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A Natural Step Margaret Mead’s best-selling volumes on South Pacific youth, published between 1928 and 1935, and Bronislaw Malinowski’s sensationally titled 1929 monograph, The Sexual Lives of Savages, introduced educated Americans to the concept of puberty rites—ritualized celebrations of an individual’s passage from childhood to adolescence or adulthood.1 Anthropologists noted that these transitions typically entailed a shift from relative asexuality to potential or actual sexual activity, often marked by virginity loss (customarily defined as first vaginal sex). Virginity loss accordingly came to be understood as a rite of passage through which boys were transformed into men and girls into women.2 In some non-Western societies, virginity loss was closely associated with marriage, as it is in Judeo-Christian tradition; in other societies, the two passages could be separable, a fact that, at the time, many Americans and Europeans found disturbingly “uncivilized.”3 Once Americans viewed virginity loss as a rite of passage in other cultures , it took but a small leap to train that interpretive lens on themselves. The popular reach of the passage/process metaphor is evident in any number of semiautobiographical recollections of the 1940s.4 Although men penned the majority of these reminiscences, anthropologists applied the rite of passage concept to both female and male virginity loss; the perspective therefore offered an implicit alternative to the sexual double standard embodied in the gift and stigma metaphors.5 As college enrollments swelled following the Second World War, more and more young Americans had the opportunity to take anthropology courses in which they learned that virginity loss could be interpreted as a rite of passage. By the late 1950s, as the baby-boom generation began to enter adolescence, reassuring anxious parents with anthropological insights had become something of a cottage industry, with Margaret Mead at its helm.6 It was in this context that movie director William Asher re5 141 leased his 1963 youth hit, Beach Party. Primarily a vehicle for singing stars Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello, the romantic comedy cleverly unfurled its central love story through the eyes of a culturally tonedeaf “developmental biologist, social anthropologist, and explorer” intent on recording the sexual mores of American youth. In the film, Dr. Robert O. Sutwell (Bob Cummings) has made his name studying puberty rites (his term) in the South Pacific. But for his latest project, the bearded and bespectacled Sutwell has decided to scrutinize college-age surfers (all male) and their female friends, whom he describes as “a true subculture —they live in a society as primitive as the aborigine of New Guinea.” Among the titles he’s considering for his eventual book are Post-Adolescent Surfing Subculture, The Behavior Pattern of the Young Adult and Its Relation to Primitive Tribes, and, with a broad wink at Alfred Kinsey’s best-selling scientific study of sexual behavior, The Sutwell Report. Armed with a telescope, camera, and tape recorder, Sutwell observes the “kids” as they surf, dance, and flirt on the beach and at a local beatnik club. His attention inevitably centers on the crowd’s informal leaders, Frankie (Frankie Avalon) and Dolores (Annette Funicello), whose romance wavers when Dolores’s “cold feet” stop her from sharing a beach cottage with Frankie, “all alone . . . just like we’re married.” When Sutwell rescues Dolores from the clutches of a local biker gang, she agrees to become his “first contact” (i.e., key informant). Finding “Bob” refreshingly mature for not making sexual advances on her, Dolores con- fides that she intends to remain a virgin until she marries and that she hopes Frankie wises up—and rebuffs the blonde bombshell he’s currently chasing—before it’s too late. In keeping with its anthropological subplot, the film frames virginity loss as a rite of passage. Sutwell’s dictated field notes describe the youths’ flirting, sexy dancing, and make-out sessions as puberty rites. Dolores herself likens virginity loss to a step in the process of growing up when she complains to her friend Rhonda (Valora Noland), “I want Frankie to think of me as more than just a girl.” Confused, Rhonda says, “But you’re not even a woman,” implying sexual status as well as chronological age. Dolores clearly has the former in mind, for she snaps, “But I’m close—and I’m not getting any closer until I’m a wife!” In effect, she believes that virginity loss and marriage both transform girls into women— and that...

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