I had an instructive little exchange with a colleague this
week. The setup: A buck whitetail deer crashed through a window on our campus,
probably because it’s the mid-fall rutting season and bucks become crazy, testosterone-maddened
brutes, and he saw his own reflection in the window and tried to fight with it.
Once the poor animal found himself inside the building, he panicked and started
running around the halls looking for a way out, terrorizing students and staff
people at every turn. He ran across the lobby into the dining hall, tried to
jump out of a window there, then scrambled back into the lobby, hooves clattering
and flailing along the slick terrazzo floors, bashing into more windows, down a flight of stairs, bursting
into the game room, then the snack bar, breaking more windows, leaving blood
stains and broken glass everywhere, people yelling and shrieking all the while,
finally down a basement hall heading for the loading dock. Some poor guy
walking down the hall minding his own business heard the commotion behind him, turned
around to see a huge charging whitetail bearing down on him full bore, and he
took off running for his life down the hall with the deer gaining on him. They reached
the loading dock at the same moment and fell off of it together in a tangled
heap. A chunk of the buck’s antler broke off and stuck in the student’s back,
and he suffered a concussion. The deer bounded off for the woods, with some
cuts from the broken glass and a disfigured antler, but otherwise okay. The student was taken to the
hospital, had the wounds in his back treated (they weren’t serious), and was
released. He’s fine. When the student got back from the hospital, he was of
course an instant campus celebrity. Because the damage was limited to three
broken windows, some scuff marks and blood stains, and because the student wasn’t
badly hurt, that opened the door for a salvo of jokes. One of them: You were
trying to steal that buck’s doe, weren’t you? That’s asking for trouble!
Not thinking too deeply about the political ramifications, I
repeated the joke somewhere and got politely called on it. Bucks don’t “own”
does and fight for possession. They fight to attract the females’ attention. Who
is really in control of this situation? Uh-oh….
That’s debatable in the case of deer, but discretion is the better part of
valor, they say, and rather than engage in a gendered argument about cervine
sexual politics, I instantly dropped it. I can forget to think at particular
moments, sure, but I’m not stupid. Not an argument I was going to win in the environment
of a college campus with a feminist history professor. I didn’t want to win
that argument anyway, which is more to the point.
There are all sorts of human behaviors where males use
dominance and violence to control groups of women: harems, slavery, pimps and
hookers. This is generally considered immoral and criminal. They’re underground
behaviors these days for the most part, generally condemned and criminalized.
Depends on what corner of the world you’re in, though. But this is still an
undeniable aspect of violent human behavior. It’s possible to see some male human
behavior as determined by a perpetual rut. Deer, not being affected by a moral
code, just do what they do. They don’t have to ask why. This behavior in humans
is condemned and underground now because it is enforced by violence, and
because the women involved have their agency and humanity stripped from them.
They’re reduced to commodities, and maybe we’re progressing to the point,
society wide, even in all its backwaters and darkest corners, where this is not
an acceptable condition. And yes, it’s narrow and boneheaded anyway to think
that women are ever helpless, but it’s also true that violence makes victims
and robs them of their agency. The point of this, though, is to acknowledge
that in the fully and realistically regarded worlds of both deer and people,
the females have every bit as much control as the males do. So, males need to
attract attention, and in order to attract attention, males brag, pose, flatter,
and preen. They sharpen their antlers to gleaming ivory points, but it’s more
about show than actual fighting. Deer rattling their antlers in the woods,
linebackers in their strange brightly colored and patterned uniforms—like birds
of paradise—the show and pantomime are what it’s really all about. The women
are watching.
And sometimes you write a poem to the women you want to love
and admire you. You flatter them. You note that Ellen is on a hill-top, and
Maris is the vividest writer yet, and Valerie “has only & always her own /
in her daring & placid beauty.” And if you really want to up the ante, you
mention—just as a sort of casual aside, you know—that you wrote a letter to the
White House apologizing for missing out on the invitation to dinner with the
President of the United States, one of the greatest conferrals of stature
extended to an American. And why do you do this?
I should
have consulted him on my splendid getting
four ladies
to write to Henry: who is most fair,
ingenious
& adept?
I guess it’s so ridiculous that we’re supposed to laugh at
it, and yes, I can laugh at it. Oh, yeah, well, I got an invitation to the
White House, and damn, that’s quite an amazing accolade, but even better is the accolade I just got from
letters written by you four fair & adept ladies! Let's talk about that, Mr.
President! Oh good lord, but doesn’t it also strike me as maybe just a touch fawning,
fatuous, and perhaps even just a little bit creepy? Nah! It’s for the ladies! Watch him strut his stuff!
And so it goes. Toujours
l’amour…
