The Evolution of Marriage and of the Family

by Ch. Letourneau

[111] Ibid., Cato.

CHAPTER IV.
SOME SINGULAR FORMS OF SEXUAL ASSOCIATION.

I. Primitive Sexual Immorality.—Origin of modesty—Absence of modesty in the savage—Loan of wives in Melanesia and among the Bochimans—Absence of modesty in the Esquimaux, the Redskins, and Polynesians—Right of the husband in Polynesia—Loan or barter of wives—Erotic training of little girls in Polynesia—Society of the Areoïs—Man in a state of nature—Unnatural love in New Caledonia, in the two Americas, among Asiatic peoples, and in Greco-Roman antiquity—The erastes of Crete.

II. Some Strange Forms of Marriage.—Coarseness of primitive marriage—Horror of incest artificially created—Incest among various peoples—Artificial defloration—Experimental marriages among the Redskins, the Otomies, the Sonthals, the Tartars, and in Ceylon—Temporary marriages among the Jews of Morocco and the Tapyres—Free unions—Partial marriages and marriages for a term among the Arabs—Marriage and the right of the strongest in savage countries—Savage coarseness and civilised depravity.

I. Primitive Sexual Immorality.

In a former work[112] I have attempted to trace the genesis of a sentiment peculiar to humanity—the sentiment of modesty. It would be inexpedient here to treat the subject afresh in detail, but I will recall the conclusions arrived at by that investigation. Modesty is par excellence a human sentiment, and is totally unknown to the animals, although the procreative need inspires them with desires and passions essentially identical with what in man we call love; it is therefore certainly an artificial sentiment, and comparative ethnology proves that it must have resulted from the enforced chastity imposed on women under the most terrible penalties. In reality, primitive marriage hardly merits the name; it is simply the taking possession of one or several women by one man, who holds them by the same title as all other property, and who treats adultery, when unauthorised by himself, strictly as robbery. This ferocious restraint has resulted, especially in the woman, in the formation of particular mental impressions, corresponding psychically to the sentiment of modesty, and inducing a certain sexual reserve which has become instinctive. But this moral inhibition is still very weak in races of low development, and, taking the whole human species, it exists chiefly in the woman; it is a sexual peculiarity of character, and is of relatively recent origin.

If we keep well in mind these preliminary considerations, we shall not be much surprised at the forms of sexual association which we are about to consider, although they are singularly repulsive to our ideas of morality. We shall be still less surprised at them when we are acquainted with the extreme licence permitted in many savage and barbarous societies.

There is nothing more difficult for us to realise, civilised as we are, than the mental state of the man far behind us in cultivation as regards what we call par excellence “morality.” It is not indecency; it is simply an animal absence of modesty. Acts which are undeniably quite natural, since they are the expression of a primordial need, essential to the duration of the species, but which a long ancestral and individual education has trained us to subject to a rigorous restraint, and to the accomplishment of which, consequently, we cannot help attaching a certain shame, do not in the least shock the still imperfect conscience of the primitive man. On this point facts are eloquent and abundant; I will quote a few of them.

In Tasmania it way thought an honour for women to prostitute themselves to Europeans, who were ennobled in the eyes of the natives by the prestige of their superiority.[113] The Australians, who were a little more developed than the Tasmanians, willingly lent or hired out their women—at least those that were their own property—to their friends.[114]

The women were not less bestial than their males. They often engaged, says Peltier, in furious combats, fighting with spears, for the possession of a man. This is a peculiar case, and is an entirely human instance of that law of battle of which I have spoken in regard to animals. Like the females of animals also the Australian women adored strength, and when the men of their own horde were beaten in battle they sometimes went over to the camp of the conquerors of their own accord (Mitchell).[115] In these facts there is nothing exceptional, and we may change the country without changing the customs. Thus the Bochimans treat their wives as simple domestic animals, and offer them willingly to strangers,[116] as do also the Australians.