Quote:
Originally Posted by cbrmale  Trond,
The sexually insatiable goes back a long way, well before any of the cultures in your posting developed. Primitive cultures which were not discovered until the 18th and 19th Centuries. Indeed, my posting pre-dates any of the cultures you mentioned. Greece and Minoa and so on were recent: humanity evolved over hundreds of thousands of years, and these cultures were only a few thousand years ago. Very recent.
Primitive cultures were a lot more sexually relaxed than you give them credit for, although in many cases they didn't understand the linkage between sex and pregnancy. In Australia, for example, there was polygamy, but a wife could also have sex with any man in her extended family, say a brother or uncle of her husband. In Tahiti, wives would have sex with other men during feasts. In the Trobiand islands, this still happens. In some parts of Africa if a woman wanted to have sex with another lover, this was fine as long as he was from a different village. This also applied to polygamous marriages, which is akin to Australian aboriginals.
By the way, female circumcision is not in 'many' parts of Africa, but a relatively small practice in a very large continent. It is largely confined to the Muslim areas of the continent, although Islam itself encourages sexual pleasure for both men and women, and therefore female circumcision is against the teachings of the Koran. It's actually a reaction against traditional African female sexual behaviour, where wives expected to be allowed to have other lovers. Again, a recent development of men supressing the feminine. |
These are all pretty recent cultures. How can you know that the Polynesian or Australian aboriginals live(d) a life which is similar to that of, say, European hunter-gatherers thousands of years ago? You can't. The fact is, very little is known for certain about pre-historic Europe. I'm sorry, but I think your view of what was going on thousands of years ago sounds very romanticized. Primitive cultures were probably extremely different, region from region, and your previous post on "Asians" certainly don't apply to even most of people in Asia.
Most studies show that men are, on average, hornier than women. Men probably always have been. You mentioned polygamy: notice that men with female harems are far more common than women with male harems. This makes biological sense (and a common pattern in a number of mammals), as one man can easily make a lot of women pregnant. We are biological creatures, after all. Sex wouldn't even exist without a biological function. Among the San people of Africa (according to some, the oldest hunter-gatherer culture in existence), men apparently choose when to have sex, even though women are nearly equal in social status:
Survival of the !Kung San people in the Kalahari Desert
This does not mean that the women don't enjoy sex, of course.
If you are studying these topics, I think such objections could be valid ground for further enquiry. Take this as friendly advice from someone who just got his PhD in evolutionary biology, and who has also been interested in ancient cultures since childhood.