5 - Sex and uncertainty
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2009
Summary
I can't even imagine what you mean when you ask about being a teenager. In this neighborhood boys grow up to be men before they are five. There is no such thing as being a teenager. You're a child, then a man, and then you die.
Stephen, 19-year-old father in a high-risk neighborhood in a large US city (Burton 1997:211)I mean we don't have no money so we make up for it with women. I mean if you going to come into a hundred thousand dollars, you going to make it. Your friends be envying you. Now, if you don't got nothing, but you going to have five women, you going to be self-satisfied. It's just a thing we do. But if you have money, you don't have to be defined through women.
Eddie, resident of a high-risk neighborhood in a large US city (Bourgois 1995:291)I love kids. I believe kids are the most wonderful things alive; that's what made me live until now. Because … you know how you love a mother? You can never love a mother more until you have a baby. I loved my mother more when I had my first daughter; that's when I loved my mother more. Because when a baby is born … when you see a baby … and you see it so small, you say, that baby can't come and smack you, and say, “Mommy, don't do this; don't do that.” […]
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- Information
- Death, Hope and SexSteps to an Evolutionary Ecology of Mind and Morality, pp. 149 - 202Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999