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TAHITIANS (SOCIETY ISLANDS, FRENCH POLYNESIA)
Featured: Pukapukans, Ra’Ivavae, French
Polynesia [Marquesans, Cook
Islands [Tahiti, Aitutaki, Mangaia], Samoa, Tonga Isl.]; Santa Cruz Isl., Santa Cruz Isl.
Early betrothal was described by Ellis[1].
Cook noted in 1769 that a boy announced his wedding with an eleven- or
twelve-year-old girl by having sexual intercourse on the market, thereby
advised by the audience (Stoll, 1908:p693; Sutor, 1964:p418; Brongersma,
1993:p123)[2]. As mentioned before,
Oliver (1974)[3] noted that coital
simulation became actual penetration as soon as young boys were
physiologically able. Oliver (1981)[4]
notes that children played in mixed-gender groups until 13 or 14 years old.
The Tahitian attitudes to children playing at copulation was one of amusement
(1981:p366). As children approached the age of 11, adult parental attitudes
shifted in regard to young females but not males. Jacobus X ([1893] 1898,
II:p440-5])[5] fully agrees. The
children “learn at an early age to play at little husband and little wife.
Children of neighbours form couples, and mutually instruct each other. The
Tané is precocious; he attains puberty at eleven or twelve years at the
latest. By the age of ten, he has commenced to prepare for the work of love”.
The boys practice urinary preputial adhaesiolysis, and sometimes perform an
imitated preputial incision, to hasten readiness. “As soon as the gland [sic] can come out freely, the young
Tané, whether he produces sperm or not, commences to copulate with his
“little wife”. Due to the “habitual coition with children of the same age,
whose yards are in proportion to the size of the vulva and vagina, [t]here is
a slow and gradual dilatation, which distends the hymen without tearing it”. On Taihiti, one Dr. Lesson (quoted by
Caufeynon, 1920:p72)[6] noted the close, in fact causal,
connection of coitarche and menarche: “Toute fille réglée, est à leurs yeux
une fille déflorée, et la menstruation est l’indice certain qu’elle a subi
les approches de l’homme”[7].
In
the Tahitian institution of mahu, adult males
would have practised fellatio and/or intercrural intercourse with local
“boys”[8].
The mahu would be “particularly selected when boys and kept with the
women solely for the caresses of the men” (Bligh as cited by Levy, p13). Levy
found a single 16-year-old mahu in the early 1960s, noting that
“[o]vert homosexual behavior was distinctly not an essential shared part of
the community’s idea of the mahu’s role”.
Levy further documents
that “[t]here is much homo-erotic play among boys, particularly related to
the adolescent boys’ life stage in which membership in the village peer group
is of central importance. There is much body contact, occasional dancing
together, occasional group masturbation, much darting out timidly into
heterosexual forays and then a return for bragging and discussion to the peer
group” (p18).
Janssen,
D. F., Growing Up Sexually. VolumeI. World Reference Atlas. 0.2 ed. 2004. Berlin:
Magnus Hirschfeld Archive for Sexology, Berlin
Last
revised: Sept 2004
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