Infant and Child Sexuality: A Sociological Perspective - Ipce

tion by the young child is accepted also as a normal practise. (Ford
and Beach, 1951, p. 188).
Among the Balinese, play and teasing with the genitals is common. A
mother will pat her baby girl on the vulva and exclaim, “Pretty!
Pretty!” (Bateson and Mead, 1942, p. 26, 32, 131). A boy’s penis will
be stroked and rubbed. After he has urinated, he will be dried by a
flick of his penis. As he grows older, his penis will be pulled and
stretched and ruffled, and he will often attempt to keep his balance
when learning to walk by holding on to it. Babies are comforted and
quieted by manipulating their genital organs. In fact, in Bali, a baby,
especially a baby’s genital, is a toy with which to play. There is much
delight taken in stimulating and playing with the baby to watch him respond.
There has been a strong taboo in the United States on suckling an
infant in public or even reproducing photographs in magazines of infants
suckling; whereas bottle feeding in public and pictures of bottle
feeding infants are acceptable. Thus, in America, a young mother
often starts suckling her infant without having once observed another
woman suckling an infant. She is ignorant even if she is interested.
There are marked national differences in breast feeding even in
Western countries as was found in a cross-national study involving London,
Paris, Stockholm, Brussels, and Zürich mothers. (As reported in
Newton and Newton, 1967). Not only were the overall incidences different,
but significant differences in the type of weaning curves were observed.
Higher breast-feeding rates were associated with high social
status in Zürich and Stockholm, but not in Brussels and Paris where no
hint of class differences in breast-feeding was noted. British and
American studies show high social status to be associated with favorable
attitudes toward breast feeding. Sears found that only about twofifths
of the infants in their American study were breast-fed, the
large majority for less than three months. (Sears, et al, 1957, p. 71-
74). The commonest reason given for not suckling the infant was that
the mother was physically unable to do so. Twenty-six percent of the
whole group gave this reason.
Lactation failure or the inability to suckle infants fluctuates
greatly over short periods of time, suggesting that it is triggered by
psychological rather than physiological factors. For instance, national
surveys indicate that the rate of breast-feeding of infants in
the United States fell by almost half during a ten year period. Likewise,
in the course of twenty years in Bristol, England, the number of
three-month-old breast-fed infants dropped from 77 to 36 percent. In an
obstetric clinic in France the proportion of babies not suckled increased
from 31 to 51 percent in five years. This change is so rapid
that it cannot be attributed to hereditary factors and major physiological
changes in function would be unlikely in the absence of radical
stresses such as starvation or epidemic disease. (Newton and Newton).
Western societies raise many barriers against sensory contact between
infant and mother. Western styles of female dress calling for
brassieres and one or more additional coverings of clothing over the
breasts have made breast-infant contact difficult. Frequently mother
and infant do not sleep together in the same bed, or even in the same
room.
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