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“Become Big and
I’ll Give You Something to Eat”:
Thoughts and
Notes on Boyhood Sexual Health
Diederik F.
Janssen, MD, BA
UNEDITED DRAFT
of in press article (2005)
[download me in PDF]
ABSTRACT. In the West, a long heritage
of health notions of boyhood sexualities has come to inform and contain their
performance. However, the applicability of any biomedical paradigm is greatly
restricted if oblivious to the worldwide variety of indigenous ramifications,
anticipations and management strategies that inform boys’ bodies and sexual
practices. This article hints at this wide range of practices associated with
boys’ sexual bodies, and argues in favor of an ethnohistorical “cartographic”
approach to local boy sexualities. I provide a brief exposé of salient
ethnographic findings by a discussion of boy bodies, male puberty, male
virginity, and boy-involved same-sex intimacies. The focus of this paper is
to illustrate the ways in which the status of boy bodies and sexualities has
been imagined in terms of the biomedical paradigm, more specifically in terms
of a historicizeable process of medicalization.
KEY
WORDS: boys; sexual health;
ethnography;male sexual development; male
puberty; male virginity; medicalization.
“What law
cannot suppress, a fear of the supernatural does. As, for example, the
current belief that self-abuse in a boy causes hair to grow on the palm of
his hands” (Bonnerjea, 1931, p. 225)
Boys, Sex and “Health”
In this paper I
offer some comments on the notion of “boyhood sexuality”, and the health
paradigm by which this abstraction is routinely approached. Health, as will
be argued, is a conventionalized metaphor for approaching the young male, his
corporeality, and his comportment. This analytic breakdown (subject, body,
act) is already symptomatic of the way in which this approach is mediated by
a large academic apparatus that needs to disentangle
“the patient” before it can associate
its constitutive health parameters. The difficulties with this two-step
process (patient to symptoms to diagnosis) definitely prove substantial in
sexuality studies, where the body and the act can be legitimately approached
only via the subject, and still more substantial in the study of pre-adults,
where the subject is assumed to be “still developing”.
As a mode of
anchoring an approach to health as a “paradigm”, we might first explore how
boyhood sexualities have been routinized as objects of focus. The current
status quo of “boyhood studies” as a field of inquiry allows the image of a
nexus, niche, or intersection projected from “established” panoramic frames
of gender-oriented endeavor such as “men and masculinity studies”, feminist
pedagogy, male (or men-in-)feminism, and as informed by such composite agenda
as “gender in/and health”. These paradigms of boy research, all late 20th
century Euro-American projects, have had a tremendous impact on the current
reception and imagination of health, boys’ sexualities, as of pre-adulthood,
gender and sexuality in general. As a research “territory” itself, boyhood studies seems to be a late
acquisition (Pattman, Frosh & Phoenix, 1998; Sørensen, 2000; Janssen,
2005, pp. 3-4).
The field’s
diverse genres of parentage have called for, and inform, various ways of
historicizing the boy’s psychomedical ontology (the boy as patient), his
nosology (boy-specific ailments and health risks), and the
rhetorico-political schemes in which “healthy boys” have been envisioned. In America’s
post-1950s sexological hegemony boys’ disturbances and insubordinations were
being delivered to a progressively professionalized scrutiny and an at times
mechanic logic of psycho-medico-legal praxis. The very notion of “the boy”,
critics have argued, may be perceived as rooted in a politically slanted
manufacturing of a gendered curricular subject, a subject that appeared to
require intelligent social as well as psychic engineering to facilitate its
entitled coming-of-age. As a health issue, boyhood has been workbenched by
gender-articulating master projects such as pedagogical nationalism (Macleod, 1983;
Kidd, 2004), imperialism (Warren, 1986; Randall,
2001; cf. MacDonald, 1993) and
feminism (Sommers, 2000).
All of these projects have situated “boyhood
sexuality” through often elaborate psycho-medical or psycho-hygienic programs
and subtexts. Thus, a long heritage of health notions concerning “boyhood
sexuality” has informed and strained its performance in Euro-American
settings. As is well researched, the West has known a remarkable decursus
from Greek pederastic paideia
politics (and centuries of its academic re-digestion) (Percy III, 2005),
anti-masturbation crusades (Hall, 1991; Pryke, 2005), Oedipality and absent
fathers, “developmentally expected” adolescent homosexuality (Spurlock, 2002),
“gender disorder” (Sedgwick, 1993; compare Zucker & Spitzer, 2005) and
sissiness (Grant, 2004), circumcision apologism versus abolitionism (e.g.
Darby, 2005; Gollaher, 1994; Knights, 2004), to the silenced sexual abuse
survival of boy acolytes (for a general review see Holmes & Slap, 1998).
During
previous decades, boy bodies have been informed by a range of differentiating
approaches, including the (cross-)culturalism of “rituals of manhood” (e.g.
Herdt, ed., 1981) and the allied spatialism of “local boyhoods” (e.g. Gunn,
2004), the self-conscious anti-structuralism of “queer boyhoods” as a
contribution to “gay boyhoods” (Morrison, 2002) or “boy-on-boy sexualities”
(Savin-Williams, 2004), post/colonial boyhoods (consider Goldman, 2003),
cultural representations of boyhood sexualities (e.g. Dennis, forthcoming), and so forth. These
leitmotifs have informed heterogeneous chapters and genres of pedagogical
identity, agenda, and authority vis-à-vis
what, hence, can hardly be conceptualized as a stable, uniform or unchanging
object of focus.
Conceptions of
boyhood “sexual health” associated with these diverse genres of inquiry (and
corresponding tales of struggle) seem to be multiply, at times ambiguously,
and often antagonistically versed. However, one does not find a facile binary
between the efforts of the interventionalist bulwark (opting for education,
protection, and correction of healthy boy bodies) and those of the
deconstructionist industry (opting for healthy irony, dissent,
anti-interventionalism, and anti-bulwarkism). On the contrary, both “sides”
of this debate seem to concur in terms, as “healthiness” appears to be a
pervasive and durable master trope in Anglo-Saxon literature on boy
sexualities. This ultimate convergence can be traced in increasingly
saturated terms of developmental appropriateness, hegemonic or patriarchal or
hetero-normative or misogynist or homophobic or violent (or weak or multiple)
emerging masculinities, and “sexualization” (cf. Dennis, 2002). In the U.S.
this line of culture critique has become securely integrated in an expanding
therapy culture in which individual boys’ psychosexual health is measured,
contained, and assessed in quite unselfconscious ways. Male “psychosexuality”
as development, then, has proven to be an extremely hospitable articulation
site of the psychotherapeutic profession, as well as for the expanding media
forums that inform and critique the politicized task of raising boys.
Healthy Boys, Medicalized Boys
Clearly, the
current focus on mental (if cultural and historical) phenomena such as
minority sexual orientations, fragile or otherwise problematic sexual
identities, and sexual psychotraumas, seems to outperform or eclipse
legitimate attention to boy bodies themselves, their performative nature, and
their social context.
This
marginalization of performing, social bodies I contend may be analyzed as a
corollary of what Foucault identified as disciplinary
society in which sovereignty over social bodies (i.e. over their acts and transactions) has been
replaced by what Foucault referred to as “technologies” of the normal Subject
(boy), by which he brackets and polices his own social performance. A
remarkable feature of this disciplined society is its elaborate investment in
pedagogical regimentation of its residents. According to Foucault’s momentous
notion of the pedagogization of
sex, this latitude of pedagogical necessity is historically rooted in the
invention, definition, delimitation, consolidation, and proliferation of its
objects, and thus, of their social
transactions. Hence, a boy’s body can only be understood as such, that is, as always-already mediated by the discourses
and cultural embedding in which it is to perform its gendered subjectivity.
From this problems arise that are in definite ways peculiar (or at least
native) to Western academization of the boy (which indeed seems to imply a
discursive proliferation): the masturbating boy, the Oedipal boy, the
“adolescent” boy, the “sissy” boy, the (pre)homosexual boy, the “sexually
abused” boy, the sexually aggressive or “sexualized” boy, the sexually
“normal” boy.
“Health” and
more specifically “sexual health”, for instance, can be examined as master
tropes that came to be deployed in attempts to accommodate the considerable
diversity of handling, regulating, managing and policing boy bodies. Taking
into consideration the general history of the concept (Giami, 2002; Edwards
& Coleman 2004), we might specify for boys the question recently posed by
Sandfort and Ehrhardt (2004): whether “sexual health” amounts to a useful
paradigm or a moral imperative. For instance, how does sexual health perform
as a pedagogical paradigm? As a
pedagogical imperative? In any case, while applications of this Foucauldian
(“genealogical”) option for the study of boy bodies and boy sexualities have
been sparse as yet, colonial and non-Western case studies have been yet
sparser.
A key issue in
Foucault’s work has been the appropriation of social problems into a medical
routine. Medicalization, according
to Foucault, served as a “[procedure] by which that will to knowledge
regarding sex [scientia sexualis],
which characterizes the modern Occident, caused the [former, Christian]
rituals of confession to function within the norms of scientific regularity”
(1976 [1981, p. 65, 67]), relocating sin, excess and transgression to their
new spaces, under the rule of the normal and the pathological, the “true
discourse” of the medical scene. In recent debates, it has been argued,
consensual sex in adolescence has become increasingly medicalized (as well as
criminalized) within a discourse centralizing adolescents’ “best interests”
and the role of the state as a parental institute (Sullivan, 1989).
To situate aforementioned
U.S.
forms of medicalization (here defined more narrowly as routinization of professionalized medical scrutiny) in an
anthropological framework, then, requires an examination of their dramatis
personae, their effects, exclusions and tacit assumptions on how bodies in
fact are operationalized. A popular test-case is the DSM-IIIR/IV-TR entity Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder,
which necessitates a reflection on cultural and biomedical notions of what
constitutes normal boyhood behavior (Singh, 2005; Timimi, 2005; Hart, Grand
& Riley, forthcoming).
Other than a market- and
protocol-driven professionalism underlying the notion of the medicalized 20th
century American boy, popular therapeutization
of preadult male sexualities is hardly unique to the West (see Janssen,
2003a, II, pp. 265-274), a matter of prime concern to health workers and
educators. This being the case, an anthropologically informed framework could
well profit from a tentative “cartography” or mapping of boyhood sexualities
as local and situated performances. In short, our framework could be informed
by an examination of local performances of boy bodies, their locally salient
transitions, and their experiential inauguration in local sexual scenes (cf.
Herdt, 2004).
Here I haste to remark
that bodily development, bodily transitions and social inaugurations of the
body are best appreciated as ethnotheoretical variables, not ontological
coefficients or constants around which cultural practices are, if at all,
organized. Any demarcation of our cartographic object, then, is opportune and
(to state the obvious) bound to cultural preoccupations. I also haste to note
that a cartographic entry to boy (as to male) sexualities is only that: a
preliminary appreciation of spatialized specificity, if any. [[1]]
Facets
of Boyhood Sexual Health
In the
remainder of this article I would like to explore four key ethnohistorical
facets of sexual health as they articulate, produce and operationalize boy bodies. With “operationalization”, I intend to
denote two sets of processes: (1) indigenous ramifications of the young
sexual body in terms of its pragmatic utility and active anticipation of
salient performance; and (2) analytic interventions to delimit it as an
object of ethnographic observation and rationalization. The background to
this bifurcation (which I propose is sequential, not epistemological) is my
thesis that a boy’s body is disciplined into “good” sexual performance by a
nonlinear two-stage process: first by the perceived demands of its immediate
social environment (e.g. a boy’s “virginity complex”), and a second time by
the textual and methodological conventions of ethnographic procedures (e.g. a
researcher’s diagnostic or therapeutic fixtures). In short, a boy’s bodily
enculturation as well as its
anthropological reception are normalizing and political events. Our
cartographic representation, for instance, is likely to be informed by
regimented local encounters of boys with adult researchers (though
“autoethnographic” research formats seem increasingly popular) who are
commonly interested primarily in modifying “health behavior” at the expense
of “risk behavior”. With the progression and devastation of HIV/AIDS,
however, many authors have over the past two decades come to appreciate
qualitative “holistic” entries to the “male side” and “pedagogical side” of
the problem. Here, the focus is less on (healthy) boy bodies than on
(healthy) boy cultures, less on boy psychology than on boyhood as a
discursive and performative entity. Though useful enough as such, these “new”
studies contribute to more than prevention-centred maps, as they illuminate
how young gendered bodies are (if at all) constituted, disciplined and
positioned as health subjects and health objects.
Some might
argue that the two issues identified above (pedagogical rationale and ethnographic
digestion) are incommensurable in terms of their impact on boys’ lives and
(hence) salience for a medical sexology of boys. Here I would disagree on the
basis that both are deeply intertwined social routines that seem to
necessitate, assume and legitimize
each other in ways that must remain objects of critical and historical
inquiry. And to argue that action research and publications themselves do not
substantially affect either those directly involved in the research process,
or those implicated by virtue of policy recommendations, seems to be overly
pessimistic of the normative effect of current sex research worldwide.
In the hope to
have sufficiently legitimated the role of a critical ethnographic approach in
the field of boys’ sexual health studies, please allow me to provide a brief
exposé of salient findings related to (1) boy bodies, (2) male puberty, (3)
male virginity, and (4) boy-involved same-sex intimacies. These findings are
eclectically drawn from an ongoing review effort, which is available
elsewhere. [[2]] What I want
to argue throughout is that notions of healthy male physiology are contingent
on quite diverse biomedical frameworks, which call for pedagogical routines
that rarely seem to refer to evidence-based praxis and always to a “boy
ethos”, an ethical curriculum variably extrapolated from notions of sexuality
as a (“human”, social) imperative, right, or essence.
Boy Bodies
Sexual bodies
of boys are subject to a variety of practices worldwide (Janssen, 2003a, II,
p. 292-295, 367-369, 370 and 2003a, I, passim).
For instance, in over 70 ethnogeographic settings ethnographers have
documented adults’ handling of (particularly male) infantile genitalia
outside immediate preparatory, hygienic or medical routines (Janssen, 2003a,
I, passim; 2003a, II, pp. 228-252;
Janssen, 2003b). Here we see mothers eagerly awaiting and experimenting with
baby erections, the teasing of Puerto Rican machito’s (real little male’s)
penes, Vietnamese infants fondly being called a thang cu or “penis boy”, and so on. In the well documented case
of Puerto Rico and among the Spanish Gitanos this practice seems firmly
entrenched in the cultivation of machismo,
and this element may be central in other places (e.g. Suriname). The element of potency
mostly associated with African examples (e.g. Senegal,
Zaire, Tanzania) and that of virility (e.g. Puerto Rico, Turkey, Aritama of Colombia)
often seem to be genuine anticipating concerns. African erections have
frequently been shown to entail a nuptial requirement, as marriage can be
annulled on account of the apparent impotence of the marriage candidate (a
case in point would be the Wolof). Thus, according to one ethnographer,
“[t]his causes a good deal of anxiety among mothers on account of their boys,
and it often happens that they will want to see that their little boys are
capable of having an erection”. African developmental potency is often
identified as a focus of explicit parental and peer concern, taboos, tests
and medicines, both therapeutic and preventative. Schenkel (1971), for
instance, stated that a Toucouleur (Senegal) mother typically
appeared “obsessed with the virile potency of her infant”, and eager to
observe his erection. According to Mushanga (1973, p. 181) Nkole (Uganda)
mothers were “very anxious to observe penile erections of their sons to
assure themselves that the little ones are potent. Should erections be absent
on several mornings, not only the mother but also the father will begin to
search for a remedy”. At puberty a Shona (Zimbabwe) boy’s urine and semen
were examined to assess his potency, and the eventual necessity of special
foods (Gelfand, 1979, 1985). Elaborates Shire (1994, pp. 154-156),
“Certain
fruits and pods signified potency and formed the basis for activities which
centred on notions of sexual competence. For example, the mumveva (Kigelia pinnata) fruit was regarded as signifying this kind of
masculinity. When the fruit was regarded in season, boys would bore a hole in
the young fruit, into which they would insert their penises. They would then
wait to see whether the fruit matured or died. If the fruit died or became
deformed, this signified a threat to their sexual potency. If it grew into
maturity, this was seen to result in sexual competence and an enlarged
penis”.
Diagnosis and
treatment, then, proved ultrastructural to Shona masculinity “whose discourse
centred on giving pleasure to women”. Expectedly, in many African communities
early boyhood sexual activities would be welcomed as a signal of potency (as
explicitly documented for the Bakongo, Tutsi, and Burundi).
Illustratively,
Western commentaries on the aforementioned routines of parental
penis-touching (which are likely to have been universal in pre-1800 Europe as
well) can be summarized as follows: (1) these acts are classifiable as
“sexual abuse” and the child suffers inherent consequences; (2) these acts
are psychopathologically motivated; (3) the cultural domain of these acts is
“incest”; or, conversely, (4) these acts connote a freedom from neurotic
age-based stratificationism with regard to intrafamilial physical intimacy.
However, the “abuse” inference is hardly ever researched (Bali appears to be
the sole exception, see Angulo, 1995, pp. 90-92); indigenous pathologization
of the actor is found to be examined very sporadically; likewise, “incest” is
only rarely documented as a prevalent indigenous classifier or delimiter of
the practice, as are liberationist attacks on Freudian and Judeo-Christian
ramifications of intimacy (Oedipality and “continence”/“abstinence”,
respectively). With very few exceptions, then, the mentioned Western
inferences turn out to be unsubstantiated ethnocentrisms exactly where they
try to classify, interpret and diagnose.
Indeed, we
here encounter four typifying instances of 20th century Western
“medicalization”. Boyhood sexuality, also, has been understood by generations
of anthropologists in terms of narrow Reichean/Marxist econo-repressive
formulations. Until recently, these reductionist paradigms and medicalizing
attitudes have halted an ethnographic appreciation of the differential degree
by which boy bodies have been and are being anticipated, “worked up”,
celebrated, performed, and (literally) teased
into being as focal instruments of reproduction, pleasure-providing, and
pleasure-receiving. Clearly this entails a pro-active pedagogical paradigm
that could not be fitted into the “sexual permissiveness” scales of
generations of cross-culturalists (Janssen, 2003a, II, pp. 185-186 et seq.). In any case, by a logic that
is at once capitalist, demographic and foundationalist, exclusively negative
formulations are very much alive in today’s U.S. sex education programs which
seem to lionize abstinent virginity-pledging bodies. Hence, we see a
reduction of “sexual boyhood” to a preemptive industry of risk behavior
tackling.
Let us digress
for a moment on the cultural erection. While childhood “impotence” is thought
by the Serer (Senegal) to be caused by the spilling of milk on the boy’s
penis (a fact also documented for the Fulani), in the West erections become a
salient clinical and managerial issue only within the framework of a
biomedical emergency (i.e. pre-chemotherapeutical cryopreservation of semen
in young adolescents), medicolegal investigations (the lowest published age
for diagnostic penile plethysmography known to me is 11), and adult health
care. As far as I am aware of, outside the psychoanalytic framework only a
lone Norwegian sexologist ever considered early adolescent impotence as a
salient clinical entity (Langfeldt, 1981, p. 71). Moreover, the socialization
of male physiology in Western studies is rarely addressed, leaving a
significant cultural vacuum. For instance, in a 1993 Irish study (Deehan and
Fitzpatrick, 1993), parents were reported as “having discussed erections”
with a mere 11 percent of (mostly prepubertal) sons and 5 percent of
daughters; wet dreams would have been discussed with a low 4 percent of sons
(versus 3 percent of daughters). A further significant finding in
media-saturated societies, young erections have come to be banned worldwide
from the legal possibility of being depicted, which has effected a cartoonization of the male organ in
its educational coverage. [[3]] If not
simply absent, modern Western reactions to early erections have been twofold:
punishment (in the assumption that their occurrence implies or facilitates a
“knowing sexuality”), and triumphant or apologetic inference that it connotes
some substantial already-there “sexuality” or “sexual nature”. In his
pre-Freud days Wilhelm Stekel (1895) suggested that, to preserve them for
Mankind, “Knaben müssen öfters in der Nacht auf Erection untersucht werden”.
Conversely, Grande Dame of sex education Mary Calderone (1983) used fetal
erection as an opportunity for arguing that “sexuality is a marvelous natural
phenomenon”. Although these attitudes seem antithetical, they both refer to a
core male or even “human” sexuality that would prove causal and prior to
boyhood physiology. By contrast, non-Western data suggest that early
erections are often thought of as sine
qua non prerequisites for the actualization of masculine performance.
Here, not just behavior but even the body itself is an intentional artifact,
an instrument for sexual performance rather than a (marvelous or unholy) sign
of “sexuality”:
“During the
process of masturbating with caustic plants, Nandi boys call out, ‘Suren
suren, ce kwamon pek a metet’ (Become big and I’ll give you something to
eat)” (Bryk, 1928, pp. 117-119; cf. Bryk, 1931 [1934, p. 200]). [[4]]
This finding
is not incidental. [[5]] At puberty,
Baushi (Zaire)
boys used numerous plants to prepare genitals to ensure glandular function
and erectile potency, to provoke spermarche, and to effect penile
enlargement. Boys’ preoccupation with function and measure is much more
concealed in the West where the imperatives of size and performance tend to
be downplayed by the advice and education industry. This obviously contrasts adult erectile function which, if
anything, has become a heavily commercialized, managerialist and anonymous consumer
issue (e.g., Loe, 2004).
From the above
one might conclude that the phrase “boyhood sexual health” is a problematic
entity considering its referencing of three abstractions (boy-hood,
sexual-ity, health-iness) none of which is either a human universal or a
historical constant. The boy’s healthy body in the contemporary West does not
so much “matter” to a community of stakeholders and potential beneficiaries,
as to a bureaucratically cemented obligation to a subjectivity informed by a
protectionist/correctionalist “psychology” (“body image”), welfare
entitlements (“bodily integrity”), and a democratically secured,
“identitarianist” individuality (“sexuality”). We further observe that this
obligation entails a culture that is hesitant and even hostile vis-à-vis any
event in or intervention into what is scientifically “worked up” as a natural
¾hence,
entitled¾ development.
Thus, the Western healthy boy is required to actualize constellations of
naturalized abstractions, rather than living up to series of status-enhancing
agenda.
Male Puberty
If the
anthropological record shows anything, it shows that male “puberty” is a
cultural, analytic and methodological artifact, contained within culturally
specific tropes. I haste to admit that puberty can be thought of as a
psychoneuro-endocrinological process, yet this process’s verification,
rationalization and assessment rests on cultural truths that require a need,
a motif, a research technology, and a media apparatus for thus consolidating
“it” in the popular mind’s eye. Telling the tale of puberty, then, has been a
multi-facetted cultural project that only toward the Occidental late 20th
century came to be dominated by economically delimited pharmacological
possibilities, clinical surveillance, and hormone research. This has produced
a culture that heavily invests in what Morss (1990) identifies as the
“biologizing” of life phases, chronometric age (Chudacoff, 1989), and in
“developmental” stages rather than the earlier medico-hygienist desiderata of
regulation, firmness and discipline (Turmel, 2004).
This
historical elaboration offers only one of many case studies in mass cultural
associations of puberty (a psychobiological reality, although a hidden and
complex one) and sexuality (an ethico-political curriculum). If anything,
this nexus is metaphorically accomplished in the assessment of a “healthy”
upbringing. For instance, a Xhosa boy is rather a “bull” (unsocialized) than
an “ox” (socialized sexuality) (Mayer & Mayer, 1990). Across cultures,
boy bodies are variably assumed as
gendered and “genderable”, to the extent that in some societies they are not
assumed to be gendered in any substantially male sense until after the
completion of complex and (to the novices) horrifying ritual trajectories
meant to rid the boy’s body from toxic maternal fluids and feminine
influences (archetypical examples of this defeminization protocol are located
in Papua New Guinea). The salience and role attributed to pubescence is also
extremely varied. However, partly due to an absence of feminist interest,
male puberty has received far less social scientific coverage than menarche.
[[6]] Sociological
studies of the experience of male first ejaculation are few and augmented
only by a few scattered ethnographic remarks. These remarks, however, are of
interest as they suggest that even the relatively nonintrusive event of first
ejaculation may in some cases be socially reckoned as a milestone event.
After a young Tongan’s polluarche
(first nocturnal emission), he is said to “have become an adult. Medicines
may be administered to the boy that will prevent him from being overcome by
them (the Custom of the Erotic Dream, Tilorela)”. For a Nyasaland (Malawi)
boy’s coming of age, “[t]he decisive sign is the erotic dream”, which has to
be reported and is followed by a small ceremony. Evans-Pritchard’s account of
Azande ejacularche implies that, in the absence of a chronometric age
reckoning, a boy’s developmental status was actually measured by the
appearance of his ejaculate:
“A boy of
about 12-14 years of age is said to have orgasms without emissions; from
about 14 to 16 his emissions are ‘merely like urine’ and contain no mbisimo
gude [“soul of the child”, reproductive capacity]; at about 17 years of age
they contain mbisimo gude. A man considers himself capable of procreating
children so long as he is able to ejaculate sperm” (1932, p. 401).
Apart from
differing attitudes to body transitions, events, physiology and gender status,
an interesting feature of this fragment is that one encounters recognition of
a physiological possibility (prepubertal “dry” orgasm) that appears to be
silenced and problematized in Western sexology (see Janssen, 2003a, II, pp.
305-360). It is probably due to a lack of ethnographic interest or detail
that this knowledge is not reported with greater frequency in studies on
non-industrial societies (ethno-psychoanalyst Georges Devereux, for instance,
documented a like familiarity with early male orgasm in his remarkably
extensive research on Mohave sexuality). What we can infer from this small
exposé of data is that puberty, its connection to sexuality, and its social
significance has been acknowledged in widely disparate frameworks of social
reception, which are themselves pivoted around overarching moral paradigms
that naturalize a specific (and specifically elaborate) sexological coverage.
Boyhood Virginities
In Durban Area
South Africa, “A virginity test for boys involves looking for lines at the back
of the knees, inspecting the foreskin (which should be hard), and testing
whether boys can urinate over a wire suspended 1 m above the ground” (Watts, 1999). This kind of surveillance seems to be
rare, but it suggests that virginity may not always solely or simply be a
“patriarchal” tool to control girls and privilege boys. While in the
contemporary West boy virginities are subject to the propaganda of expert
educationalists, their resolution is not always left to advice, peer
folklore, and pervasive media culture. Throughout the ethnographic record,
boys are documented to have been offered genuine training in sexual
proficiency, especially in Africa and Oceania
(Janssen, 2003a, II, pp. 195-196). In these cases boys are sexually initiated
by elder women, commonly widowed, pregnant, “barren”, divorced and
prostituting women, or some related or unrelated “older” women. Prostitute
contacts are frequently arranged or take place with paternal, parental or at
least peer group arrangement or blessing, securing a “veritable initiation
rite toward male maturity”. For example, Stavans (1995, p. 52) relates:
“The Hispanic
family encourages a familiar double standard. Few societies prize female
virginity with the conviction that we do. But while virginity is a prerequisite
for a woman’s safe arrival at the wedding canopy, men are encouraged to fool
around, to test the waters, to partake of the pleasures of the flesh. […]
Like most of my friends, I lost my virginity to a prostitute at the age of
13. An older acquaintance was responsible for arranging the “date”, when a
small group of us would meet an experienced harlot at a whore house. It goes
without saying that none of the girls in my class were similarly “tutored”
[…]. Losing virginity was a dual mission: to ejaculate inside the hooker, and
then, more importantly, to tell of the entire adventure afterwards”.
The same was
found by Espín (1984, p. 157) and others. Thus, male virginities seem to be
local complexes, the management of which is organized in locally available
venues. Ernesto “Che” Guevara de la Serna Lynch’s sexarche at age 14 was,
according to Che’s biographer Jon Lee Anderson (1997), typical:
“For sex, boys
of Ernesto’s social milieu either visited brothels or looked for conquest
among girls of the lower class [...] for many, the first sexual experience
was with the family “mucama”, or servant girl, usually an Indian or poor
mestiza from one of Argentina’s Northern provinces. It was Calica Ferrer [the
son of a doctor who treated Ernesto for his asthma attacks] who had provided
Ernesto with his first introduction to sex [...] in a liaison with his family
mucama, a woman called “La Negra” Cabrera” ”.
Many
age-divergent experiences probably turned out awkward for some. Among the
Nigerian Rukuba, for instance, a “ritual marriage” is mentioned of males
before initiation, sometimes before puberty. The boy reportedly spends a
night with a married, pregnant woman, who instructs him in sexual behavior,
and whom he is to avoid sexually in the future (Muller, 1972, pp. 293-294):
“The ritual
marriage teaches a boy what he can and cannot do although being so small at
the time of the initiation, many Rukuba men later recall with laughter the
one night spent with the pregnant woman. They insist on their bewilderment and
inability to cope with the situation, the initiative resting with the woman
who, apparently, means business however small the initiand might be”.
Male virginity
is a cultural condition the medical relevance of which is very much dependent
on the cultural logic by which it is experienced, resolved, or managed. For
instance, in a number of societies boys are likely to experiment on coitus
with cattle (Janssen, 2003a, II, pp. 213-214). Streiker (1993) details how
Colombian boyhood sexuality is implicated by the virginity codes concerning
women:
“Since women’s
virginity and monogamy are so jealously guarded, many boys’ first sexual
experience is with a marica [“faggot”, passive homosexual] or a female donkey
(burra). Though a large, rapidly growing city, Cartagena’s anemic economy still has room
for burros as transportation (especially in the scavenging and construction
trades). Where there are burras, there are boys. The power dynamics of sex
with donkeys are even clearer than in male-to-male sex: female consent,
initiative, and pleasure are simply not issues. Boys/men exert an absolute
power over the females, usually immobilizing the animals’ hind legs with rope
or a belt. […] What determines proper sexuality for men is not necessarily
heterosexuality, although this is the ideological norm, but rather requires
that the man initiate relations, seek his own pleasure, and in doing so
demonstrate his supremacy over inferiors”.
From the above
excerpts, one might argue that there is substantial cross-cultural divergence
in the ways and the extent to which the male body is thought to be in need of
organization, patronage, rehearsal, dramatization, good timing, or legitimate
substitution of heterosexual coitus as a “first sexual experience”, or as
“the final” of several courtship “bases”. Study is needed to see, for
instance, whether or how “traditional” Latin patterns might be challenged by
“new” ones (e.g. Miranda-Ribeiro, 2003, pp. 28-30; Reyes, 2003). In any case,
even if “male virginity has not generally been valued by most societies and
cultures” (Baumeister & Vohs, 2004), its loss, as its retention, is all
but a value-free performance.
Boy-Boy and Boy-Man Sexualities
Lastly, a
number of ethnographic reports addresses scenes with boy-specific
articulations of “health”. Parker (1995, pp. 245-246), for instance,
describes that in Brazil,
“Among rapazes [boys or young men], same-sex
play and exploration is almost institutionalized through games such as troca-troca (turn-taking), in which
two (or more) boys take turns, each inserting his penis in his partner’s
anus. It is perhaps even more obvious in the expression “Homem, para ser
homem, tem que dar primeiro”—A man, to be a man, first has to give (in
receptive anal intercourse)—often used by older boys seeking to comer [lit., to eat, viz., to penetrate] their slightly younger playmates”.
Among Tanzanian street
boys’ anal sex (kunyenga) is often
practiced as an “initiation rite” (Lockhart, 2002). According to Larsen (2005)
a considerable number of Norwegian boys, in their mid-teens, visit men who
take a sexual interest in them. It appears that some cultures emphasizing
male heterosexual development within a double standard concerning male and
female sexualities are confronted with more than occasional boy-boy contacts,
typically compounded by an age differential. Interesting case studies
include, among others, Mexico
according to Carrier (1976, pp. 368, 369, 370; 1980, p. 109; 1985), and Morocco
according to Eppink (1974 [1976, p. 8]; 1977, p. 111; 1992). Sexual
encounters of boys with male adults are a routine ethnographic finding
(Janssen, 2003a, I, passim; Herdt
& Trumbach, Eds., forthcoming),
yet details are sparse and it is all but well documented to what extent these
practices are engaged in contemporarily. [[7]] Needless to
say, for these practices to be recognized (which appears productive in most
cases) as “patterned” or “cultural”, we are encountering radical departures
from hegemonic US
attitudes on the matter. According to an unpublished late 1990s NGO report
(Ismail, n.d.), 22.57% of 1,710 Pukhtun respondents residing in
Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province agreed that “adults having sex with
boys” was considered “a matter of pride” (although generally condemning the
practice), while another 14% stated it was seen as a “symbol of status”; a
further 10.76% argued it was “not considered bad”. 83% claimed to know that
“some adults keep boys for sexual services in [their] area”, of which 16%
stated it was “very common”, 31% “common”. According to 80%, boys in their
community would “sell sex for money”.
The problem
with much of the literature on this subject is that it is rare, and, if existent,
seldom offers a rich understanding beyond the protectionist, correctionalist
and educationalist agenda from which it is to originate. However, from the
above example we might observe that pride, symbolic capital, and “goodness”
are assessments that do not meet Western medicolegal interests in these
behaviors, which are more geared toward a management of “age-appropriate”
“gender-appropriate” subjectivities (or at least the re-instalment of
“normally” age-stratified and heteronormative sexual milieux). Obviously, to
study young male sexualities (other than through retrospective accounts by
adults) poses definite and in part field-specific problems to the researcher,
as related to funding, access, role, ethics of disclosure, local
jurisdiction, textuality, and publication. Although radical ethnographies
have appeared on diverse male sexualities, boy sexualities sadly lack a
backbone ethnographic corpus that might legitimize academic interest in their
cultural salience.
To Conclude
The focus of
this paper has been to illustrate the ways in which the status of boy bodies
and sexualities have been imagined in terms of biomedical paradigms, more
specifically in terms of an historizeable process of medical
professionalization and annexation. The foregoing exploration suggests that
while the contemporary Western hegemony (being the American psychotherapeutic
industry) defines its pedagogy of male sexual bodies through principles of
anti-interventionalism, preventionalism, anti-exploitatoinism,
anti-traumatism, and psychotherapeutism (a paradigm of repair and
resolution), in a diversity of non-Western cultures one notes paradigmatic
interest in pro-activism, active anticipation, and (ritualized) advancement
of performance. As noted, male anatomy,
physiology, and social inauguration are not unmediated attractors of cultural
(or medical) signification, but in fact salient situated projects through
which diverse tales of the malleable male are told.
Although this
paper has been mainly theoretical in scope, the praxis of sexual health care
to boys should ideally be fine-tuned to any such tales-of-the-field as they
will inform health needs, communication, reception, and compliance. While
true for transcultural sexual health care in general, I think this is a forteriori productive in the area of
ethnospecific boyhood sexualities, which so far have largely been deprived of
a much-entitled anthropological review. I would say that the question of
medicalization of modern sexuality, as observed by (among others) Thomas Szász,
Michel Foucault, and John Money, is of pivotal interest to this state of
deprivation. Departing from the facets of boyhood sexual health identified
above, it is of immediate interest to involve boys themselves into
discussions about therapeutization and medicalization. In no unimportant
ways, as I hope this paper suggests, this entails problems of paradigmatic
importance. Do boys experience “sexual health” as a structure, a norm, or a
protocol? Do boys locate themselves amidst a virginity war, do they suffer
from virginity complexes, or do they navigate virginity options? Are boy
bodies repressed, disciplined, or controlled? What about “race”? Researchers
that “solve” these problems for their research subjects (rather than posing them) might be overlooking
something important, namely that healthy boys are not the effects but the
co-editors of a health culture. And possibly that resolving health issues may well be constitutive of what is
contemporarily understood as “boyhood”.
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