The Sexual Paradise that never was

https://quillette.com/2025/12/30/the-sexual-paradise-that-never-was-margaret-mead-samoa/

by cjauvin • 7 months ago

4 2 7 months ago

tim-tday• 7 months ago

I’m not sure the article proves the headline. The observation period was short. Ok. No strict guidelines for process existed because she was one of the first. The methodology could have been better. Ok? That doesn’t quite raise to the level of the claim the headline is making.

appreciatorBus• 7 months ago

In Mead’s telling, the Samoans, having “no conviction of sin,” had “the sunniest and easiest attitudes towards sex.” They regarded lovemaking as “the pastime par excellence … based on the general assumption that sex is play, permissible in all hetero- and homosexual expression, with any sort of variation as an artistic addition.” Romantic love does not occur in Samoa, she further claimed, while many of the emotions that “have afflicted mankind” had been eliminated—“perhaps jealousy most importantly of all.” The islanders’ relaxed attitude towards sex meant that “frigidity and psychic impotence do not occur.” Instead, the “exceptionally smooth sex adjustment of adult Samoans [was] preceded … by a period of free lovemaking and promiscuity before marriage by adolescents.”
Freeman provides a darker—but, he insists, more accurate—picture of Samoan sexual behaviour, replete with numerous anecdotal and recorded accounts of sexual repression, jealousy, and violence.

Headline seems to sum it up reasonably accurately.

The Sexual Paradise that never was

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