Open Relationships, the Anthropology of the Hmong, Akha & Ourselves, Too

in the clip that you're about to see
Mayim Bialik invokes her reputation as a scientist she mentions that she is a scientist and she then invites you to imagine that you can make a leap of influence from a generalization about how human sperm appears on a slide under a microscope in a laboratory and a generalization about how our societies develop how ethics and social norms operate within a given culture in a given period of time that's a huge leap of inference and what I draw your attention to here in advance before I play the clip is just that she makes this leap of inference with the assumption that men the male's of the human species are engaged in sexual activity without an awareness that sex leads to pregnancy now in the discipline of cultural anthropology there are a few a few tribal societies on record where people really did not understand that having sex leads to babies but in almost all of the societies we could be taught possibly talking about whether tribal or living in massive cities whether with advanced agricultural civilizations or even hunter-gatherer civilization in almost all cases you're talking about a society where there is a fundamental awareness even if crude that having sex leads to pregnancy and as soon as you have that awareness on an individual level and on a cultural level then the types of generalizations she's making here fundamentally do not make sense it does not make sense for her to say that women would be careful in choosing a mate because they care about who's the father of their child who they're gonna spend ten years with raising a baby whereas men would not saying that men numerically have more sperm and women numerically have fewer eggs is even Aerith matically irrelevant to the question of what are you doing with the next ten years of your life if men are aware that falling in love with a woman and having sex with her is going to lead to a 10-year commitment raising the child or conversely the shame and obligee of no infanticide or child abandonment that's going to powerfully motivated shape human behavior it's gonna powerfully you know influence the development of social and moral expectations ultimately sexual behavior and society as we know Okin relationships that's what it's called when you're in a relationship but then you have relationships with other people too like not just sex emotional relationships too and sex and everyone involved in this relationship knows about it no lying no secrets just everything out in the open just open hence the name open relationships I also get that monogamy is a cultural construct we aren't biologically wired to be monogamous people in open relationships are exchanging one cultural construct for another that of equating male and female sexuality but as a scientist I'm here to ruin everybody's good time and to tell you that the assumption that male and female sexuality can be pretty much treated the same is in direct opposition to our biology it's not more culturally relevant it goes against millions of years of evolution now before you roll your eyes at me cut it out I'm talking to you stop rolling your eye see you okay let's review the male body produces billions of sperm every day did someone fact check that cameo the male body produces millions of sperm every day a woman produces one egg per month for all of evolution women have carefully selected a mate and their hormones and physiology favor careful selection men don't need to be as selective because they are constantly able to have sex biologically not just colloquially so in the intro I invited you to be sceptical about the claims mam was making here I'm now gonna leap right into a an example from my own fieldwork my own experience studying and living in various cultures in the field in northern Laos and Southwest Union China there are two different cultures there that live adjacent to each other they live in the same climate and in many ways they have the same kind of material culture in terms of how they survive in relation to the jungle and farming and how they make clothes at a cloth in many many ways they're similar indeed I think tourists who show up and interact with these two tribal groups I'm gonna describe to you they're not even aware that they're two different ethnic groups speaking two different languages but they are they have different languages they have different customs they're different religions animist religions religions they've generated themselves and they also profoundly different assumptions about human sexuality and how marriage works one of these two tribes I'm going to talk about are called the akai so if you search my name plus akka you're going to find some really interesting articles that reflect the research I did in this group but I also met them I mean they were around I was living in that part of the world I knew them face to face to some limited extent I could speak loshon I could not speak the akai language um be that as it may the akka became a little bit famous and infamous because when I was there in Laos they were still carrying on a traditional custom that ultimately does reflect a biological reality their custom was that young women would have several years of freedom to date and sleep with many different men in theory the young women could sleep with every young man and the tribe before selecting her husband and then they'd get married and settle down and be monogamous now I remember pointing out this is not so different from the assumptions about dating and marriage that exist right now in Paris France in France most people most people who are not Christian fundamentalists they will expect the young woman to have a limited number of years of sexual freedom in which she could date and sleep with some number of men and then she's supposed to choose one commit and be monogamous however biologically in Paris France that's based on the assumption that the young woman is going to use the birth control pill or use condoms or otherwise avoid pregnancy until she selects the man she's going to commit to historically this assumption in akha society in this travel society in Southeast Asia was entirely the result of poor nutrition poor hygiene is also a problem but poor nutrition delayed the completion of few delayed women becoming truly fertile for many many years so this is observed in different societies around the world depending on the diet you have the age at which women can actually conceive a child it gets later and later the worse and worse your nutrition is so from their perspective a young woman at sixteen would have several years in which she could date men and have sexual relationships but during which time there was almost zero possibility of her getting pregnant and that shaped the development of that whole culture there is another big assumption there that I would say people in Paris France basically have in common with this Travel Group in Southeast Asia that is the assumption that the young woman would date and sleep with young men of her own age of her own generation so yeah obviously the guy might be a couple years older or a couple years younger but there was a very deep assumption that she would date and find a find the man she would marry with in young men approximately her own age okay there's another tribe right next door called the mom Hmong is spelled with an H so some people press it along but they just bounce it mom the mom still to this day this is a challenge and the legal authorities often get involved they have a totally different assumption that much older men will pursue Court and marry teenage girls that teenage girls become the targets of affection seduction and even abduction by older men now for modern society in Laos modern society in Thailand in a sense it's almost easier to cope with this clash of cultures ancient and modern when it ends up in court when the young woman is flabbergasted or when she rejects the marriage when she takes the older man to court and says no this is bad and it's wrong it's much more difficult to deal with when the young woman really has accepted these cultural values to give an example that I know from a hospital in Laos I had a friend working at a hospital and she was really shocked that there was this teenage girl and her husband looked like he was 90 years old so probably the guy was actually in a 70s but this was a teenage girl with a husband she said this guy he really looked incredibly old then well let's say it's a guy in his 70s with a teenager and so this is from this tribal subculture the Hmong who had come down into the city these are people living in the far north in relatively tribal conditions those people still have that intact culture traditional culture and they come down to the city because they needed to do something at the hospital and when they're at the hospital the hospital plays are really kind of sharp with this but the young woman in this case she was kind of proud of herself she had she had taken on these cultural attitudes where she felt like she was the prettiest girl in her village and that this you know attention from this older man it it raised her status that he was some kind of you know it meant that she was a prize and that he was also some kind of high status man within the tribe whatever the situation was she was kind of chuffed with her success in this situation anyway I think it's her call some people at the hospital asked will you be allowed to marry another man after he doxa 40 kudos for asking but yeah so those were two tribes living right next to each other that developed completely different ethical systems and completely different assumptions in dealing with partner preference partner selection ultimately monogamy and the raising of children now the problems that emerge in 21st century were that the a-cups that's the first group I discuss describe the akka who had a culture of teenage girls and young women having a lot of sexual freedom up to a certain age they were getting involved in prostitution and that was partly because outsiders were coming to the village and they would so to speak exploit this culture and they would bring in tourists and outsiders I could say more about this sometimes they were for example men were building a highway nearby you know because this is like literally the first highway going through the jungle that was what was going on at that time I'm the jungle itself was being cut down very rapidly but so there'd be stereotypically there'd be Chinese employees building this highway and some kind of pimp would bring these guys into a village and say hey we can set this up we can make this arrangement where you get to sleep with these much younger women so that was the cultural problem there and the case I wrote an article of though it had to do with humanitarian workers people who are part of a humanitarian relief projects who were coming in and sleeping with these young women so and so forth all right and the other problem is nutrition and hygiene had improved right this is the 21st century so all of a sudden people are eating better food they're not as nutrient deficient the young women are you know having their first ministration at younger and younger ages something happens throughout urban scientific civilization right so also the young women are now getting pregnant and as a culture they had not cope with that before they not cope with that to this extent their culture had developed the assumption that you had several years of Liberty before pregnancy became a problem or concern and that was shrinking or disappearing so again this is an interesting case of technological change forcing cultural change now the problem the other group had the Mong was basically that many of their cultural customs were now perceived as kidnapping we're now perceived as criminal and I even knew I knew one anthropologist who specifically research this issue basically the issue of rape within this culture rape and abduction and then beyond that again there was also an economic aspect that probably hadn't existed before where you know an older person again you could say wealthy but this is by third world standards so I just a person has a little bit of money it might be a very poor person by Western standards but some older man is safe that money is paying for these arrangements through business and it's brutal and dehumanizing and of course ultimately it snuffs out the opportunities these young women would have to choose who they want to marry and it's enough so that their opportunity to get an education or have a career or do normal things of their lives and of course the government there was very reluctant to real to set off like a tribal civil war by trying to impose the morality of other tribes on this one particular tribe or imposed the morality of the big city and the central government on this on this tribe so that tension was really unfolding in front of my eyes in Laos as the jungle was cut down as electricity and highways extended into the forest for the first time so that's all I have to say here it's really I mean Mayim Bialik is well intentioned but what she's saying is really kind of vile and evil and stupid and wrong you've seen this kind of excuse used to justify an amazing array of sexual behaviors where people say well you know men have sperm therefore if you're not talking about a severely mentally disabled man if you're talking about a man who's capable of understanding the sleeping with someone just once can entail a ten year commitment or a 20 year commitment to raising a child then ultimately you're having to look at questions of how society develops coping with that awareness of responsibility a few months ago I did a book review about the history of the English Civil War that history starts at least in the 1630s and ends at least in the 1650s the English Civil War goes on a long long time and at one point the scholar who wrote the book just kind of breaks breaks through the fourth wall and addresses the audience directly and says look you know what I've been reading all these historical documents all these primary source documents all these records and you know there's torture and violence and a lot of robbery huge amounts of piracy and looting and this kind of stuff but no nowhere is there an indication in this history of rape even though nudity was sometimes used to humiliate people in the Civil War like people were made to march through the street naked or something as a kind of punishment he comments that in this culture you know people it's not just that they were questioned they obviously were deeply deeply committed the idea that sex equals pregnancy pregnancy equals a commitment to raise a child so in the context of this unbelievably brutal civil war people are murdering each other and robbing each other and terrible things are happening but the idea of enemies raping each other doesn't exist yet because of this profound awareness of the responsibility the sexual intercourse entails so look guys the question that Mandy Alec is leaving unasked and that this video at least is leaving unanswered is how do we now cope how do we now adapt and develop a new culture when in some ways anything is possible anything is permissible but there's no outside force that will compel us to take responsibility when the sense of responsibility now more than ever has to come from within [Music]