1 result for (book:notp AND session:768 AND stemmed:cultur)
[... 6 paragraphs ...]
Even when social scientists or biologists explore human sexuality, they do so from the framework of sexuality as it appears in your world. There are quite natural sexual variations, even involving reproduction, that are not now apparent in human behavior in any culture. These variations appear in your world on only fairly microscopic levels, or in the behavior of other species than your own.
[... 4 paragraphs ...]
All of this becomes very complicated because of your value judgments, which oftentimes seem to lack — if you will forgive me — all natural common sense. You cannot separate biology from your own belief systems. The interplay is too vital. If each act of intercourse were meant to produce a child, you would have overrun the planet before you began. Sexual activity is therefore also meant as enjoyment, as an expression of pure exuberance. A woman will often feel her most sexually active in the midst of the menstrual period, precisely when conception is least apt to occur. All kinds of taboos against sexual relations have been applied here, particularly in so-called native cultures. In those cultures, such taboos make good sense. Such peoples, building up the human stock, intuitively knew that the population would be increased if relations were restricted to periods when conception was most likely to occur. The blood was an obvious sign that the woman at her period was relatively “barren.” Her abundance was gone. It seemed to their minds that she was indeed “cursed” during that time (emphatically).
[... 8 paragraphs ...]
These are simple enough examples, but the man who possesses interests considered feminine by your culture, who naturally wants to enter fields of interest considered womanly, experiences drastic conflicts between his sense of personhood and identity — and his sexuality as it is culturally defined. The same, of course, applies to women.
[... 6 paragraphs ...]