Spiro explores two Burmese cultural ideas, the "Ideology of the Dangerous Female" and the "Ideology of the Superior Male," which dominate male-female relationships in that culture. He attempts to answer a question regarding the reasons why an individual would internalize a cultural system that is empirically groundless and dangerous to its adherents. His answer is that both beliefs serve to defend Burmese males against unconscious castration fantasies, and in turn enable them to be aroused by the vagina with less guilt and anxiety. This proposition can be empirically tested without a cultural deterministic assumption. Also, this view of "psychological preadaptation" for the internalization of these beliefs decreases the causal