Sex And The Scientist

Note to the delicately nurtured:  this post is slightly R-rated.

A long-ago TV documentary on the sexual politics of a troop of baboons showed the dominant male, huge and ill-tempered, lording it over his unfortunate subjects.  He chased the other males, swatted the babies who dared approach him, and grabbed food from the females.  This, the investigating scientist intoned, was natural selection at work, Gaia's way of ensuring that the next generation would be endowed with the best possible set of genes.  In order to be able to spread his DNA as widely as possible, the alpha male had to be big, aggressive, and mean.

Did I mention that the scientist in charge was a man?

Then some years later another ethologist went out and studied baboon sexual politics, and found that many of the lower-ranking males were peace-loving, friendly types who would share their food with females and help them when they got into scrapes.  And when the females went into heat, it was the nice guys they sneaked off into the bushes with, while the alpha male was busy snarling and swatting and stomping around.

Did you guess that this researcher was a woman?

When E.O. Wilson's theory of sociobiology emerged in the 1970s, it seemed to confirm all the stereotypes about male and female sexuality.  If humans are only the gene's strategy  for reproducing itself, it makes sense that men, who theoretically can father infinite numbers of children, would desire infinite numbers of sexual partners.  Women, on the other hand, can produce only one child a year at most, so they are programmed for monogamy.

Despite my admiration for E.O. Wilson, I always found his theory, when applied to human sexuality, unsatisfactory.  It failed to explain, for instance, women's sexual stamina--a woman can have sex with five men in five minutes, but the equivalent is not true for a man. And the theory provided a handy, science-based excuse--"my genes made me do it"--for male infidelity.

Now the old notion that men are programmed for polygamy and women for monogamy is being looked at again.  And this time, some of the scientists doing the looking are women  (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/books/review/what-do-women-want-by-daniel-bergner.html?pagewanted=1).

One of these researchers, primatologist and anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, thinks that women's anatomy might be specifically designed for sex with multiple partners within a single sexual episode --the slower pace at which a female reaches climax, for example, could be meant to ensure this, which in turn would maximize the chances of conception.  This would also, to my mind, guarantee her lots of help in the care and feeding of the resulting baby....

My point here is not to debunk the stereotypes of male and female sexuality, which most women have always suspected were false anyway.  My point is to celebrate the long-overdue entrance of women in these fields, so that a different view of the world is gradually emerging, one that reflects the perceptions and experiences of the other half of humanity.

As to where--in the male view, or the female view, or somewhere in between--the real, empirical, unequivocal truth lies...that, of course, we will never know.

A Call For Polygamy

At the moment, there are three and a half dozen eggs in my fridge. Tomorrow there will be almost four dozen. The girls are out on pasture and enjoying the long hours of daylight, as am I, and the grass and bug supplements to their diet. That means four eggs, almost every day (o.k., they're Buff Orpingtons, a "heritage breed," not laying machines).

I give a dozen eggs to the local food bank every week. Serendipitously, the food bank director passes my house every Tuesday on the way to the 30-minutes-away-food bank and picks up my offerings. If we're invited somewhere, and the hosts don't already have chickens, I take a dozen eggs as hostess gift. And my husband and I eat, oh, several eggs a week.

The full cartons piling up in the fridge tell me that it's that time of year: time to freeze eggs. It is possible, and quite easy, to freeze eggs. I crack four at a time into a bowl, lightly scramble them with a fork, and pour them into a small freezer bag. After defrosting, they're perfect for omelettes, baking, scrambled eggs, and so on, although they will obviously not whip up for meringues or souffles. So I should be freezing eggs right now, against the depths of winter when the hens will be molting/getting older/suffering from SAD.

The thing is, I'm coming up against my annual "I'm a farmer, not a farm wife" complaint. This complaint is almost forty-years-old, and is starting to get to me. I see to the hens, feed and water them, talk to them, clean their quarters, gather the eggs. Should I also have to deal with the harvest? The same obtains with the vegetable garden. I compost the soil, till it, plant the seeds, water the seedlings, gather the bounty. And as a reward, I get to wash, blanch, drain, package and freeze a ton of green stuff summer after summer.

My spouse, bless him, wouldn't care if all his food came canned and frozen by the house brand of the local supermarket. He would not blame me for a minute if I were to let go of it all tomorrow--garden, fruit trees, hens. With good enough grace, he does things like build portable chicken houses and drive the tractor and pull the cart into which I dump the used bedding. I cannot expect him to enter into the minutia of day-to-day food growing and preserving.

So here is my case for polygamy. I need a woman--or a man would do just as well, in which case it would be polyandry; this is not about sex, but food--to come over and just deal with all the stuff I grow. Wash it, freeze it, cook it, whatever. Just make it go away.

In exchange for this she/he will get...I'm not sure what. Half my kingdom? A seat at our table? The privilege of playing with my dogs? Any applicants, contact me, and we'll work something out.