Though a large part of the population (the lower classes) would get such informations, and though males would certainly get it too (if only by going to the brothel), it seems it’s not obvious at all that females brought up in the upper and more uptight classes would have any clue about sex. It was customary for the mothers to give their daughters a speech just before the marriage, but then it was necessarily very complete.
There’s a quite famous female writer, whose name escapes me who wrote that she was totally clueless about sex when she married (at the beginning of the XX° century). Not only she didn’t expect to have sex and had no clue what sex consisted in, but she didn’t expect to have any kind of physical contact at all with her husband. She wrote that what happened was essentially a rape (with the bonus that she wasn’t even understanding what was going on). IIRC, her mother told her to let her husband do whatever he was going to do. Nothing more.
There have been multiple attempts to locate human instincts, without much success. But my guess is that, assuming they survive till adolescence and puberty kicks in normally… they would be curious about what the other animals on the island were doing and perhaps try it out. Children from environments with domesticated animals don’t have to be told TOO much about sex… all they have to do is look around and take a few mental notes.
It is widely reported that the world’s youngest parents were 8 and 9 years old. In 1910, in China. I don’t think they learned it from watching Prime Time TV.
Cite: Just google for “world’s youngest parents.” I’m not claiming it’s absolutely factual, but if not, it isn’t far off. I went to high school in Kern County, where pregnant 11-year-olds were not rare.
Even in early-twentieth-century China – especially in early-twentieth-century China – I really doubt any formal sex education was going on for 8- and 9-year-olds. It’s likely that they had some observational experience, but depending on the age at which our shipwreckees were stranded, they probably would too.
Infants masturbate. Children exhibit sexual behaviors. (You saw Cecil’s column on tickling.) It’s not as if the nerves are magically hooked up at midnight on your 18th birthday.
The female writer is an unusual case. Yes yes, ‘blushing bride’ and all that rot. Girls do talk, whatever their station in life – you think it’s merely the result of a beautiful wedding reception that makes a newlywed the center of attention for her (unmarried) female friends? It’s amazing how much even a prim and proper Victorian housewife can communicate with a few giggles.
Even if we accept that the girl involved has no clue and no interest in making physical contact with her island companion, it doesn’t take much for a teenage boy to realize what his fist is supposed to simulate, especially with the benefit of watching animals going at it. And humans do give behavioral and scent cues – that’s one theory for the purpose of pubic hair, incidentally. Traps smells.
The real question is, how would they learn to take care of the little brats?
I wouldn’t dispute that, but that makes it a learned behaviour, not an instinctive one.
Learning by trial and error is something we do really well, but that’s very different from extrapolating that all other animals do it instinctively so we must.
I’m sorry, with all due respect, now I think you’re just quibbling to save your position.
Clearly, in the context of the OP, if you grant that, without any cultural instruction or examples of animals to follow, they have the urge to do it, that’s the instinct we’re talking about. If they get better at it over time, that doesn’t make it less of an instinct, or turn an instinct into learned behavior.
But I also grant, as others here have noted, that there’s no real way to decide this issue with certainty. A GD, not a GQ, IMO.
That’s not clear at all. They will have the urge to masturbate certainly. They may also have an urge to masturbate each other but I don’t see it being at all clear that they have an urge to bump uglies.
If an urge to masturbate leading to learning how to bonk is evidence of a bonking instinct, then an urge to see leading to learning how to make spectacles is evidence of a spectacle making instinct.
Everyone seem to be ignoring the fact that our Blue Lagoon couple would be dead in a few days if they were younger than, say, 7 or 8 yrs old. Humans simply don’t have the cognitive ability to survive outside a social setting until that age. And I’m being very genrous on the young side. Realistically, an age of 12 would more likely be necessary. In which case they certainly wouldn’t be sexually naiive. Or at least they would have matured to the point where they could figure sex out without being taught. Would that be instinct? No. It relies on other cognitive abilities that could not be achieved outside a social environment.
I would say yes they would figure it out because of:
1 - seeing it done by animals, this might get them going earlier then their own sex drive just out of cureosity.
2 - They would find out that they liked being close to each other, would discover spooning and the pleasures of masterbation and eventually put it together.
Oh, the get the idea for providing pleasure for each other, sure. But ‘insert tab A into slot B’? I think not. Hell, the simple fact that some women orgasm more readily from non-penetrative sex would, by definition, lead to (if we’re going that way) mutual masturbation more readily than intercourse.
And on the subject of feral humans and communications:
Apart from the fact that we’d be torturing our poor children in this scenario this fact springs to light: none of these children ever acquired or developed a sophisticated sense of language.
Jonathan Chance: I just checked the site you linked to. I’m afraid Wild Peter is not a very good example.
A child who has only lived in the wild for a year, and cannot and will never learn to speak? Looks like he had a mental deficiency (which may or may not be related to physical abuse). That he wasn’t interested in sex may well be caused by the same deficiency.
I’m with the people who think two kids, assuming they have enough hormones running through their bodies and are sexually interested in each other, will figure it out. The guy will have an instinctual need to hump and put it in somewhere (Exhibit 1), the girl will have an instinct need to stroke, and will have found out that it feels good to have something ‘in there’. They’ll work out what feels good together.
In fact, isn’t having to figure it out still the norm these days? Even with all the sex-ed and porno movies available, being in bed with someone the first time is entirely different from looking at it from an outside perspective. I don’t know how you guys worked it out the first time, but I doubt you had a number-to-part puzzle chart up next to the bed. You just have to feel your way around, with a bit of help of your partner. Good sex is always a matter of working out together what feels nice and works for you.
I once read the highly suspicious “fact” that humans only need to be three years old to survive on their own, but I can’t remember where it was – anybody else heard this before?
Not even a chimp could survive alone at age 3. Humans don’t begin to develop fully rational thinking process until about the age of 12. That’s our key to survival, and without it you’re toast.
The OP really didn’t mention how old the children were. If we were to assume that they were the lone survivors of a shipwreck, and that they could survive after, what, ten years old? Twelve? Then I think that they would see critters on their island doing the hungabunga. Kissing and such aren’t taboo in our society, so they would know about that. At some point they would probably start kissing, which would naturally lead onward. It seems to me that even without any animal observation, with the starting point of knowing about kissing, trial and error after that would lead them to the enevitable outcome.
You’re forgetting that, in the “Blue Lagoon” movie at least, they had that old pirate guy to take care of them and teach them basic survival skills. Whether anyone that young would still retain and use those skills after the pirate dies, though, is certainly in doubt. (Not to mention that a TRUE stranded-on-desert-island scenario would be much more akin to Cast Away than The Blue Lagoon…)
I do think a controlled experiment is in order. I’m trying to acquire the proper “test subjects”, but so far, every family in the neighborhood has politely refused to sign my consent form. Ah well, maybe I’ll just adopt…
I cannot begin to know where to look for a cite, but I swear I read somewhere that chimps or some other high-order primates raised in captivity without older role models had to be shown videos of others of their own species mating in order to know exactly what to do.
