Saturday, October 31, 2015

#304




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

4 comments:

  1. an interesting musing--a muse being the creative spirit that does not always produce 'sense'--but something else a little more intangible than 'sense.' You offered the puzzle pieces, and suggested, by implication unspoken, for a reader to pick up their colors and edges and fit them--if at all possible--into a picture, however "modern" or fair, or helpful. I found it helpful. I found the "outsideness" of referring to "them" of some value--a reminder to myself that I am both a fraction female of more or less quantity, that I have been born of woman, and--the thought that always intrudes--that an almost ultimate "mother/woman" was an amoeba-like crittur some billion or so years ago--each mother teaching her child something and something and something down through eons. Perhaps most of all teaching men to behave as partners, nor owners--as co-creators, not controllers, and as fundamentally equal as children of a Creator...and always failing (as in most deep human enterprises). thus endeth my musings,Karl.

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    1. Nice musing! I know what you mean about "them" and "us"--it's woven in the language, that as soon as we acknowledge a difference among groups of people, a group the speaker doesn't belong to arises almost by default as othered. I don't know how to talk about women without doing that. I usually just try to avoid the whole discussion, but that wasn't an option here. I just try to remember, in action and in the action of writing, that we're all a great mélange anyway.

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  2. I'm inclined to see this DS as creepy. And I don't think it's the ladies B is calling adept. It's himself. He charmed the ladies into writing to him, and fawn on him in print.

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  3. Oh, and it's amazing no one was killed by that deer.

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