Download Sexual Values in a Moroccan Town

Sexual Values in a Moroccan Town
DOUGLAS A. DAVIS & SUSAN SCHAEFER DAVIS
All human societies impose rules on the form and
meaning of sexual behavior. As Freud observed a
century ago, such rules are partly learned during
early childhood, but they are fully expressed only
during the years after puberty, when increasing sexual drive and new opportunities for sexual contact
lead the individual to confront the restrictions imposed by society. Straight/gay, faithful/unfaithful,
sexy/frigid: the words we use to describe the sexual
side of ourselves reveal a lot about who we think
we are, and who or what we think others are. The
study of sexual behavior and values is thus a means
of understanding both cultural patterns and the
shaping of individual personality
Sexual attitudes and feelings are usually among
the most private aspects of a person's life, and even
in the case of the most thoroughly studied individuals it is unlikely for the biographer to have full
access to the secrets of the bedroom (or, for that
matter, those of the nursery, the kitchen, or the bathroom). The ethnographer or cross-cultural researcher who wishes to understand sexual values
starts with the realization that these are shaped by
broad social forces such as religion, language, or
ethnicity: by family and community or neighborhood-level influences such as gender, birth order, or
socioeconomic status; and by such individual factors as identification, anxiety-tolerance, and imagination.
Whatever one thinks about Freud's notion that
sexuality is the central problem of personality development, any adult who has tried to have a frank
conversation with a teenager about who did what,
and with what, and to whom, will acknowledge
that accurate information about sexual actions is
hard to get and that erotic feelings are often mysterious even to the person who has them. As part of
our research on adolescence in Morocco (see Davis
& Davis, 1989), conducted as part of the Harvard
Adolescence Project (which sent field teams into
seven different cultural settings) in 1982 and following years, we returned to a Moroccan town we
have studied since the middle 1960s and attempted
to learn in detail about the family relationships,
friendships, sources of pleasure and conflict, and
marriage and career plans of a group of teenagers.
Douglas A. Davis is Professor of Psychology at
Haverford College. He earned his Ph.D. in Psychology
in 1974 from the University of Michigan. His primary
scholarly interests are personality and culture and psychoanalytic psychology. He has done fieldwork in Morocco and worked for the Peace Corps in Morocco and
India. He is co-author, with Susan Schaefer Davis, of
Adolescence in a Moroccan Town: Making Social Sense (Rutgers Press, 1989).
Susan Schaefer Davis is an independent scholar,
and consultant on international development for the
World Bank and Peace Corps. Research interests are
gender, relationships, and women in development, especially in North Africa. Her Anthropology Ph.D. is
from the University of Michigan (1978); she's taught at
Haverford and Trenton State Colleges. She has several
articles and two books: Patience and Power: Women's
Lives in a Moroccan Wllage (Schenkman, 1983),and Adolescence in a Moroccan Town, the latter with Douglas
Davis.
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Sexuality touched each of these topics but, despite
the fact that we are well known and trusted in this
community and speak Moroccan Arabic fluently, it
was hard to get anyone to be completely frank
about their own sexual behavior and sometimes
impossible to reconcile what we heard from individuals about their own behavior ("Who? Me?
Never!") with what the same young people said
about their peers ("Everybody does it."). We are
confident about the generalizationswe make below
because we have lived in this community for years
and were able to compare individual's statements
with those of their friends and neighbors. But like
the rest of the members of the Adolescence Project
we came away with a real sense of the complexity
of obtaining accurate information about sexuality.
ISLAM A N D SEXUALITY
Like other major religions, Islam has lent itself to a
variety of interpretations of the role of sexuality
(Bouhdiba, 1985). Sexual pleasure is recognized as
an essential part of human life, and some Muslim
writers have described it as a foretaste of paradise.
On the other hand, most Muslims view sex outside
of marriage as sinful and dangerous to the social
order. Thus Muslim societies have usually placed
great emphasis on marriage as an essential part of
adult life, and the seclusion of women in many of
these societies serves the function of keeping both
female and male sexuality under control. The traditional emphasis on female chastity is changing in a
town like Zawiya, but gender differences in sexual
behavior are much greater than in most European
or North American settings, as we will see.
THE SETTING
We describe in this chapter the sexual side of adolescent life in a small town in North Africa, whose
Arabic-speaking Muslim young people we have
come to know as part of our 25-year interest in their
community (Davis, 1983; Davis & Davis, 1989). In
the semi-rural town of Zawiya in central Morocco,
the changing sexual attitudes and practices of teenagers have been influenced by many of the same
factors seen in the United States and Europe: coeducational public schooling, television, popular music, and travel to large cities. On the other hand,
Moroccan society is strongly shaped by the values
of Islam and by traditional Arab views concerning
honor, modesty, and gender. The picture we give
here is of one relatively traditional town in a country with remarkable diversity. While we believe
many of these observations about sexuality could
be made of other small towns in Morocco and the
Middle East, Zawiya is quite different from both the
truly remote villages of the Atlas Mountains or the
Saharan fringes and the cosmopolitan centers of
Casablanca or Tangier.
Zawiya in 1982 was a town of roughly 12,000
located in a fertile agricultural area in north central
Morocco. While Zawiya has the look of an impoverished country town, with few paved streets and
no restaurants, modern stores, or movie theaters,
a provincial city of 50,000,2 kilometers away provides all these amenities. Train and bus connections make it possible for Zawiya residents to visit
major Moroccan cities within a few hours. The
young people we studied in the early 1980s were
therefore still in close touch with the traditional
family and religious values of their parents, most of
them uneducated country people, but they had
knowledge of a world of other possibilities from
their experiences in school, their travels to visit relatives in large cities, and their daily exposure to TV
and radio.
The youth of Zawiya today are coming of age at
a time when social roles and institutions are undergoing significant and rapid change. Morocco was
controlled by France from 1912 to 1956, and the
current generation of Moroccan youth are being
formed in part by the tension between traditional
religious values and modem political and economic
ones. Parent-child relationships are interesting in
such a community, as illiterate parents try to help
prepare their children for a world far beyond their
own experience. Young children of both sexes are
affectionately and indulgently cared for by their
mothers. Although both boys and girls now typically attend at least elementary school, girls remain
under closer maternal influence during the elementary school years as they help with a variety of
child-care and housekeeping tasks. Since Zawiya
houses have not had running water until the past
few years, girls often spent hours a day getting
water from one of seven public taps. After puberty,
girls are still likely to be kept closer to home than
boys, even if they continue in school, and they have
many more responsibilities in the household. Boys,
on the other hand, typically have much less supervision by parents during adolescence, and many of
them spend hours hanging out with male friends.
In the later teen years, relationships outside the
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family are especially important for adolescents in
most cultures, and these include friendships between lie-sexed age-mates and romances or sexual
relationships between males and females. As
Zawiya teenagers make the long walk to high
school in the nearby larger town, or leave home to
take jobs, they have increased opportunity for interaction with the opposite sex-and this has led to
conflicts between traditional and modem sexual
values.
SEXUAL ATTITUDES,
SEXUAL ACTS
Like most predominantly Arab societies and much
of circum-Mediterranean culture (including such
countries as Greece, Turkey, Lebanon, and Egypt),
growing up in Morocco involves learning stronglydifferentiated gender roles. Boys and girls have a
very different experience in the family as preschoolers; they are subject to different levels of constraint as they reach sexual maturity, and they have
different expectations from friendships with the
other sex.
The most striking features of adolescent sexuality in Zawiya today center on three factors. First,
there is a clear double standard, in which males have
Finally, courtship, sexual values,
and marriage choices are
undergoing significant and
rapid change as a result of
increased access to education
and electronic media.
a good deal of sexual freedom and are assumed to
be sexually active, while females are much more
restricted in opportunities for sexual activity and
are expected to remain virgins until marriage. Second, there is a much greater range of sexual practices by males than by females, including
homoerotic play and masturbation. Finally, courtship, sexual values, and marriage choices are undergoing significant and rapid change as a result of
increased access to education and electronic media.
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Chastity and the Double Standard
The sexual behavior of males has always been subject to much less restriction than that of females in
Morocco, and even in traditional communities men
sometimes sought sexual outlets other than their
wife. While the extramarital activity of a man could
bring scandal on his family, or provoke violence
from a cuckolded neighbor, it is understood that
males will on occasion consort with prostitutes or
attempt to seduce married women and virginal
girls. Young men in Zawiya today often attempt to
have sexual relationships with young women classmates and friends, while still expecting both to protect the virginity of their own sisters and to many a
virgin themselves. A young man may decide not to
marry a girl because she has given in to his own
sexual advances. The responses from 100 young
people ranging in age from 9 to 21 whom we asked
about the qualities wanted in a mate emphasized
good character and honorable reputation, along
with physical attractiveness, as central concerns
shared by both sexes (Davis &Davis, 1989, pp. 125126). The hope is to combine love and mutual respect for a mate of whom family and community
will approve, and, among more educated youth, we
often heard about intentions to combine career and
family and to share two incomes. At the point of
actual marriage, however, many young men from
backgrounds like Zawiya are drawn to younger
and less educated girls, and they expect these
brides to defer both to themselves and their families. If they do select someone of similar age and
education, she is likely not to be a neighborhood girl
but someone met at school or on the job in the city.
Even in an age when most U.S. young people
are sexually active, brides in the United States usually wear a white dress signifying sexual purity.
When a marriage is celebrated in a traditional semirural town like Zawiya, the wedding festivities
often culminate in the bride's and groom's retreat to
a bedroom nearby. After a brief time, a female family member will bring out blood-stained sheets for
triumphant display to the crowd, attesting to the
bride's virginity and the groom's potency. Since
many young couples today have in fact been sexually active before the wedding, however, the display of the sheets can pose a problem. We heard of
cases where the bride brought a vial of her own
blood into the bedroom, or where the groom cut
himself, or where animal blood was used. This custom is changing and has been abandoned in many
middle-class urban weddings, and often couples
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will begin living together after government civil
marriage papers are signed and celebrated with a
small family party. This saves the expense of a large
wedding; it also means that demonstration of the
bride's premarital virtue never becomes an issue.
Girls do fear loss of their virginity, and thus
possibly of opportunities to marry, and they are
well aware that the risks of sexual intimacy are
mostly theirs. Yet, despite strong traditional censure
of the unwed mother, premarital pregnancies do
occur in this community, and in these cases the
Moroccan family is usually pragmatic. We heard
several reports of young women who left the community before giving birth, but there have also been
recent instances of a young woman's giving birth at
home to a child who is then raised by her or her
parents. Abortion, which in the past was provided
by midwives or knowledgeable older women, has
become widely available in recent years through
private doctors in nearby towns, and some unrnarried young women are reported to have had several
abortions. The difference between the traditional
emphasis on chastity as a matter of family honor
and the actual behavior of young people and their
parents in a community like Zawiya should caution
the anthropologist not to mistake a statement of the
social norm (what is thought to be right or desirable) for a valid generalization about normative
(typical) behavior.
The Variety of Sexual Acts
Social scientists now generally recognize that the
range of normal sexual behavior includes a variety
of feelings and acts, including homoerotic and autoerotic (masturbatory) experience. In American society, however, despite the general relaxation of
sexual prohibitions over the past several decades,
and despite widespread recognition that homosexuality is fairly common in most societies, few
teenagers admit readily to homoerotic feelings or
homosexual acts (Coles & Stokes, 1985). Morocco
seems to be distinguished from the United States
not so much by a different proportion of people
who are homosexual a s by a relative absence of the
homophobia that makes homosexuality the focus of
so much fear, hostility/ and anxious humor in America. In Zawiya, various forms of homoemtic play,
including nude swimming and group masturbation, were reported as fairly common for boys in the
early teen years. Older males sometimes engage in
homosexual acts, sometimes including interfemoral
and anal intercourse, but these young people do not
think of themselves as homosexuals but rather as
going through a phase. Homosexuality in adulthood seems to be rare and is still considered shameful by most Moroccans. Separate terms are used for
the partner who plays the active and the passive
role in intercourse, and the term for the passive
participant (urnel) is an insult and a frequently seen
graffito on walls near Moroccan schoolyards. In
contrast to what we heard from young men, most
young women in Zawiya seemed never to have
considered the possibility of female homosexuality,
and both sexes stated that lesbian relationships
were very rare.
Another striking difference between the sexes
in Zawiya was with reference to masturbation. Kinsey's researchers, surveying Americans in the
1940s, found that most males and a majority of females recalled masturbating in the years following
puberty. This topic was very difficult to discuss
with young people in Zawiya, however, and we
concluded that masturbation is viewed more negatively in this traditional Muslim community than in
most American groups. A few boys and young men
admitted to masturbating, and estimated that most
males did so, but no young women either admitted
or described female masturbation. Generally, we
were struck by the much greater range and frequency of sexual experiences reported by males,
although both sexes were fascinated by romantic
images.
Inducements to Change
As part of our research in Zawiya, we asked adolescents about their exposure to influences that we
suspected might change their ideas of traditional
gender roles. These included watching television,
listening to radio or cassettes, reading books, attending films, and travel to larger towns. We took
detailed educational histories and asked people in
and out of school to describe their daily activities,
so we could determine the effects of schooling on
attitudes and activities. It is easy for those of us
growing up in societies where almost everyone has
attended public school to overlook the profound
effects on a traditional society of suddenly uprooting all young people born in a given year from
family and neighborhood and compelling them to
spend most of their waking hours together in
school. Indeed, the unverified assumption that adolescence is a universal lifestage seems to us to grow
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directly from the institution of a lengthy moratorium between childhood and adulthood during
which youth are prepared by employees of the state
for a life different from that of their parents.
We asked about preferences for Arab or Weste m programs on radio, television, and cassettes. A
wide range of music is available on Moroccan radio
stations, including popular Moroccan groups in
Arabic and Berber, Middle Eastern romantic ballads, and both French and American rock and country music. On television, Egyptian romances share
the airwaves with U.S. evening soaps ("Dallas,"
'Dynasty"), crime dramas ("Colombo"), and sitc o m ("The Cosby Show").
One apparent effect of TV in Zawiya has been
on attitudes toward marriage. Traditional Arab cultures specified a parent-arranged marriage to a patrilateral parallel cousin (father's brother's son or
daughter) as the ideal but cousin marriages are now
quite uncommon in Zawiya, and most young people expect at least to play a role in selecting a
spouse. Today's educated young people have more
idea of what they want in a spouse. This inclination
is fed by romantic magazines and television programs. A recurrent theme of Egyptian TV dramas,
for example, is the love match opposed by parents,
who prefer a rich older man for their daughter; the
love match usually triumphs. As one young Zawiya
woman said, "Girls today learn a lot from films.
They learn how to lead their lives. They show the
problem of marriage and divorce and everything
in those films. TV explains a lot. TV has made girls
aware-boys too, but mainly girls." While most of
the roughly 100 Zawiya youth we asked "Who
should choose the spouse?" answered "the parents" (64% of females and 55%of males), about 25%
of each sex wanted to take part in the decision. The
number saying they wanted to be involved increased significantly as youth increased in age and
in level of education.
The two sexes in Zawiya have a very different
exposure to cinema. Of girls, 80 percent had never
been to a movie, while 40 percent of boys went
occasionally and another 40 percent went weekly or
more often. Like television, movies in the nearby
city offer exposure to a range of cultures. In addition to Egyptian, French, and U.S. films, Italian
westerns, Hindi fantasies, and Oriental karate film5
are popular. The most important influence on gender relations may be the soft-core European films,
portrayingsexual behavior that is banned on television. Young men's sexual fantasies, and their expec-
229
tations of girlfriends, seem to be changing as a result of exposure to these imported images. As
guides for adult living, the TV, pop music, and
movie images available to youth in Zawiya seem to
influence fantasies and premarital behavior, but
these imported notions are often of little relevance
to the actual relationships these young Moroccans
are likely to experience with a future spouse.
In terms of media preferences, significantly
more girls than boys preferred Arabic entertainment on radio, cassettes, and television. For radio,
83 percent of the girls preferred Arabic programs
compared to 35 percent of the boys; for cassettes
(mostly music) 85 percent of girls and 56 percent of
boys preferred Arabic. On television, 44 percent of
girls and 12 percent of boys preferred Arabic programs. While boys on the average were more educated than girls (and thus more comfortable with
non-Arabic languages), it appears these differences
are due to sex rather than educational level. Young
men as a group are more deeply involved with
Western media and the assumptions about relationships and sexuality implicit therein. While both
Western and modern Middle Eastern media are preoccupied with love and romantic encounters, the
former are more sexuality explicit and less compatible with traditional Moroccan and Muslim ideas
about marriage.
CONCLUSION
The sexual side of life for these young Moroccans is
characterized by rapid change, sharp gender-differentiation, and some contradiction between traditional and modem expectations of a relationship.
Sexuality can be problematic in such a community,
since sexual activity either involves, for the young
man, persons unsuitable for marriage (prostitutes,
"dishonored girls) or, for the young woman, a
need to conceal her actions and feign virginity at
marriage. Because of the double standard, the sexes
approach each other with contradictory motives,
and often with distrust, so that maintaining emotional intimacy is difficult. On the whole, however,
we have been impressed with the respect these adolescents still show for parental and traditional religious values, even as they prepare for an adulthood
very different from what their parents have known.
The youth of Zawiya still tend to assume they can
have new social roles, and new kinds of relation-
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ships, without openly challenging family and religious values they share with their parents.
SUGGESTED READINGS
b h d i b a , A. (1985).s ~ ~ l iinf kyh m . %&on: bufledge
and Kegan Paul.
Coles, R., & Stokes, G.(1985). Sex and the American teenager. New York: Harper & Row.
Davis, Susan S. (1983).Patience and power: Women's lives in
a Moroccan village. Cambridge, MA.: Schenckman.
Davis, Susan S., & Davis, Dough A. (1989).Adolescence
in a Maroccan town: Making social sense. New Banswick: Rutgem University &.
Mernissi, F, (198q,Bqmd tkv ~ l , . m l e ~ ~ ~ e ind p m ~
modem Muslim society. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.