childbirth etc./AND P CONTENT!

[Henry Kingman]

Vaska Tumir writes:

A mean wall of abstruse words, fer sure. [zounds!]

Which I took to mean: an individual is informed by compensatory analogs
such as nature/culture and masculine/feminism, being the product of both
sorts of influence and rarely if ever all one side or all the other. So
like, you have all those foax on AOL getting in touch with their foaxo
or foaxa sides, as the case may be...? [did I get that right?]

Or you have young 'prentice McClean, expected to play the swaggering
masculino for the men who smoak his dangerousness and the passive neuter
for the milk maids, who may expect him to be above desire given his
obvious powers, or something.

Okay, so "individuals," (who as such, are not actually "divisible" at
all...?) are taken as complex amalgams of compensatory qualities, like
nature/culture, m/f/n. Huh? Is it two or is it three? But wait, there
were *four* symmetric possibilities, no? In Crying? With the paranoia
sounding last? And who was that philosopher thought thinking in threes
was foolish, as four was grander granularity? (Hume, maybe?)

So if parsing people is pretty pathetic, can you parse bodies medical
along nature/nurture lines? The midwives personifying nature, the
babydocs (I Haiti when those mixed allusions get in there...?) culture?
Well, Vaska says the two groups are known to consort and even display
"collegiality," a sort of noun-ification of "collegial," which means
"similar in nature to a college" (so like, beer bongs in the delivery
room?) Is this fallacy, like, pathetic or what? Well, not really (since
it sure ain't poetry) and don't bring it up in evolutionary bio 101, if
you know what I mean...?

Men have it rougher than women, just look at the actuarial tables and
see who wears out faster. Women have it rougher than men, just look
around you.
If you stick your finger into a boy-rat's cage, it sniffs and licks your
finger.
If you stick your finger into a girl-rat's cage, you'll get most of it
back...

Is it a zeitgeist that we argue not as Tiresius once did of which sex
had the greater capacity for pleasure, but rather the greatest share of
suffering? And we, in the age of ease...

"Grow titts and learn to talk for an hour without taking a breath" and
you'll make Tiresius proud.
"There is in fact more earth than sea," he said, but he was wrong about
that wasn't he?

"With their longer pelvic muscles and superior pelvic blood supply, the
female capacity for orgasm is indeed profound (Masters and Johnson? Why
can I never *remember* these things! I do recall that it was an
observation prompted by clinical observation of a woman who, after
riding her bicycle to the location, achieved over 200 orgasms within
several hours).

-Henry

----
Men, lacking the ability to create babies, are compelled to create all
manner of substitute horrid mechanical monstrosities, such as
automobiles and lovelorn ducks. ---H.K.
 
 

Okay, here's what Vaska axually wroat:

The whole nature/culture polarization here strikes me as misleading
[Pynchon

> uses it in _GR_ but with such a dose of thoughtful and deeply
> thought-out
> ambivalence that it undercuts any attempt to plunk oneself down on one
> side
> rather than another].  Here's why, in point form [I'm not reading
> Pynchon's
> mind but merely continuing with my own observations]:
>
> Culture, to paraphrase Aristotle a little, is natural to our species. 
> Even
> Marx, or especially the old Karl, had quite intelligent things to say
> about
> our "species nature," one of whose inherent characteristics is the
> production of culture[s].  Much clearer on that than Hegel, for
> example, for
> whom obfuscation was a stock in trade.
>
> The nature-culture split also runs along along the *very same*
> ideological
> lines as the feminity-masculinity split; both of which are imaginary
> but
> also performative constructions of considerable proportions: i.e. they
> have
> real consequences in the lives of flesh-and-blood women and men -- and
> children.
>
> To reify evolutionary processes into a semi-personified nature as
> Charles
> has done in one of his recent posts is an absurdity Darwin might have
> taught
> us all to at last try to avoid, whenever possible, i.e. whenever we
> are
> sensible enough to actually try to think rather than serve as
> mouthpieces of
> received opinion -- and to avoid for the sake of some [more]
> production of
> real knowledge.
>
> There's another and strictly specific culture-bound dimension to this
> discussion that no one's mentioned so far: midwifery has never had the
> same
> fate in Europe as the one it underwent on the North American
> continent.  A
> first-hand observation: my own ob/gyn father has spent his entire
> professional life working side-by-side with midwives, some of whom are
>
> family friends, and without whose care, intervention and knowledge his
> own
> ability to help women in labour would have been severely impaired.  To
> say
> the least.  By the same token, I watched him for years getting up 2 or
> 3
> times *a night*, 3-4 days *a week* [on average], called by those same
> midwives to come in and take over in those emergency situations they
> simply
> couldn't handle on their own.  These women [for all of them were
> women] were
> highly experienced professionals, too.  [I've watched my father and
> the
> midwives he's worked with help women deliver babies since I was a
> ten-year-old; the collegiality and the co-operation I saw in those
> delivery
> rooms were palpable and entirely focused on easing the woman's stress
> and
> pain as well as the trauma any infant goes through in the process of
> being
> born.  And sometimes the level of empathy -- at least from what I was
> lucky
> enough to see and witness -- was almost magical in its depth and
> results.]
>
> The faults and crimes of modern medicine are many; but let's not sweep
> it
> under the carpet that the incidence of puerperal fever and other
> causes of
> death associated with childbirth have gone down to almost zero
> precisely
> through the efforts of that very same modern medicine.  Given a
> choice, no
> woman in her right mind would prefer to bear a child in the 19th [not
> to
> mention the 16th or the 13th, say] as opposed to the 20th century.
>
> Finally, it was a man who noticed that modern delivery techniques not
> only
> alienated the child-bearing women but were also profoundly [and
> unnecessarily so] traumatic to the new borns themselves -- and then
> took
> measures to prevent that state of affairs from perpetuating itself.
>
> The myth of nature propounded in some of the recent posts is no less
> bizarre
> today than the myth of a golden age of pre-modern medicine suggested
> in
> others.
> BTW: women, too, have rectal examinations.  I was surprised to see
> that this
> seems to be considered something only men undergo.  Not so.
>
> Vaska
>
> P.S. As for Esther's nose job: I remember hearing that Pynchon himself
> went
> through a much more painful and prolonged surgical process for much
> the same
> reason.  I wonder if people really "buy into" any beauty myths as
> respond to
> the actual behaviour others accord to them.  The fact that each
> culture has
> its own distinct set of aesthetic standards of preference -- and that
> these
> are also historically bound -- makes me suspect that the production of
>
> aesthetics is also a part of our ever so pliable species-nature.  But
> that
> it is there at all, cross-culturally, makes it into a realtivism which
>
> expresses a universal [but totally content-free] predisposition of
> sorts.
>