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.