Page 203 - Cultures and Organizations
P. 203

He, She, and (S)he  179

        Fertility rites are known from virtually all human civilizations since pre-
        history; they survive to the present day, such as in wedding ceremonies and
        in sanctuaries devoted to prayers for pregnancy. In Judaism and most of
        Islam, circumcision of the male organ is a condition for being admitted to
        the religious community. In Hinduism, the architecture of temples models
        the lingam and yoni (phallus and vulva). Chinese philosophy and religious
        practices give strong importance to the complementarity of yang and yin,
        the male and female element.
            Most or all religions contain dos and don’ts about love and sex. Human
        sexuality has the two facets of procreation and recreation, of reproduction
        and pleasure. Different religions, and currents within religions, have taken
        different positions toward the pleasure side of sex; the general trend is for
        religions in masculine cultures to stress procreation and for those in more
        feminine cultures to also value pleasure. Masculine Roman Catholicism
        has rejected sex for pleasure, institution alizing celibacy for priests, the
        cult of the Virgin Mary, and marriage as a sacrament with the purpose of
        procreation, while prohibiting divorce, contraception, and abortion. When
        the less masculine Protestant Christian churches split from Rome, they did
        away with celibacy, did not consider marriage a sacrament, and accepted
        divorce. Orthodox Islam accepts sexual pleasure for men but considers
        sexual pleasure in women a danger. Currents in Hinduism have taken a
        positive attitude toward sexual pleasure, as manifested by the Kamasutra
        love guide and the erotic temples of Khajuraho and Konarak in India. In
        feminine Buddhist Thailand, the profession of prostitute carries less of a
        stigma than in the West. In very feminine Sweden, female prostitution is
        forbidden, but the client is punished, not the woman.

            In the domain of scientific theories about sex, it is remarkable that the
        work of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) originated in Austria, a country with

        one of the highest MAS scores in the IBM list (79). Freud, the founder
        of psychoanalysis, argues for the fundamental importance of sexuality in
        the development of the human personality; he attributed many psycho-
        pathological problems to the repression of sexuality. Freud attributed penis
        envy (jealousy about not having one) to all women. We wonder whether
        an author from a less masculine society would have imagined this. Every
        author or scientist is a child of his or her society; Freud’s work comes
        directly out of the masculine Austrian context in which he was raised.
            Table 5.6 complements Tables 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, and 5.5 by summarizing
        the key differences between feminine and masculine societies from the last
        two sections.
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