CULTURAL OBSERVATIONS: ATTITUDES TOWARD MARITAL SEX
Among groups, with few exceptions, men regard marital sex as a natural right, to be sampled regularly and enjoyed. As with orgasm, the data for women are more variable. Rainwater, in his study of marital relations in four cultures of poverty, found a range of responses to questions on interest and enjoyment of marital sex by women. The gamut went from, “If God made anything better he kept it to himself,” to “I would be happy if I never had to do that again; it’s disgusting”. The norm among his four groups, however, was closer to the latter attitude. Sex was generally considered to be a man’s pleasure and a woman’s duty. Women were believed not to have sexual desires at all or to have much weaker needs than men had. In Tepoztlan respectable women were expected also to have strong negative attitudes toward sex. Women who needed men sexually were called loca (crazy) and perhaps bewitched (Lewis).
Although data are scant, the women of Mangaia, Bala, and East Bay appear to have more positive attitudes toward the sexual parts of their marriages, if frequency is any indication. Even so, a high normative interest and positive regard for sex by married women is not frequently encountered in the cross-cultural literature. Reasons for this are not hard to find: emphasis on virginity for girls, with lack of premarital experience; the cultural/experiential factor in women’s orgasmic response, typically observed to be more important to women than to men; the characteristic male domination of marital sex, in that males initiate sexual activity and direct it to their satisfaction (with some exceptions as previously noted); the consequences for women of pregnancy and child care; the fairly widespread regard for women as sexual property, to be used, bartered, an exchanged; and rules of modesty, religious sanctions, and taboos which are directed more against women’s participation in sex than against men’s.
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