!Kung Sexuality and Conrols on Sexual Behavior

Megan Foster
January 8th, 2015
Anthropology 308
Professor Wallace

Sexuality and controls on sexual behavior

In the !Kung culture they believe that the idea of sex and sexuality came from these two girls who lived alone in a village and two men who lived alone in another village. One day the men noticed that there were women living in a nearby village, so they went over there with the intentions on stealing the women. When they got there, the women were not there because they were out gathering food so the men waited until the women came back. When the women came back, they were shocked to see men and they said that they were going to teach these men about sex. When the night came each man and women paired up and laid down with each other. One of the men got up and wanted to have sex with, so he tried putting his penis in her mouth, ears, nose, and eyes. The women was like why are you trying have sex with my face when I have a vagina right here, so the man finally pushed his penis in her vagina and that is how they had sex. The next morning the men got up and went to other villages so they could tell everybody else what sex was and how to do it.
There is little too no privacy in the !Kung culture because in the hut where the parents and the kids sleep there is no divider and the kids who are still young, sleep in the same bed with their parents. The adults try to keep the children from noticing any sexual activity going on but it is hard. Especially when the go to arrange meeting in a bush so they can have sex, the younger kids tend to follow because they do not like to be away from their mother for too long. The only time parents are not engaging in any sexual activity is right after birth and that is because there is a post-partum sex taboo that prohibits men from having sex with women after giving child birth because the blood that came out of the women is still healing.
When children are still very young they are curious onto what their parents are doing because they think that parents are just lying down with each other doing their work. It is not until little boys and girls get around their friends is where they talk about sexuality and what they think is going on between their parents.
When they !Kung have free time the children play with each other and this is where little boys rub their genitals behind other little boys and when a boy sees a little girl by herself then he will go up to her and they will have sex or at least what they think sex is. Children in the !Kung culture exploring the sexuality is completely normally concept for the !Kung people. After the little children start playing with each other, they start to understand what their parents are doing in the huts and they start to move out and build their own huts so they can start to have privacy too. Sexual play begins with boys playing together and girls playing together. But girls can’t do much together, so they start realizing that they need a penis to actually play and boys are normally the aggressive one to start the sexual play between boys and girls. When older children play with each other they might actually touch each other genitals but they never actually have sex. Adults do not approve of sexual play between young kids but they do not do anything to stop because if they do not see it going on than they really don’t know it is going on.