sex and marriage

Chapter 3
Generally speaking.Marriage customs are produced by the interaction of three factors: human instinct, economic development and religious influence.It is not to say that these three factors can be completely separated.Even in other ways.For example, the fact that shops are closed on Sundays, which had religious causes, is now the result of economic considerations.So are many laws and customs about sex.A beneficial custom with religious origins.After its religious influence has worn off, it can often continue because of its usefulness.The difference between religion and instinct is also difficult to distinguish. All religions that can control people's behavior, generally speaking, always have the basis of some people's instinctive needs.However, if we pay attention to the influence of genetic factors, or in other words, which of the various instinct-based behaviors is more important, then religion and instinct can also be distinguished.For example, love and jealousy are inherent emotions of people, but religions blindly believe that jealousy is a moral emotion, which is indispensable and should be supported and understood by society, while love is dispensable.

What we usually imagine is that many people's instincts are reflected in sexual relationships, but it is not.My purpose in this book is not to deal with anthropology, except that which is necessary to explain the problems of modern society.But on the other hand, the science of anthropology is very necessary to our usefulness, for it can shed light on how much behavior which is considered to be contrary to instinct can persist for a long time without too much or too much conflict with instinct. Obvious conflict.For example, the legal (and sometimes public) rape of virgins by priests is a common custom not only among savages and ignorants, but also among some more civilized peoples.In Christian countries, it is generally believed that the first sexual intercourse is the prerogative of the groom, and most Christians still believe that their aversion to the vice of religious rape is instinctive.The custom of lending one's wife to a guest as a gift to entertain guests is also contrary to human instinct in the eyes of modern Europeans, but this custom is very common.Polyandry is also a vice that contradicts human nature in the eyes of white people.As for the act of killing one's own baby, it is even more against human nature.But the facts tell us relentlessly that people are more than willing to kill their own babies as long as it makes financial sense to do so.

The above facts show that for human beings, instinct is extremely vague, and it is easy to run counter to moral concepts.This is true not only among savages, but among some civilized men as well.In fact, the word "instinct" is not a very appropriate word for human sexual behavior.Scientifically speaking, the only behavior that can be called instinct in the strict sense of psychology is the baby's sucking action.I don't know about savages, but civilized people learn to have sex.For example, it is not uncommon for couples who have been married for many years to consult their doctor about how to have children, and the doctor, after examining them, finds that the couple does not understand how to have sexual intercourse properly.Strictly speaking, therefore, coitus is not innate, nor is sexuality instinctive, although there is a natural inclination towards it and a desire which cannot be satisfied without it.

True, when it comes to human beings, we do not have the sexual behaviors that other animals have, because human instincts have been replaced by something quite different.Human beings have, first of all, a feeling of dissatisfaction, which gives rise to random and imperfect actions of all kinds, but which slowly or occasionally reaches a level of satisfaction which is often repeated. the behavior of.Therefore, the so-called instinct is not an innate action, but a learned impulse.As a rule, the activity which satisfies human beings cannot be clearly prescribed in advance, although that activity which is most physiologically beneficial will be the most satisfying given that we have mastered it before developing habits to the contrary. of.

Since all civilized modern societies are based on the patriarchal family, and the establishment of the patriarchal family also dominates the moral concepts of ordinary people towards women.The first question which we have now to investigate is: From what natural impulse springs the father's affections.The problem is not as simple as the uninitiated imagine.A mother's affection for her child is not a difficult question to understand, because there is a biological and inseparable close bond between mother and child, at least during the lactation period.However, although the father and the child are physically connected, this connection is indirect, gradually instilled and inferred, and this connection cannot be divorced from the wife's ethics and morals. It belongs to the category of knowledge, not instinct.This is all the more clearly the case if the father's affections are concerned only with his own children.Even so, fathers still have feelings for their children.The Melanesians do not know that men have fathers, but among them the fathers love their children as much as those who know they have children.In Malinowski's writings on the Trobriand Islanders.The father's psychology is explained very thoroughly.In particular, his three books, Sex and Sexual Oppression in Savage Societies, Fathers in Primitive Psychology, and Sexual Lives of the Barbarians of Northwest Melanesia, are great for those who want to explore fatherhood. People with feelings are indispensable.As for a man's affection for his own child, it is actually for two quite different reasons: first, because he believes it is his own; second, because he knows it is his wife's. .In those places where the father is never known, only the second reason exists.

Malinowski proved an indisputable truth: the Trobriand Islanders did not know that a man had a father.He observed this phenomenon.When a man returns after being away for a year or several years, he is very happy to see his wife has a newborn child.Such a person can never understand the mind of a European, because a European would doubt his wife's morals in such a situation.Malinowski also found that there a person who owned a herd of fine-bred pigs would always castrate all the boars, unaware that this behavior would lead to the extinction of the species.People on the island believed that the child was brought by the gods and placed in his mother's arms.Although they know that virgins cannot conceive, they still believe that it is because of a physical barrier set up by the god of marriage, which prevents the gods from giving.There, young unmarried men and women live a life of complete love and freedom, but for some reason, unmarried women seldom get pregnant.Pregnancy by unmarried women there is considered a very shameful thing, although according to the local concept, pregnancy is not the result of their actions, which is really strange.Sooner or later a girl gets bored with life before marriage and chooses to marry.She moved to live in her husband's village.But people still think she and her children belong to her own village.The philosophy there is that her husband and children are not related by blood, so their descendants must be completely dependent on the woman.

In other places the authority over the child is exercised by the father, but among the people of the Trobriand Island it is exercised by the uncle of the child.This creates a very peculiar and complicated problem.The prohibition between brothers and sisters is so severe that, when they are adults, brothers and sisters are not allowed to talk about anything sexual, although they cannot avoid talking about it indirectly.Although uncles had authority over nephews, nephews rarely saw their uncles except when they were away from their mothers and families.This worthy institution enables the children to develop, without discipline, an affection for their fathers which is not found anywhere else.The father of the children may play with them and love them, but he has no right to discipline them.On the contrary, although their uncle can order them, he has no power to be with them constantly.

It is curious that the people there, though they think there is no blood relation between the child and its father, conclude that the child is more like their mother's man than their mother or their brothers and sisters.It would be very rude to say that there is some resemblance between brothers and sisters, or between a child and its mother, and they would deny it even if there were a very marked resemblance between them.According to Malinowski, fathers feel affection for their children because they believe that children are like fathers rather than mothers.He found that the relationship between father and son here is more harmonious and full of emotion than that in a civilized society, without the color of Oedipal abnormal psychology at all.

Despite Malinowski's efforts to explain it, he was still unable to persuade the Trobriand Islanders to recognize the existence of the role of father.They thought it was just a silly story made up by those Western missionaries.Christianity is a patriarchal religion and as such cannot be understood, either emotionally or cognitively, by peoples who do not recognize the role of the father.In Melanesian view, "God, father" should be changed to "God, uncle".But this does not give the correct meaning to this sentence, because "God, Father" in Christianity contains both power and benevolence, but in Melanesia, it is generally believed that what the uncle has is only power, and the father All it has is kindness. The idea that "man is a child of God" was never acceptable to the Trobriand Islanders, because they believed that no one could be a man's child.Therefore, those Western missionaries should first study the biological facts before preaching their teachings.We learn from Malinowski that those Western missionaries were not engaged in this most important work, and therefore they could not carry out their missionary work at all.

(End of this chapter)