August 21, 2007

• I’ll get over it.

  I suppose I’ll get over it.  I’ll choose, at some point, to put it out of my mind, at least temporarily, and move on.  I wouldn’t want to live in the constant keen realization of the illogic and injustice of it all for very long, so before very long I will focus on the more pleasant aspects of reality and let the depressing bullshit go.  That’s how it usually happens:  to begin with, something hits me and sets off a chain of associations.

  Today it started when I woke from a dream about a man who was cheating on both his wife and his mistress.  The mistress found out and, after a sequence of scenes that were visually reminiscent of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, and dramatically similar to any number of soaps, she had the guy dangling by a rope from a cliff, screaming for her to pull him up.  She got into her car, with the rope tied to its rear bumper, and it appeared that she was going to pull the guy up, when she lit the fuses on the explosives strapped to her thighs, and blew her legs off.  I guess that showed him, eh?

  The first thought to cross my conscious mind when I woke from that was, “WTF?!”  Then my mind wandered through a series of associations ranging from myth (the book I’m reading now continually refers to Medea, who murdered her own children to get revenge on their father for straying from the marriage bed) through fairy tales, cultural mores, religion, and soap opera, and into neuroelectrochemistry.  It is becoming a familiar pathway for me.  I start out marveling and puzzling over human stupidity and end up with some logical perspective on it but no assurance that we are going to see things improve for at least several generations yet, if at all.

  Viewed from an anthropological, zoological or biological perspective, we know that the most favorable reproductive strategy for a female is to choose the best available male for a mate, one who not only has healthy genetic material to pass along, but who can protect and provide for his mate and their offspring.  In current cultural terms, this usually translates into good looks and money.  This strategy has the best potential for assuring that a woman’s children will survive long enough to reproduce and her DNA will endure through a maximum number of generations.

  The optimal reproductive strategy for a male to ensure the propagation and perpetuation of his DNA is to inseminate the maximum number of healthy females, “healthy,” again, being defined as “good looking.”  We are hardwired to find beauty in physical symmetry, strength, grace, and the various outward signs of robust health, such as shiny hair and clear skin.  Neurochemists have discovered that we also respond to olfactory signals, which would tend to explain why so many people who don’t fit all the common criteria for physical beauty are nevertheless very sexy.  Robert A. Heinlein went on at length, in several of his books, about the sexy body odor of redheads.  We’re an eye-brained species, so that many people consciously focus on the visual aspects while being unconsciously led around by their noses.

  At the dawn of human history, when people started carving records in stone that have endured into the present, the institution of marriage existed in a form that had by then certainly been developing over many generations, for millennia.  Rich, powerful, strong men had many wives, and generally had their pick of the choicest specimens.  These guys were civilized, of course, and some of those wives were chosen for strategic political purposes, to form alliances between powerful families, for example

  After politics and priesthoods got involved, and limitations were placed on the numbers of wives a man could have, the bigger fish and fatter cats supplemented those numbers with a theoretically unlimited number of concubines.  A king, chieftain or warlord would end up with a mixed brood of offspring, including beautiful bastards from gorgeous concubines and ill-formed or funny looking heirs from the politically expedient wives.  If you have ever wondered how some of the royal families of Europe, or the richest ones in the U.S., got to be so funny looking, wonder no more.  Some of it is inbreeding, of course, and some of it is politicoeconomic expediency, which has always been able to find mates for otherwise unattractive boys and girls.

  By the time of the European Middle Ages, the situation had grown so absurd that nobles were specifically expected to marry not for love but for political advantage, and a new kind of love, “courtly love,” came into vogue.  Highborn ladies were recognized as the property, first, of their fathers and, then, of the husbands to whom their fathers sold or traded them.  Women were not expected to love their husbands.  That much was realistic and practical.  The less practical aspect of courtly love was that lovers were expected to love each other from afar, to respect the one-sided bonds of matrimony that kept a woman in a chastity belt and exerted no similar restraint upon her husband.  Of course, biology will find its way; witness Lancelot and Guinevere.

  Just think of all the suffering and destruction that has occurred because of the unreasonable expectations set up in the rules and strictures of marriage as we know it.  Medea’s solution is a fine example.  The old double standard makes a sort of one-sided sense, because it allows for a man to spread his seed far and wide the way he is biologically set up to do.  Such mores and customs are problematic only because the myth of marriage, and the vows that men and women exchange, lead a woman to expect a man to save it all for her. 

  Likewise, the institution as it exists tends to discourage a woman from moving on to the next guy when one comes along who is obviously a better catch than the one she’s currently stuck with.  Husbands have gotten away with double murders in such cases, and continue to do so when they keep their wits about them sufficiently to avoid leaving evidence of premeditation.  That is civilized behavior, in that it is endemic in urban culture.  It is not very highly evolved behavior, but it is civilized, and it is condoned by religious and political authorities.

  Don’t get the idea here that I’m condoning “marital infidelity,” “sexual promiscuity,” or any similar invidious pejorative dyslogisms.  Such phrases simply codify judgmentalism and give ammunition to moralistic morons.  I also don’t want to give the impression that I believe men and women are incapable of mating for life.  It happens, and there are definite neuroelectrochemical analogs for companionable bonding, just as there are for sexual attraction and mating, but such bonding is much more optional, while the buzz and rush of infatuation and lust can take us unawares and all unwilling.

  I am in favor of knowledge and understanding, and I understand that it is not an easy task to shove the facts down the throats of a populace reared on soap opera and indoctrinated with fairy tales and religious myths.  I view these culturally entrenched false and limiting beliefs as a disease state.  There is a minority of people who recognize the pathology in the mythology and attempt to live their lives free of it.  However, laws, customs and mores tend to interfere with their freedom.  Those who have chosen to live in chains would prefer to see everyone chained, so the free ones have to homeschool their kids and keep them away from mass media, which is difficult at best and practically impossible.   The myth is so seductive that I have friends who get defensive about it when I bring up the role of brain chemistry in romantic love.  They admit that the biological facts are “interesting,” but they prefer to believe in fairy tales.

  

  It is probably too late to help such incurable romantics.  If someone has been practicing serial monogamy into middle age and still keeps looking for Prince Charming, the only cure for her is menopause.  She has most likely already infected her daughters, but we can try to inoculate the grandkids with a dose of neuroelectrochemical data and a few courses of history, psychology and sociology.  As long as I look at the situation that way, and think of the potential for a more rational culture, I can live with today’s bullshit.  And as long as I can occasionally rant about it, I may be able to avoid going postal and walloping my Cinderella friends with their own squirrel fur slippers.

   

  • 5:50 pm
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