[All posts in this series can be found at The Arab Mind archive.]
"Give me a child until he is five and he is mine forever."
(Various attributions)
Arab Child Rearing Practices: Boys
In Part II I began to describe the early experiences of children in a typical traditional Arab family with an emphasis on the different approach to boys and girls and especially, the effects of late weaning on boys. This post, and the following in the series, will focus on the development of boys through latency and puberty; a future post (or posts) will discuss the continuing development of girls through latency and puberty.
Throughout the first four years of his life, the boy is almost exclusively involved in his relationship with his mother. The father is a distant, relatively uninvolved figure. The mother believes in pampering her son and attending to his every need and desire. It is worth quoting an extended passage from Raphael Patai's The Arab Mind, on one particular aspect of the pampering: (pp. 34)
The prolonged period of lactation also impresses into the mind of the boy child a special image or archetype of the male-female relationship. For a period of up to three years, the mother was unfailingly at his beck and call. Her breast, his greatest source of pleasure and gratification, was his for the asking. This experience cannot fail to become a contributing factor in the general mold to which the boy will eventually expect his relationship to all women to conform. ...
This expectation is further reinforced by another childhood experience of which many male infants participate in the first years of their lives. In contrast to a girl, whose crying evokes little attention - since one is not supposed to pamper a girl - a male infant who cries is picked up and comforted. This comforting and soothing of the baby boy often takes the form of handling his genitals. Mother, grandmother, other female relatives and visitors, as well as his older siblings, will play with the penis of the boy, not only to soothe him, but also simply to make him smile. Among the fellahin of Upper Egypt, the mother may attempt to prepare her son gradually for the circumcision operation "by caressing his organ and playfully endeavoring to separate the foreskin from the glans. While doing this, she would hum words to the effect that what she is doing will help to make him to become a man amongst men." * Since circumcision in Upper Egypt is usually performed any time before a boy attains maturity, this motherly caressing of the boy's penis may well go on at an age from which the boy retains distinct memories throughout his adult life.
(* Quoted from "Growing Up in an Egyptian Village", Hamed Ammar, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954.)
With the usual proviso that there is little information I have been able to find to determine how widespread such activity actually is, what evidence there is presents a clear picture in the extant literature that such intimate caressing continues for significant periods of time in the young boy's life. This has significance for both the boy's psychosexual development and the girl's psychosexual development.
All parents search for ways to calm a crying and distressed baby. In America there is a tendency to search for ways in which the baby can soothe himself. Pacifiers are ubiquitous components of American child rearing practices. This not only frees up the parent to attend to other business, including the American preoccupation with offering the child intellectual stimulation from the earliest age, but it also places the means for calming within the purview of the child himself. The child learns at an early age that he has the ability to calm himself when distressed; when used judiciously, this helps to establish from an early age the child's autonomy and self control. We elevate independence and autonomy to ideals in our culture and though there can be problems associated with such child rearing practices, the gains would clearly seem to outweigh the losses.
[Children who learn to soothe themselves by sucking their thumb have an additional advantage in not requiring any outside agency to help soothe them. The resulting habit can be difficult to break and its derivative, nail biting, can become a lifelong problem in some children, but on the whole the idea that a child can control his inner states through ministrations under his control is a very beneficial development. Thumb sucking and the pacifier can be misused in that it can come to partially replace the parental interest and care that are necessary for the child's emotional development, but for most children with "good enough" parents, such emotional deprivation is rarely the case.]
Genital manipulation in boys does soothe and amuse. Boys typically "discover" their penis within the first year of life and take great delight in playing with it and exploring its attributes. They proudly show it off to whoever will look and take great pride in being able to pee standing up and making it change shape as they become aroused. Most boys must be taught that their penis is private and for their use and display only. This approach to the boy's sexuality, in a way very similar to the availability of the pacifier (or thumb), but much more intimately, reinforces the boy's sense of self and his own autonomy. As with many habits or tendencies, boys who use masturbatory activity to soothe themselves inappropriately may be struggling with problematic anxiety and this can reflect developmental conflicts, but in general, young children in exploring their bodies find ways to soothe and amuse themselves and this is unexceptional and even, dare we say, "healthy." Contrast this description with the practice described among the Arabs.
In Arab culture, the practice of genital manipulation of boys would be considered a form of child abuse in the West and creates significant problems for the developing psyche. First of all, while caressing the boy's penis may well amuse him and soothe him, it also arouses. Further, it establishes from an early age that he can be aroused through no activity of his own. In fact, when distressed, or even just for the amusement of the women in his life, he can be erotically charged. The act of sexual arousal, always in tenuous control for the male of the species, is even more uncertain for the Arab male. This is clearly reflected by the Arab cultural identification of the woman as the dangerous arouser of men. Arab men are expected to become uncontrollably aroused at the sight of an unenshrouded woman. Rape of a scantily clad woman in Arab communities in the West is considered the fault of the woman for exciting the men. This seems to be a clear derivative of the structure developed in early childhood.
A second way in which such genital caressing and arousing is problematic is that when a particular practice is associated with ameliorating anxiety and distress, anxiety itself can become libidinized. In other words, the association between anxiety and arousal is established very early and in the future other situations that provoke anxiety can become sexualized. Of even greater significance, the reaction to poorly controlled arousal, especially in young men who do not have acceptable sexual outlets, can include anger at the object of arousal for making the young man feel out of control (as in the rape situation mentioned above) or, alternatively, severe asceticism and religiosity as external structures to help control unacceptable sexual thoughts and feelings. When the ascetic religion offered is a version of radical Islam, the tendency toward Islamic terror has been facilitated.
[Please note, feeling or being "out of control" is a signficant part of the traumatic situation. Some Arab men behave as if sexuality itself is traumatic; for such men, the source of the traumatic experience, the temptress, must be strictly controlled lest the "out of control" experience be repeated. Consider my post on Ayman al-Zawahiri and how such childhood experiences could have contributed to his severe sexual asceticism.]
We can see then that certain child rearing practices have established for the young boy that his relationship to his mother is, on the one hand, an idyllic one based on instant gratification and the sexual soothing of anxiety. Women thus are the font of all that is good, with the father a distant storm on the horizon. Yet at the same time, the seeds have been planted for a psychosexual crisis. The boy is not the master of his own body; his arousal depends upon and is caused by the women who are clearly inferior to the father, the master of all he surveys. As the boy approaches the Oedipal phase, that time when he begins to see himself as a rival of his father, he must renounce his mother and the Paradise she built for him and place himself under the strong arm of his father, a father he fears and must compete with. Furthermore, and far more powerfully than in the West, the association of anxiety and sexuality has already become deeply entrenched by the time the boy is ready for his next developmental milestone.
That milestone is yet another extremely significant hurdle he must surmount, alluded to in the passage from Patai and deserving of a post of its own; to follow.
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