MEN, WOMEN AND SEX
375
its sex, for the American child it
is
the process of becoming a success:
learning skills, developing a good personality, learning to handle money,
learning to be successful in one's male or female role.
All of this has been first-rate reporting, passionate with deeply–
felt perception, and Dr. Mead has been equally firm and thoughtful as
she has gone on to describe the adolescence which develops from such
childhoods. Recent sociological study has made much of our American
system of dating, and this research provides the material of Dr. Mead's
discussion of a youthful inter-sexual situation in which our boys and
girls, after a consistent non-training in their distinctive sexuality, are
all at once thrown into a most elaborate and lengthy game of courtship
in which all the appurtenances of true sexuality are invoked for them–
breasts, legs and attractive dress for the girls, attractive dress and manly
swagger for the boys. The purpose of this game-business, we had bet–
ter call it-is the public affirmation of a boy's or girl's success in the sex–
ual competition; sex itself is intended to play but a negligible part in
it. Yet sex has an unfortunate way of intruding itself, for which
eventuality we have devised the petting system-a pattern of advances,
encouragements and refusals as formally routinized as the steps in a
ballet. In petting, the boy is expected to demonstrate his manliness by
making a full sexual demand upon the girl, but the girl is expected to
show that she is far too "popular"-successful, that is-to need to accede
to his desire. And this preparation, in which both sexes learn that it is
the woman who sets the terms of sexual union, in which the girl learns
that she must never surrender to impulse on penalty of losing caste,
and the boy learns that the nicer a girl is the more surely she will check
him-this is our preparation for marriages in which we expect a happy
sexual mating!
Or perhaps most provocative of all, there has been Dr. Mead's
fine observation of that peculiar phenomenon of modern civilization,
the need for domestic privacy- the desire of each family to live in its
own isolated quarters.
It
is a common thing to say nowadays of the
American middle-class woman that she is being undone in her pro–
fessional ambitions by the lack of servants. The disappearance of
servants is of course an economic fact; but is also a fact with deep
sources in our sexual attitudes. Dr. Mead does not actually deal with,
but except for D. H. Lawrence she is the only writer I know to bring to
mind, the possible connection between the growing distaste for domestic
service and the distaste for our bodies in which we are increasingly
being trained-to be a domestic employee or employer involves rather
close physical contact with a "stranger." Dr. Mead reminds us that
