Male-Female Relationships in Cross-Cultural Perspective: A Study of Sex and Intimacy

The relationship between the sexual and nonsexual aspects of male- female interaction across cultures is explored. Results indicate that societies are neither entirely consistent nor entirely arbitrary in their patterning of heterosexual relationships. Three clusters or dimensions of opposite-sex interaction were isolated so that variables within a cluster were highly correlated and variables in different clusters were largely unrelated. This research suggests that sexual relationships, nonsexual intimacy, and male sexual orientation are not highly related to each other.