Title: Men’s Extramarital Sexuality in Rural Papua New Guinea

 

Men’s Extramarital Sexuality in Rural Papua New Guinea

Holly WardlowPhD, MPH

Abstract

Married women in rural Papua New Guinea are at risk for HIV primarily because of their husbands’ extramarital relationships. Labor migration puts these men in social contexts that encourage infidelity. Moreover, many men do not view sexual fidelity as necessary for achieving a happy marriage, but they view drinking and “looking for women” as important for male friendships.

Although fear of HIV infection is increasing, the concern that men most often articulated about the consequences of extramarital infidelity was possible violent retaliation for “stealing” another man’s wife. Therefore, divorced or separated women who exchange sex for money are considered to be “safe” partners. Interventions that promote fidelity will fail in the absence of a social and economic infrastructure that supports fidelity.

Introduction

Epidemiological and ethnographic research in a wide range of societies has found that married women are at risk for HIV primarily because of their husbands’ extramarital sexual liaisons, and wives have little control over this risk, which is not lessened by their own fidelity.1 Such findings indicate that to understand the dynamics of marital HIV transmission, it is necessary to delineate the economic, social, and cultural factors that propel and structure men’s extramarital sexuality. Although it is probably present to some extent in all societies, men’s extramarital sexuality varies widely in terms of frequency, pattern, cultural meaning, and personal significance. Socioeconomic contexts structure both opportunities and disincentives for men’s extramarital liaisons; thus, whether and how often a married man engages in extramarital sexual relations depend on a wide range of material and ideological factors, including geographical opportunity, the degree of stigma or prestige conferred by extramarital liaisons, male peer group patterns of socializing, and so on. Accordingly, I analyzed the economic and cultural contexts that shape the behavioral patterns and social meanings of men’s extramarital sexuality in rural Papua New Guinea.

An important yet rarely acknowledged factor that potentially influences men’s extramarital sexuality is the social construction of marriage, i.e., the emotional, cultural, and economic meanings of conjugality in a society. The ethnographic record shows that husbands’ and wives’ economic and emotional roles and expectations of each other vary culturally and are influenced by other factors, such as a society’s economic organization, political organization, religion, and gender relations and a couple’s socioeconomic status.2 However, “ABC” approaches to HIV/AIDS prevention (promoting sexual Abstinence before marriage, Being faithful within marriage, and using Condoms with sexual partners when the first 2 behaviors are not possible3) are premised on a unitary and highly idealized Western construction of the marital relationship. The social science literature often refers to this as companionate marriage, where marriage is expected to be a person’s primary source of emotional gratification and marital sexual fidelity is a key symbol of this intense emotional bond. Thus, engaging in extramarital sexual relations forsakes or violates this bond.4 The literature on ABC approaches to HIV/AIDS prevention rarely acknowledges that the marital relationship may not be universally conceptualized as companionate in accordance with an idealized Western model or that there may be competing economic and ideological pressures on men that minimize the value and practicability of marital fidelity.5

My case study of the Huli in Papua New Guinea shows the problems that are associated with uncritically advocating and expecting marital fidelity. Findings from the study included:

•	Huli men’s mobility and labor-related absences from home put them in social contexts in which extramarital sexuality is extremely likely.
•	Huli men view extramarital sexual relations more as a potential transgression against other men and less as a transgression against their wives or the marital bond.
•	Economic decline and men’s long-term absences from home have resulted in a growing number of Huli women who have sexual relations in exchange for money. These women are often described as “safe” extramarital partners because sexual relations with them are unlikely to result in retaliation from absent husbands.
•	Most Huli men do not see sexual fidelity as necessary for having a successful and happy marriage, and they assert that seeking out alternative sexual partners is appropriate at some junctures during the course of a marriage.

These findings indicate that there are more socioeconomic structures that promote, enable, and normalize Huli men’s extramarital sexuality—and thus increase women’s HIV risk—than constrain or discourage it. Furthermore, this research suggests that rather than conceptualize marital infidelity as a matter of individual choice over which men can and should exert control regardless of context, HIV/AIDS prevention policies and programs should specify and target the socioeconomic structures that make the choice of extramarital sex so likel

Important quotation:

Methods: 

This study was conducted between February and August 2004. The data were obtained through participant observation, interviews with key informants (experts with local knowledge on particular aspects of marriage or men’s extramarital sexuality), collection of both popular media and official documents about HIV/AIDS and marriage, and interviews with 40 married Huli men and 25 married Huli women.

Result:

Men’s Extramarital Sexuality

Men’s extramarital liaisons were primarily shaped by 4 interlocking factors: (1) the role of male mobility and migration in creating social contexts in which extramarital sexual relations are the norm, (2) the significance of bride wealth (goods given by the groom’s family to the bride’s family to formalize a marriage and to compensate for the loss of her labor and fertility) in shaping the social constructions of marriage and infidelity, (3) the growing pool of sexually available and “safe” women caused by local economic decline and men’s long-term absences from home, and (4) the homosocial nature of Huli sociality, i.e., men find it difficult to spend time at home and far easier to spend time with male friends.

As one man said, “Sex is like money; they are temptations. If a man offers you money, you don’t say no. How can you make yourself say no when he is holding out his hand and giving it to you? The same is true when a woman offers to have sex with you. You just say yes.”

Male Mobility and Labor Migration

Men often described the process of becoming familiar with a new urban area as an almost ritualized event that involved being taken to bars by urban-based kin or friends and then bringing women they met at the bars back to low-cost guest houses for sexual relations. 

Taking visitors or new urban arrivals to bars and paying for the beer and women is a way for male hosts to provide hospitality, and accepting these gifts enables new arrivals to experience modern urban masculinity.

Bride Wealth and the Social Constructions of Marriage and Infidelity

Some men asserted that fidelity was expected of their wives because of the bride wealth that was given for them, but fidelity was not expected of men because they were the givers of bride wealth.

Older men in the sample emphasized the importance of women’s agricultural labor and maintaining good relations with a wife’s extended family in order to have a wide range of political alliances and economic resources. Moreover, many older husbands assumed that their wives’ primary emotional attachments and loyalties would be to their own natal kin, even after years of marriage.

An important consequence of this conceptualization of marital infidelity is that as long as a man’s extramarital sexual liaisons do not infringe upon other men, little moral disgrace and few social or economic penalties are attached to the liaisons. As many men said, it is only common sense for a man to avoid marital discord through secrecy about his extramarital liaisons, but he has a moral obligation to protect his kin from tribal fighting and compensation claims by choosing “safe” partners—traditionally, widows and divorced women. This construction of what constitutes a safe partner clearly departs from the standard biomedical definitions of safe sexual relations.

Women Who Don’t Belong to Anyone

Passenger women themselves cited a wide range of motivations for engaging in transactional sexual relations: lack of money for children’s school fees and other necessities, encouragement from female kin to actively search for a new husband rather than waste fertile years waiting for an existing one to return, and a desire for retaliatory sexual relations upon learning that a husband has taken up with another woman elsewhere.

Heterosocial Households and Homosocial Peer Groups

Many of the interviews in this study suggest that labor migration initiated men into a culture of masculinity in which extramarital sexuality was considered normal, modern, and an expression of male autonomy; thus, it set in motion an enduring pattern of extramarital sexuality

This pattern is buttressed by the homo-sociality of adult life among the Huli, which makes many men feel out of place in their own households and results in men’s leisure time being spent with male peers. Most married couples now live together in the same house, which is a significant departure from the precolonial period when adult men who belonged to the same clan typically lived together in an all-male residence. 

Spending more time with male peers also was expected at this point in a man’s marriage, and boasting about extramarital liaisons, exchanging information about women, and spending Friday nights drinking and looking for available women were important components of masculinity and male friendship

“Yes, I boast to my friends—it’s something I show off about. I get very graphic. I say, ‘This woman is willing to do this and that’ or ‘This woman’s genitals looked like this’ or ‘That woman’s genitals felt like this.’ We all talk about women in this way.”

“Yes, I boast about this to my male friends. I tell them when I’ve had sex with another woman and what we did together. And sometimes I tell my friends what she’s like, what she is willing to do, how much you have to pay her. And then my friends can go ask her for sex. But I know that I got there first and was able to tell them all about it.”

Condom Use

Although the immediate concerns of many men in this study were to minimize the potential negative sociopolitical consequences of extramarital sexual relations by choosing “safe” partners, they also sometimes used the English word safety to refer to condoms, and most were aware of the possibility of marital transmission of sexually transmitted infections and HIV. They expressed a range of attitudes toward condoms, with a few saying they used them scrupulously, a few saying they never used them and did not intend to, and most saying they used them sometimes. Most of the men volunteered lack of access as a substantial obstacle to use. Because of the dominant social conservatism of the community, local stores do not sell condoms, and many men expressed shame about asking for them at the hospital, where the staff were known to be reluctant distributors.33 Most men in this sample relied on what might be called an underground informal condom economy, in which some men stocked up on condoms from health centers and pharmacies in larger towns and then sold them surreptitiously in Tari.

CONCLUSIONS

ABC approaches to AIDS prevention assume that marital sexual fidelity has an inherent moral value and is what all married people everywhere know they should be striving for at all times. By contrast, many Huli men consider extramarital sexual relations to be acceptable after a man has successfully established a family, and many assert that marital fidelity takes a toll on a marriage and that extramarital sexual relations are generally harmless. Labor migration often initiates men into a masculine subculture in which extramarital sex is overdetermined and all but inevitable. Moreover, sexual relations with sex workers is seen as unproblematic and safe, because passenger women “don’t belong to anyone.”

These findings show a range of arenas in which HIV risk reduction measures can be implemented. First, there must be greater recognition that men’s labor migration plays a large role in (1) initiating some men’s extramarital sexual debut, (2) immersing men in work site subcultures in which extramarital sexuality is seen as both normal and an important means for enacting modern masculinity, and (3) creating pools of women at home who are more likely to have sexual relations in exchange for money. The public health community has accumulated more than enough epidemiological and ethnographic evidence that shows men’s risk for HIV—and thus also their wives’ risk—is strongly associated with economic structures that require men to leave home to support their families and that put men into high-risk social environments.34 The risks seem especially pronounced when the work sites in question are resource extraction sites, such as mines, perhaps because of their predominantly male workforces and their arduous working conditions.35

The single most important recommendation is that employers should be encouraged to provide family housing for their workers who come from far away. Family housing would reduce the loneliness and sexual deprivation that some men said encourages extramarital sex; it would create a community—similar to that of the men’s home communities—that discourages risky practices through the everyday scrutiny of community members’ behavior, and it would decrease the number of married women who have sexual relations in exchange for money because of a husband’s prolonged absence. Recent research has suggested that family housing could significantly reduce the risk for HIV infection.36

There also is a need for more aggressive workplace AIDS education and condom distribution, particularly at work sites where a large percentage of the workforce is male and has emigrated. In countries like Papua New Guinea, where a long history of Christian missionization has made rural communities highly resistant to the social marketing of condoms, such workplace interventions are particularly important.37 The 4 male field assistants in the study stressed the importance of promoting structured recreational activities for men—both at work sites and in home communities—such as sports teams, literacy and vocational training classes, and political discussion groups.

Finally, it is important to acknowledge the structural nature of men’s extramarital sexual behavior. Interventions that promote fidelity appear to make certain assumptions about the marital relationship, such as the universality of a Western model of companionate marriage or, more fundamentally, that spouses are actually living together in 1 place. However, simply telling men to be faithful is not likely to be effective in the absence of a social infrastructure that makes fidelity more possible. Such infrastructure could certainly include faith-based initiatives, such as work-place support groups for male migrants or pastoral guidance for married couples that goes beyond the existing premarital counseling and that candidly acknowledges the many challenges to marital fidelity in resource-poor settings where economic opportunities are few and where men must often leave home to make a living. Socioeconomic initiatives that enable men to live at home or that enable wives to live with their migrant husbands also are necessary.