n 1983 the famed anthropologist Margaret Mead came under attack by those skeptical of her theories of Cultural Anthropology. She had caused a great controversy in the scientific and academic communities with her endorsement of the new science of parapsychology. By 1983 her ideas on anthropology were under critical fire and her reputation as one of the world's greatest anthropologists began to decline. The primary cause of the decline of Mead's reputation was Margaret Mead and Somoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth, by Derek Freeman of the Australian National University. Freeman claimed that Mead's famous Coming of Age in Somoa gave a distorted picture of the behavioral standards governing sexuality in Somoan society in order to support the idea that cultural and not biological factors are the most important determents of human behavior. Margaret Mead said that the repression, fear and guilt she considered to be endemic in industrial society were not reflected in Somoan attitudes or behavior, and she argued that attitudes toward sexuality and other profound human emotions must therefore be shaped by culture and circumstance, not by biology or genetic endowment. Her critic, Freeman, insisted that her basic conclusions, and the findings on which she based them, were wrong.

By the 1990s Freeman's analysis had gone from the front page of the New York Times into magazine articles. In 1998 the controversy comes to the World Wide Web.