Sex In free supply, Tahiti style
What happened to sex when there was plenty of food and water and no invaders — so women didn’t need to keep sex in short supply until they found a proteaor? The Tahitians possessed these conditions of abundance from the moment humans sealed there. Tahitian parents aaually taught their children sex at an early age, as did other elders.49 When they became teenagers, the parents encouraged the children to enjoy sex with anyone they happened to meet and be attracted to. Even group sex was fine. The more lovers the children had, the more the parents were pleased.’0 Because children were easily cared for, pregnancy before a marriage was celebrated as a sign of fertility. Tahitian religion had no rules suggesting sex was sinful. Sex was considered a combination of pleasure, skill, and sport.
Within a century of Cook s discovery of these islands, though, Westerners imposed their concepts of morality, repressing sexuality. The Westerners, by not understanding utoy they considered sex immoral, sapped the spirit of the Tahitians. As Ian Campbell wrote in Lost Itaradise, “Those who have nothing to live for, die. Within three generations, the population of Tahiti plummeted from more than 140,000 to less than 5,000.