Any anthropologists here? Explain this exception of male and female mating behavior in this African tribe found in the Omo valley.

NomadicAnomaly · 2017-06-05T05:02:32+00:00

Egalitarian groups have much much better social relations than we do. We're all kinds of fucked up. I'm not an Anthropologist, but I've done a lot of research.

scotFree66 · 2017-06-04T22:01:52+00:00

...i bet this society is still living in mud huts and making everything by hand. An advanced Civilisation goes hand in hand with controlling and evenly rationing females individually to the men.

cashmoney_x · 2017-06-05T13:00:33+00:00

You should read Sex at Dawn. There are all kinds of cultures that have practices like this and interestingly enough, the idea of sexual jealousy is seen as abhorrent, shameful behaviour.

I think this is the way humans are naturally (if you will) predisposed/inclined to live (and if you look not so closely you can see that pretty clearly even here in our so called monogamous culture) and what happened was the move to living in one place, one family per home led to a push towards monogamy and shaming of our naturally (there's that word again) polygamous instincts.

I actually think that our culture provided amazing technology at the expense of human happiness and health. The author of Sex at Dawn has a book coming out about this called Civilized to Death. It's interesting to ponder.

PLUTOKRAT · 2017-06-04T20:15:29+00:00

Young men and women of the tribe, organized dances at night where basically they chose a man for the night.

Might be.

The women seemed to have so much sexual freedom and their sexual promiscuity turns out is not a huge deal in this tribe.

Absolutely NOT. Can't be. Never heard of it, and even though I'm not an anthropologist (I study Med and Surgery), evolutionary psych is one of my hobbies.

What I know is this - I don't know if you are confusing it with this:

The trouble is, those idyllic, non-Western [sexually liberated] societies seem to have existed only in the minds of a few misguided, if influential, academics. The classic example is Margaret Mead, one of several prominent anthropologists who early this century reacted to the political misuses of Darwinism by stressing the malleability of the human species and asserting the near absence of human nature. Mead's best-known book, Coming of Age in Samoa, created a sensation upon its appearance in 1928. She seemed to have found a culture nearly devoid of many Western evils: status hierarchies, intense competition, and all kinds of needless anxieties about sex. Here in Samoa, Mead wrote, girls postpone marriage "through as many years of casual love-making as possible." Romantic love "as it occurs in our civilisation," bound up with ideas of "exclusiveness, jealousy and undeviating fidelity," simply "does not occur in Samoa."41 What a wonderful place!

It is hard to exaggerate the influence of Mead's findings on twentieth-century thought. Claims about human nature are always precarious, vulnerable to the discovery of even a single culture in which its elements are fundamentally lacking. For much of this century, such claims have been ritually met with a single question: "What about Samoa?"

In 1983 the anthropologist Derek Freeman published a book called Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth. Freeman had spent nearly six years in Samoa (Mead had spent nine months, and hadn't spoken the language when she arrived), and was well versed in accounts of its earlier history, before Western contact had much changed it. His book left Mead's reputation as a great anthropologist in serious disarray. He depicted her as a naif, a twenty-three-year-old idealist who went to Samoa steeped in fashionable cultural determinism, chose not to live among the natives, and then, dependent for her data on scheduled interviews, was duped by Samoan girls who made a game of misleading her. Freeman assaulted Mead's data broadly — the supposed dearth of status {75} competition, the simple bliss of Samoan adolescence — but for present purposes what matters is the sex: the purportedly minor significance of jealousy and male possessiveness, the seeming indifference of men to the Madonna-whore dichotomy.

Actually, on close examination, Mead's point-by-point findings turn out to be less radical than her glossy, well-publicized generalizations. She conceded that Samoan males took a certain pride in the conquest of a virgin. She also noted that each tribe had a ceremonial virgin — a girl of good breeding, often a chief's daughter, who was carefully guarded until, upon marriage, she was manually deflowered, with the blood from her hymen proving her purity. But this girl, Mead insisted, was an aberration, "excepted" from the "free and easy experimentation" that was the norm. Parents of lower rank "complacently ignore" their daughters' sexual experimentation.42 Mead granted, almost under her breath, that a virginity test was "theoretically" performed "at weddings of people of all ranks," but she dismissed the ceremony as easily and often evaded.

Freeman raised the volume of Mead's more hushed observations and pointed out some things she had failed entirely to note. The value of virgins was so great in the eyes of marriageable men, he wrote, that an adolescent female of any social rank was monitored by her brothers, who would "upbraid, and sometimes beat" her if they found her with "a boy suspected of having designs on her virginity." As for the suspected boy, he was "liable to be assaulted with great ferocity." Young men who fared poorly in the mating game sometimes secured a mate by sneaking in at night, forcibly deflowering a woman, and then threatening to disclose her corruption unless she agreed to marriage (perhaps in the form of elopement, the surest way to avoid a virginity test). A woman found on her wedding day not to be a virgin was publicly denounced with a term meaning, roughly, "whore." In Samoan lore, one deflowered woman is described as a "wanton woman, like an empty shell exposed by the ebbing tide!" A song performed at defloration ceremonies went like this: "All others have failed to achieve entry, all others have failed to achieve entry... . He is first by being foremost, being first he is foremost; O to be foremost!"43 These are not the hallmarks of a sexually liberated culture. {76}

It now appears that some of the supposed Western aberrations that Mead found lacking in Samoa had if anything been suppressed by Western influence. Missionaries, Freeman noted, had made virginity testing less public — performed in a house, behind a screen. In "former days," as Mead herself wrote, if the tribe's ceremonial virgin was found at her wedding to be less than virginal, "her female relatives fell upon and beat her with stones, disfiguring and sometimes fatally injuring the girl who had shamed their house."

Title	Any anthropologists here? Explain this exception of male and female mating behavior in this African tribe found in the Omo valley.
Author	[deleted]
Upvotes	3
Comments	9
Date	June 4, 2017 1:38 PM UTC (9 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MGTOW
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MGTOW/comments/6f7dhn/any_anthropologists_here_explain_this_exception/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MGTOW/any-anthropologists-here-explain-this-exception-of.583516 https://theredarchive.com/post/583516

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