Fw: V-2nd. Contraceptives on every door

[Michael Bailey]

Monte Davis wrote:
>
> I think you've got a strawman behind that word "sensation, and/or an
> implicit "mere" in front of it. Are you sure you want to go there?

only on the way to somewhere else...

>Would we
> be "more natural" aka better if human females came in heat at intervals, and
> the rest of the time neither party were interested? Ah, life without
> temptation, wot bliss eh?

that's a place we're coming from, evolutionarily, but where are we headed,
quo vadis, America, in thy shiny black cars in the night (as Jack Kerouac asked)

>
> Most (maybe all) of our specifically human behaviors are "unseated":  they
> take capabilities with functional, pragmatic "evolutionary reasons for
> being" and extend them to contexts in which the function is increasingly
> communicative, symbolic, ritualized, long-range. There are evolutionary
> reasons for being an agile biped. Would you describe as unseated _Giselle_,
> or the dirty bop, or a perfect launch into the mosh? There are evolutionary
> reasons for being able to convey <feed me> or <ripe fruit over there> to
> someone who isn't looking at you. Are Robert Hunter lyrics unseated from
> that? Etc...
>

saved me the trouble of disputing/refuting my previous statement, (a
la Dr Evil: "No, I can't back that up.")
and very nicely too

although...there's unseated and then there's unhinged,
diving and drowning, Joyce was diving in the glossolalia, his daughter
was drowning;
David Duchovny in "Californication" is diving into promiscuity; in
real life, didn't he actually go to a clinic for sex addiction? Rome
while declining and falling certainly had a lot of lifestyle diversity
but nobody would call it a healthy society...

what is " communicative, symbolic, ritualized, long-range" about
promiscuous sex?
I ask this thoughtfully, in a spirit of inquiry, not in a scoffing tone.

Pynchon provides somewhat of an answer: "...to be granted at least the
illusion of having 'played the field'" (page 19)

my meshugenner mishmash mashup etymology:
pro - in favor of
miscuous - like the word "miscibility", ability to mix

so, in favor of mixing

communicative - sure, not much chance with anyone if you don't communicate

symbolic - sure, being a sex symbol is everyone's aspiration, or at
least that of many; to be seen as someone
                      who "does it" is to be successful; "we all love
to see young people get together"

ritualized - knowing the right things to say, having the correct
stance on the day's fads and fashions, believing in a certain sequence
of events that will lead to horizontality (and being a member (hee
hee) of a group that is cognizant and observant of them)

long range - like Paul's grandfather, building up a backlog of
memories for old age?


so, do we want a society so intolerant of promiscuity that pregnant
young women jump in canals?
definitely not

but, do I as a person want to continue "playing the field" my whole
life?  of course not...right?  I mean, assuming I play the field
honestly, one of my bets may pay off (to extend the metaphor: I mean,
"playing the field" is a horse race metaphor, right?) but isn't it
true that procreation and/or long term relationships ARE the payoff in
this game?

and then with colonialism (I'm rilly down on colonialism these days),
you restrict the field so that you can't ordinarily win across the
oppressor/oppressed line, all you can do is place the bet, put part a
in part b (although Strom Thurmond and Thomas Jefferson did a little
more than that, inter alia) - and the narrowing of the field results
in incestuous relations like the Sudwest house party among the
"elect"; which is carried to an extreme among crowned heads
(individuals whose families have basically colonized their native
land)...
>



-- 
Yippy dippy dippy,
Flippy zippy zippy,
Smippy gdippy gdippy, too!
- Thomas Pynchon ("'Zo Meatman's Gone AWOL")