Page:Margaret Mead - Coming of age in Samoa; a psychological study of primitive youth for western civilisation.pdf/263

 The fashion in which their sex practice reduces the possibility of neuroses has already been discussed. By discounting our category of perversion, as applied to practice, and reserving it for the occasional psychic pervert, they legislate a whole field of neurotic possibility out of existence. Onanism, homosexuality, statistically unusual forms of heterosexual activity, are neither banned nor institutionalised. The wider range which these practices give prevents the development of obsessions of guilt which are so frequent a cause of maladjustment among us. The more varied practices permitted heterosexually preserve any individual from being penalised for special conditioning. This acceptance of a wider range as "normal" provides a cultural atmosphere in which frigidity and psychic impotence do not occur and in which a satisfactory sex adjustment in marriage can always be established. The acceptance of such an attitude without in any way accepting promiscuity would go a long way towards solving many marital impasses and emptying our park benches and our houses of prostitution.

Among the factors in the Samoan scheme of life which are influential in producing stable, well-adjusted, robust individuals, the organisation of the family and the attitude towards sex are undoubtedly the most important. But it is necessary to note also the general educational concept which disapproves of precocity and coddles the slow, the laggard, the inept. In a society where the tempo of life was faster, the rewards greater,