Commentary to "The Socialization of Homosexuality and Heterosexuality in a Non-Western Society ''~

The main point of our paper was to make the argument that reinforcement via conditioning mechanisms does not adequately account for erotic behavior, aberrant or not, with the Sambia or any other society. Our data, without getting into all of them again, show that other factors, in the case of Sambia, play a part. Baldwin and Baldwin agree with that. In general, though, they write as if we would disagree with their main contentions; in fact there is plenty on which we agree. We want to set up a dialogue, and as we made clear at several points, we pushed the argument along, using learning theory as a "straw man" to our counterpoints drawn from a psychodynamic perspective. We know that reinforcements for heterosexual behavior are present in Sambia development, despite the powerful positive reinforcements for homosexual behavior. In fact, the authors will find in Herdt's latest work (1987), that mechanisms of conditioning and learning theory are brought to bear to explain these developmental outcomes. The authors, necessarily not familiar with the Sambia, cannot know the conditions of Sambia erotic development. Two central problems need to be addressed. First, the authors have not correctly understood the category distinctions and sets of the Sambia and similar Melanesian peoples. Though they begin by stating that "it is essential to avoid imputing Western patterns" (p. 14) to the Sambia, their paper does just this. They have dichotomized Sambian erotic behavior into the heterosexual/homosexual categories of Anglo-