Contents*

• Demographics and a Brief Historical Perspective 1

1. Basic Sexological Premises 2
2. Religious, Ethnic, and Gender Factors Affecting Sexuality 3
3. Knowledge and Education about Sexuality 6
4. Autoerotic Behaviors and Patterns 7
5. Interpersonal Heterosexual Behaviors 7
6. Homoerotic, Homosexual, and Bisexual Behaviors 10
7. Gender Diversity and Transgender Issues 10
8. Significant Unconventional Sexual Behaviors 11
9. Contraception, Abortion, and Population Planning 17
10. Sexually Transmitted Diseases and HIV/AIDS 19
11. Sexual Dysfunctions, Counseling, and Therapies 23
12. Sex Research and Advanced Professional Education 24
13. Epilogue 24
14. References and Endnotes 24

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This miraculous indigenous America
Made everything at a fantastic scale
Wanting to look at the sky,
she raised herself on the Andean Mountains
And her cross, instead of wood,
is made of stars.¹

Demographics and a Brief Historical Perspective

ROBERT T. FRANCOEUR

A. Demographics

Argentina, the second-largest country in South America with 1,073,518 square miles (2,780,399 km²), occupies most of the southern tip of the American continent. It extends from slightly above the Tropic of Capricorn to Antarctica, on which it keeps a constant military and research presence. Hence, it has a variety of climates and the different natural resources associated with them, although it is best known for its fertile pampas of the temperate region. The Patagonia plateau in the south is flat or rolling. The rugged Andes Mountains mark Argentina’s western border with Chile on the west. Bolivia and Paraguay are Argentina’s northern neighbors, while Brazil and Uruguay lie to the northeast.

In July 2002, Argentina had an estimated population of 37.8 million. (All data are from The World Factbook 2002 (CIA 2002) unless otherwise stated.)

B. A Brief Historical Perspective

Nomadic indigenous tribes roamed the pampas when the Spaniards arrived in 1515 and 1516. The land quickly became a part of the Spanish empire. By the late 19th century, nearly all the native peoples had been killed.

The long period of disorder that followed the colonists’ declaration of independence in 1816 ended only when a strong centralized government developed. Large-scale Italian, German, and Spanish immigration after 1880 spurred modernization, and major social reforms were instituted in the 1920s. Military coups were common from 1930 to the 1946 election of General Juan Perón as president. Perón and his wife, Eva Duarte (died 1952), effected labor reforms, but suppressed freedom of speech and the press, closed religious schools, and ran the country into serious debt. A series of military and civilian regimes followed Perón’s ouster in 1955. After an 18-year exile, Perón returned in 1973 and was elected president. When he died ten months later, his second wife, Isabel, who had been elected vice president, succeeded him, becoming the first woman head of state in the Western Hemisphere. Mrs. Perón was ousted in 1976, amid charges of corruption.

The military junta that followed existed in a state of siege with guerrillas and leftists. An estimated 5,000 people were killed and thousands jailed and tortured. Democratic rule returned in 1983 after Great Britain successfully defended the Falkland Islands in 1982. In 1985, five former junta members were found guity of murder and human rights violations. By 1989, the nation suffered, as severe hyperinflation and political problems sparked looting and rioting in several large cities. Perónist President Carlos Saúl Menem, elected in 1989 and again in 1995, has introduced harsh but necessary economic measures to curtail hyperinflation, control government spending, and restructure the foreign debt.

[Update 2003: The presidency of Carlos Menem that started in 1989 with hopes of a long period of stabilization and prosperity ended with the deepest economic crisis known since Argentina organized itself as a modern nation by the end of the 19th century. Neither the International Monetary Fund, nor the World Bank or the Interamerican Development Bank, explained clearly to the world how such a profound economic deterioration took place.

[Just a few years ago, Argentina was largely a middle-class nation with the highest per-capita income in Latin America. The Gross National Product (GNP) per capita that was $9,950 in 1997 is estimated to have fallen in 2002 to less than $4,700, which is the threshold above which the country becomes a contributor to international organizations rather than being just a borrower (World Bank Development Report 1999; Executive Board UN Development Program 2002).

[Foreign public debt started mounting and reached $132 billion by the end of 2001. At the same time, unemployment is estimated as being as high as 25%.

[The absence of political leaders with a clear vision of the future, and the cynicism and greediness of those in power who dispose of government revenues as their private property, led to disastrous policies. Bank assets were stripped, leaving the average citizen without access to their deposits, while rich Argentines and foreign enterprises timely sent their money to foreign accounts. The Argentine peso that remained pegged to the dollar since the early 1990s was devaluated, and is above three pesos to a dollar at the time of writing this update. As The New York Times reports, the situation of most Argentines has dramatically changed:

According to the most recent statistics, issued in January 2003, at least 60 percent of the country’s 37 million people now lives in poverty, defined as an income of less than $220 a month for a family of four. Even more alarming, more than a quarter the population is classified as ‘indigent,’ or living on less than $100 a month for a family of four (Rohter 2003).

[Every day children and old people die of hunger. People in the affluent neighborhoods of Buenos Aires put leftovers from their meals in separate garbage bags to provide a concentration-camp ration for the survival of night scavengers.

[Survival, a powerful human force, is originating other, more-positive initiatives as a response to the economic and social chaos. One creative scheme is the organization of bartering networks where people can exchange goods and services. Professionals, farmers, health service workers, homemakers, teachers, and people from all occupations participate in these exchanges. (End of update by S. Kamenetzky)]

1. Basic Sexological Premises

A/B. Gender Roles and Sociolegal Status of Males and Females

In Latin American societies, the sexual behavior of women is always much more conditioned by norms, rules, regulations, and taboos than the sexual behavior of men. Argentina is no exception. Women were supposed to reach marriage in a virginal state, and then take care of the home, go to church, bear and educate children, and support their men in political, professional, and economic activities.

For a long time, this double standard was accepted without open criticism. But since the late 1940s, women have taken steps towards equal rights and independence from parents, spouses, and lovers. Of course, the first steps were taken by women with college degrees and businesswomen. They started painfully opening spaces in Argentina’s political, economic, legal, and educational arenas. The governments have also opened opportunities for them in political and administrative positions. Today, we see women in university chairs, legal benches, large corporations, research laboratories, journalism, medicine, and all fields of art. However, it is still possible to observe discrimination against women and privileges given to men, not because of their excelling in a job or profession, but simply because they are males.

C. General Concepts of Love and Sexuality

Virginity is no longer a condition for marriage. On the contrary, before deciding to engage in a permanent relationship, most women want to know their future spouse in bed. Argentine women are exercising their new roles in markets and societies with a flexible mental attitude that tries to integrate all aspects of their complex new situation. They know that it is not easy to balance their responsibility as mothers and lovers with their workplace obligations; they need to walk a tightrope and compromise, giving, when needed, more visibility to their men. They do not want to renounce breastfeeding their babies, because they know its importance for healthy development; hence, they are fighting to increase the availability of daycare facilities close to their workplace. Accepting now their share of responsibility in maintaining a healthy sexual life, they take the initiative in foreplay and learn techniques to introduce variety in sexual intercourse, while at the same time, they try to increase both depth and scope in the emotional and intellectual communications within the couple.

For males, it is sometimes difficult to internalize these changes in the patterns of family life. However, most are starting to perceive that they enrich the relationship and are beneficial for both partners. The advantages of sharing two incomes, and participating in the rearing and education of the children, awakens emotions and provides a joy never felt before. Men are also learning to relax when making love, enjoying alternate passive and active roles, and accepting the fact that they can also be seduced and excited.

Women’s liberation from submission to parents, brothers, and spouses is slowly harmonizing male and female energies and leading to a win-win situation for both, although the way to this end is not yet free of obstacles that will take pain to remove. Most of the population still believes in a double standard, but increased dissatisfaction with their sexual lives shows that their rigid positions of the past are cracking.

2. Religious, Ethnic, and Gender Factors Affecting Sexuality

A. Source and Character of Religious Values

The influence of the Catholic Church was and is hegemonic. Ninety percent of Argentina’s population identify themselves as Roman Catholic, although the percentage of active churchgoers is much less.

A very conservative interpretation of Catholic dogma shaped life during colonial times. The powerful grip of the Church in Argentina’s life was not relaxed after independence from Spain in 1810, nor when the country was finally organized as a modern state towards the end of the 19th century. Throughout the history of Argentina, secular powers have had to battle against a Church determined to maintain its hold on the institutions of civil life, like education, the availability of contraception and abortion, and even the registration of major events in the lives of the people, like births, marriages, and deaths.

The values and beliefs of Catholic doctrine have been inscribed in the minds of the Argentine people in a way that has proven difficult to delete. Outstanding among these are the Church’s views on the social roles of males and females, its insistence on seeing the body as a root of evil, the need to free the spirit from the urges of the flesh, and sexual intercourse viewed as a curse brought upon humans with no other objective or justification than the preservation of the human species.

The influence of this dogma has led, as one might expect, to a dichotomous, often-schizophrenic pattern of behavior. Recently, three Catholic women in Uruguay, Argentina’s neighboring country, investigated Catholic women’s ideas on and practices of sexuality and maternity. Their sample included hundreds of women from Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay, countries which share a similar historical and cultural evolution. The women commonly expressed dissatisfaction with their sexual lives, and had developed the strategy of “not feeling” or “getting used to putting up with it.” Others were oppressed by the idea that sex is sinful and felt bad after each sexual encounter. While many of the women interviewed felt God as a close friend, they viewed the Church as distant, disciplinary, and controlling.²

B. Source and Character of Ethnic Values

Before the arrival of the Spaniards in 1516, Argentina was inhabited by fierce, indomitable tribes that valued their freedom and had learned to survive by adapting to the climate and resources of the different regions of the country. Except for the Northwest, which was conquered by the Peruvian Incas, the indigenous populations of Argentina did not develop the complex, and, in some aspects, advanced civilizations whose remains can still been seen in Mexico and Peru. The indigenous people who inhabited the pampas were mercilessly condemned to extinction by the thirst for land of the Spanish conquerors first, and the new South American nation later on. A few still survive in small reserves, especially in the Northeast, where the Jesuits had organized them in productive communities that were destroyed after the expulsion of the order in 1767 from Spain and all her colonies.

This, and the fact that Argentina never had a very active slave trade, explains the predominance of a population of European origin. Between 1850 and 1940, some 6.6 million Europeans joined the 1.1 million people already living in the country in 1850.³ In 1991, Argentina’s population was 32.7 million, having grown in the previous decade at the rate of 1.3% per year.⁴

From 1810, when the links with Spain were severed, to 1853, when a unified nation started its organizational development, Argentina was a field of constant quarrels among feudal provincial warlords and between these caudillos and the two aristocracies of money and of culture based in the port city of Buenos Aires. The two aristocracies were trying to control the chaos, often for their own benefit, and neglecting the needs of the rural population.

From 1853 on, Argentina moved solidly on the roads of social and economic development until it ranked in the early decades of the 20th century among the ten most-developed countries of the world. In his study of Argentine history, David Rock comments:

By the outbreak of World War I, per capita income equaled that in Germany and the Low Countries, and was higher than in Spain, Italy, Sweden, and Switzerland. Having grown at an average annual rate of 6.5% since 1869, Buenos Aires had become the second largest city of the Atlantic seaboard, after New York, and by far the largest city in Latin America. . . . By 1911, Argentina’s foreign trade was larger than Canada’s and a quarter of that of the United States. Argentina was the world’s largest producer of corn and linseed, second in wool, and third in live cattle and horses. Though it ranked only sixth as a wheat producer, it was third, and in some years the second, largest exporter. Despite the competition for land from cattle and forage crops, the expansion of wheat farming after 1900 outpaced Canada’s. . . . By and large, working-class conditions in Buenos Aires were much the same as in Western European cities. . . . By comparison with American [U.S.A.] cities in this period, Buenos Aires was relatively free of ethnic ghettoes, and its highly mobile labor force made it also a city with little permanent unemployment.⁵

However, the brightness of these figures hides the shadows and contradictions of the Argentine society and economy of that time. As the same historian points out:

By 1914 Argentina had . . . evolved into an extremely mixed and diverse society. Across the regions extreme modernity and immutable backwardness coexisted. Expectations remained high that the imbalances would steadily recede as the present wave of growth continued, for there was still much to accomplish.⁶

In 1930, with the global economic crises and the first local military coup, the development trend stopped and reversed. Instead of being included among the high-income economies in the World Bank tables, Argentina is now among the upper-middle-income countries, where it shares positions with Brazil, Uruguay, Mexico, and Venezuela from the American continent, Gabon and Botswana from Africa, and Latvia, Lithuania, Portugal, and Greece from Europe.⁷

The economic and cultural mismanagement of the country could not, however, destroy one of the main achievements of the organizational period of the country: the establishment of a gratuitous, compulsory, tax-sustained, and public education. Although the quality of education suffered from all those years of regressive, and sometimes fascist attacks, quantitatively it still is reaching the whole of the country, allowing everybody at least to read and write, and with these instruments, giving the vast majority of Argentines access to information offered by a large market of diverse publications. In 1990, the pupil-teacher ratio in the primary schools was 19 students per teacher; 1970 data put the ratio in secondary schools at 44:1, and for colleges at 22:1.⁸

Argentina can be seen as a large tapestry woven with different threads, each thread representing the diverse nationalities and cultures that came to the country from different regions of the world, among them Spaniards, Italians, British, French, Germans, Polish, as well as Jews and Muslims of different ethnic origins. The basic canvas on which this tapestry is woven is the native Argentines themselves, descendants of the early conquistadors and the populations that inhabited the land when the conquistadors arrived in the 15th century. While a few represent a pure white or native lineage, most are products of hybridization. The result is a tapestry without a clear-cut design, a tapestry whose lines twist and appear as a sfumato.

Because the plantation economy never was important in Argentina, the introduction of African slaves never reached large proportions. The few slaves that were in the country at the time of its independence from Spain (in 1810) were freed immediately after in 1813. They gathered in the suburbs of Buenos Aires, mixed quickly with the remaining population, and gave birth to a cultural group, the mulattos, who have produced their own artistic expressions. From their music evolved the tango of which I will say more later.

Jorge Luis Borges, a great Argentine poet and writer, saw Argentina seesawing between the search for progress through mimicking foreign cultures, especially the European and North American cultures, and a deep-seated provincialism that refused to change inherited colonial patterns. Borges sought to transcend these trends by developing an ability to understand and talk with both the universal and the local.⁹

The period of accelerated economic development and social transformation (1860-1930) was a period of mimetism promoted in the school system and marketplace. During this period, provincialism found refuge among limited social groups at both ends of the economic spectrum. At the bottom level, it translated into the crude behavior of the persecuted gauchos, the mestizo cowboys of the Argentine pampas, and of the compadritos of the suburbs of the large cities, whom Richard Powers, a dance historian at Stanford University, defines as “a folk antihero somewhere between a bully, a thief and a pimp.”¹⁰ At the upper economic scale, some large land owners and church members remained nostalgic of bygone days when they were masters of the country and kept the mind of the people restrained by dogmas and myths.

Paradoxically, the provincialism of the lumpen-proletariat engendered a form of music, the tango, that would acquire universal acceptance and soon invade the salons of the sophisticated outer-oriented aristocracy. The tango expresses the sadness of displacement: from rural fields to crowded suburbs for the natives and for the immigrants from their many diverse landscapes of Europe. It also mixes instruments from the natives—the guitar—and the immigrants—the fiddle and the bandoneùn, a concertina-like German instrument. The words often speak of crude, brothel-oriented sex, and of betrayal and revenge, but there is also tender romance and the longing for stable relationships. Some tangos shift from individual feelings to social criticism and become vitriolic pictures of a face that Argentina hides under its economic and cultural exploits.¹¹ A few examples in Table 1 illustrate this. Somehow, the chronology of these examples reflects a parallel slow zigzagging movement of Argentine society towards more gentleness.

The tango was created by males for males. It reflected well the traits of the social structures among the poor urban population and those immigrants who decided to join them. The tango muses about the hybridization, the resentment, the sadness, and the longing for women that were scarce, because most of the immigrants who stayed in the city were single, while those who came with families looked for a piece of land in the countryside. The hybridization in the poor neighborhoods of Buenos Aires produced insecure males who resorted to macho postures when observed or ridiculed by their peers.¹⁴

[Comment 1997: In addition to the value of machismo mentioned above, Argentine sexual attitudes and behaviors are strongly influenced by three other values—marianismo, ediquetta, and pronatalism—which are commonly shared with some minor variations across the Latino world of South and Central America. To avoid duplication in several chapters, these four basic values are described in detail in Section 1A, Basic Sexological Premises, in the chapter on Puerto Rico in this Encyclopedia. (End of comment by R. T. Francoeur)]

Since 1953, provincialism has made repeated attempts to regain the dominant position it held before 1853, but it was often infiltrated by foreign fascist and Nazi influences. These attempts, beside damaging the country’s cultural and economic development, succeeded in drastically changing the image of Argentina in the rest of the world. David Rock’s seminal book on Argentina summarizes this change in two beautiful paragraphs.¹⁵ Before 1930:

Indeed, for many decades many Europeans believed that Argentina offered an opportunity equal to, if not greater than, North America. The pampas estancieros enjoyed the reputation that Texas or Arab oil magnates have today, and the expression riche comme un Argentin remained a commonplace among the French until the 1930s. In 1907, George Clemenceau perceived the genesis of a great new national community originating from a spirit he equated with Manifest Destiny in the United States. “The real Argentino [sic],” he commented, “seems to me convinced there is a magic elixir of youth which springs from his soil and makes of him a new man, descendant of none, but ancestor of endless generations to come.” The Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset issued a similar pronouncement in 1929. The Argentine people, he declared, “do not content themselves with being one nation among others: they hunger for an overarching destiny, they demand of themselves a proud future. They would not know a history without triumph.”

In his second paragraph, David Rock reflects on the Argentina of 1987:

Such copious expectations and laudatory reflections form a stark and bitter contrast with more recent judgments. For at least the past two decades economists have classified Argentina in the underdeveloped or “third” world, and by the 1960s Argentina was becoming a byword for political instability, inflation, and labor unrest. During the 1970s a sudden procession of horror stories emanated from Argentina—unbridled popular riots, guerrilla warfare, assassinations, abductions, imprisonment of dissidents, institutionalized torture, and eventually mass murder. For a time Argentina elicited a single association: los desaparecidos, the thousands of students, workers, writers, lawyers, architects, and journalists, men and women alike, who had “disappeared,” simply vanished without trace. At this time too, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, Los Angeles, Paris, New York, London, and Rome became refuges for a vast Diaspora of political and economic exiles from Argentina.

David Rock asks: What went wrong? My response, based on my own and my husband’s studies of the socioeconomic evolution of Argentina, and our existential experience there, is that the 1930 regressive coup stopped the process by which Argentina, inspired by Jeffersonian philosophy, was constantly redesigning her coat of laws and regulations in order to adjust to changes in her growing physical and economic body, these changes being in turn induced by changes in the global economy and by the scientific and technological advances that humankind was achieving. That coup pushed Argentine society into the seesawing mentioned above, and from 1930 to 1983, with successive coups, the regressive forces became increasingly powerful.

Since 1983, Argentina is slowly and painfully regaining its democratic structures and its ideals of constant progress of both economies and minds. Will she be able to go beyond mimetism and provincialism and realize the synthesis that Borges and many others were longing for?

This summary of Argentine evolution as an independent nation should help readers to see Argentine sexual mores as the result of a complex mix of influences from the regressive and progressive periods of Argentine history. More details on Argentine history and sociology will be given in the following sections of this chapter when required for a better understanding of a particular subject.

3. Knowledge and Education about Sexuality

A. Historical Perspectives

Argentina really started its life as a modern country in 1853, when a generation of progressive politicians organized the country, promoted public education, and produced a radical transformation in the economy and society.

A census in 1869 reveals that:

four-fifths of the population was illiterate and housed in mud and straw shacks. Twenty years later, although conditions varied greatly among the regions, in some areas education, housing, and consumption standards bore comparison with the most advanced parts of the world. By the late 1880s, the nation’s population was increasing by threefold every 30 years.¹⁶

Outstanding among those new politicians is Sarmiento, an Argentine educator who was president of the republic between 1868 and 1874. In his inaugural address he said: “We need to transform the poor ‘gauchos’ into people useful to society. For this purpose, the whole country should become a school.”¹⁷

In 1847, Sarmiento had traveled through Europe to learn of the successes and failures of educational systems. Nothing of what he saw satisfied him. He wanted to know of a school system capable of developing reasoning power in the magical and mythical minds of poor peasants.

Then, one of his friends suggested that he visit the United States and get acquainted with the work that Horace Mann was doing in the school system of Massachusetts. He crossed the Atlantic and visited not only with Horace Mann, but also with other brilliant Bostonian Unitarians who were meeting at the Divinity School of Harvard, among others, Henry W. Longfellow and Ralph W. Emerson.

The friendships he established then were further cultivated during his second sojourn as Argentine Ambassador to the United States, from 1864 through 1868. When Sarmiento assumed the presidency of Argentina, Mary Mann, the widow of Horace Mann, was instrumental in sending to Argentina a group of 65 American schoolteachers, with whom Sarmiento and his Ministry of Education, Nicolás Avellaneda, who succeeded Sarmiento as president of Argentina, began to organize the country’s educational system. Primary schooling was free and compulsory for all. The number of well-furnished schools constantly increased, and teachers, who were quickly formed by their American counterparts in normal schools, were conferred high social status and adequate monetary rewards.

Prior to this, the monopoly of the Catholic Church over education kept the common people ignorant of the advances in science, technology, and political organizations that were taking place in the world. The education of people of certain rank and fortune was a little better, but ineffective for the development of the country. Only a small number of young men, and even fewer young women, managed to break the fences that an education based on theology created in their minds. However, these few opened the doors to the outside world, other cultures, and great foreign thinkers. Even if they were studying in a Church-managed university, they would smuggle in, often with the help of prominent and open-minded priests, books from Jefferson and the great philosophers of the French Revolution, which they secretly read and discussed with friendly priests.

All this changed when Sarmiento and Avellaneda decided to organize the new school system to provide an education for life in the here and now. It is for this reason that Sarmiento and Mrs. Mann agreed that all the schoolteachers sent from the United States would be females, so as to serve as role models for Argentine households. Sarmiento and Mrs. Mann wanted them to bring new knowledge through words, and a new vision of life through the example of their lives. Since then, the children of poor and uneducated native peasants, and of equally poor and uneducated immigrants, had access to scientific knowledge and learned about their own nature, about what it meant to be human. They would learn how babies are born, how to cut their umbilical cords, how to change and clean their diapers, and how to take care of babies and their own bodies.

In the years of political freedom, social progress, and economic growth that followed, issues on sexuality and the status of women began to be discussed. They were introduced mainly by female politicians of the Socialist Party, and by the youth who by 1918 had achieved success in their fight to change the university system that resisted Sarmiento’s reform and, although no longer managed by the Catholic Church, had remained scholastic. It is interesting to observe that while the socialists were bringing a message of sexual liberation, the communists, when they split from the democratic socialists, adopted a moral code based on strict monogamy.

Sarmiento’s progressive work on the schools affected many other aspects of Argentine life. One of these aspects was a surge in bookstores that would offer writings of the most-varied orientation, writings to which youth had access and which often supplemented and amplified the information they were given at school.

The 1930 military coup started a slow process of reversing Sarmiento’s ideas on education. The purpose of education now focused on keeping pace with the advances in the natural sciences and technology, while preventing students from acquiring a vision of life that would contradict the obsolete moral codes of a narrow theology. However, the alliance of the most-reactionary members of the Catholic hierarchy with the military never managed to take the schools completely backwards. Argentina’s life had irreversibly changed, and what was not taught in the classrooms, the students would learn in their households and in the streets, although sometimes the information would reach them distorted or incomplete. For quite a while after the first military coup, books on sexuality could still be freely obtained in the bookstores. Later on, more-reactionary military coups would censor even this source of information.

B. The Situation Today

Currently there are no sexual education programs at the primary-school level. It is left to the teachers to give some information as part of the classes on biology. In the few cases in which a teacher decides to do so, it is no more than a description of the reproductive organs in plants and animals, and some references to the role of ovaries and testes in human reproduction, with no explicit mention, or even less, showing of pictures of the genitals.

It would be easy, however, to introduce full courses on sexual education in all Argentine public schools. All that is needed is an order of the National Educational Council, which by law decides on the nature and extension of primary-school programs. The members of the council are appointed by the president of the country following advice of the ministry of education. Once decided at the level of the central government, there are no elective local educational boards where parents could either oppose or suggest the idea of providing sexual education to the students. The provincial educational councils have jurisdiction only over provincial schools, not on those established by the national government. Although a few sophisticated private schools have developed advanced programs of sexual education, these schools reach only a tiny minority of children of rich urban households.

The same possibilities of organizing national programs of sex education are open for secondary schools (high schools), because they too report to the authority of the central government. But here again, the situation changes from one school to the other, depending on its director (principal), and is, in general, well behind the demands of the present. Neither primary nor secondary schools have recovered yet from the regressive trend imposed on them by decades of regressive military coups and brief civilian intervals.

For further information about sex education, see Section 5, Interpersonal Heterosexual Behaviors, below.

4. Autoerotic Behaviors and Patterns

In Argentine society, despite official Catholic negative views of sex outside the marital union, it is usually seen as normal for preteenage boys to play exploratory games with other boys, and girls with other girls. These games are seen by most parents as part of the process of growing up. It allows the child to reassure him- or herself of the normality of his or her body by comparing it with the body of a friend, relative, or schoolmate, although sometimes, instead of being a reassurance, it could generate anxieties, as when girls compare the size of their breasts and boys the size of their penises. It is also a source of anxiety when a boy feels sexually excited by another boy and fears he is becoming gay.

Freedom for these kinds of exploratory games was greater in bygone days when Argentine society had less violence, and drugs were not as common. In the past, boys would gather in parks and compete to see who threw their semen further while masturbating. Parks were also a place where couples would meet for sexual encounters, and teenagers would peep on their activities without disturbing the partners.

5. Interpersonal Heterosexual Behaviors

A. Children

See Section 4 immediately above.

B. Adolescents

What is known about the sexuality of Argentine adolescents is limited to anecdotal reports, most of which deal with middle- and upper-class urban teenagers, rather than with rural poor and urban street children. In this limited context, my personal experience in the 1970s in developing a sexual education program for students, ages 13 through 17, of middle-class households may be informative. This program was for a prestigious coed secondary school of suburban Buenos Aires, the Colegio Nacional San Isidro. After a dialogue with the parents aimed at interesting them in the sexual education of their sons and daughters, an integrated approach led the students to discuss biological and social aspects of sexual behavior in relation to their personal development and the establishment of interpersonal relations.

Although the students were offered the possibility of presenting their questions anonymously in writing, they preferred to come out openly with their questions. Their greater concerns were with the emotional and spiritual aspects involved in a sexual relationship. One vividly remembered example is typical of the concerns and perspective these youth had. A 15-year-old male student asked: “Can you know when your partner is pregnant without performing a lab test?” I left the student to share first his own views, and his answer was: “I think that when one is deep in love, one can detect subtle changes in mood and behavior of his lover that indicate a potential pregnancy.”

Among the biological issues, girls were more interested in knowing more about the physiology of menstruation, pregnancy, and delivery, while boys wanted to reassure themselves that masturbation and nocturnal involuntary ejaculations were normal and could be enjoyed free of guilt and shame. Both sexes converged in expressing that they were facing the awakening of their sexual potential with anguish and feelings of being all alone in this experience. They all needed to be reassured that there was nothing abnormal in their bodily sensations, and in the fantasies and feelings these sensations often evoked.

In 1931, when Argentina’s freedom to experiment with and discuss these subjects was not yet fully eroded, an Argentine scholar, Anibal Ponce, studied the problems of growing up in Argentine society in a book titled Ambition and Anguish among Adolescents. Regarding the common feelings of being isolated and alone, he said:

With a personality not yet formed, and while trying to awkwardly build the structures of his ego, the adolescent suffers more than anybody else, the anguish of solitude, because he or she needs more than anybody else the support of the others.¹⁸

Unfortunately, since my experience in 1970, the situation has deteriorated for Argentine adolescents, who find in their society less and less support for their existential anguish. In 1993, while researching this paper, this deterioration was obvious in my talks with adolescents. In a meeting with a group of them, ages 15 to 17, they told me about the typical pattern of a course on sexual education in a school that chooses to implement it. The teacher does not allow questions from the students during the presentations. At the end, he agrees to receive a few. Sensing that the instructor is insecure and unable to facilitate a dialogue in depth, the students then prefer to end the class quickly, declaring they have nothing to ask.

The teenagers confessed that it is attitudes like this, repeated in their homes, that make them view society and family cynically. Surrounded by injustice and hypocrisy, they feel they can do little to get the adults to change. They were, for instance, very disturbed by the expulsion of two students from their schools when they became pregnant.

The situation is no better at the college level. There are no courses of sexual education in Argentine universities, except, and this only since the 1960s, at their schools of medicine (see Sections 11, Sexual Dysfunctions, Counseling, and Therapies, and 12, Sex Research and Advanced Professional Education, below).

Premarital Sexual Activities

Sexual behavior differs from one group of Argentine youth to another depending on their social class and place of residence. Social belonging and location determine different levels of knowledge, repressions, and attitudes towards life in general, and sex in particular.

In the larger cities, like Buenos Aires, Cordoba, Mendoza, Rosario, and Santa Fe, youth are exposed to a cosmopolitan vision of life and receive more information on sex and sexuality. They are also freer to experiment with this vision and information than youth living in smaller towns, where family control is strong and where cultural patterns are rather narrow.

For rural youth, it is quite different. On the one hand, they receive information on sex and sexual behavior just from observing nature in which they are totally immersed, and from the relation between genders in the family where members enjoy little privacy, if any. On the other hand, the prevailing Catholic Church writes deep into the unconscious of every boy and girl, but especially of the latter, ideas of guilt and sin that trouble the pleasure that the early awakening of the senses in the rural milieu can bring. Neither boys nor girls are taught about the relational and recreational aspects of sex, and the possibilities offered by modern technology for keeping under control the reproductive aspects. Hence, the purely instinctive sex leads to pregnancy, confronting the boy with the responsibility of an early marriage that he is not yet ready to assume, and the girl with the responsibility of an unwanted motherhood for which she also is not prepared.

Youngsters in the big cities have easy access to magazines where sexuality is soberly analyzed, even if their parents and the Church hide such information from the youngsters. They know about contraceptive techniques and can acquire contraceptives in the pharmacies without problem. However, the guilt and shame associated with sex are also present here and, as usual, instead of promoting either safe sex or abstinence, these only lead to quick sexual contacts. Under the uncontrollable pressure of a hormonal flood released in a hurry and in the most unromantic places, boys and girls neglect prevention of pregnancy and disease. For youth in the poverty belts around the big cities, the situation is compounded by the lack of money. Even if they would prefer to use contraceptives, they cannot buy them and there are no places where they can get these free. Only the army distributes free condoms to the soldiers when they leave the barracks on their weekly leave days. Knowing the limited budget for healthcare within the army, the Church has not complained to the military, with which they keep good relations, pretending instead to ignore a practice that otherwise they could not openly accept.

First Sexual Experiences

In late 1993, the author had long conversations with different groups of young people in Buenos Aires. These mainly middle-class youths, ages 18 to 24, were encouraged to bring to the meetings problems related to their sexual life and development.

One subject recurrent in these meetings was their difficulty in establishing a fruitful dialog with their parents. Repeatedly, they expressed regret that aspects of their lives that engender so many anguishes and fears could not be explicitly discussed in the intimacy of their households.

Contrasting the information gathered in these meetings with my previous experience in medical private practice in Argentina, it became clear that sexual activities are initiated at increasingly earlier ages. Most of the interviewed youths defined their first experiences as disappointing. Asked why, they always responded that it was so because of a lack of romance. Most boys had been initiated in whorehouses, under the pressure of fathers who would arrange the visit, and this happened without a previous intimate talk that could soothe the anxiety of the teenager by discussing what he may expect to happen and how to protect himself from diseases, mainly AIDS, about which the teenager had already heard at school. Such experiences, they said, left bitter memories, which for some disappeared when they fell in love and discovered the ingredient they were longing for: romance. The boys all agreed that the experience at the whorehouse was felt as an obligation to fulfill in order to affirm their virility.

Among girls, the memories of their being deflowered were somewhat different from the boys. Some did not bother to get prior information about the meaning and the possible consequences of their first sexual encounter. They perceived their first intercourse as the fulfillment of a strongly felt desire that, at the same time, would transgress a social taboo. Hence, they reached the situation with many expectations, and as much anxiety as boys said they did. For other, more-entrepreneurial-type female students, it was a calculated action to get rid of their virginity, which they perceived as an obstacle to enter into a more mature and fulfilling sexual life. These girls sought information from doctors in private gynecological practice and acquired the necessary contraceptive technology to protect themselves.

Reflections about Sex Policies and Politics from Meetings with Youth

The young’s perception is that society is not providing appropriate responses to their needs of knowing more about sexuality and sensuality. The information they get at home, school, and church is incomplete and biased by the prejudices of the adults. Although short articles dispersed in different magazines are useful, they cannot fully fill the gap. They would prefer an honest, open, uninhibited dialogue with parents, teachers, and priests.¹⁹ They see the AIDS epidemic slowly changing the situation, although they consider that their survival is in danger, because society is reacting too slowly and is still not assuming full responsibility, preferring to stick to old patterns of thought and behavior rather than save lives.

The more-enlightened youth perceive many deficiencies in the information process, deficiencies that they say may risk the future of a stable relationship. For instance, they are not told that, although syphilis and gonorrhea can still be easily cured, these diseases may make it easier for the AIDS virus to invade the immune system. Girls are not told that chronic or repeated inflammation of the genital tissues may lead to infertility and ectopic pregnancies.

A generalized opinion among youth is that it is necessary to invest in improving and updating education and information to secure the future of the country. The impression left on me by my meetings in Buenos Aires is that middle- and upper-class youth are slowly evolving from a macho behavior, which still is deeply programmed into their minds by their acculturation, to an attitude of better understanding of their own and the opposite sex’s sexuality. They are learning to integrate male and female traits in their own personality, and to harmonize the roles of males and females in the marketplace, households, and political arenas. They are also starting to understand and respect those who show preferences for intimate relationships with persons of their own sex.

However, the majority of the Argentine population is unchanged. It is unclear at this time whether the elite youth of the urban middle and upper class, as they mature, will influence the democratic process that reopened in 1983 to introduce changes in the educational and legal systems that could usher larger groups into a new vision of their sexual life.

[Update 2003: Argentine teenagers face serious risks in their sexual life, especially concerning sexually transmitted diseases and premature maternity. Those risks arise from the lack of information, of deficient health services, and of disregarding responsibilities towards oneself and one’ s partners.

[The health and sanitary authorities are not lending sufficient attention to these risks, despite statistics indicating that the number of cases of AIDS among Argentine children is the highest in Latin America. Their mothers, who often are less than 20 years old, infected about 90% of those HIV-positive children (CRLP 2000).

[Around 86% of women between 15 and 19 years of age use contraceptives in the City of Buenos Aires, while the percentage is much smaller in the rest of the country—between 31% and 45%. However, these figures do not indicate the degree of responsibility and of knowledge with which those contraceptives are being used. Independently of their diverse lifestyles, most youngsters, when interviewed, express needs for emotional support and for a complete sexual education that should include knowledge on contraceptive technologies, but not be limited to this subject alone. Public health services do not satisfy these needs.

[During the interviews sustained while writing the original chapter for this encyclopedia, youngsters expressed different approximations to sexual activity. But all of them—those who had begun to exercise their sexuality at a very early age as well as those who were not yet active, those who had multiple partners as well as those in more-stable and long-term relationships—confessed not to know much about their own bodies and about the sexually transmitted diseases. They were ashamed to seek preventive information or early treatment from medical services. The economic crisis that the country has suffered, since the 1997 publication of this chapter, adds poverty to ignorance in increasing the emotional and physical damages that Argentine youth is suffering.

[Argentina should take immediate measures to establish programs of sexual education in all the country, teaching youngsters how to protect themselves, resist pressures when sexual activity is not yet desired, and diminish the risk of their sexual encounters by negotiating with their partners. The provinces of Rio Negro, Neuquén, and Mendoza have assumed leadership in this direction by establishing services in the area of sexual and reproductive health for adolescents by law.

[Those who oppose these programs argue that discussing human sexuality at an early age awakes prematurely the curiosity of the youngsters and advances their initiation in sexual activity. After evaluating 1,000 sexual programs of education in diverse countries of the world, the World Health Organization has arrived at the contrary conclusion. Courses in sexual education do not advance the age at which sexual activity usually starts in the respective culture. Moreover, in some cases, the major and better knowledge defers the experimentation (Population Information Program 1995).

[Because young Argentines are making decisions with neither knowledge nor responsibility, they compromise their health and the economy of their homes. Because the Argentine State ignores its role in the sexual education of its youth, it compromises the future of the country with a long-term social and economic overload of sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies. (End of update by S. Kamenetzky)]

C. Adults

Marriage and the Family

Mature people, who married before the recent shift in sexual behavior towards more openness and gender equity acquired the intensity and spread they now have, are being bombarded by the mass media and performing arts with messages that carry a heavy sexual and sensual content, telling about new techniques for lovemaking, new roles within the couple, new risks in extramarital relationships, and so on. These issues are also conversation matter among friends and families, and at business meetings and almost any social gatherings.

Inevitably, mature couples start imitating the open and direct language of their younger counterparts. This, and the perceived risks of extramarital affairs since the AIDS epidemic, is leading them to recreate their sexual life and expand their erotic horizon. They are discovering that fantasy and playfulness within the couple are the best antidotes of boredom. Men are learning to ask their spouses to use new forms of stimulation with them; they are learning that it is more important for them and their partners to be mutually tender and understanding than it is to count their performance points. Oral sex and anal intercourse are losing their status, especially among younger Argentines, as techniques practiced only with prostitutes. Masturbation is increasingly viewed not only as a form of self-satisfaction, but also as a means of sharing sensual and orgasmic experiences without penetration.

Extramarital Sex

We still find married men who maintain a longstanding relationship with a second woman, sometimes with the knowledge and approval from his spouse, and even of his grownup children. For some couples, it is a solution that keeps their marriage alive: The man is free to express sexual needs that he does not dare to reveal to his wife, and the woman is relieved from pressures to change her sexual behavior, a task that for her heavily structured personality may be so painful that she prefers to share her partner with another woman. These are generally women with limited horizons in their lives and a very low sexual appetite.

Fewer are the number of couples where the man and woman both have temporary extramarital relationships under mutual knowledge and agreement. This is the most risky modality in today’s Argentina, because many of the men resist the use of condoms and ignore whether their occasional partners may be HIV-positive.

Older Adults

The new ways of thinking and making love are also resounding among couples over age 55. Often it is their own children and grandchildren who awaken them to the new sexual behavioral patterns. In Argentina, there is still strong interaction among the generations, and the oldest easily perceive the freedom that the new generations have won. Nowadays, a granddaughter moving from home to the apartment of her boyfriend is not grounds for scandal. And grandparents do not stay away from a wedding where the bride in a long white gown shows signs of pregnancy.

Indeed, these are open-minded elderly who keep their own sensuality and vitality alive; they are not ashamed to show tenderness between them through hugging and kissing. These are people who consult the urologist at the first signs of impotence in the man, or the gynecologist when the woman’s sex drive declines. Most elderly couples, however, have not reached this openness. They let their sexual drive disappear without seeking remedies. Many drift into depression and develop hypochondriac behavior.

Incidence of Oral and Anal Sex

In Argentine society, both oral and anal sex carry a negative connotation, especially for older persons and among the traditional middle- and upper-class families. Argentine youth, however, seems to be taking a new look at these sexual expressions, according to what they said at the meetings.

Girls were divided in their responses. One group accepts and practices oral sex as a way of avoiding the risk of pregnancy and maintaining their virginity until marriage. For another group, it was a more-intimate form of sexual relationship, somehow more romantic than intercourse. Youth holding this latter view believed that oral sex should only be engaged in with a stable partner, and not in the first exploratory encounters. Some other girls joined some boys in rejecting this way of expressing love to a partner, and thought that only prostitutes could practice fellatio on boys. The older the boys are, the more easily they accept oral sex as a normal part of dating and within marriage.

Prejudices against anal sex are even stronger among older adults, and even the younger set. A minority of the youths in the groups I spoke with accepted anal sex, and then only for fully committed couples and not as part of dating. The boys agree that: “A woman will never ask for it.” The old injunction against sodomy is still well alive in their subconscious.

6. Homoerotic, Homosexual, and Bisexual Behaviors

[Note from the CCIES Website Editor:  See Last-Minute Developments for updates related to this topic that were added after this chapter had been typeset.]

Argentina still is, to a large extent, a macho society, and machos detest gays, whom they see as effeminate. For a majority of the population, including physicians and psychologists, homosexuality is felt to be a perversion and a disease. Teenagers who feel a strong attraction to members of their same sex experience, first, extreme confusion about their feelings. When the picture becomes clear in their mind, they awake to the unpleasant reality of belonging to a group that society marginalizes.

Gayness, however, is increasingly being tolerated, and a gay movement is gaining increased strength and fighting for its rights, which ten years ago was impossible even to think of. The scorn for gays is higher among lower- and middle-class men than among members of the upper class. There always were artists and writers whose homosexuality was known among the elites, but carefully kept out of scrutiny from the media and the masses.

Lesbians are still not too visible in Argentine society, in keeping with the Victorian tradition, which never wanted to think about sexual activities in a relationship between two females.

Contrasting the social attitude that openly scorns gays, although sheltering them when they belong to special groups, we see Argentines as quite uninhibited in publicly expressing tenderness and affection among people of the same or different sex. Men of all ages will embrace and kiss each other when meeting, and there are also exchanges of kisses among men and women who are relatives or friends, and, of course, among women themselves. The increased publicity about the spread of AIDS has not acted as a deterrent of these affectionate expressions.²⁰ (See the discussion of same-sex sex rehearsal play in Section 4, Autoerotic Behaviors and Patterns.)

To be gay or lesbian in a repressive environment whose stereotypes are the macho man and the submissive reproductive woman is not an easy task indeed. Anyone who deviates from a strict heterosexual behavior is ridiculed: A gay is not a man, a lesbian is a degenerate woman. However, to be bisexual is not so annoying, as long as one’s same-sex behavior is kept very private.

The young gay faces the hostility of society by withdrawing from his heterosexual circles to a subculture where he can find both lovers and understanding study and sport mates. Successful professionals have solved their problems by choosing to retreat into more-accepting cultures where they can be openly gay without jeopardizing their future. In private discussions, young gays report that their most traumatizing experience is when they decide to open up to their families and are rejected.

With a population of 12 million in Buenos Aires, one would expect a larger number of gay and lesbians than the numbers one can estimate from the few who have left the closet. These few, however, are very active in promoting the rights of the whole community. They speak for the visible and the invisible, helping the latter to openly assume their identities. They have formed organizations that have been given legal status, they have an official meeting and business place, and they publish and distribute documents to the press and public. In these documents, they tell of their suffering, explain their lifestyles, and ask support for their fight for more legal freedom to be themselves and for equal rights with people of other sexual orientations. There is a whole gay and lesbian culture that is emerging, with gay masseurs who announce their services in the most-important papers and gay bars and discos. (I have not heard of any lesbian bar.)

I also did not find neighborhoods exclusively or predominantly homosexual. Most mix with the mainstream population of their own social class. Those who have a well-defined and highly visible economic or political role are still in the closet. The same is true for members of the armed forces and the Church. To confess their lifestyle and orientation would be suicidal. On the other hand, among artists, writers, moviemakers, actors, dancers, and university professors, to admit openly they are gay may bring rejection from the most conservative members of society, but they end up being accepted, and sometimes even see their popularity increase.

Who are those conservative members of the Argentine society? First, of course, are the orthodox Catholics who still believe that sexuality and sensuality ought to be repressed to achieve spiritual development. If all sexual and sensual manifestations are sinful except in marriage, homosexuality is particularly so. It is unnatural, a perversion of nature. Second, the orthodox Jews who still follow the Torah’s abomination of this kind of relationship that in the past deserved capital punishment.

Third, in the domain of medical science, many have not yet evolved to a humanist, integrative, harmonizing approach. Orthodox psychoanalysts still consider consistency in the male or female physical and mental development as essential to a normal personality. They believe homosexuality originates in conflicts and traumas that therapy can face and resolve. In the chairs of sexuality of the schools of medicine, complex biological schemes are used to disguise the view among traditional physicians that homosexuality violates the laws of nature.

The irrational fear of physical love between partners of the same sex still pervades Argentine society. The overall situation can be described with the same words that Erwin J. Haeberle used to describe the prevalent attitude of society in the United States 20 years ago:

Typically, they do not know any homosexuals, do not want to meet them, but would like them to be controlled, contained, put away, locked up or eliminated.²¹

Argentine society still is far from taking seriously the role of sexuality in the physical, emotional, and spiritual life of men and women. It still has to reflect on other words of Haeberle:

The ultimate liberation of both homosexuals and heterosexuals can lie only in the abandonment of all labels and in everyone’s freedom to explore his own sexual potential, whatever it may be.²²

7. Gender Diversity and Transgender Issues

Argentina was always a male-dominated society where those who do not behave in the macho way were scorned by men and women alike. However, with the return to democratic freedom, and TV messages from foreign countries penetrating into the intimacy of households, attitudes are slowly changing. Thus, the erotic minorities have had a chance to come out of the closet and express themselves. For the moment, the masses react to them with neither violence nor acceptance, rather with curiosity. In the world of the performing arts, cases are well known of transvestism, and because these persons are celebrities, the public accepts them with smiles and gentle jokes.

If things are not easy for noneffeminate gays or nonmasculine lesbians, they are even more difficult for those who identify themselves with the opposite sex in manners and clothing, and even more so for those who want to see their bodies change towards the features of the other sex.

Some heterosexual transvestites have acceptance from their mates, and sometimes from their children, to crossdress in the intimacy of their homes. In this way, men, who seem to outnumber women in practicing this sexual behavior, can safely express the feminine part of their personalities. In their work and social environment, these men usually return to macho stereotypes.

Those who desire to change their sex physically and be socially recognized as a member of the other sex should seek legal authorization for both procedures, the surgical acts and biochemical treatments needed, and the right to change names and status. Usually the authorization is denied on the basis of Article 91 of the Criminal Code that considers them as mutilations that would affect the capacity of women to engender children, which is considered as their primary social role. The law punishes with jail the patient who has changed sex and the doctor who performed the operation; the medical license of the latter is also revoked.

Change of sex in Argentina has a tragic history. In 1958, a prestigious physician, Dr. Defacio, went into self-imposed exile after suffering several years in prison because he had changed the sex of a man, Mauro Fernandez Vega, who, in turn, was never able to get new identity documents. Now another man, Javier Alberto Urbina, who claims to feel uncomfortable with his sexual identity and desires to be transformed into a woman, has started a public campaign for the right of any person to own his or her body. For this purpose, he has challenged government and society alike, standing before the doors of the Argentine Congress with billboards asking the abolition of Article 91. The Permanent Assembly for Human Rights is supporting his actions, according to a letter he proudly exhibits. In the letter, the President of the Assembly acknowledges Mr. Urbina’s contributions to the cause of civil rights and individual freedom. The letter says that Mr. Urbina’s actions may result in the legal recognition of the right to decide freely on matters that concern one’s own body. However, legislators seem insensitive to this claim.

8. Significant Unconventional Sexual Behaviors

A. Coercive Sexual Behaviors

Sexual Abuse and Incest

There are no statistics on incest. Professionals in the medical and legal fields who deal with family violence and abuse encounter cases at all social levels, but they seem to be more frequent in rural areas and among poor people.

Adolescent girls are often raped by the older males of the family, and fathers often use them as sexual objects after the death of the mother, or when the spouse’s work keeps her for long periods outside the home. Abusive males are usually unemployed people with a past of family violence, high consumption of alcohol, social inadequacy, and impulsive behavior. However, although less frequent, cases are also known in which the male is the head of a well-to-do household and respected by his community.

Lawyers at the Office for the Protection of Minors who mainly deal with cases of incest among the lower classes are surprised at how often they find that the abuser has no perception of having committed a crime. This office is now working with a multidisciplinary team of professionals. This, and the recent institution of oral court hearings, is increasing knowledge about the extent and motivations of this unconventional sexual behavior.²³

It is in private medical practice that cases of incest within middle- and upper-class families surface. Young females acknowledge the trauma of an early unwanted incestuous relationship when coming for treatment of sexual dysfunction in their marriages.

Sexual Harassment

On December 19, 1993, a decree of Argentina’s federal government introduced the legal concept of sexual harassment in its administrative procedures and Criminal Code. The decree was prepared by the Secretariat of the Civil Service with the help of the Women’s National Council.

The decree punishes sexual harassment independently of the hierarchical levels occupied by aggressor and assaulted, and regardless of their respective sex. Sexual harassment is defined as:

Any reiterative activity, whether this be a behavior, a purpose, a gesture, or a bodily contact, that is not accepted and reciprocated by the person to whom it is aimed, that humiliates her or him, and that involves a threat against the stability of employment or the opportunities for advancement.

This action by the administration was promoted by the Secretariat for Women of the civil servants’ labor union (Uniùn del Personal Civil de la Naciùn) that provided information on the increase of this type of behavior in different government organizations: the Ministry of Public Health and Social Action, the Secretariat of Tourism, the National Atomic Energy Commission, the National Institute of Technology, the Ministry of Economy, Customs, National Parks Service, and many others. After the decree was issued, more than 700 cases were initiated in the city of Buenos Aires alone.

Sexual harassment is punished through an administrative indictment that may end with a dismissal from public service. The administrative procedure, however, does not preclude legal action by the offended person, because the same decree introduces in the Criminal Code, Article 124B that reads as follows:

Those who use their hierarchical position or any other situation of employment to induce another to satisfy his or her sexual requirements, be this or not carnal intercourse, will be punished with two to four years of prison.

This decree is important because it shows that Argentine women are expanding their political presence and are winning the collaboration of men who know, from well inside the system, the injustices perpetrated against women. Men and women both hope that the new legal situation will not be spuriously used to either accomplish personal vengeance or obtain undue economic gains.

Rape and Family Violence

Despite these aspects of sexual violence in Argentine society, such behaviors have been affected by the educational reforms instituted at the end of the 19th century, producing a more genteel society. However, violence within the household is still considerable, especially from husband to wife. Abuses of this kind are seldom reported to police, because women know that the members of the latter usually behave in the same manner in their homes.

Among the poorest households, since their early infancy, girls observe the violent behavior of their fathers, particularly when they return home intoxicated with alcohol. The mother is beaten and bruised, and a sexual encounter may follow that amounts to a rape. Faced with a society that, until recently, did not recognize female rights, the woman capitulates, represses her feelings, closes herself within her taciturn dreams, and continues laboring for the survival of her family, especially her offspring. Even then, if she does not manage to hide at least some of her earnings, the male may spend them with another woman and with friends imbibing alcohol.

Once more the tango draws on this popular behavior. A male songwriter puts on the lips of a female protagonist who falls in love with a hoodlum the following words:

Now, even if he beats me
my boy from the shanties
knows that I love him
with all my passion
that I am all his
that for him is my fond attention
and that it will be ours the child
product of this love sickness.²⁴

The lawyers at the judicial branch that deals with family violence estimate that there has been recently an increase of some 40% in the cases of women beaten and practically raped. However, rape in public places of the large cities or by intruders in private homes is not as frequent as in other countries, although with an increase in unemployment, especially among youth, this violent behavior is also starting to increase.

Lawyers admit that, when a girl or young woman is raped, the experience of going through the legal procedures and crude and insensitive examinations by forensic doctors could be more traumatic than the rape itself. The Argentine Criminal Code punishes with four years of prison the culprit of an incest with or rape of a minor.

A new brand of young lawyers, judges, psychologists, and sociologists are trying to uncover the economic and social roots of this violent behavior. As Martha Mercader, an Argentine writer of whom I will write more later, says, “Rape is not an animal act. Because it is a denial of human rights, it is an aberrant product of human culture.”²⁵

[Update 2003: In Argentina’s daily life, whether in the households, in society, or even in cultural circles, it is easy to perceive what in the popular language is called “machismo.” It is a male attitude of superiority that disregards the human dignity, intellectual merits, and economic worth of females.

[The situations in which women are victims of violence and criminal attacks have recently multiplied because of the deep political and economic crisis the country is undergoing. Corporal punishments that may end with death, forced sexual engagements that hurt the women physically and mentally, rapes, and child abuse, are all common features in Argentine society. Most of these events are not reported. There are fears of reprisals, concerns for how they may affect the offspring, worries about being left without means of subsistence, and lack of support from parental families. Women do not trust the police, because they know that the same machista mentality pervades its members.

[Argentine legislators have tried to modernize the laws related to acts of sexual violence against women, children, and teenagers. In 1999, laws were passed on crimes against sexual integrity. The new laws have changed most of the problems of sexual violence from the category of crimes to that of conflicts, which authorizes the judges to arbitrate or seek conciliation.

[Rape goes well beyond conflict. Raping is a criminal attack that involves many physical and mental consequences. The attacked person may contract AIDS or other sexually transmitted diseases, could subsequently suffer depression, even suicidal thoughts, and could have difficulties in reassuming a pleasant, satisfying sexual behavior. Legal protection and social equity for both genres of all ages require more than just changes in the laws. True protection and equity will be achieved through a profound educational reform aimed at structuring people’s consciousness in the appreciation of the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual benefits of a sexuality exercised with mutual respect and responsible freedom. (End of update by S. Kamenetzky)]

B. Prostitution

The Past

The gauchos, the native inhabitants of the country, themselves products of the heavy breeding between the early conquistadors and the indigenous population, and of the lower-class Spaniards who arrived in the wake of those conquistadors, seldom commercialized the sexual favors of women. A gaucho would take a woman as his sexual partner and could abandon her after some time without remorse. His mind was not programmed into thinking marriage, nor seeking stability, but neither did it contain programs that would make it acceptable, even less desirable, to make profits by exploiting his or any other woman. The gauchos were fearless, quarrelsome, but honest machos, skilled in the use of knives and boleadoras,²⁶ who wandered on their horses through the vast expanses of flat land that are the Argentine pampas.

After the efforts by Sarmiento and Avellaneda to build more rational structures on the magical and mythic mind of the Argentine population (see Section 3A, Knowledge and Education about Sexuality, Historical Perspectives), the situation changed for both the gauchos and their women. In 1880, the image of a country that would develop following European models was well set in the minds of the country’s leaders. The gauchos had to transform themselves from vagrant free hunters who lived with women practicing subsistence gardening and husbandry into a rural labor force for the large ranches that the wealthy started to organize, or find a place in the smaller agricultural undertakings of the immigrants that started to flock to the Argentine pampas. The new generations were prepared by Sarmiento’s schools to assume the new role, but they were betrayed by the large landowners, who did not treat them as salaried labor within a capitalist system, but rather as peasants attached to the lord’s land who rendered services to the lord in exchange for a place where they could build their shacks and where their wives could tender a garden and raise some chickens, in addition to work as maids or cooks in the landlord’s house. The older gauchos, not enough acculturated into the new system or economic and social relationships, would often rebel. The police would then seize them and send them to the armies that were battling the remaining southern indigenous populations and expanding the agricultural frontiers for the “civilized” land-based entrepreneurs. In brief, the displaced gauchos were making room for the estancias of the old native oligarchy and the settlements of the newly arrived middle-class Europeans.

The women of the older gauchos sent to the frontiers as cannon fodder were left without support and would often join the wives of the settled laborers as servants and sexual objects of the landowner families. They also became prostitutes in the small villages of the rural areas with their population of single rural laborers and traveling salesmen. An Argentine writer, José Hernandez, who knew well the mindsets and lifestyles of the gauchos, wrote an epic poem about their suffering because of their inability to adjust to the transformational process, and the often rough way in which this process took place. It was a process that sacrificed the human dignity of the lower classes to the purpose of building a modern, productive nation. And the women suffered the most from this process.²⁷

Most of the immigrants came seeking possibilities for earning their livelihood through hard work, risky but honest investments, and the use of the best available technologies. However, as in any migratory inflow, some elements came with the idea of making money quickly by exploiting native people and land. A few used prostitution as the means to accumulate wealth and wield power.

Argentina would soon become one of the most active centers of the so-called white slave traffic. In Buenos Aires, Rosario, Mendoza, and other cities of the country, powerful entrepreneurial organizations, affiliated with even more-powerful European organizations, enslaved an unbelievable number of young women lured or forced to leave their European villages to become the merchandise of a very profitable trade in a wide variety of brothels.²⁸

Just one of the organizations, known as the Zwi Migdal, owned 2,000 brothels where 30,000 women were each producing monthly an average of 3,000 Argentine pesos for their pimps.²⁹ To put this amount in due perspective, I should remind the reader that at that time the peso had the same value as the dollar, and that a sales clerk in a department store would earn less than 100 pesos per month. This gave the exploiters a tremendous financial power, and they used it to buy cooperation and loyalty from police, city and immigration officers, judges, ministers, medical doctors, and congressmen.

Who sustained such a large demand? Although for different reasons, all social classes made their contributions. The rich were looking for the merriment and diversity of sexual practices that they would never dare to ask from their wives, the respectable matrons whose aim was only to bear and raise children, manage households, and organize social activities. The poor came to brothels because either they had to prove to themselves everyday by using many women that they were machos, or because they were feeling lonely. Loneliness was particularly harsh on the immigrants to the large cities, who initially were without family or social groups with which to relate. But the poor native porteûo machos³⁰ also often felt lonely, frustrated, and sad. They put these feelings into music and created the tango. One of the tangos declares: “In my life I had many, many chicks, but never a loving woman.”³¹

Bully porteûos would mix in the brothels with longshoremen, sailors, farmers seeking city fun, employees of government offices, banks, and large stores, small businessmen taking a break from their shops, and youths having their first experiences. Brothels varied in size and amenities according to the class they were catering to. Most were just a succession of small rooms that barely accommodated a double-size bed. In the remaining space, a chair would provide a place for the customer’s clothes, and a washbowl would be the only available means for the customer’s and prostitute’s hygiene. A typical construction would be two rows of ten rooms, each with a latrine at the end of each row. In the more-expensive brothels, there would be a grand receiving hall with sofas, vases, and paintings on the walls. There, rooms were more spacious and some would have mirrors on walls and ceilings. They were the places for the rich who could afford to pay from 5 to 15 pesos.³²

The white-slave traffic to Argentina continued growing during the last two decades of the 19th century and the first three decades of the 20th century. Already in 1892, a German magazine, Das Echos, commented on a trial that took place in Lemberg, Austria, where 22 persons were condemned for sending young women to different parts of the world under the pretext that they would be employed as maids, cooks, and nursemaids. Because the defendants were Jews, the magazine, in addition to denouncing an abominable trade, used the case to encourage anti-Semitic undercurrents of German politics that would open up in the German political arena some decades later.³³

Between 1920 and 1930, Albert Londres, an officer of the French Sureté Genérale investigating the ramifications of the international white-slave traffic, decided to mix himself in the life of the small Polish villages where many of the women were bought or seduced. He finally published a book, Le Chemin de Buenos Aires (The Way to Buenos Aires), whose influence among Argentines who were fighting to stop the traffic proved to be decisive.³⁴

Meanwhile, homosexuals, outcasts of Argentine society until recently, were, on the one hand, persecuted by the police, and, on the other hand, using some prostitutes and their madams for their own purposes. In Buenos Aires, for instance, a group of wealthy and influential, but closeted homosexuals organized young prostitutes to lure handsome young men into luxurious orgies in specially arranged places. They would be unwittingly photographed, and the pictures would be used to blackmail them into providing sexual favors to the hosts of the orgies.³⁵

Finally the empire built by the traffickers, which was facilitated by the regulation of the exercise of prostitution, was destroyed when the government moved to the opposite behavior and made organized prostitution illegal. Never was the Argentine market really a free market for sexual services, meaning by this, a market where the suppliers chose the profession out of their own free will, exercised it on their own and for their own benefit, and could enter and exit the market freely. Only very recently is it possible to see a type of prostitution that can be assimilated to small businesses.

From Regulation to Prohibition

The Argentine empire of whoredom was born and grew up sheltered by the regulated status of the brothels under laws and decrees whose declared purpose was to protect both suppliers and consumers of sexual services. In fact, it protected neither and only served to replace risky capitalistic forms of exploitation of sexual services with a capitalism of political patronage that benefited bureaucrats and scoundrels.

Regulation of prostitution is always based on the premise that prostitution is an inevitable evil, hence, it should be regulated in order to minimize the damages to society from its practice. Some of the regulatory decrees dictated by city councils in Argentina were quite detailed in their requirements. One included the following rules:³⁶

Later on, at the request of the Argentine Association Against White Slave Traffic, a page was added to the “sanitary notebook,” stating in Spanish, German, French, Yiddish, English, and Italian:

This is a free country. Nobody can be compelled to work as a prostitute. Whoever wants to exit from the profession can contact [here the name and address of the organization was given] that will see to her defense and help her.

In this notebook, the City Sanitary Services recorded the results of the mandatory periodical medical examinations. If the woman was found to be infected with a disease, she was to be taken to a hospital and remain there until dismissal. The sanitary notebook had to be shown to any customer that would request it to attest to her health condition.

The madam managing a brothel could not leave the brothel for more than 24 hours without notifying the sanitary authorities, who had to authorize leaves in writing and never for more than 15 days. She also could not accept any prostitute in the brothel who had not first registered and passed a medical examination. She had to take her pupils personally to the periodical medical examination at a hospital or have them ready if the examination was done at the site, in which case the brothel had to have a special room equipped with all the furniture and instruments the sanitary authorities requested. The madam also had to report immediately to the sanitary authorities whenever a prostitute felt ill, whether it be from a sexually transmitted or any other type of disease. If the woman could not be taken to the sanitary authority, a doctor would examine her at the brothel and decide whether to send her to a hospital.

It is easy to imagine the gigantic corruption that this naive attempt to protect customers and suppliers generated. The big trade organizations mentioned above bought the protection of the police, who were in charge of enforcing the regulations, and bribed justices and politicians, who all ignored the transgressions in favor of concentrating on the humanitarian provisions aimed at avoiding deceit and violence, and at protecting, at least partially, the free exercise of the profession. In reality, this approach did little to protect the health of the women and their clients, as elementary mathematics show.

With an average of ten daily services per woman and two examinations per week, and accepting that the examinations were thoroughly performed, which often was not the case, only the first client after the examination could be considered free from contracting a venereal disease. The women had no protection from customers already infected. Hence the chances of safe sex for the other 30 or 40 clients that would visit the same woman before she went to the next examination were constantly decreasing. We should remember that the customers were not subject to compulsory medical control, and that many might not have shown any symptom for some time, while others would suffer in silence and continue practicing sex with prostitutes, lovers, and wives.

Although there are no official statistics from that period, we know from studies made by some concerned physicians, and from the clamor in the press, that the number of cases of gonorrhea and syphilis kept increasing. From a study by the director of the sanitary services of Rosario, Dr. José M. Fernandez, we learn that the examinations practiced during one year—October 1, 1930, through September 30, 1931—revealed that 73% of the prostitutes had a positive serological reaction to syphilis and close to 100% of them were carriers of gonococcus.³⁷

Finally, a law was promulgated by the federal government on December 30, 1935, ordering the closure of all brothels throughout the nation. It even criminalized the provision of sexual services by a single person in her own home.

Anticipating this abrupt policy change, several measures were taken by public institutions and grassroots organizations to protect the women that the law would leave without job and home.

The Situation Today

The 1935 law ended the corrupting empire of large organizations involved in the white-slave traffic, but it could not end the exercise of individual prostitution. The application of the law to individual prostitution was even declared unconstitutional, because Article 19 of the Argentine Constitution says: “Private activities that do not affect public order and morality and do not harm other people are reserved to the judgment of God and off-limits to the authority of magistrates.”

Hence, an adult person who by spontaneous decision engages in sex with other consenting adults, for money or otherwise, cannot be penalized unless the practice takes place in such a way that it offends or harms third parties.

On the other hand, the change in mores that took place in the world after World War II was strongly felt in Argentina. Internally, the Perónist movement drastically elevated the status of the working class, including rural labor, and Eva Perón’s actions sped the recognition of women’s political, economic, and social rights. The large masses of single immigrants, to whom the brothel provided a recreational and physiological outlet, are pictures from a distant past. The machos of the suburbs of Buenos Aires and other big cities are drowned by a wave of proud blue-collar workers who may have consenting lovers in addition to their official spouses, but would never exploit one or the other. Contraceptives and information about them reach women and men of all social classes. For quite a while, penicillin brought control over venereal diseases. All this allowed women to consent to premarital and extramarital sexual relations.

However, prostitution has not disappeared. Teenagers, sometimes by their own initiative, but more often under the pressure of peers or their fathers, seek prostitutes for their sexual initiation. Then there are the handicapped and those who do not dare to share with lovers and spouses their need for special sexual practices. And as always, sailors and other single travelers from the countryside and abroad. Single women and married men with hidden homosexual or bisexual tendencies are also asking for sexual services. Hence, male prostitutes have made their appearance in the market.

The modern Argentine male and female prostitutes advertise their services through newspapers. A typical announcement reads: FIRST NAME; Your place or mine from Monday to Sunday; Telephone number. Some include the price. In one single issue of a popular newspaper, I found eight advertisements with prices ranging from 15 pesos to 40 pesos, which equaled the same amount of dollars in 1993 exchange.

Another form of advertising is the use of taxi drivers and hotel bell captains as intermediaries. These agents receive part of the price in exchange for referring clients. In the large hotels, the bell captains may have an album with pictures of different prostitutes from which the guest may choose.

Sex titillation by phone is also making its inroads. It is being introduced by representatives of foreign organizations. Romance through the line, as one of the announcements reads, is offered by calling a number in the United States, Hong Kong, or Mexico.

The spread of AIDS has further reduced direct trade of services and has made room for these telephone and other electronic alternatives. They are used for those who do not find a way to create romance and introduce fantasy in their relationships. Most of the well-informed youth are now seeking to satisfy all their sexual needs through a committed relationship that may or may not end in marriage. Usually, they contract marriage when they decide to have children. Among homosexuals, who are now more accepted by society, there is also a trend toward less promiscuity and more-stable monogamous relations.

Prostitution is still a topic of discussion in the news media and for journalists. It is becoming clear that prostitution is a cultural as well as an economic problem. A morality that denies and represses bodily needs will never solve the problem. It can only increase the demand for commercial providers of sexual services. And a society where greed on one side creates poverty on the other will inevitably create greedy profiteers and needy prostitutes.

C. Sex in Argentine Mass Media: Erotica and Pornography

Literature

A review of the Argentine literature of the last few decades shows that Argentine writers often describe in detail heterosexual, gay, and lesbian sexual encounters in their novels. The practice of sprinkling some sexual spices to add flavor to the narration is not limited to romantic novels; it occurs also in historical novels, and indeed in psychological novels that delve deep into the feelings of their characters.

This literature has led middle-class urban readers to rethink their own attitude towards sexuality and sensuality. It helps in lifting the last traces of machismo, of seeing love and sex as two separate things that are practiced with different women, and of perceiving homosexuality as a perversity. In a historical novel set between 1851 and 1862, for instance, Martha Mercader, a famous novelist, defines in just one sentence the most common mindset among young military men in the first armies of the equally young Republic: “He [the protagonist of the novel, an adjutant in the recently organized National Guard] must always be on top; on top of Indians, of the blacks, of the gauchos, of the peasants, and of the females.”³⁸

This same novelist dared to reveal her own sensual and sexual life in an autobiography in which she describes her puberty within a family and a society hampered by a multitude of taboos, the fantasies of her adolescence fueled by the movies that Hollywood sent to Argentina in the 1940s, the difficulties women had to choose freely and assume responsibilities, her conflicts with the rigid mindset of an intellectual husband that was progressive in his ideology and conservative in his social and sexual behavior, and conflicts that ended in a sour divorce. Her personal history illustrates the limitations to which women were, and, to some extent, are still often subjected. For some, the limitations amounted to a veritable enslavement.³⁹

When we compare the historical novels published in the 1980s by this writer with the books of the same genre published in the 1970s by another famous Argentine writer, Beatriz Guido, we perceive the advances made in language openness and in acknowledging women’s feelings, their desires, their erotic fantasies, and their voluptuous carnality.

For instance, in one of her books,⁴⁰ Beatriz Guido describes the initiation of two young men with prostitutes. It is a description almost devoid of emotions: The two adolescents do not even ask one another about how they performed. They leave the brothel in silence and walk through the streets talking economics. The scene reflects what was then acceptable in Argentine society.

By contrast, Martha Mercader, in another of her novels,⁴¹ talking through a heroine of the time of the war among provincial caudillos, recounts the sufferings of innumerable Argentine women of the past and reveals things that today’s Argentine women are still longing for. The main character questions, already in the 1830s, the role of reproductive machines that the Church has assigned to women. She is a woman that is consumed by passion for life and yearns for opportunities to share with her husband both her sensual desires and her intellectual potential, her abilities to perceive the social, political, and even military situation in which they live. By insisting on doing so, she destroys her relationship that cannot survive a destabilization of the macho role of her husband. Through Juana Manuela, her character, Martha is calling for further changes in a society that still is repressive and castrating.

It is worth mentioning a rare book discovered while browsing in an old bookstore of a provincial city. Its title is Textos Eróticos del Rio de la Plata (Erotic Texts from the River Plate) by Robert Lehmann Nitsche, a German anthropologist.⁴² It was published originally in Leipzig, Germany, in 1923, under the pen name of Victor Borde, and includes an exhaustive collection of popular songs, poems, proverbs, riddles, sentences, and remarks with a high sexual, sensual, and erotic content. In 1956, after Julian Caceres Freyre, an Argentine scholar, obtained a copy of the German original from a bibliophile friend, a group of entrepreneurial editors undertook the task of translating it into Spanish. The 1981 Spanish edition contains the full original text, plus an article anonymously published by Lehmann in the journal Kryptadia in 1901.⁴³

Lehmann arrived in Buenos Aires in 1897 to work at the Anthropological Museum of La Plata, the capital of the province of Buenos Aires, when he was only 25 years old, and resided there until 1930. Compelled by his curiosity and animated by a truly scientific passion for honest and forthright research, Lehmann did not hesitate to survey all sources, from ordinary rural folks to prostitutes and pimps. He questioned his students at the University of La Plata and gathered graffiti from public latrines, restrooms, and from prison walls. His work has rescued from oblivion popular customs and traditions that progress would consign to burial without a trace, because Argentine scholars considered them too vulgar and embarrassing to be scientifically studied.

Lehmann used the material he compiled to compare popular myths, prejudices, and stereotypes, some of which are still part of the collective Argentine subconscious. He dared to undertake this task at a point in the evolution of humankind when sexuality was still a bad word even in Europe, where he had to publish the result of his work either anonymously or under a false name.

After 1933, the Nazis tried to use Lehmann in their intelligence network about Argentina, given the deep knowledge the scientist had of the country, but he refused and was ostracized from the scientific community until his death in 1938.

To give the readers a flavor of this collector’s work, I provide translations of one each of its riddles, sayings, and limericks. Riddles are usually innocent, but the solution is sexually charged (see Table 2).

Popular Magazines

It is through popular magazines that we can see more clearly the changes taking place in Argentine society. The numerous, so-called magazines for women are found everywhere: homes, hairdressers, doctor’s offices, almost any place there is a waiting room. And in almost every issue, there are articles about sex and eroticism, some signed by respected local and foreign professionals. Articles cover a variety of subjects, such as contraception, the influence of a healthy sexual life on the physical and mental well-being of women, or how to improve marital relationships. Three other types of magazines deal with sexuality and eroticism:

Foreign magazines like Playboy and Penthouse can also be bought in some newsstands.

Television and the Video Industry

With the return of democracy in 1983, it became possible to openly discuss and present sexual issues on television. Well-known physicians, psychiatrists, psychologists, sexologists, and writers are invited by popular anchorpersons and questioned on all kind of sexual matters.

This situation contrasts with an experience I had in the early 1970s. As medical advisor to an Argentine enterprise, I was helping to design a strategy to introduce the first tampon manufactured in Argentina, a task of which I felt very proud, because it would allow Argentine professional and working-class women to feel more comfortable at their workplace. However, I soon discovered that the word “menstruation” could not be used in advertising the product on television or in newspapers and magazines.

Argentine television programs are now following on the line of pioneer shows in the United States and Europe that favor participation of the public and encourage them to share in a discussion of intimate problems. Argentines who know the languages can now receive these American programs, and also European programs, directly on their screens through satellite and cable.

The videotape industry is partially handicapped by the fact that Argentine television uses the so-called PAL system that cannot play either VHS or Betamax recorded cassettes. The market is composed mainly of foreign video pornography converted to the PAL system and subtitled in Spanish. It is a new market where a fast-growing demand is allowing businesses to make good profits. X-rated material is displayed in a separate room limited to adults who pay the store fees and deposit.

However, legislative revisions have