.png)
It would be misleading for me to imply that I have any special insights into the mind of the fairer sex. Every once in a while I do stumble across an acorn that might be worth sharing. And when a person like the super-famous Glen Filthie, blogger extraordinaire expresses bafflement about some nuance about the behavior of grown wimmin-folk...and I think I can help...well I am on it like flies on tater-salad.
The most esteemed Senor Filthie was marveling at mature wimmin's ability to be enraptured by the most inane drivel and hokem. According to him, even intelligent wimmins are sometimes mesmerized by it.
It is all about evolutionary biology
Men are expendable. That is the price of launching 200,000,000 missiles with every ki-yi-yippi-yi-yea. The tribe does not need very many of us.
Biologically, men are the ones tasked with stalking mastadons with sharp rocks lashed to crooked stick with half-rotted caribou guts. We are the ones who crawl through cacti and over ant-hills to sneak up on antelope at watering holes. Men are the ones who must sneak into the nearest village to steal an ember when a sudden downpour quenches all of our tribe's fires.
Women, on the other hand, are in the inner-ring. They are slightly expendable.
Criminal Minds
Belladonna adores the TV show Criminal Minds. I never paid much attention to it. I might listen to it for 30 seconds when I was near her and it always seemed like fiction written by a precocious 8th grader. You know, all narrative and 'splaining.
Every aspiring author has it drilled into them to SHOW the reader...not TELL them. Yet these shows and news programs TELL, TELL and TELL some more.
There might be four or five psychologists sitting around a table, cantilevering vaulting spans of speculation from tiny shreds of observation. "Dr. Reid, it is obvious that based on the wisp of fiber found wedged beneath the elm tree near the 13th victim that the perp was right-handed, has a Hula Bobble-head fetish and drinks Absinthe from a gold-rimmed goblet while driving a red Camaro at 105 mph through residential neighborhoods."
The more ridiculous and far-fetched the better it is received by the audience.
The point is that because wimmins are slightly expendable, there is enormous competition to be in the inner-most ring that is NOT expendable. It is not the content of those TV shows, it is the tone and the implied 'confidentiality'. As the audience, you get the vicarious thrill of being one of the very inner-most and cherished sanctum, the NOT expendable. You are the fly-on-the-wall, the sixth, world-class psychologist.
As men, we are socialized (and perhaps genetically predisposed) to risk our lives. The appeal of being in the inner-most sanctums is opaque to many/most of us.
As wimmins who are slightly expendable, the appeal of KNOWING that they will be the very first one in the lifeboat or the heifer defended to the last adult musk-ox is hard-coded in them.
Another cold, hard fact is that the most valuable musk-ox is the springing heifer, the one closest to having a calf and with the greatest potential for future calves. The musk-oxen who is past her calf-bearing years is biologically expendable (perhaps even more-so than the males). The TV shows that baffle Senor Filthie are lobbing soft pitches right down the center of the strike zone for those old-biddies. It scratches an itch they cannot get scratched in "real life'.
If you believe in Jung's archetypes, then the person who watches The View is trying to bump her way into the role of the village witch; the one who makes love potions, poison for dart tips (or unfaithful husbands), poultices...and has dirt on everybody.
Human psychology is an amazing subject. Glad my daughter has swapped that for being a pony veterinarian... before starting college!
ReplyDeleteWOW. Insightful. Gin up another short story, por favor. You have a masterful way with wordsmything. I understood, finally, what I've seen my whole life. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was a youngster, there was a show called What In The World put on by the University of Pennsylvania. It usually had three eminent archaeologists sitting around a round table examining artifacts from Penn's massive museum. They would sound just like your dialogue.
ReplyDelete"Well this is an Arcadian arrow straightener from 130 BC made by a left handed slave from somewhere in lower Rhine Valley.
"Why yes and you can tell he suffered from rickets as a child by the counterclockwise striations on the underside."
Sometimes they would be blindfolded and do the same examination of objects. Most of the time they were correct.
It still is hard for me to know if they were just fooling around or not.
https://www.penn.museum/collections/videos/playlist/list.php?id=7
It's not that not many males are needed. Au contraire. It's just that many are needed BECAUSE many are also very expendable. Someone has to feed and protect that "inner circle" of womenfolk. And those someones must be willing to sacrifice themselves in order to do so. The tribe just needs a very few to survive, but it very much needs a bunch of them to be there at the start.
ReplyDeleteNot about to comment, anything I say will be wrong... LOL
ReplyDeleteThere are very few women left in Western Civilization.
ReplyDeleteFor you yunguns out there, if you find one do all you can to keep her.
All too plausible, Joe. We used to have pitched battles on the validity of 'evo-psych' theories at Uncle Bob's Treehouse years ago. Like you, the theory has its attractions.
ReplyDeleteI get egged and accused by the manly men of the man-O-sphere when I say 'not all women are like that'. It triggers the walking wounded that have gone through the emotional wringer with crazy women... but I am adamant. "My wife is not like that." The vast majority of the women at our church "are not like that". These behavioural anomalies may well have their roots hardwired in DNA... but they can be controlled and compensated for, I have seen it. Men are expected to rise above their base nature - it used to be a requirement. Yet today, our cellars are infested with soys, and our sons are falling over themselves to get sex changes or join the rainbow cult. I personally believe the heart of our gender problems is in conditioning. Our women fight tooth and nail for the "right" to murder their own babies. Clearly, evo-psych theory has its limits. Even elderly musk ox will move to protect the herd's young.
Of course - I reserve the right to be wrong about all that too...