Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality (19 page)

Women provide a majority of the calories and men provide protein from hunting meat. Unlike their agricultural neighbors, they store no food and experience no droughts. They can always find something to eat. Their diet is varied and rich in nutrients. In addition, they spend a relatively small amount of time gathering food and a great deal of time socializing. While they have remained small in number, compared to the agriculturalists, the Hadza people maintain strong health.

Their religion has been described by Frank Marlowe, Harvard anthropologist, as minimalist. Until a generation ago, they didn’t even bury their dead. Today they bury the dead but make no ceremony and show little or no
emotion. They have no concept of an afterlife. Death seems to be just another part of life. The focus is on living today and enjoying social connections. According to Marlowe, one of the few rituals they have:

… is the Mai-toh-ko, or female puberty initiation, which happens when the berries are ripening. Pubertal girls gather in a camp where they are covered with animal fat and adorned with beads, then chase boys and try to hit them with their fertility sticks.
¹⁰⁰

Quite different from any Christian or Muslim religious ritual, the ritual is sexual and shows that women hold a powerful place in the society.

Over the last century, there has been constant pressure to get the Hadza to settle down and farm. Most efforts were a combination of government and missionary work. Many included force or coercion. In every case, most Hadza soon returned to foraging. As Frank Marlowe observes:

Missionaries sometimes come to Mongo wa Mono and try to make converts. Usually, they do not last longer than a few months. Hadza children and teen-agers often sing Christian songs, and the Hadza welcome the food provided by missionaries, but there has been little conversion to Christianity. Many observers felt the settlements would mean the end of Hadza foraging, but surprisingly, they did not. Even today, few Hadza practice any kind of agriculture. Although most adult Hadza have lived in a settlement at some point in time, such experiences have been short-term and have not prevented them from continuing their foraging lifestyle and maintaining much of their traditional culture.
¹⁰¹

With respect to sex and relationships, the woman is in charge. A man and a woman stay together for a few years, then they split up and find other mates. Most Hadza go through several partners in a lifetime. There is no marriage or divorce. If a woman doesn’t like the way a man treats her, she simply leaves him. Occasionally, a man has more than one wife. While rare, this isn’t forbidden by the culture. Children are well cared for within the groups, and men seem to be very interested in the welfare of all children. The Hadza are not particularly concerned with paternity:

Up to 5% of Hadza women marry men from neighboring cultures.

Often after a Hadza woman does marry an outsider and has a child, she leaves him and returns to raise the child in a Hadza camp. This may well be because Hadza women are too independent to put up with the sort of treatment they get from non-Hadza men. When they do return, they do not experience any noticeable stigmatism.
¹⁰²

The children of such outside marriages are treated no differently.

One recurring theme among the Hadza people as well as other hunter-gathering peoples is the independence of women. How does a husband control a woman when she provides as much or more of the calories as the man and she can roam anywhere she likes? She is not seen as property and has as much support and freedom within the community as any man. She is seen as an independent sexual person from adolescence, with full rights to choose whom she likes.

In Polynesia, sex-positive,
¹⁰³
egalitarian cultures thrived for thousands of years. The Mangaians are good examples. They are a fishing and gardening society on an isolated island in the South Pacific. Sex within the culture is seen as positive in most respects, with a focus on sexual pleasure, particularly female satisfaction and multiple orgasms. Romantic love is not necessarily linked to sex. There are few restrictions, and most of those are on the kings and queens or elites.

Mangaian youths do not date. There is no gradual increase of intimacy beginning with kissing, necking and petting. For the youth, coitus is the expected outcome of the intimate encounter.

According to Donald Marshall, a cultural anthropologist, fewer than one out of one hundred girls or boys have not had “substantial sexual experience.”
¹⁰⁴
Young people are encouraged to have as many partners as
possible prior to marriage. Masturbation is seen as normal and encouraged.
¹⁰⁵
After a boy goes through supercision,
¹⁰⁶
he is taught sexual techniques in great detail by a male mentor. Also, as he becomes sexually active, he is expected to know a great deal about female anatomy. Young Mangaian males (early teens to early twenties) average three orgasms per night, seven nights a week. At 28 years of age, they average two orgasms per night, five to six times a week. The expectation is that the male will strive to have his partner have two to three orgasms to his one.
¹⁰⁷

Before Western contact, Mangaian women were seen as sexually equal, even superior to men. Women could expect their lovers to please her, and they might also wish to play with other women from time to time. Mangaian religion was not heavily involved in sex and sexuality. Little or no evidence exists of sexual prohibitions based on religion. What the initial English missionaries found looked nothing like their Victorian sexuality so they worked hard to infect the culture with the restrictive practices and ideas of Christianity.

In present-day Mangaian culture, Christianity has taken over, but missionaries have largely failed in their attempts to impose religious sexual values. Christian sexual guilt and shame do not infect the Mangaians. Premarital sex is still widely practiced. The purpose of sex is still seen as largely recreational.

Hunter-gatherers gave way to societies that farmed or gardened while hunting or herding. When the soil was depleted, they moved on with their herds. The Na is such a culture.

The Na, also called the Mosuo, are a tribe of about 40,000 who live on the border of the Yunnan and Sichuan provinces in China. They are particularly interesting in this context because they seem to break many of our religious notions about marriage and childrearing.

The Na do not practice marriage – their language does not even have a word for husband or wife. In the Na culture, boys and girls pass directly from childhood to adulthood at puberty. Upon achieving adulthood, they are sexually free. The Na are matriarchal, as kinship is traced through the mother, and most people develop close relationships with maternal aunts and uncles. In matriarchal societies, women lead in different ways than men in a patriarchy. Women are more consultative and cooperative in decision-making; control of others is not the objective, but rather harmony and a prosperous family for all. It bears some similarities to the bonobo chimp matriarchal system discussed in
Chapter 9
.

The girl’s residence is the primary place for sex. A man always visits a woman, but he must be out of the house by morning. Men and women do not live together. Fatherhood is unimportant. A child is raised by his mother in the home of her mother. The uncles are the male figures in the child’s life. The mother may not know or care who the father is. Women guard their sexual freedom as do the men. The number of lovers a person has can be a point of pride, though not something that is openly discussed.

Within the family, women can talk to other women about their sexual experiences as do men to men, but it is considered improper to discuss sex in mixed company. The Na women are famous for their openness to sex, even with people outside their tribe. Marco Polo visited them in 1265 and wrote, “They do not consider it objectionable for a foreigner, or any other man, to have his way with their wives, daughters, sisters, or any other women in their home.”
¹⁰⁸
Being a macho Italian, Polo failed to realize that it was the women who chose to enjoy the foreigners.

The Na show us that humans are not programmed for any particular sexual arrangement. Women can be as independent as men in matters of sex, and healthy successful childrearing does not require a Western-style family. Finally, the Na cannot be easily classified into any of our preconceived relationship types. Men and women are equal in almost every way.

The Na people are very religious and follow a form of Buddhism as well as their own ancient religion, Dabaism. It has many gods, including the rain, mountain and cave gods. Many deities are genderless, but some of the most important gods are gendered. As with many cultures, their gods
reflect the sexual power dynamics of the culture. The sun is female and the moon male.
¹⁰⁹
The primary deity of the Na is a goddess, Gemu.
¹¹⁰

In the 1950s, the Chinese government attempted to force the Na to marry. The government put pressure on the tribe in many cruel ways. Chinese communism is notoriously conservative with respect to sex, even prudish, just as the major religions, so the ways of the Na were seen as being out of line with the dogma. In recent years, the government has relaxed control and pressure, and, as a result, the Na reverted back to their original sexual practices.
¹¹¹

The major religions have many dogmatic ideas about marriage, childrearing and sexuality. They also make claims about human nature and sexuality. They proclaim that a child must be raised by two opposite-sex parents, that sexual activity before marriage will harm the marriage, that marriage is essential for the greatest human happiness, that masturbation is unnatural, that women must be subordinate to men, etc. They say that without religious sexual control, humans will run amok, behaving immorally and without regard to families and children.

Among these three cultures we can see that none of these dogmas hold water. People have lived happily and productively for thousands of years without the sexual, marital and childrearing practices of Jesus, Mohammed, Joseph Smith or Buddha. Comparing these cultures with our own, we can see that modern religions make claims about human nature and sex that are not supported by the data. Even if we cannot say exactly what human sexuality is, it definitively is not what Western religions claim.

98
For an excellent summary of the negative impact of agriculture on human health, see
http://www.scribd.com/doc/2100251/Jared-Diamond-
The-Worst-Mistake-in-the-History-of-the-Human-Race
or read Jared Diamond’s book,
Guns, Germs and Steel
(2005).

99
For an excellent article on the Hadza, see
National Geographic
, Dec. 2009.

100
Frank Marlowe, “Why the Hadza are Still Hunter-Gatherers,” in
Ethnicity, Hunter-Gatherers, and the “Other,”
edited by Susan Kent (2002), p. 252.

101
Ibid., p.255

102
Ibid., p. 256

103
Sex positivity is an attitude towards human sexuality that regards all consensual sexual activities as fundamentally healthy and pleasurable, and encourages sexual pleasure and experimentation.

104
Marshall, D.S. in
Human Sexual Behavior: Variations in the Ethnographic Spectrum
, (1971), edited by Robert C. Suggs, p. 103.

105
Worell, J. in
Encyclopedia of Women and Gender: sex similarities and differences, Vol.1
(2002), p. 295..

106
A partial cutting of the foreskin of the penis but not like circumcision. It is mainly practiced in Polynesian cultures.

107
Noted by Donald Symons in
The Evolution of Human Sexuality
, (1981), p. 263.

108
As noted in Ryan and Jetha's
Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What it Means for Modern Relationships
, (2007), p. 127.

109
Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender: Men and Women in the World’s Cultures
, edited by Carol R. Ember and Melvin Ember, (2003), p. 702.

110
Ibid., p. 608.

111
Ibid., p. 704.

How did the religion of early agricultural societies impact sex?

The transition from hunter-gatherer to agriculturalist took place rapidly in the fertile crescent in Iran and Iraq, and other places like China and India, more than 9,000 years ago. Since farming can increase food availability by 100 times and can support 100 times more people, the farmers quickly outpaced the birth rate of foragers, resulting in steady encroachment of agriculture upon hunter-gathering groups.

The conflict between foragers and farmers and herders has played out over the world for 10,000 years. Throughout the 20th century, scholars debated, “What happened to the Europeans who inhabited Europe before agriculture?” Some thought they learned farming from the neighboring groups and eventually became farmers themselves, but a 2009 study of ancient European DNA from graves over 7,500 years old concluded:

… there is little evidence of a direct genetic link between the hunter-gatherers and the early farmers. Today’s Europeans share few if any of the genes found in the early Europeans.
¹¹²

It is a recurring theme: farmers don’t integrate with hunter-gatherers; they eliminate them.

Invading farmers rarely adopt the cultural practices of those they replace. The result is a totally new set of sexual and religious practices. Even if a fraction of the people survive the farmer invasion, the religions don’t. The religion of the Great Plains Indians in the United States did not survive; Christianity took over. Tribal religions of Afganistan in the 800s CE did not survive; Islam took over. This change is especially true of sexual practices and gender relationships with invading religions.