Different Forms of Sexual Initiation

Do not miss the article about how different cultures around the world understand the loss of virginity and perform different forms of sexual initiation.

Different forms of sexual initiation for men and women

One of the key aspects for understanding the traditional construction of the concepts of femininity and manhood is also shown in different forms of sexual initiation. In traditional societies we roughly distinguish between two representative patterns of female sexual initiation: some people try to open the door to sexual life or “reproductive work” to young girls in puberty, so they mate them with older men and reassert the gender domination with age as well. This model is still used in many African countries in the Sahara and on the Indian continent. The initiation of boys can begin later than with girls in this case.

The sexual initiation process in Latin and Latin-American cultures

The second pattern, where Latin and Latin-American cultures belong to, works in the opposite direction: girls are supposed to preserve their virginity for as long as possible (until marriage), while boys must prove their manhood at a very early age, either with prostitutes or with older women. The social demand for adaptation is especially hard on women in both cases, even though boys also feel pressure because they have to prove their manhood during sexual initiation.

Sexual initiation and the concept of femininity

The concept of femininity is about the reproductive process in both models. It means fertility, the belonging of one woman to a single man (even if the man can have several women) and the lack of initiative during the sexual act. In many cultures (especially Mediterranean and Latin-American), the loss of virginity before marriage meant a great transgression, which marked the girl as dishonest and defiled. The initiation of men into sexuality is also a key moment in the construction of manhood; in most cultures manhood means constant bouts of strength, especially by denying feminine elements in their behaviour, with successful sexual activity or the repression of homosexual tendencies.

Sexual initiation represents the beginning of reproduction 

The scheme of reproduction is not only a burden for women in the traditional sense (the life between the ages of 15 and 50 is committed to a constant cycle of birth in societies with a high birth rate – we can still find this on the African continent), but it is also one of the most universal self-evident things in the world. In many African cultures a sterile woman is marked as an “unreal” woman, while a woman in menopause is often accused of witchcraft, as Héritier found out. This is confirmed by the fact that their social role is limited to the reproductive function.

Following the ideal of having many children

When it comes to our understanding of the reality of family life and the number of children, the following lines will be hard to comprehend. In societies with high levels of birth rate, men and women do not have the same reasons for following the ideal of having many children: while descendants mean mostly an increase in political power for the man’s lineage, women see children, especially sons, as a possibility to strengthen their position in the new home or the husband’s family.

Children give them better protection and a better status than just marriage; the obligation of reproduction is a symbolic compulsion for them because they cannot ''not want'' many children. To men their body is an object, an empty place which has to be filled and conquered. Bozon calls this “sexual objectification”, with which men symbolically take charge of the heritage the woman carries.

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