Making The Bed

Deep inside the reptilian center of my brain there lurks a  housewife with an eye for the Martha Stewart touch.  She's the paragon whose bathtubs invite long meditative soaks, and whose every tabletop reflects on its well-oiled surface a simple pottery vase filled with flowers.

The first thing this person does upon arising is to make her bed.  As the sun rises in the east and the birds twitter in the trees she straightens the pillows, gives the duvet a good shake and lays it down smoothly, and arranges a flock of throw pillows aesthetically on the bed.  Then she casts a look around the room and smiles, secure in the knowledge that her sanctuary, with its scented sheets, its orderly dresser tops, its bouquet of cheerful zinnias on the bedside table, will be waiting for her when she returns to it at the end of another happy and productive day.

Of course, this woman lives alone.

When I was growing up my mother was not obsessed with orderliness.  The living room and the music room where my father gave violin lessons were reasonably neat, but the rest of the place was another story.

As a teenager, I was dismayed by the clutter in my parents' bedroom:  piles of clothes on chairs, books and sewing projects scattered everywhere.  I thought that the mess revealed a disregard on my mother's part for the little touches that keep a marriage alive, and I promised myself that my conjugal bedroom, should I ever have one, would be a haven of order, serenity, and sensuous charm. 

I should mention that, messy bedroom notwithstanding, my parents had an enviably happy marriage.  And I'm sure that, if my mother wasn't bothered by the clutter, neither was my father, because in my experience men, straight men at least, don't care about neat bedrooms or beds.

I've heard stand-up comics deliver diatribes about their girlfriends' neurotic need to pile decorative pillows against the headboard.  I've heard happily married guys deride bed-making as an absurd and time-wasting ritual because, obviously, you're just going to mess it up when you get in it again.

Which is why my fantasy housewife lives alone.

Whereas I (fortunately, in most respects) don't.  And so I go through periods when, feeling like Sisyphus pushing his rock up the mountain, I make the bed in the morning, straightening up the duvet and placing the occasional pillows with care.  But after several days of having it callously disarranged by my (in most respects, adorable) spouse, I give up and leave the duvet in turmoil and the throw pillows unthrown.


And my inner Martha shudders with horror, and retreats even deeper into my reptilian brain.

After Steubenville: Defensive Driving For Girls

I really don't want to write about the Steubenville horror, but I won't be able to think of anything else until I do, so here goes.

Lest I be accused of blaming the victim, let me say that if I had been the judge, I would have handed down much stiffer penalties to the rapists.  And I hope that the grand jury metes out the punishment they deserve to the sneering bystanders, the coaches, and those who perpetuate the wrong-headed cult of sports and athletes.  As for the victim's drunkenness, that no more excuses the rape than did the mentally deficient state of the girl who was raped by another gang of football players in Glen Ridge, New Jersey a few years ago.

Since the Steubenville story broke, there have been numerous accounts in the media of similar occurrences in analogous situations:  fraternity parties, bars, post-game celebrations.  Which leads me to wonder, what are we telling young girls as we send them out into the world?  (What we are telling boys is another, and more appalling, story)

When girls are learning to drive, we warn them repeatedly about all the bad drivers out on the road:  drivers who text while driving, drivers who fall asleep at the wheel, drunk drivers....  It would be great if we could tell our daughters, "Drive without a care, my dear, for nothing bad will happen to you."  But that's not the way the world works, and so we teach them to drive sober and drive defensively.

On the other hand, many girls are launched into the roiling waters of adolescent social life without equivalent instruction.  It would be nice to be able to say, "Go have fun!  Do whatever you want and nobody will bother you."  But frat houses and bars and, apparently, people's basements are just as dangerous as the highway, and we need to teach girls to navigate them defensively, even if such instruction causes them to roll their eyes and mutter, "whatever!"

I don't think that it need take the joy out of going to parties for a young woman to be told that excessive alcohol consumption removes inhibitions and often makes people more aggressive.  I don't think that it places an unfair onus on her to be taught that the first step in protecting herself is to drink cautiously and sparingly so she can remove herself in time from dangerous situations. This is not blaming the victim, but helping her to keep from becoming one.

I mentioned in another post my grandmother's advice never to trust a man with a nose on his face.  It is overly misanthropic, so I've come up with another version:  never trust a man with a drink in his hand, a weave in his walk and a roomful of buddies who are also drinking and weaving.  If you are approached by such a person, do what you would do if you were driving and saw a car weaving all over the road--get out of the way.  And whether you're driving or partying, for your own sake and that of your parents who are waiting up for you at home, stay sober, stay sober, stay sober.

Not-So-Noble Savages

I recently read Napoleon Chagnon's Noble Savages, an account of his years of anthropological field work among the Yanomamo tribes of Venezuela and Brazil. 

Blithely summarizing here:  Chagnon takes a Darwinian, socio-biological approach to anthropology.  This means that he regards the behavior of the Yanomamo, one of the last remaining Stone Age cultures, as an expression of the competition for reproductive advantage that has fueled the evolution of all other species on the planet.  And he thinks that our ancestors behaved pretty much as the Yanomamo do.

It is the scariest book I have read in a long time. 

Since a woman cannot have more than one child every nine months, having more than one husband is not necessarily to her genetic advantage  On the other hand, it is in a man's interest to have as many wives, and thus as many children, as possible. Yanomamo men who have killed other men enjoy superior status.  They have more wives than men who have not killed, and sire an average of three more offspring.

Because some men have several wives, and because among the Yanomamo significantly more boys are born than girls, there is a chronic shortage of women.  This, you would think, would redound to the women's advantage--men would go to great lengths to seduce them, bringing them flowers or feathers or food.  But it doesn't work that way.  Men use their daughters and nieces as currency, establishing complex systems of exchange and alliance that will in turn give them maximum access to their exchange partners' female relatives.

 Adult men are in constant competition for women.  They spend their lives both trying to get more wives, and guarding the ones they have from other men.  This is a lot like what happens when deer go into rut in the fall, except that bucks calm down after a few weeks, and they do not abuse the females.

Yanomamo villages regularly raid each other, not for food or land or machetes but for women.  At any given time, approximately a quarter of the women residing in a village have been abducted.   These abductions are brutal:  the kidnappers grab the woman by one arm and her "defenders" grab the other, and a tug of war ensues that leaves the woman, regardless of who wins, in a sorry state.  Gang rapes are common.  If a party of hunters comes across a woman and her husband from another village in the forest, they restrain the husband and rape the woman.

What with the need to get more women so as to sire more children on the one hand, and to keep other men from impregnating his wife on the other, a Yanomamo man is under a lot of stress.  He takes this out on the woman, with the excuse that she deserves punishment for her supposed infidelities. Chagnon describes the disfiguring marks of their husband's abuse that Yanomamo women bear.  Unable to dispatch her with a gun, the husband beats his wife with his fists and burns her with logs from the fire. He hacks at her with an ax or a machete.  He shoots curare-tipped arrows at non-vital parts of her body...unless he misses and hits a vital organ, in which case she dies.  And nobody in the tribe thinks anything of this.

If, as Chagnon believes, our ancestors lived  pretty much like the Yanomamo, isn't it a miracle that human females, bound to their muscularly superior males, ever evolved to walk upright and use language, let alone get master's degrees in business administration?

Just after I finished Chagnon's book the Oscar Pistorius story broke.  And it struck me as ironic that, even inside a body which, transformed by twenty-first century technology, illustrates the apex of human evolution, a Stone Age male lurks and rages.