Growing Up Sexually

SCCS:

(2-,2,3,2+,3,3;5,5)

COMANCHES (North-American Natives)

More: Arapaho, Assiniboine, Athabascans, Blood/ Blackfoot, Cherokee, Cheyennes, Chipewyans, Apache Chiricahua, Crow, Dakota, Flathead, Gros Ventre, Hopi, Huron, Ingalik, Copper Inuit, Iñupiat, Iroquois, Kaska, Kiowa-Apache, Klamath, Kutenai, Kwakiutl, Lakota, Menominee, Mohave, Mantagnais / Naskapi, Navajo, Nootka, Ojibwa, Omaha, Papago, Pawnee, Paiute, Point Barrow, Pomo, Powhatans, Qipi, Quineault, San Ildefonso, Sanpoil, Seminole, Shoshone, Shuswap, Sioux, Tinglit, Ute, Yokuts, Yurok, Zuñi

Wallace and Hoebel (1952:p128)^{^[1]}^[39] state that small children play “chief” choosing wives. “The more precocious dallied in sexual experimentation. “One day we played at being married. I did my best to make a baby with my wife”, said Post Oak Jim”. “Although youngsters were not subject to moral censure for sexual activity, it was encouraged. Boys, during the period of their preadolescent gang life, ignored the girls to a great degree”. At adolescence, when they become “positively bashful”, this changes: the girls visit the boys. Linton (1945:p75)^{^[2]}^[40] states the following: “Sexual play between children began at an early age, and was carried out on quite freely as long as the two children were not brother and sister. The Comanche paid no attention to virginity; they took these childhood relations more or less for granted”. Further (p138, 156), free masturbation would decline after acquisition of the loin cloth, the children would “imitate” adult modesty. Much clandestine sex play, both heterosexual and homosexual, occurred; children would imitate adult obscenity. Children’s behaviour indicated a knowledge of the relation between copulation and conception (p138).

“Generally girls married young, sometimes even before puberty. Colonel Richard I. Dodge wrote of attending a Plains Indian dance where the “belles of the evening” were “two little girls of about ten years old, who, he believed, where already beginning “to feel matrimonial hankerings”. One Comanche chief, Sanaco, he declared, had as a wife “a pretty little maid of about ten years, of whom he was very fond”. Chief Sanaco may, or may not, have had sexual relations with his ten-year-old bride. To have done so would not have been unheard-of, as will be apparent later. […] [Berlandier] entrusted to his journal the method by which an older Comanche husband prepared a child wife for future sexual relations. The warrior purchased the little girl for a horse or a mule when she was seven or eight years old. The child continued to reside with her parents for the time being. When she was nine or ten, her husband began coming to her father’s lodge to sleep with her, without attempting to initiate intercourse. For a long time, on each occasion fist greasing his fingers, he masturbated her, using one finger then two, “in order to dilate the uterus”. When at last his two fingers entered her easily, he considered the child ready to take up her wifely duties and brought her home with him to his lodge[3]”[4].

Janssen, D. F., Growing Up Sexually. VolumeI. World Reference Atlas. 0.2 ed. 2004. Berlin: Magnus Hirschfeld Archive for Sexology

Last revised: Sept 2004