America: The New Pornographers

"Masturbation is only for ugly people. And albinos."

No, this isn't a line from South Park, or some skewed Christian Right mantra to try to convince people who consider themselves good looking not to jerk off. It's what the natives of the Trobriand Islands explained to an anthropologist regarding their confusion as to why masturbation is such a common pastime in the West.

Now don't think this means that we as Americans simply enjoy pleasure more than other cultures, or by some *stroke* of luck are more comfortable with our bodies. According to Jack M. Weatherford, author of "Porn Row" and Macalester College Anthropology professor, it's actually quite the contrary.

In the chapter "Sex Without Partners" of his anthropological analysis of the porn industry, Weatherford looks at a tribal group living in scattered villages of east central India that are known as the Muria. In their culture, a part of adolescent life and education is participating in the Ghotul, a night activity that begins with singing, dancing, and coupling off to rub one another with sensual oils. As the night continues, the massages slowly turn into "more intimate touching and feeling of the other's body, and if both agree, they make love, or spend the night just caressing each other, or sleep snuggled closely together." They do this nightly, switching partners so that no two people are together for more than a couple days, and no one is left out.

Through these nightly encounters, each person learns everything about their partners' bodies-- every curve and crevice, how much oil they enjoy being rubbed with, how they respond to certain touches, how long they can keep it up, et cetera. In their view, the woman is seen as deserving wonderful sex since she has to bear the brunt of menstruation and child birth, and so each male is taught he must keep going until she is completely satisfied. Because of this practice, the male learns stamina and to stay erect for longer, so that he can keep going until she is set. Additionally, since adolescents jump right into coital rather than going through a period of masturbation, the female learns to come from vaginal stimulus alone, rather than learning to orgasm clitorally and later having to switch.

For the Muria, the concept of a platonic relationship is virtually unknown. "Every male-female relationship among unmarried people is expected to be sexual," and as their proverb goes, "Thirst is not quenched by licking dew."

You may be thinking 'But what about the STDs?' 'And all the babies?', but this is not an issue in their society.

As Weatherford explains,
"The Muria consider it bad for young people NOT to have sex, and for them teenage pregnancy does not seem to be a problem. Despite the possibilities of pregnancy, other issues are more important. In their explanation of the world, sex is a powerful force, and if it is stored too long inside the person, it may emerge in strange and harmful ways. To prevent such harm, sexual desires need to be exercised constantly."

In time, families set up arranged marriages for the young people, which are generally extremely satisfactory. In result of the Ghotuls, everyone in the same age group has been with everyone else, and so there is no urge from one partner to know what it would be like to be with a different partner, because-- oop! They already have! Also, since everyone has learned from everyone else, everyone knows everything that everyone else does, and so they're all amazing in bed.

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The entire experience is contrasted abruptly with the industrial society, particularly the masturbating habits of the citizens of our grand ol' U.S. of A.

As Weatherford puts it, "Muria youths learn coitus and may occasionally masturbate, but Western youths learn masturbation even though they may occasionally have coitus."

Weatherford points out that many of the ways westerners learn about sex end up being relatively detrimental to their sex life later in life. For the male, he learns to reach orgasm as quickly as possible, maybe in his parents' bathroom, hoping he'll come before his mom walks in, or at night under the covers, dreading the appearance of an older brother. He learns the goal of speed. As Weatherford says, "while the Muria boy learns through several years of practice in the Ghotul to sustain coitus until the female is satisfied, the American boy learns merely to rush through the act and get to the climax as quickly as possible."

Meanwhile, the female gets used to reaching orgasm through clitoral stimulus alone.

Once the two combine the masturbation backlash occurs.

For the male, it is difficult to unlearn speed. Now that he is doing it with another person, he allows for no dialogue between bodies as he simply goes in to finish the act as soon as possible and then leave. *On top* of this, being used to the strong and hard pressure of the hand, the switch to the softer, looser flesh of the vagina makes it difficult for him to come.

The woman is now faced with the challenge of coming through vaginal stimulus rather than clitoral, making the process irrelevant and frustrating for her. "By contrast, women in societies such as the Muria learn from the beginning to reach orgasm with penetration."

Weatherford explains how this ends up screwing us over for the future:

"During the initial years of adulthood, when coitus is new, the novelty of the act may be enough to overcome the problems of changing from masturbation to copulation, but in time problems arise. As the female's vagina becomes less firm and tight with age, her partner may experience greater difficulty maintaining an erection or attaining on orgasm. Problems of impotence, premature ejaculation, and lack or orgasm may all be connected with the early from of solitary sex training."

This does not happen for the Muria who learn to copulate (rather than masturbate) at an early age.

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The most interesting difference between sex styles is that, for the Muria, the emphasis is upon learning the other person's body and knowing everything about it and them so you can confidently please them. This, compared to our western way of learning all alone and all about your own body, so that you know it perfectly and are set for autosex, but don't have much consideration for the other person and what they want or how they work. In our culture, sex is selfish.

Even before addressing sex, the issue of one's partner becomes possessive. You can only be with one person at one time, or else everyone will be jealous because that person was supposed to be YOURS. As the Muria would say, this inhibits greatly upon sexual learning and the overall skills of all in the population. (Remember, however, that the Muria do end up marrying, and staying with that one partner for the rest of their life.)

The system of the Muria could never work in out society because people couldn't be trusted enough. They've been taught to think for themselves and only of the good of themselves, so in a theoretical Ghotul, you wouldn't be sure if some person had sketchy reasoning to be there in the first place. For the Muria, jealously doesn't take shape because everyone is equally participating and sharing everyone else.

All because Capitalism turns sex into a commodity.

[Another problem is how that kind of set-up would only work when you have a relatively small population and really only one community.]

America also has an incredibly interesting dynamic where we have a super-sexed-up culture, with music videos, clothing advertisements, and just about anything you can think of, juxtaposed with the extreme-Christian Right and conservative government that are constantly blaring messages of chastity and abstinence until marriage (if not after as well). This creates an atmosphere of urges and fantasy that are often awkwardly contained, or let to escape in secretive, sometimes embarrassing or harmful ways, as people wish their sexual thoughts didn't exists almost as much as they wish they would come true. Making it so the last thing most people want is to TALK about sex. Because that would be awful!

In severe contrast, in the Muria society, parents see the Ghotul as a way to keep adolescents out of mischief! Compared to ours which would see the mere concept of such a thing as promiscuous and sinful, let alone a case of minor scandal.

The overall result of severe shame related to sex, bombardment of sexual imagery, lack of sex, and lack of dialogue around said subject is that people grow up with often unattainable fantasies and expectations. This is what creates a need for porn, though it merely perpetuates the cycle when real human contact actually occurs and is unable to meet expectations, only creating more of a need for said images.

I'm still not sure what to make of our culture. I had always thought that the whole taking-it-slow thing was a good plan, but Weatherford and the Muria seem to make out anything beside penetration to be unnatural and oddly Western/industrial-based. I guess the key note of this label is the mentality of a mystery around sex and the other person, extenuated by a selfish goal of purely self-pleasure. But he still makes masturbation seem oddly pathetic.

While I had always thought the [sex-related] steps to overcome in our society were purely shame in sex and lack of sex-education, now it seems that there is so much more. That it's possible we are incredibly immature in the world of erotica.


*(All quotes come from Jack M. Weatherford's book, "Porn Row")