SEX LAWS IN SAVAGE LANDS.

Taranaki Daily News, 28 May 1921, Page 10

SEX LAWS IN SAVAGE LANDS.

The discussion upon “sex warfare” can be illuminated by a consideration of the manners and customs of savage and .barbarian peoples (writes Mr. A. E. Crawley in the Daily Mail.) Thousands of years ago primitive man had the whole question cut and dried and stereotyped by “taboos.” The penalty for breaking any of these was death. The story may begin with this piece of gospel—there is an instinctive antagonism bdtween Ithe sexes which no civilisation can reduce. In consequonae of this instinctive solidarity of each sex within itself, the savage tribe has usually a man’s club and a woman’s club. In New Guinea -the men have their marea. and the wbmen have theirs. Breaking the sex taboo of entrance is death. I have hundreds of similar cases from all over the world. Among the Bechuanas the men plough and it is taboo for a woman to touch the cattle. The Eskimo considers it a scandalous thing for a man to interfere with or perform work belonging to women. In “primitive” life it is practically a universal law that men and women may not eat together.

A Hindu wife never ea'js with her husband; if she were to touch his food “it would be rendered unfit for use.”

The segregation of the sexes goes so far in many cases that each sex has practically a different language. The Caribs have two distinct vocabularies —one used by men and by women when speaking to men; the other by women when speaking to each other and by men when repeating some saying of the women. The reasons given by missionaries and travellers and by the people themselves •for this taboo-sanct segregation are curious but natural. Here are some mixed examples—Dyak boyts are forbidden to eat venison, the special food of women and old men, “because it would make them timid as deer” or women. Redskin warriors avoided the “weaker” sex for fear of being made weak. ’ A good deal of all this sex taboo is evidently to be put down to male jealousy and proprietary feeling, but there must be something deeper. ; > A curious corollary is to he seen in marriage ceremonies. The bringing together of a man and a woman is, on the primitive theory, a breaking of the taboo, and is dangerous, because each sex* is dangerous to the other. The most general of marriage ceremonies is eating together, for the first and last time. Others are the exchange of clothes, drinking each other’s blood, and inoculation with each other’s blood—the idea evidently being assimilation by communion. It is a critical affair, as is shown by the Bengal custom —each of the pair being first married to a tree. But you cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs or a marriage without breaking taboo.