Your posts are like a mine field that can explode at any moment.
:D LoL. Why would you think that?
I think that one has to consider the great variety of cultural sexual norms and behaviors across space and time.
Let me consider. I do not believe that pre-modern man thought primarily in theory about his sexuality and would boldly claim that pre-modern people had certain practices in common with regard to the manhood and womanhood of their adolescents. These in turn, I would agree, differed significantly from one another, which I attribute to factors such as climatic and geological conditions, i.e. the localities to which people were confined.
Mountain peoples had different rituals to coastal peoples, nomads different to sedentary peoples, which I consider to be the greatest distinction in the lives of pre-modern people, since that was also their economies. Accordingly, their cultures formed around their living conditions. Some may have been more permissive than others, and again I see the climate as a major factor in this, not exclusively of course. In the tropics, nudity is normal, but not in cold climates, for example. Certain practices had to do with hygiene and/or which plants and animals people mainly came into contact with (though they may have attributed it to their Gods, as well). Where people lived in border areas with other foreigners, they influenced each other and so on.
I think that you allude to something that is very interesting. What exactly do we know about how different cultures now and in the past arranged their sexual systems?
In our current western cultures, monogamy is the rule. A child growing up in such an environment will be exposed to certain acceptable behaviors in regard to interaction between the sexes. In other cultures where polygamy is the rule, a man takes on multiple wives. Children raised in such a home will be exposed to behaviors not seen in a monogamous culture. Melvyn Goldstein describes still another practice that while less common it still persists: polyandry.
In the marriage system developed by some Tibetan people, two or more brothers take on a single wife. It used to be the parents who arranged the marriage but over time, it changed to this system of fraternal polyandry. All the brothers participate as providers and sexual partners to the wife. Children under such a system of polyandry experience a different reality than those in monogamous systems. For instance, the very young brothers do not participate in the marriage until they reach their mid-teens. The older brother is usually the one who has direct access to sexual congress with the wife, but all brothers have the opportunity to sleep with her. Such an arrangement creates a unique environment in which these children mature and develop.
This example of Tibetan polyandry is one of many marriage systems that anthropologists have looked at across various cultures in time and place. So, this is what I mean about taking into account the social norms and customs across the globe and history. To be able to create a theory of how sexual development is occurring now in modern times, we need to be able to put it in the context of what we actually know based on grounded research.
For me, broadly speaking, I think that technology is now playing a key role in our sexual development. How exactly? It's difficult to say, but it is a topic that arouses much curiosity in me. ;)
Resource:
Melvyn Goldstein. 1987. When Brothers Share a Wife