If we consider our two cases from Samoa and Tahiti, we should note that the presentation concerned “young girls.” The girls were even “very young,” as Vaujuas observed in Samoa, and indeed as Fesche’s physical description of the Tahitian girl presented on April 7 attests. Furthermore, a detailed analysis of all the published narratives and journals for each of these two visits leads us to the certain conclusion that the very first presentations concerned only the “young girls.” The “women” were not involved. Their role was to bring forward the young girls and surround them, and to make sexual gestures (in the same way that they would stand behind the young virgins in the ceremonial dances performed to invoke the procreative powers of the male gods). This they did repeatedly, the most likely reason being that they wanted to explain to the visitors what was expected of them.

However that may be, the explicit references to defloration as well as the constant references to the girls’ young age must henceforth completely invalidate the main hypothesis initially proposed by the French and then recycled in the form of a Western myth persisting until today. We now know that there is not a shred of truth in the proposition that the sexual encounters were organised by the Tahitians and the Samoans in the name of love and pleasure.

Two conclusions are to be drawn, one from the feminine perspective, one from the masculine. The hypothesis put forward by certain Frenchmen about these young girls being driven to satisfy their desire in the constant search for new lovers is totally untenable for the type of encounters we have seen described when we take into account the girls’ young age and their fear – not to mention their “suffering” during the “operation.” On the other hand, if we consider the situation from the chiefs’ perspective and imagine that their motive for presenting the French with young girls, even ones shrouded in tears, was to offer sexual pleasure to their visitors, we come up against two obstacles. Firstly, this would suggest that the Polynesians had immediately seen the French as ordinary men; but I have conclusively shown elsewhere, drawing on a wide range of examples, that this hypothesis must be abandoned, because it is incompatible with too many other aspects of Polynesian society and culture of that time and as described by the same early visitors.^[30] Secondly, one could ask why these men, if their idea had been to please their visitors with a “sexual gift,” would have chosen for this purpose young or very young girls, always or often virgins, distressed and physically tense, rather than young women who were just as attractive but more experienced. Young women, who did not have to endure the physical pain of defloration and who would most likely have been less frightened, would have been preferable sexual partners and surely a more likely choice for sexual hospitality.^[31]

In Polynesia the person of the young girl or young woman who is still a virgin, or at least who has not given birth, holds an essential place in the “human” collectivity, or ta(n)gata. Throughout Polynesia, societies have reserved a quite specific vocabulary for such a person, distinguishing her thus from the child, from the mother, from the woman as a sexual partner and from women in general.^[32] But we are still waiting to see persuasive ethnographic information that could show us that the distinctive place given to the person of the young girl or woman in the social whole flows from the high cultural value put on the sexual pleasure of adolescent girls. All we have, though, is Handy’s unreliable reconstruction of a hypothetical Marquesan culture and claiming that the overriding purpose of this period of a woman’s life was to collect lovers.

Mead followed close behind and thought she had confirmed this for Samoa when she heard her foremost masculine informant, a young teacher who was rather full of himself, smugly tell her about his sex life and his many feminine conquests. Mead made the grave error of attributing to the two sexes a vision that was an exclusively Samoan male view conveyed to her by this favourite informant.^[33] This male vision, which one finds elsewhere in Polynesia as well, was itself the expression of the normal fantasy life of young men that derived in turn from the myths glorifying the sexual appetite of the male gods and of the chiefs. It must be understood within the double standard^[34] of the male conquest of virgins versus the female preservation of virginity until marriage. An important consequence flowed from this: Mead did not pay any attention to the fact that the detailed account that this teacher gave her of his real or imaginary conquests also indicated that the young girl was often coerced and that she would subsequently have to suffer the reproaches and even blows of her family, if the affair became public.^[35]