The Marind people in New Guinea are subjected frequently to sodomy by their elders because they think that absorbing sperm from the anus will make them grow strong and they don’t seem to develop any traumas at all. So yes, I agree 100% that what constitutes a violation is socially constructed.
I (maybe) agree directionally but I’m again irritated by the lack of nuance here (“100%”).
There are good reasons to think that an experience is worse when it’s not socially condoned. People aren’t just afraid and disturbed about “what happened” – they’re also afraid about “what could’ve happened.” Traumatic experiences are often from near-misses (you didn’t die, but something went wrong and you better avoid it in the future!). If the experience is contextualized as “elders do this by tradition; it’s meant to benefit you” – that seems less concerning than if you have something done to you by someone who is blatantly ignoring your personhood (and engaging in criminal behavior). In the latter instance, you don’t know what comes next – the person doing it to you has demonstrated that they don’t don’t feel the same way about other people (this is disturbing in itself, possibly for hardcoded evolutionary reasons around fear/apprehension of bad agents; it also has implications like “since they have no concern for you, nor for the law, they might murder you if they suspect you could tell someone”).
Just because something’s considered normal doesn’t mean it can’t traumatize some people. (For instance, it’s common among rationalists to express the view that school can be traumatizing – “small t trauma,” admittedly.) And activities do differ in their risk-to-traumatize. (See my other comments on this post.)
Researching this is hampered by the fact that most work done on it is in old books that aren’t fully online, but the little I have found makes me dubious of your conclusion.
From what I can piece together, that society was, unsurprisingly, ravaged by sexually transmitted diseases (gonorrhoea, granuloma inguinale...) and resulting infertility (the former inflames the female pelvic region and uterus, making intercourse very painful, and scars your fallopian tubes, leading to ectopic pregnancies, which are fatal; the latter causes worsening painful sores that don’t heal, which can progress to the degree where your penis autoamputates). As a consequence of the infertility problem, they ritualised that brides, during the marriage ceremony, were systematically raped by every single male relative of the groom, which often led to the gang rape festivities lasting over a day, in an attempt to “up fertility”. They would also repeat this after the woman had given birth; if you have ever seen a vagina immediately after giving birth, you can imagine the level of pain that would have implied. And the men began giving themselves bloody diarrhoea on purpose in an attempt to mimic menstruation, in the belief that this would somehow help pregnancies now that severely sick women weren’t menstruating. Which made the STI induced fertility problem worse, of course. So they also began kidnapping young fertile people from other tribes, headhunting members of other communities to transfer the mana from the severed heads to their few (STI-infected) newborns in an attempt to fix their perceived mana deficiency while eating the remains, and eating young girls who had reached sexual maturity—yep, large scale cannibalism, on an island chain that is known for epidemic outbreaks of Kuru, a prion disease that gives you essentially a novel take on mad cow disease.
- Like, I am not doubting at all that social framing has a pronounced impact on perception, but I am dubious of the idea that culturally telling each other that they were making great choices here somehow shielded them from all the traumatic consequences. Being raped when your ass is infected must bloody—literally—hurt, and having someone insert a dick covered in sores into you when you have seen where and when these sores break out and what they build to does not sound an empowering experience. Being told something is actually healthy for you doesn’t simply make it so. Being told something is good does not make it so. The nazis went to extensive trouble to tell their people that killing Jews was not just okay, but a positive and absolutely necessary good, through indoctrination starting in childhood and working daily to affirm and stabilise this course, and yet they had to devise gas chambers because making people shoot the Jews by hand was causing severe problems—propaganda or no, the vast majority of those directly involved in the murders showed signs of extreme stress, and many people would be flooded by guilt, have mental health breaks, some even commit suicide, even though everyone was telling them they were doing a good and normal thing.
I was really hoping to find in depth interviews on how the Marind-Anim individually framed the whole ritualised rape thing when not under elder supervision, as well as mental health scores, physical health scores, scores on behavioural abnormalities. Like, if you went through this, you must be under massive psychological pressure to tell yourself it serves a crucial function that made it worth it, and that everyone else has to go through the same so your sacrifice was not in vain, you’d be super defensive of it, because admitting you were wrong and went through this or perpetrated it for no rational reason would utterly crush you. But would your behaviour be consistent with your claimed beliefs that this was awesome? Would you be gladly seeking out the rape each night on order to achieve peak manliness, or rather systematically avoiding the contexts in which you get raped, by making the perpetrator drunk or working late? How far would the indoctrination reach, and how would it change in response to being hit over the head with reality? Like, if you haven’t been raped, but told if how great it is for you, I assume you will be very eager to get started, and devastated if someone prevents it. How does that hold up after the actual ass-penetration has started? How is it changed by whether you are attracted to the perpetrator, how old you are, how gentle they are, what stimuli it is associated with? How does it hold up after the first time you are doing badly and do not acutely want it and yet it happens regardless? How does it hold up once significant pain and disease transmission get added to the mix? Would they be showing the same physical and mental trauma signs we observed in the West, such as dissociating, depression and anger or self-harm and psychosomatic pain, or different ones? How do they talk about it—is it taboo, spoken of loudly, reverently, casually, with humour? What is the long-term relationship with the perpetrator, do we see traumatic bonding? What changes when a different culture tells them this is fucked up—do they get worse, or better, do they double down? I’ve read in depth reports of how suffering crimes that are not framed by society as such impacts people, but never on this scale. Like, are the cannibalistic murders a separate phenomenon, or a consequence of severe anger issues? Were the gang rapes of wives just a response to rising infertility from STIs, or a circle of rape thing where the boys that had been raped now also got to rape to re-establish their hierarchy?
But it looks like the anthropologists at the time went either “oh my God no oh God Jesus no what the flying fuck stop raping her with your sore covered dick and please don’t eat the infected corpse just no” or “well, wow, moral standards are really totally relative, aren’t they, I guess everything is constructed, I’m going to use Foucault to analyse this penis jewellery”, while I would have loved to see more in depth empirical data. It would have given us fascinating insights into the limits of cultural construction of nonviolence.
If anyone digs up more concrete data, I would love it if you could share it. If you are interested in epistemic injustice, such a scenario is a massive treasure find.
The Marind people in New Guinea are subjected frequently to sodomy by their elders because they think that absorbing sperm from the anus will make them grow strong and they don’t seem to develop any traumas at all. So yes, I agree 100% that what constitutes a violation is socially constructed.
I (maybe) agree directionally but I’m again irritated by the lack of nuance here (“100%”).
There are good reasons to think that an experience is worse when it’s not socially condoned. People aren’t just afraid and disturbed about “what happened” – they’re also afraid about “what could’ve happened.” Traumatic experiences are often from near-misses (you didn’t die, but something went wrong and you better avoid it in the future!). If the experience is contextualized as “elders do this by tradition; it’s meant to benefit you” – that seems less concerning than if you have something done to you by someone who is blatantly ignoring your personhood (and engaging in criminal behavior). In the latter instance, you don’t know what comes next – the person doing it to you has demonstrated that they don’t don’t feel the same way about other people (this is disturbing in itself, possibly for hardcoded evolutionary reasons around fear/apprehension of bad agents; it also has implications like “since they have no concern for you, nor for the law, they might murder you if they suspect you could tell someone”).
Just because something’s considered normal doesn’t mean it can’t traumatize some people. (For instance, it’s common among rationalists to express the view that school can be traumatizing – “small t trauma,” admittedly.) And activities do differ in their risk-to-traumatize. (See my other comments on this post.)
Those are good points and you are right about my lack of nuance. Thanks
Researching this is hampered by the fact that most work done on it is in old books that aren’t fully online, but the little I have found makes me dubious of your conclusion.
From what I can piece together, that society was, unsurprisingly, ravaged by sexually transmitted diseases (gonorrhoea, granuloma inguinale...) and resulting infertility (the former inflames the female pelvic region and uterus, making intercourse very painful, and scars your fallopian tubes, leading to ectopic pregnancies, which are fatal; the latter causes worsening painful sores that don’t heal, which can progress to the degree where your penis autoamputates). As a consequence of the infertility problem, they ritualised that brides, during the marriage ceremony, were systematically raped by every single male relative of the groom, which often led to the gang rape festivities lasting over a day, in an attempt to “up fertility”. They would also repeat this after the woman had given birth; if you have ever seen a vagina immediately after giving birth, you can imagine the level of pain that would have implied. And the men began giving themselves bloody diarrhoea on purpose in an attempt to mimic menstruation, in the belief that this would somehow help pregnancies now that severely sick women weren’t menstruating. Which made the STI induced fertility problem worse, of course. So they also began kidnapping young fertile people from other tribes, headhunting members of other communities to transfer the mana from the severed heads to their few (STI-infected) newborns in an attempt to fix their perceived mana deficiency while eating the remains, and eating young girls who had reached sexual maturity—yep, large scale cannibalism, on an island chain that is known for epidemic outbreaks of Kuru, a prion disease that gives you essentially a novel take on mad cow disease.
- Like, I am not doubting at all that social framing has a pronounced impact on perception, but I am dubious of the idea that culturally telling each other that they were making great choices here somehow shielded them from all the traumatic consequences. Being raped when your ass is infected must bloody—literally—hurt, and having someone insert a dick covered in sores into you when you have seen where and when these sores break out and what they build to does not sound an empowering experience. Being told something is actually healthy for you doesn’t simply make it so. Being told something is good does not make it so. The nazis went to extensive trouble to tell their people that killing Jews was not just okay, but a positive and absolutely necessary good, through indoctrination starting in childhood and working daily to affirm and stabilise this course, and yet they had to devise gas chambers because making people shoot the Jews by hand was causing severe problems—propaganda or no, the vast majority of those directly involved in the murders showed signs of extreme stress, and many people would be flooded by guilt, have mental health breaks, some even commit suicide, even though everyone was telling them they were doing a good and normal thing.
I was really hoping to find in depth interviews on how the Marind-Anim individually framed the whole ritualised rape thing when not under elder supervision, as well as mental health scores, physical health scores, scores on behavioural abnormalities. Like, if you went through this, you must be under massive psychological pressure to tell yourself it serves a crucial function that made it worth it, and that everyone else has to go through the same so your sacrifice was not in vain, you’d be super defensive of it, because admitting you were wrong and went through this or perpetrated it for no rational reason would utterly crush you. But would your behaviour be consistent with your claimed beliefs that this was awesome? Would you be gladly seeking out the rape each night on order to achieve peak manliness, or rather systematically avoiding the contexts in which you get raped, by making the perpetrator drunk or working late? How far would the indoctrination reach, and how would it change in response to being hit over the head with reality? Like, if you haven’t been raped, but told if how great it is for you, I assume you will be very eager to get started, and devastated if someone prevents it. How does that hold up after the actual ass-penetration has started? How is it changed by whether you are attracted to the perpetrator, how old you are, how gentle they are, what stimuli it is associated with? How does it hold up after the first time you are doing badly and do not acutely want it and yet it happens regardless? How does it hold up once significant pain and disease transmission get added to the mix? Would they be showing the same physical and mental trauma signs we observed in the West, such as dissociating, depression and anger or self-harm and psychosomatic pain, or different ones? How do they talk about it—is it taboo, spoken of loudly, reverently, casually, with humour? What is the long-term relationship with the perpetrator, do we see traumatic bonding? What changes when a different culture tells them this is fucked up—do they get worse, or better, do they double down? I’ve read in depth reports of how suffering crimes that are not framed by society as such impacts people, but never on this scale. Like, are the cannibalistic murders a separate phenomenon, or a consequence of severe anger issues? Were the gang rapes of wives just a response to rising infertility from STIs, or a circle of rape thing where the boys that had been raped now also got to rape to re-establish their hierarchy?
But it looks like the anthropologists at the time went either “oh my God no oh God Jesus no what the flying fuck stop raping her with your sore covered dick and please don’t eat the infected corpse just no” or “well, wow, moral standards are really totally relative, aren’t they, I guess everything is constructed, I’m going to use Foucault to analyse this penis jewellery”, while I would have loved to see more in depth empirical data. It would have given us fascinating insights into the limits of cultural construction of nonviolence.
If anyone digs up more concrete data, I would love it if you could share it. If you are interested in epistemic injustice, such a scenario is a massive treasure find.