From a Usenet newsgroup discussion (June 2009):

[1]:>>> According to Margaret Mead, the South Sea Islanders paid no attention to sexual taboos – hardly knew sex was connected with pregnancy. They indulged with abandon where and when and with whom they felt like, and age was no barrier.

[2]: >> That’s a remarkably simplistic reading of Mead.

[3] Me: > And also substantially *wrong* if we are to believe Derek Freeman’s assertions that the Samoans made up naughty stories for this gullible foreigner (‘Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth’).

[2] again: Well, my point was that people tend to trot out Mead as ‘evidence’ for pretty much any and all types of sexual behaviours and mores which aren’t the same as their own, whether they’re promoting such behaviours and mores as escaping narrow, hidebound restrictions, or disapproving of them as nasty and ‘animal’.

Me again: I remember interviewing Margaret Mead in the early 1970s for Australian radio, and found her a most interesting/engaging person. Pity she endured a couple of unhappy marriages before her third marriage (that husband walked out on her, but was apparently the love of her life). And then there are the rumours of her ‘interesting’ erotic relationship with Ruth Benedict (but we won’t go there 🙂

[2] again: Not exactly uncommon. Historically speaking, clandestine lesbian relationships were mostly ignored or tacitly accepted, mainly because they didn’t infringe on patrilinear inheritance. A male lover was a serious threat, a female one wasn’t. Plus, there was a prevailing notion that anything women did together wasn’t ‘real’ sex anyway. Women who openly rejected heterosexuality, otoh, *were* a threat, because they might influence prospective brides, and then who would breed the male heirs?