[Note: this transcription was produced by an automatic OCR engine]

MARRIAGE AND RELATIONS OF SEXES I55
this cohabitation is generally carried on inside the hut. If it is
at night-time, the parents wait until the children are asleep,
and then the wife goes across the room to her husband's sleeping-
mat. If they wish to have relations at any other time each of the
children is told to go ofl on some distant errand, so that their
parents may be left alone. It is considered bad for children to
see any man or woman in the act of coition, and in the normal
course of events this would never happen. A man is ashamed, too,
should his son see his penis through some mischance, such as his
nambas slipping down. After a girl is married it is indecent for
her father to see her genitals, for only her husband now has
the right to do so, and should any other man see them, through
her having exposed herself indecently, it is her father’s duty to
reprimand her severely. The line drawn between decency and
indecency differs greatly from our conventions‘ A small boy will
give a realistic imitation of copulation in public without being
reprovedfl but it would be regarded as indecent and suggestive
were he to point out to a woman that there was a cockroach or
a piece of mud on her skirt.
Frequent cohabitation is regarded as a bad thing, especially
for a young man, even if he be of exceptional bodily strength,
since it will weaken him. The advice generally given by the
old men is that a man should copulate once a night for three
nights in succession and then have two nights’ rest, and so on
continuously. If a man, having two wives. should cohabit twice
in one night, he may do this for two nights running, but he should
then abstain wholly on the third night. Only for old men,
especially those whose hair is white, is it considered right to
sleep with a woman once nightly with no intervals. A father
will occasionally speak angrily to his married son for lying with
his wife too frequently, telling him that he ought to leave his
wife alone occasionally, and the son will be ashamed. Sometimes
one man may say to another jestingly, if the latter has proved
himself not strong enough to perform some task: " You have
been lying with women too much.â€ù Some men take such a remark
in good part, but others would regard it as an insult, and it
“This would seem to contradict the statement made above, that normally
a child would not see a mam and Woman in the act oi coition. It is probable
that in Seniang, as in our own society, the actual knowledge of small boys
concerning sexual matters is very much greater than what is theoretically
supposed.—C. l-I. W.