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136 5 “Whip Him in the Head with a Stick!” Marriage,MaleInfidelity,andFemaleConfrontationamongtheHuli Holly Wardlow Miriam only had a sixth-grade education, but she had become relatively welloff : her husband was a coffee buyer, purchasing green coffee beans from families in the Tari area and selling them to a roasting factory in a distant town. He had saved enough money for them to set up a small trade-store, selling the few goods that can be found in all such stores in Papua New Guinea: salt, cooking oil, soap, canned mackerel, and packages of instant noodles. Hers hadn’t been an arranged marriage, but he hadn’t been her first choice either. As she put it, “Before I got married, I had four boyfriends. I married the fourth one, but my true love was the very first one.” (Her “true love” was a much older man, and when her parents found out about the relationship, they had sent her away to live with her mother’s brother’s family.) Unlike her first boyfriend, who had surreptitiously given her money enclosed in love letters, her husband had gone about things the proper way: he had asked an older male relative to approach her parents and negotiate the amount of bridewealth he would have to give; he had spoken to her in public, but only when his sisters were present; and he had agreed to pay a manayi (an older man who is an expert in traditional customs) to teach Miriam and himself about sex. Miriam described the ritualized sex education they had received: “It was just the three of us—me, my husband, and the manayi. We killed, cooked, and ate a pig together, and when we were done, the old man instructed us. He said, ‘Our custom is for husband and wife to have sex like this. This is how you will get pregnant.’ And then he explained what to do. [Interviewer: So he was very direct?] Oh yes, they are very candid and direct. He said, ‘You, woman, you will lie on your back. And then your husband will put his penis in you and move it.’ Very direct. We were so embarrassed listening to him. And we were embarrassed again the first time we had sex. But by the second or third time it was not so embarrassing. We had been taught the proper way, so there was no reason to be embarrassed.” In point of fact, her husband was actually quite a bit more knowledgeable about “Whip Him in the Head with a Stick!” 137 sex than he had let on. Buying and selling coffee kept him on the road much of the time and brought him to large towns, where he often went out drinking with other coffee buyers or treated his less well-off male wantoks (literally, “one talk”; people from the same ethnic group) to nights of carousing, including sex with women they met at bars. Most of the men in the Papua New Guinea sample typically asserted that they only did “traditional” sex with their wives but would try “style style sex” with other women (Wardlow 2008a); unlike them, however, Miriam’s husband had chosen to share his sexual knowledge with her, initiating her into erotic language and practices that their manayi had not taught them. In answer to my question, “Can you tell me about a time when you were newly married and your husband did something that made you really happy?”—a question to which most women responded with stories about gifts or about a husband praising them in front of his family—she told me about the time he introduced her to mutual oral sex. As she described it, “He just about died—he expressed so much pleasure. And he said things to me like, ‘Oh Miriam, my love, this is too much. I am dying.’ And I felt the same way, and we both finished our worries [a Huli euphemism for orgasm]. We were really joined. And we did it a lot after that. Sometimes I would even say to him, ‘Let’s do that other sex and not the kind that makes babies.’ . . . He is living in Port Moresby now, but I believe he still thinks about me and the sex we had together. It really joined us. What we did together was against Huli custom, and I don’t think that other spouses do the things we did together. We were really joined. But then that second...

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