Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Although they’re from a couple of months ago these are probably the best paragraphs I read that week. They’re from Megan Carpentier of Jezebel on how she stopped calling herself a feminist and how she started again. I think it gets to the heart of why so, so many people (mostly but not always women) say “I’m not a feminist but…”

The professor was, apparently, a pro-life and pro-choice feminist, who believed that abortion was a moral wrong outweighed only by the moral wrong of sexism. And, once sexism had been conquered, the world would be perfect and abortion would no longer be necessary.

I thought she was cracked, but I was 19 and didn’t realize that “feminism” meant many different things to many different people, or that there was more than one way to be a feminist. Having been raised in a religious environment in which we were taught that there was one gospel, one Church and one way of looking at a set of issues, it didn’t occur to me that a political and social movement would or could be more multifaceted. I figured if she was a feminist, and feminists believed that about abortion, then I was obviously not a feminist.

But the March for Women’s Lives made me realize, very concretely, that there was more to it than what I’d been told: more people, more ideas, more ways of looking at the issues, more ideas of what was or was not a feminist issue. And I came back to the idea of calling myself a feminist, and what that meant, and the kinds of ideas, attitudes, disagreements and fights that the movement could both be and embrace.

Read the quote in context here.

I think this is a great example of the “I Can’t Be A Feminist Because Feminists Believe X” trope precisely because it is so rare to find dyed-in-the-wool feminists who also believe abortion should (at least eventually) be illegal. It sure beats the more common misconceptions that one somehow can’t be a feminist if, for instance, one wears lipstick or shaves one’s armpits or otherwise misses some item on an imagined mile-long checklist of requirements.

Since I still hear someone say they’re not a feminist because of this or that at least a couple of times a year I’d like to propose a good checklist item of my own: If you’ve ever felt compelled to say “I’m not a feminist but,” chances are very, very good that you actually are.

Katy of Jezebel passes along some news from UPI (and elsewhere) that now she’s in charge of the State Department Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is following up on her interest in human trafficking that goes back to her alliance with the late Senator Paul Wellstone in the 1990s.

There’s a first time for everything: the US State Department’s annual report on human trafficking has included a rating for the United States. “We believe it is important to keep the spotlight on ourselves,” explained Hillary Clinton.

She said it here.

Incidentally, what’s significant about trafficking isn’t how open-eyed victims are going into their situation. Nor is it how bad things were, or even how much worse they were before they left their homes. It’s whether and how easily they can get out of their situation. And from slaves and convicts transported to America in the 18th Century to the “owe my soul to the company store” miners and loggers of the 19th Century to the sharecroppers and “adopted” orphans of the 20th to sex workers, agricultural workers, domestic servants, and industrial laborers today the U.S. has had an ongoing history of pretending trafficking is somebody else’s problem.

Good for Sec. Clinton.

Oh yeah, and fuck all the assholes who claim it only counts if you’re trafficked for (commercial) sex. It certainly does count, of course, it’s just not the whole story. And never has been.

So back in the days of my stay-at-home dad career, when online forums like Compuserve and Usenet were current and blogs were still a gleam in a few pioneer’s eyes I used to hang out on a couple of parenting and home-life forums. Topics ranged all over the map, obviously, but some of them were pretty recipe intensive.

I’ll never forget* a short thread on, I think, meatloaf or meatball sauces for spaghetti where one poster said her sister in law was “a real gourmet” because she used French onion soup mix instead of regular onion soup mix in her recipes. She said it in a way that implied she was slightly admiring, slightly intimidated, and maybe slightly unsure the extra effort would be worth it.

Anyway, the other day in conversation one fairly staid (as far as I know) friend mentioned to another that a particular camisole could be worn under a jacket as a blouse. (Or maybe a blouse could be worn like a camisole? Either way it seemed pretty darn innocuous.) The other friend’s eyes grew wide and she laughed and said, with what sure seemed like sincerity to me, “you really are a little kinky aren’t you?”

So what can you say to that anyway? Is French onion soup mix gourmet in a way that regular onion soup mix isn’t? More to the point, is French onion soup mix on the same continuum with Lobster Thermidor a Crevette with a mornay sauce served in a Provencale manner with shallots and aubergines garnished with truffle pate, brandy and with a fried egg on top (with or without spam) in some way that plain onion soup mix isn’t?

Well, similar problems present themselves with “kink” then don’t they? It’s not that there’s no such thing, any more than there’s no such thing as “gourmet.” It’s that if French onion soup mix can be gourmet and wearing a camisole as a top can be kinky then there’s virtually no such thing that can’t be “gourmet” or “kink!”

And in the case of “kink,” the intense self-restraint that must be imposed in order to avoid any hint of “kinkiness” at all is restrictive enough to constitute a kink in its own right!

* Ok, I guess if I can’t remember if it was meatloaf or pasta sauce I eventually will forget, but I won’t forget the “real gourmet” remark. —fl

Paleoanthropologist John Hawks has more news that’s bound to be a disappointment to those who found their ideologies on the presumption that males in general, and human men in particular, are psycho-bio-accountants when it comes to providing paternal care only to offspring they know beyond all doubt is “theirs.”

The value of long-term field studies: Christophe Boesch and colleagues report on adoption in the Taï Forest chimpanzee study population — where more than 30 years of observations have produced 18 well-defined cases of adoption of orphaned individuals. They considered “adoption” to be the provision of maternal care (e.g., carrying, feeding, food sharing, defense) for more than two months. It’s possibly unfortunate terminology, as it leads to headlines like mine. Yet it is really interesting behavior.

It would be nice to say that these cases represent 18 happy endings, but these adoptions did not increase the probability of survival compared to orphaned individuals who did not receive ongoing care. There were a couple of cases where females breastfed orphaned infants “for many years,” but there seem to be several sad stories too.

Sometimes, the care for the orphaned juveniles was given by males:

Remarkably, all adult males of the East Group that adopted young orphans went a step further by investing in unweaned small infants and carrying them dorsally during travel for many months (see Figures 3 and 4 of Porthos with Gia) (Table 3). Since, Taï chimpanzees walk about 8 km per day on average, this represents a notable investment. Porthos’ adoption of Gia lasted for 17 months, until his death due to Anthrax, and he was seen to carry her even in extremely risky situations, such as during encounters with neighboring communities [26]. Furthermore, some males were seen to share their night nest with their adopted infant (Table 3). Fredy, the 3rd ranking male of the East Group, adopted Victor, the son of Vanessa, who died from Anthrax in late December 2008, and shared his nest with him every night, carried him on his back for all long travels, and shared the Coula nuts he opened from December 2008 to July 2009. For example, on February 17th, Fredy cracked 196 Coula nuts for 2h05mn and shared pieces of 79% of them. This gives a measure of the altruistic investment made in an unrelated infant.

That sounds pretty amazing. I think it’s very relevant to human evolution, as orphaning must have been very common with the high mortality rates of the past.

He said it here.

Hawks doesn’t mention it but according to the original author’s abstract, half the orphans were adopted by male chimps.

The proposed driver for this and other prosocial behavior, at least among chimpanzees, would be responses to heavy predation by leopards. That could be relevant for evolution of social behavior in humans as well since leopards have been big predators of primates for many millions of years.

Both Hawks and the original authors are very careful to point out that you really can’t draw simple, straight-line correlations between different species, but to the extent (cough*sociobiology*cough*evolutionary-psychology*cough) you do it’s something else you’re probably going to take into account while spinning yarns about, oh, all sorts of just-so stories. Like about maternal investments in offspring, paternal investments in offspring, the tendencies for animals with complex cognitive behavior being highly influenced by specific genes.

Especially if you’re going to go throwing those genes around by way of justifying explaining antisocial and/or animal-like behavior in humans in general, and men, women, and children in particular.