HENRY

So I’m reading the paper by G.P. Murdock that was cited the other day (anthropologists are a detestable bunch of bubble-prickers) and I’m enjoying it. Murdock discusses the problem of making general inferences about societies without taking all the variation into account. In short, you can’t make general conclusions just by looking at western populations. The example he uses is the sex position favored by the Trukese -

“The normal, routine posture assumed by the Trukese in copulation is one that is not even mentioned in Kinsey or, to my knowledge, in any other occidental work on sexology or pornography. It probably has never even been approximated by any native-born American couple, however experimental. The curious may be referred to Malinowski, who describes a similar posture for the Trobrianders.”

I’m stumped - I really want to know what this posture is. Given that this paper is from the 50s, is the Trukese sex position just something that isn’t the standard 1950s-era lie-back-and-think-of-England posture? Or is it something more unusual? Is it more efficient or enjoyable?

Given that the Trobrianders have also independently innovated this posture, it mustn’t be too hard to convergently evolve this position. The space of all possible sex positions with two partners can’t be that large that only two cultures have arrived at this nook in sex-position design space?

A quick poke around the internet hasn’t turned up anything. The wikipedia page for Chuuk (the modern name for the place where the Trukese live) sees fit to tell us about major exports, but nothing about Trukese sexology. Apparently, the fact that this island once featured in a Willard Price novel is more interesting than their sex positions:

Chuuk, referred to as Truk, is featured in the Willard Price novel South Sea Adventure. It is on this island that Hal Hunt, his brother Roger Hunt and their companion Omo are washed up after their raft is destroyed in a waterspout.

Anyone got any ideas?

Posted on December 23rd, 2007 by Simon Greenhill