs or sperm. External genital anatomy
concerning which there is sometimes considerable ambiguity. Since male nurse and femaleness are based on the same embryological ground plan and analogous genital organs are in part a matter of size as well as differentiated shape and function. The ministration of hormones or surgery or both can correct some of these ambiguities but often it is a matter of judgement as to what to do depending on other factors are the individual's upbringing and personal choice of course. Also it is sometimes possible to change surgically and anatomically normal person of one sex into a synthetic specimen of the other sex. But this is a matter of psychopathology. Not of the primary sexuality being discussed here. First anatomy of the internal accessory reproductive structures without sufficient study it is possible to modify
external genitalia surgically but inconsistently with the internal structural morphology. In addition to these primary anatomical Givens There are also secondary sexual characteristics and these traits of secondary sexuality are those aspects of gross male ness and femaleness in texture and body proportions and conformation that appear largely in adolescence in response to hormones such as wide hips vs. wide shoulders presence and distribution of body here. Fat and so forth. Now since both male and female sex glands produce both male and female hormones we have here not so much a shopped economy as a gamut or mosaic of traits. The constellation of these traits within a wide but normal rains can cause much psychological anguish in the
adolescent individual whose body is undergoing these physical changes. In fact even thoroughly male or female changes can cause shock or distress. Additionally physical traits that offend cultural stereotypes for example shortness in a man or tallness in a woman can cause suffering and psychological scars in individuals or otherwise entirely normal sexually. In fact I know male psychiatrist who suffered from a height that was excessively masculine for a man of his generation but would pass unnoticed in the toddler present generation. Again in our wealthy country a woman has to struggle hard to keep him. Whereas in Turkey the admired woman will be regarded by us as extremely fat. What should be emphatically noted here is the plain fact of why normal variation in these physical hormonal traits of male
ness and femaleness biological evolution proceeds on the basis of differences within the species so that we should have whore to standardized a conformity to pattern. Right would seem a physical anomaly now maybe conceivably the wave of the future. Likewise cultural evolution depends upon psychological uniqueness in culture heroes so that we should actively seek those socio political economic conditions that promote protect and cherish a high degree of individuality. From a personal point of view we should learn to take things secondary variations as not much more important than being blonde or brunette or red headed. Admittedly racial variations are precious for the future of the total human species here in America through lucky
historical accidents. We have a large pools of mongoloid genes in the American Indian of Negro genes. So importation of slaves and a carcass or genes through European migration. And yet some people are unhappy about our enormous and undeserved and unsurpassed opportunities for hybrid vigor in the future. Therefore anyone can be mildly gratified at representing in his body of racial differences that he can take no more credit for it personally. At the same time having a black or white or yellow or red skin has been blasted overrated in the past as indicating any special relationship to individual cultural potentialities civilization requires a wide range of variety of people for its purposes. However much these differences have frightened us in tribal days in the past.
Similarly the physical differences in secondary sexual characteristics are just not that important to one's potential as a human person and gross physical traits can be misleading too. In parachutes go the most gutsy and virile man I knew was a fragile looking little college professor where several of the giant athletic males with physical and moral cowards. In addition to his primary and secondary sexual characteristics there is a category I call tertiary sexual characteristics. These are the psychological traits of masculinity and femininity and from now on my talk will deal exclusively with these. Masculinity and femininity are not a tall. The symbol of the cottony of traits that they seem to be. There are three or four aspects of tertiary sex or sexuality that must be discriminated here.
Sixth in my list is the sex of assignment in rearing. Most boys are reared as males and girls as females but commonly enough pathological parents will rear a boy in feminine fashion and a girl in masculine fashion. It is not simply a matter of dressing a boy in girls clothes. There's a more subtle matter. Each parent is of one sex or the other and has definite ideas conscious and unconscious about the fact of his or her sex. Further each parent has definite attitudes toward the other sex toward the spouse in particular toward sons versus daughters and toward one son or daughter versus another son or daughter. Sometimes a neurotic family seems even to select unconsciously the individual who will be officially sick for it although the others may be
just as sick or sicker. Also the relationship of parents to one another. Changes and develops and heads children born at different times are subjected to a different parental climate. The sex aids composition of children in the family is also part of a complex accidents that have real and permanent psychological effects. For example having many sons master and eyes as a father a father who really does not like women in spite of great mass can protest in his official hyper virility in marrying all things male. This kind of a father may in effect nationalize his daughter simply because unconsciously to both he has rewarded her selectively for Nashton behaviors but has taught her contempt. For fan behavior that is tertiary sexual characteristics are to a large degree psychologically learn
again and history and mother may suddenly be quite seductively and castrated lead toward an older son but not toward younger sons. Sometimes the unconscious conflict between parents over sex of assignment to a child will directly shape conflict in the child over his sexual identity. To summarize sex assignment is a category that applies not merely to the extreme case of a male child reared in dresses and not merely to have a familiar parent shaped sister or tomboy but in subtler ways that apply to every single human being. The American meets unsuspected complexity in cases we see clinically for example a mother may acknowledge her son's male nurse but teach men to despise it and a father may court his daughter and her femininity and teach her to
overvalue it. So Ivan there are several more aspects of personal sexual sexuality gender role and gender orientation both of these are learned and both are established in the social rearing process. In fact just as there is an imprinting period during which one does or does not learn to speak so also I believe there is an imprinting period between 3 and 5 years of age in which gender role and gender orientation are sometimes irrevocably set. Gender role is the teaching of what males are like and what females are like in terms of the societies contemporary stereotypes. Let me describe the nature of gender role through an anecdote. The late Dr our frictions it was really a fine fellow and he had a
connoisseur's knowledge of exotic foods. But when he interviewed me now some decades ago it was soon clear to me that he was enormously naive psychologically and psychiatrically. I did not tell him so at the time but for some reason after World War 2 he asked me to join his research group is not closest. I refused because his research questionnaire had already taught me its severe limitations and I don't mean in a self-congratulatory way you know samplings of errors of sampling or class or regional or racial bias and so on. But he's already been massively criticised for claiming something much more pervasive and massive ignoring the methodological effects of his pioneering work. What did Kinsey actually discover. Basically that the human male is extremely oversexed in spite of all the
varied outlets quote unquote he may have to find for himself. This view is easy enough to accept. First place it fits our stereotypes. It's also very flattering in the third place. Every human male that ever lived there surely had some problem in the management of his sexual impulses. Conceivably the human female has had to bring Kinsey's first book came out I remember telling my wife a ha so that's it. Now I will predict for you what the human female will be like. Sure enough for years the human female is grievously undersexed. She's not interested in sexual fantasy in male nudity in pictures in pornographic birds in anything. In fact she couldn't care less. And if it were left up to her sexual desire alone the human race would become extinct in one generation.
Now perhaps this is a bit exaggerated but that's the essential message of the second volume. Now your generation whose source of mythology about sex is Playboy magazine knows that Kenzie's notions about women are simply not so. That foldout girl is 100 percent willing from the word go. And is just waiting for you to come along. Sex takes no time or effort or involvement at all. It's as simple as turning on or off the TV set and Everly every well equipped bachelor's apartment so to have this facility. Plainly what Kim Z has discovered is not the sexual nature of the human male and female. He discovered the folklore about sex in the society
and in that generation that is to say each generation has sets of largely unconscious stereotypes about male and female and these are part of the covert and unofficial but constantly changing culture of your generation for example. In contrast with the Victorian one at least has decided that there is really not very much difference psychologically between men and women being of another persuasion than you. Another generation I'm not sure that I subscribe to that. Now a moment's reflection would demonstrate that all these must be stereotypes. If you're going to change so with this generation genetics cannot change that fast. Again if the male is really the more urgently sexed Why did the Holy Writ in which all things are
true represent that Adam was sitting under a tree picking his nose and settling his papers. Along comes. And she said deuces him. It looks as though a different unconscious stereotype was at work here. What about those late Medieval France founders asked also in one of them a knight is riding along in the words his mind on lofty and important things like Crusades and tournaments and honor and such. His strength was as the strength of ten because his heart was pure and besides his wife was safely locked up as she should be and just a girl back in the castle. When he comes to a humble woodcutter's hut where he might spend the night. I need not repeat in this public place before a mixed audience. All the details about the woodcutters daughter.
But the anthropological generalization one could make from the encounter is that if he could not care less she was urgently oversexed and even rapaciously predatory. Matter of fact given our different stereotypes and expectancies she was like a Swedish woman seems to an American man. Remember the shock some years back when a prominent Swedish actress behaved as though a woman had a legitimate right to be consciously interested in sex or worse yet act as if she had a choice in the matter. This is no isolated finding. There are many cultures in which female sexual aggressiveness surpasses the nails. For example you could buy all of Northwest Amazonia among whom the Merom complain that the women are too ardent
among the upper class to Ouray of North Africa with female courtiers and troubadours are the sexual aggressors and the males are the guardians of the current and upper class toerag Royer would blush deeply in the love Corrie of the lady troubadours. If you as Vale slept men wear veils here not women. Now in addition to this matter of gender role that is what people think males and females are like in terms of their nature and behavior. There is another dimension in tertiary sexual sexuality gender orientation. Now as opposed to gender role which is a cultural model of expectancies gender orientation. Here's an individual perspective. This is
a question of self judgment as to how one fits the fashions in sexual behavior and to be one's conscious and unconscious preferences about how he feels what he wants to be sexually. There's possibly also see a quote unquote objective judgment of others as to how well the individual matches the stereotypes in his behavior. These are all really different. For example a girl might think that she had managed to present a seemingly facade for modest feminine behavior but secretly wished she had a man's choices and freedom whereas seeing others judged her as having cat's claws in her velvet gloves or as a predatory bit frustrating.
It's already apparent that there are comparative cultural norms for tertiary sexual characteristics of masculine and feminine. Some of these are purely behavioral expectancies went to Berber man walking hand-in-hand in North Africa means nothing concerning the gender of their morals but only simple friendship. Fifty years ago Appalachian males exchanges the holy kiss mouth to mouth before snake handling meetings and church with a secular heterosexual kiss in public would be unthinkable. Especially church indeed in earlier European times men often kissed one another in public as one night.
We did night for noble cause noble. In contrast in context this was as meaningless sexually as man wearing silk lace and long here you know 18th century Europe. This was far more a matter of wealth and status difference and of sexual difference. The best known evidence for culturally varying tertiary sexual characteristics is from Margaret means three New Guinea tribes both sexes among our pace have some of the nurturant traits because the male the colony for them the main economy for them is not into male vs. female but rather grown versus on grown persons. Males and females actually in this tribe regarded as functional equivalents alike. They differ only in that the father feeds the fetus from his body before the birth and the mother feeds
the baby after the birth. A young man grows his little fiancé by nurturing and feeding her premature sexuality between them is frowned upon. Not because of any puritanical bisexuality as such but rather because one should achieve his or her gross before contributing to the growth of another human being. That is once children with proper behavior in this respect our parish can then believe the self fulfilling fantasy that sexuality inhibits growth since one is full grown before he practices that of course among the fierce headhunting more both males and females are in our terms tough self-sufficient and masculine because as children they were let out as hostages in enemy tribes to keep the peace and they had to learn to take care of themselves in a hostile uncaring
environment. And finally among the Chamblee women are masculine and man are women in temperament by our standards in the order they give days. Men were preoccupied with her head hunting and were rituals while women did most of the economically productive work. But when the British were bad head hunting and war the charm of the men became technologically unemployed and the order of war rituals gradually developed into elaborate theatrical dramas. Men became excessively concerned with dress and appearance. The Cambridge guy seems I can well imagine that somebody saying look at him trying to get attention with that new colored feather He's got here he's overdressed don't you think. But being dependent on women they were always worried about the impression they were
making on women. Women became Were we supplier confident to corroborative feet on the ground. A Serb matter of fact and practical sex while the men were the narcissistic aesthetic sensitive easily hurt they say. It was not that women did not appreciate man and like to have them around. It was simply that men were merely decorative and entertaining but not the important sex and so they should not be taken too seriously. Paul Silver differed sharply from Freud over the nature of psychological sex differences. Shoulda thought that beyond differing actions relative to sexual anatomy sex functions and behavior all differences rose from social and cultural factors.
Margaret Mead represents an extreme cultural form of the shoulder position. By contrast Freud firmly believed that anatomy is destiny and that there are some basic psychological Meskin the Intamin of being both a human biologist and a cultural anthropologist. My position is necessarily between that of Freud and so. I think that as a psychological experience growing up in one kind of body is bound to be a different learning experience than growing up in another kind of body. On this level sexuality is learned. But on the basis of anatomical givens for example as soon as a little boy learns the girls are different then vulnerability to mutilation and loss of genitals as a punishment for the naughty
acts or things which are quite different. Castration can complex to a male and a female to a girl. Usually it's not fair. The boys have what she does not. And what has she done to be so punished. Again the grossly distinctive features of males external gentles are present at birth. But boys are insignificantly little compared to grown men. Therefore. Comparison emulation and competition I directly built into the male situation. A man always has to prove the distance he has no moved from child to man and history activity is always secondary and symbolic. A woman proves her womanhood once and for all. Why the only true creativity growing a new human being who
needs to write the great American novel where she can have a baby and produce a real human life time. By contrast and atomically the distinctive overt trait of a woman the breast a little girl must long wait for she has not even a token promise for the future. As a boy does I get the experience of a nocturnal admission to a boy at puberty just is different psychologically from the experience of menstruation in a girl which reactivates all her old kilts and innovations from earlier come the strain and if anything menstruation only further confirms her earlier castration fantasies in the boy. The nocturnal nation is the new prog for an alloyed body's own pleasure but menstruation before ation
and childbirth all mean that female sexuality is associated with pain. Surely anatomy is destiny and looks brains are larger muscles big boned body with larger lungs higher metabolic rain more oxygen carrying red blood cells per cubic centimeter. All these things will evidently teach a different stance toward life than a smaller finer textured differently vulnerable and differently shaped body with more Septimius fat and all the rest. Every single male game and athletics are quite essentially masculine. Every single male game shows this projection of body image and emulation. The runner and swimmer must do it faster than competing males but Javelin the shotput must go further. The boxer knocks down his opponent. The Wrestler pins the other down
under him in submission. In baseball the man with the bat stands up against the whole other team in golf. The champion hits the ball harder and farther and more accurately toward the hole. And with your stroke you know all team games one group of nails tries to press another group shamefully backward to force the symbolic ball into enemy territory or into his girl. And the winning team can dismantle the goalposts in football in basketball. You can clip off the net from the basket. The very form of games is male in body image to be the active invader going to avoid the passive state of being invaded and the mistake we get in the mail who overvalues me on this used to demean the female for being different. It is not necessarily demeaning to be the receiver.
Since males compete and emulate and compare males are also I think the generalization make the lawmakers and the obstructionists are the basic principals in comparisons. Partly this results from his different Oedipal fate. The mail must give up his concrete specific physical or dependent love of his mother for a protective aggressive love of women from beginning to end. He simply loves women though in physiologically different bodies own ways with opposite patterns of dominance dependence and certainly different women with some difficulty he may even be induced to settle down with one woman and give him the forms at least of monogamy.
Male Sexuality is intense embattled and burdened with proof but it's psychologically less complex. Now the female by contrast must always change the sex of her original sex object from the little girl's mother to her father to some other man in the process for good biological reasons she is allowed to retain far more of the child's dependency than the man who most changed his dependence and direction completely. I woman's proof of her sexuality is a baby and to obtain a baby a woman must first obtain a man. Again a male can never be in doubt as to whether he is sexually aroused. But a woman actually may not know female
sexuality is less embattled than male sexuality but it's more obscure more subtle and much more complex. Women can understand them magnificently. Men find it hard to understand women why men love women. It's quite clear as children they had good biological reason given the job they had of growth for loving their mothers. But why women love men. It's difficult to see. Besides I mean in terms seriously of childhood conditioning Besides women have more physiological ways of loving than men do. If men cannot understand the prodigies of concern a woman can have for a mother and her
baby want it simply because males don't have female body. Nevertheless you know her loving the female it seems to me is the country particularize or she loves this baby and this man. Furthermore there is a biological double standard that nobody can do anything about. A male can impregnate an indefinite number of females in a short time. But when a female is pregnant she gets pregnant with massive physiological changes quite lacking in the male and ordinarily only one pregnancy at a time. On these anatomical grounds I do not see how we can differ from four. At the same time it's certain that differences in the social context of conditioning can make for a distinctly different end product. When I lived in an office fashioned backwoods part of southwestern China
I was struck by the fact that the men seemed curiously devious psychologically on the Kiva feminine inscrutable Orientals knowledge stuff whereas the women seemed hard bitten and matter of fact tough and masculine. The racial difference only in time did I learn the cultural circumstances of this conservative and remote part of China around annoying drinking. Still have their own old extended patter local patrilineal family a male group male descendant lived together for a number of generations. This means that from the day he was born until the day he died and even there after that matter as an ancestor a man was caught up in a complex web of kinship relations that he had to adapt to his son nephew cousin grandson and all the rest in the preservation of a face
which for all its delicacy was a male and gendered thing. It's largely concerned for the other person's status dignity personal feelings and the like. A male must learn to become a sensitive and astute psychologist in his complex relationships with other members of his patrilineal family. The Confucian ethic in fact you're simply a statement of ideal behavior in different categories of interpersonal relationships. By contrast the female must always marry away from her father's family to the Patra local where the father is home of her husband. She uttered an AVM male centered group as a daughter in law under the leaves of her mother in law father her husband's. There was no special sympathy or sex solidarity here. Mother in law had started out as a daughter in law herself but
daughters and daughter in law status depended entirely on her aborting to work for her husband's family and to produce children preferably boys for her husband's patrimony in her old age. You might enjoy a high status was the oldest living ancestors of the group but still it is a status that she has worked hard for all her life. That is to say in this classical Chinese situation the life space culturally and socially of a male puts a premium on his developing psychological skills as was the case for a woman among us. Certainly in extremely patriarchal families where 50 and 100 years ago. I don't think women are X X X Y chromosome terms your instincts are better psychologists than men. There are Chinese men instinctively better psychos than women. It's a question
of learning and adaptation to life space and role. For the Chinese female on the other hand like us the premium was on the working hard and getting here. On her worst traits that we designate here as masculine the feminine are not sexual absolutes or tall but rather they are characteristic psychological responses of human beings to culturally defined roles for the sexes. RA are not only empowered to have ethnographic tribal differences in tertiary sexuality but also pretend differences of pattern in time. Sexuality goes through marked historical changes in style in the Renaissance man here I'd Florentine youngsters have had most sexual experience than their modern equivalents in age.
Yes and have led armies to the 14th worst silks and power here. But he was then probably the most powerful man alive. Silks were status signals. They're not sexual ones as now we even give sex to Fergus. Understand that Rick when it's used now can be done by Sextus but Menke except in some of the Taurus examples make it still a female for I believe pony skin is usable by both sexes and so on in every generation in every tribe we set up rigid norms and stereotypes and temporary one about man and women are lying and then are very unhappy but only statistically few individuals can actually lies.
These ideal extreme cases more than that are tertiary economies are sometimes very illogical and downright silly. For example it is a common cliche that only males can create great art. I suggested that it's their life space and their inability to create individuals and like men are. In their situation. If we're going to compete with women can only do it symbolically. Maybe it's the only males can create great art because only males in large numbers are motivated to do it. In our society but then we say that only females can be preoccupied with and enjoy art which is a patent absurdity. Furthermore why is it that the most there of man are defined by their being self-made millionaires like Morgan and Mellon and Carnegie and frick.
So who's to collect and enjoy art. There is no connection between chromosomes and static appreciation. And why is it that engineers who test higher in masculinity in art Terman miles mask in the family and take tests. Why is that engineers also tend to enjoy the works of Bach. I refuse to let any one little me out of my enjoyment of Baroque music and Italian Renaissance painting and modern. I would suggest that understanding and enjoying the music of Bach for example has nothing whatever to do with X X X Y chromosomes and engineers enjoy the complex structures of counterpoint and that's probably because engineering minds tend to enjoy complex dynamic structures of whatever kind and has no imputation on the
engineer that he likes counterpoint. We cannot be human unless we have elaborate codes for behavior. But perhaps Herbert Marcuse say he was right in asking what are the codes that will deliver the greatest amount of potential enjoyment and self-fulfillment for the least cost of innovations and repression and discipline. In other terms it is man made for culture or our culture is made for man. Actually every changing generation in its tertiary sexual characteristics is made up from a mosaic of traits taking from both father and mother in learning terms just as genetic physical traits are a mosaic of traits from mother and father. Let me give a simple example of what I mean. In our society at present the doctor enjoys high social status in part
indicated by the high income of doctors empowered by our legislative attempts to subsidize doctors through health insurance and other means strings enough against the doctor's most extreme and vociferous objections. Why this irrational fight against self-interest. From teaching many generations of young doctors in medical schools I think I have something I can answer in my judgment. A good doctor has something tensely masculine traits in terms of competitively high status intention to have respect where the income and intensity of this apply to remote symbolic Ian's willingness to accept responsibility and so on. The doctor wants to be symbolically the father so far as his complete authority go and rest his objection to any governmental or public authority before he sees it as a delusion for his
own total male authority. But at the same time every good doctor also has gotten from his mother a feminine concern for other people especially the weak and the sick. That is more than the ordinary endowment of a male. In fact it's not male tall. In life space terms it's really closer to the normal biological roles of the female in nurturing and protecting life less without in any way including the essential male nurse of the doctor. It's plain that in this matter he is a mosaic of so-called masculine and feminine traits. Taylor in fact thinks that one of the major hidden Motors in social change is just this mosaic of identifications in which each generation subtly changes the
generation which primarily identifies with the father is Petrus and one that identifies primarily with the mother is mentors and their mixtures of them and their areas in which there's a them to cation on them. But in general an extreme form the PAC trust we thought us use authoritarian directives paternalist and restricted the mattress. Libertarian nurturant and democratic. The pettiest is absolute rest and conservative. The Naturist relativist and progressive way Petrus father identified her as a resentment of women because the mother is the basis of the conflict between father and son and to Petrus women are inferior and sinful.
Think about historical periods to which he supplied them with the mother identifier. There is a high status and freedom of women just orthodoxy is countered by not just freedom to include interference with a Papist regime whose crime intervention in a mattress regime takes the form of new church nurturant social welfare insurance. The father identifying Petrus is a rigid and fiercely loyal compulsive traditionalist. The naturist is a spontaneous creative innovator. The plant just distrusts research and intellectual inquiry as weakening authoritarian orthodoxy. The mad trust the spouses research to change the regime for the better
and hence the mattress tends toward formal heresy pederasts who love an exalted male things have anxiety over homosexuality. Mother identifying mattress that's over incest purchased prostitution is opposed to naturist promiscuity or free love or sexual emancipation. They practiced seeks to maximize sexual differences because it benefits from them conceptually and in dress the mattress minimizes sex difference from this quick sketch it would seem that. From about the time of Franklin D Roosevelt. Our society has had a mattress to train. I don't mean to imply any kind of invidious judgments about males and females except to suggest that a total society names both masculine and
feminine. Of course it's possible to reject identification with both parents and to abandon the values of both. But it's almost like being a human dropout to become this rather sterile drop out pattern of age mate. Odd Hoke having invited what are essentially anti-cult role anti-North the hallmark of this kind of anime is aimlessness and the tyranny of conformity to this conformity was highly stereotyped and limiting and requires you to make when you cut off the past. The same all mistakes that have been made in America today politically economically and socially. The main trend of our society seems recently to be again toward the path of trust.
And this part just dispensation is viewed with alarm by those who would wish to diminish the unrestrained power of the military industrial complex and who would really prefer the Peace Corps to a Vietnam interventionist relation with other countries unrestrained power may be masculine. But it's not always socially useful. The differences between mapquest and path just are pervasive in India. And individual preferences tend to be clear. Some people prefer the right thinking security of terrorist orthodoxy under which the main problem is merely enforcing the bill used informally. Others prefer the anxiety the excitement and
the and the move of relativism. It's possible that thing immediate new generation is puzzling because it's needed Pat just more classical mattress and in the case the present day alienation from past trust authority and continuity which is necessary too is quite extreme. Whether that authority being rude to me and ridiculed father the father in the TV was always a clown and Blondie and mama always know better he's always best as a male I refuse to believe that being a father in a man is quite that ridiculous as it's presented. But we have the demeaned and ridiculed father. We have the recent president reject something of a tragedy. He doesn't know yet quite what happened to him.
They papal authority over some very serious Life Matters is out of touch. The police. The college student and in some cases college administrations when presumably you should be about the same goals or at the establishment general I think that is to me a somewhat disconcerting anti-pattern just anti-authority employing and discount maybe something good will come from it. But I feel the same way about what I feel about jeans throwing a monkey wrench into delicate machinery is only rarely going to benefit and cosmic rays going into germ cells only very rarely is going to make for a good mutation and pure destructive and by no means as M is only very rarely going to produce a better world.
But the rejection of Patrick's personalities meanwhile has been building up tremendously and the patters may be slated now for a period in the saddle. I regret it because it's so extreme. Men overwhelm opposition women undermine it and the social style of the corresponding institutions. Correspondingly contrast it seems to me that you have a decent society. If there are essentially masculine and feminine or male and female traits we certainly need them both because the extremes are distressing. Chaos of relativism or absolute ramping tattooist prisms in right thinking. I have suggested to use some 10 levels on which we may discuss sexual routing problems or more. But there exist at least
these part of the problem is that one cannot always pretend to know at which level to which level any specific item be assigned. This tenderness toward another person on mass. As a human biologist one might tend to be over instinctive list but as a cultural anthropologist one might be just as prone to be over relativistic. Meanwhile as a humanist I know that there are always changing styles and many ways of being human. To be human is to be constantly burdened with self definition and perhaps so long as the individual continues to grow. The achieving of an absolute and static density will always elude you.
I have tried to steer here a course between Scylla and Charybdis rocked of the dogma and the whirlpool of relativist chaos. The main principle I espouse is that we should not fear but should cherish human differences of whatever kind. And not to be too fanatical in categorizing them and not to be too invidious in saying that one is good and the other is bad. Ulysses after a long turmoil and more than one time being lost MADE IT HOME FINALLY I think. And Penelope. However you define and redefine home. I hope you will make it too. You want to
keep more of their own thank. You have been listening to Dr Westen love bar professor of anthropology at Duke University. As he spoke on the anthropological perspectives of sexuality This is Ben sexuality a search for perspective a series of recorded lectures from an interdisciplinary colloquy on human sexuality held on the campus of Michigan State University. The editor for the series is Steve Jensen. This is a Michigan State University radio production. This is the national educational radio network.
Series
Sexuality: a search for perspective
Episode
Anthropological perspectives of sexuality
Producing Organization
Michigan State University
Contributing Organization
University of Maryland (College Park, Maryland)
AAPB ID
cpb-aacip/500-rf5kfk47
If you have more information about this item than what is given here, or if you have concerns about this record, we want to know! Contact us, indicating the AAPB ID (cpb-aacip/500-rf5kfk47).
Description
Episode Description
This third program in the series features a lecture by Weston La Barre, Professor of Anthropology at Duke University.
Series Description
A series of lectures from an interdisciplinary colloquy on human sexuality, held on the campus of Michigan State University.
Topics
Social Issues
Subjects
Genetics.
Media type
Sound
Duration
00:58:58
Embed Code
Copy and paste this HTML to include AAPB content on your blog or webpage.
Credits
Editor: Jensen, Steve
Producing Organization: Michigan State University
Speaker: La Barre, Weston, 1911-1996
AAPB Contributor Holdings
University of Maryland
Identifier: 70-SUPPL (National Association of Educational Broadcasters)
Format: 1/4 inch audio tape
Duration: 00:58:15
If you have a copy of this asset and would like us to add it to our catalog, please contact us.
Citations
Chicago: “Sexuality: a search for perspective; Anthropological perspectives of sexuality,” University of Maryland, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC, accessed April 19, 2024, http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-500-rf5kfk47.
MLA: “Sexuality: a search for perspective; Anthropological perspectives of sexuality.” University of Maryland, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Web. April 19, 2024. <http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-500-rf5kfk47>.
APA: Sexuality: a search for perspective; Anthropological perspectives of sexuality. Boston, MA: University of Maryland, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Retrieved from http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-500-rf5kfk47