sexual mores – Success Across Cultures

From linguistics to archaeology, anthropology is the study of humankind, past and present, and the origin of all cross cultural studies.

Family, sexuality, and love are topics of much interest to anthropologists.

Each of these themes is at the core of humanity.

We’ll cover them in detail over the upcoming weeks.

Why These Topics Matter to Cross-Cultural Management

If you’re coming to this blog for corporate success across cultures, you might think that family and sexual mores don’t apply here.

However, I’d argue that they do for two reasons:

A culture’s social fabric is woven by family structures. By better understanding family-related values and norms, you’ll integrate much more smoothly into a society than if you have no clue about the important roles that family members play.
Sexual mores often evoke the strongest emotional reactions, as these norms are amongst the earliest socialized norms in a culture and are often enforced by religious and social taboos. Awareness of unfamiliar social mores will help you avoid crossing boundaries and keep you clear and well away from those dratted taboos.

In effect, any information about a culture’s values and norms will fortify understanding and help you view a culture through their own lens. Only when you can see from the culture’s perspective can you truly identify with their mentality and integrate cross-culturally.

Family, Sex & Love in Culture

Of these three topics, family structures is one of the more thoroughly researched of all anthropological studies.

The study, Family: Variations and Changes Across Cultures, explains why:

“In order to study psychological phenomena cross-culturally, it is necessary to understand the different types of family in cultures throughout the world and also how family types are related to cultural features of societies.”

Family structures are the blueprint for societal structures. This is why some knowledge of family values and norms will gain you significant headway when managing across cultures.

Sex is also on the mind of many an anthropologist. Although, according to The Cross-Cultural Study of Human Sexuality, “Anthropology has long had a love-hate relationship [with it].”

This is largely due to the own sexual mores of those anthropologists in question. Across many cultures, the topic is seen as taboo or controversial, so sexuality remains a “rarely studied” topic of human experience.

Moreover, love and romance is mixed in with family and sexuality and has been since the dawn of time.

According to Love Across Cultures:

“Although love needs to be framed within a cultural context, many scholars believe that romantic love is transcultural. Elaine Hatfield and Richard L. Rapson (1996) viewed passionate love as common to virtually all cultures, and indeed, romantic love has been found in most countries of the world.”

Over the next few weeks, we’ll dissect research on all three topics in more detail, taking a look at remote and predominant cultures, alike, to discover both shared and divergent values and norms in these themes.

A kiss isn’t just a kiss.

Last week, we spoke about different kissing traditions in different cultures.

This week, we’ll continue this discussion through Margaret Mead’s in depth research on the subject.

Margaret Mead

Margaret Mead was an American cultural anthropologist who dug deep into South Pacific sexual mores into the ’60s and ’70s.

She wrote a book on the subject called Coming of Age in Samoa. At the time, society and cultural traditions there allowed more sexual freedom than those in Western culture.

Mead argued that this freedom created an easier transition from childhood to adulthood and believed in encouraging broader sexual mores. Her theories were promoted by advocates of the sexual revolution in the ‘60s.

But although this was what brought Margaret Mead’s work to the forefront, this wasn’t her first course of research into sexual mores.

Courting Habits: American vs. Britain

The second world war brought American GIs to the United Kingdom and with this contact came cross-cultural courting.

Margaret Mead studied the conflicting courting habits of the two cultures.

Her findings:

American men believed British women were “too easy”
British women believed American men were “too fast and direct”

So, both cultures felt pressured by the other’s courting habits.

How and why did these seemingly contradictory conclusions occur?

30 Steps of Courting

Mead categorized the courting habits of both cultures from first contact to sexual intercourse. In doing so, she broke down each process – that of American courting and British courting – into around 30 steps. That’s how long it took for a relationship to progress from casual to intimate on both sides of the Atlantic.

What she found, however, was that though the process clocked in the same number of steps, there was a significant difference in progression.

The French Kiss

The real hitch all boiled down to French kissing.

For the Americans, French kissing was introduced into the mix in around the fifth step, as it was viewed as rather casual. On the other hand, the Brits viewed frenching as intimate, so it didn’t enter into the progression until step 25.

Therefore, if a British woman gave into her American counterpart and accepted his cultural courting mores at step five, she would then accept that the level of intimacy had jumped to the 25th step in her own cultural mores, thereby moving ahead much further than the American was prepared for.

This simple miscalculation created conflict that left Americans and Brits thinking negatively about each other and feeling pressured in their courting and mating habits. All because the other’s cultural values and norms differed from one’s own.

Next week, we’ll further discuss the differences in intimacy and personal distance. Stay tuned.

Tag: sexual mores

Family, Sex & Love: A Look at Humankind’s Social Fabric

Margaret Mead: A Study in Scarlet