ENGLISH 2710-001
Alexandra Self
5/1/2013

We can give our thanks to films like “Life’s Greatest Miracle”, sexual education classes, and the ever famous “The Birds and the Bees” talk from our parents to give Americans the confidence that the egg/sperm process is the only way a baby is developed. First, the baby is made when the sperm cells go through a tough journey to try to unite with the egg. Once the sperm cell has gone inside the egg, the birthing process begins as the fertilized egg goes through the stages of turning into a zygote, blastocyst, embryo, fetus, and at last, the baby. But what about other cultures like Elizabethan England, the Arapesh, and the Trobianders that did not have science or not quite accurate scientific methods on explaining how kids came to be? Would their beliefs be the same as the U.S. or would there be things about the beliefs that would seem bizarre to us until properly clarified? Does America itself try to use supernatural interpretation when they cannot answer their own questions with science? Those are the questions we shall look at in this paper.
When you hear the term Elizabethan England, it’s most likely you’ll have an image of
Shakespeare or ruff collars pop into your mind but not many people know that Queen Elizabeth’s people had a different belief than ours when it came to infant creation. The belief about male orgasms being vital to conception they got correct when comparing our views to theirs. But for them, the male is not the only one that orgasms for they believe the woman had to deposit her own female seed and have it be united with the male seed for procreation to initiate.
In our society, when it comes to orgasms for the female, it’s a benefit for her to have an orgasm but is not critical to procreation. When it comes to Elizabethan England, it was necessary that both genders must orgasm if they want to have a chance at having another human on Earth.
With the focus on the partners both enjoying the process to let two become three, we would like to think that their sex must have been more of a marvelous thing as nowadays,

according to Planned Parenthood statistics, as many as 1 in 3 women have trouble reaching orgasm when having sex and as many as 80 percent of women have difficulty with orgasm from vaginal intercourse alone. However, this belief proved to be detrimental when it came to rape trials. If you were a victim of a rape trial during this time, it was extremely unlikely you were going to win if you got pregnant out of it. The mindset of the people judging the trial was that if the only way to have a baby is for both partners to climax, then she must have secretly wanted it and therefore it’s not rape. Even today, that belief tends to stay strong as Todd Akins once said that if it was legitimate rape, then the woman’s body would have shut down so the eggs would not be fertilized. We could be furious that Todd Akins could even think such a thing; however, the unfortunate truth is that belief has had a long background and remains to be rooted in rape trial judgments. There was the fact too that when women were not having a delightful time in the bedroom and still getting pregnant or when a woman wanted to cover up an unwanted pregnancy, statements of demon possession became common.
Beliefs are not like fortune cookies that spurt off random phrases of wisdom then get tossed aside once the message has been read. Beliefs exist because they provide society a function or a motive. So this belief was established because Elizabethan England wanted to increase its population to make up for all the people they lost during the plagues. The women would not be willing to sacrifice their bodies if she was only going to get partial ecstasy. So if the women knew that there was going to be a chance of good sex, then they would not have any discouragement into having children.
Next, we will be examining Arapesh’s sexual beliefs which were actually close to being biologically accurate. They believed that sex would compose a child and that babies came from an insertion of male seed into the female. The difference was that they believed the babies were

built bit by bit from the father’s sperm and the mother’s menstrual blood. The fluids would mix and solidify with the sperm generate the child’s skin and bones and the blood would result in outcome of the child’s blood, blood vessels, nerves, and tendons. Because the baby was seen as a construction of multiple parts instead of one thing entirely, the Arapesh believed that one sexual encounter was not going to be enough to produce a child so that they had as much sex until the couple physically could not do it anymore.
Many people would love the idea of endless intercourse and maybe would not mind joining this kind of society. Before we take any action into moving to this community, the idea of it does not sound so swell once the reality is set in. It turns out in their society there are two types of sex: the sex made entirely for pleasure and the sex that is only used for baby making so it’s not entirely the intense passion people would dream about. It didn’t matter how exhausted you were or not in the mood for sex, the work had to be made in order to make a baby. So not only was the situation not as delightful as hoped, the intercourse literally did become hard work.
This belief was ingrained because the Arapesh wanted to have guarantees that babies would be spawned. Whenever you see a movie, to tell if a woman is pregnant, the pregnancy test becomes a symbol to foretelling the productive future of the woman such as a rooster to tell of when morning has come or a full moon to tell that danger will be approaching. This stick to pee on is the ultimate thing to use when a woman is wondering if their hard work has finally paid off or if the woman will be telling some bad news to her boyfriend. The Arapesh society as you can imagine did not have the materials to bring this sort of device into existence. So the way to be sure whether you were destined to have a child, constant sexual intercourse was in order.

So far, the two beliefs we saw believed that babies are the product out of the intercourse process. Now we will be looking into a culture that does not believe that there is a cause and effect relationship between sex and pregnancy. In the Trobriand Islands, they believed that the
Baloma, the spirits of the dead, would return from the afterlife and impregnate women. This was no ordinary spirit for when the baby was born, it was a reincarnation of the dead ancestor. The idea of a ghost transmitting itself into the womb of a descendant has the ringing of a horror story though that was not how they took it. No living male had anything to do with the baby, they just happened when the ghost wanted to have a body back.
So why did they not believe that sex had anything to do with making babies? The majority of Americans are aware that unless a method of protection has been established, sex will lead to a child. It turns out that with this culture, if you have been on birth control in your entire life, the mental connection between sexual intercourse and producing children is not linked together. The most important part of the Trobriand diet was the Dioscorea (yam) that has a contraceptive effect. Nevertheless, if sex was not meant to have children, then the anatomy was made to pass the time. This could be seen as both a benefit and a consequence depending on how you look at the situation. There were no mental consequences so no guilt was put on the person although this hobby could result in sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancies if the yam was not eaten (though to them, because pregnancies came as a surprise from ghosts, babies were not entirely seen as a terrible thing to occur).
This belief came to be because they did not have Gregor Mendel in their lessons. After all, if the ghost was just some random phantom, then why would the offspring look like the parents? The reincarnation was made to explain how babies would come out of the woman’s body and have traits that come from the woman or her family members. So their belief is their

own variation on how genetics worked. It goes to show that you must never underestimate biology.
Americans can be prideful when they see how these cultures were lacking in the technology we have today. However, until the time comes science is not able to comprehend every question that deals with human nature. When science is not able to sufficiently answer these questions, Americans still are hungry for any sort of answer. The conclusion does not even have to have a scientific background as long it satisfies the answer hungry monster. The insights may not have proof but if it works for the person’s lifestyle, then the belief is not going to be challenged anytime soon. Even with the technology to show how pregnancy happens like having ultrasounds, some legends or old wives tales can sneak in to fill in the blanks when we ponder about letting humans dwell inside the women until they are pushed into our world.
There are some Americans that believe you can only pregnant under certain conditions
(other than menstrual cycles and menopause). For example, the phrase, “You can’t get pregnant your first time” tends to be significantly uttered in high schools. Your body is not a store that will let you try out the product to see how you will like it. Once the spermatozoa have conquered the quest of implanting itself into the egg, there is no going back. If fertility is questioned, then protection should be stored and kept close like a best friend.
There is also claim that concrete things can aid to those that are barren (I am excluding fertility drugs on this one). Mandrakes that go way back into biblical times are still considered a fertility herb today. There are websites that say certain foods will make sure they get you pregnant. Lubricants and cough syrup state that they help out with conceiving. While some of the myths do have some scientific background like green tea, lots of these external items are just

ways to calm the nerves of the couple. So these items are more useful in the genesis of a placebo effect rather than the efficiency of the items.
Mothers are not only concerned with their fertility; they are also concerned about whether their child will be perfect. There is much claim that parents just want for their child to be healthy, however, even the term “healthy” may have more expectation than what the definition provides.
So when the mother has a disabled child, she has a tendency to think that God is punishing her by giving her a difficult child. While I am religious myself, I do not believe at all that God did this because the mother was such a sinister sinner. It is recommended to not smoke since secondhand smoke is correlated to the child having learning disabilities. Other than that, disabilities will stay as a factor of life that cannot always be explained. The child is just disabled, it is not a changeling, has evil spirits, or a lucky charm.
No culture is more advanced than the other. The term, “Savage” is a prominent name for a culture to use when they want to be the superior one of the cultures. Our desire to be better than others has gotten bad to the point where we criticize a process that is universal to human species.
One belief is not better than the other; they are just different and made from the environment the groups grew up in. We should want to know diverse beliefs so we can try to understand each other, not so we can use the knowledge to judge. Until we can get rid of our internal evils, we’ll focus for now that sexual reproduction is seen in all cultures as there is one way to form a newborn. However, even though there is only one process, how we interpret that process can go in more directions than how many we originally thought there was.

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