Sexual Politics

Welcome to the Midnight Collective Broadsheet 42

Actively supporting NZ’s endangered wetland birds

Here we are, back again, with apologies for the aphasian qualities that seeped into the last post, though they’ve now been cleared away. Here is argy bargy the promised footage of a mallard fending away a parera rival. These parera aren’t pure bred natives so we are on the lookout for behavioural difference in what is now becoming three different species –parera – mallard – and the polyglot inbetweeners.

Soon after however, we stumbled upon two more parera, comfortably settled under a seat in the village of Oneroa. These are also inbetweeners and have been taken under the protective custody of a local retailer, who approached us, somewhat concerned, while we were taking these images.

Parera-cross pair - Oneroa 11 Sept 2014

Parera-cross male Oneroa 11 Sept 

You can’t fault people for fostering animals in this way, though what became immediately apparent was that -despite the strutting male behaviour of the drake on the right, who came out at one point to assess our threat (while the female waited to take his lead) - she imagined these to be two females.

This raises interesting questions about our casual pigeon-holing of animal identity (despite our best intentions); of how we characterise them as ‘dumb’, with little ability to think or feel, or form the complex personal relationships that we do (or try to). This theorising was given powerful voice in the 1940’s and 50’s with the rise in science of (now discredited) Behaviourism, though its phlegmatic impulses live on in science, having assumed new forms in evolutionary psychology and neuroscience.

So this pigeonholing is true of the way we characterise human nature as well, and given provocative point in a recent French- Australian film Adoration. It is set in a cove, north of Sydney. (Gorgeous as this Tasman Sea idyll is, it can’t compare with our current South Pacific one here at Enclosure Bay). The film is based on a Doris Lessing novella (The Grandmothers) and features the best actor currently at work, anywhere in the globe –American  Robin Wright- which is reason enough to go see it.

Robin Wright

Yet it is Doris Lessing’s story which assumes control. Lessing pairs two mothers up (in a summer romance) to swap, not their husbands, but their sons, taking apart the usual ‘Dad seduces daughter romance’ and reconstructing it as a provocatively queasy, anti-commentary on Dora Syndrome. This would never fly in a gender reversal, and is quintessentially a female tale that is both sensuous and morally serious, which is what you expect from Lessing. (Women are noticeably more comfortable with this filmic  intrigue than men). She lays bare the assumptions we make about sexual identity, almost all of which have been nurtured by the male of the species.

One of the most obvious is the beefcake quality of the twenty year old sons. They surf, they horseplay, they promenade with their shirts off (endlessly), they are sexually accomplished, they can’t talk and think at the same time (A Kiwi would think this an integral part of being Australian!).  All of this reveals, not their own facile portrayal, but the clothes-horse character of the young women in any Hollywood film you might care to name. Lessing (with director Anne Fontaine and her troup of actors) have conspired to illuminate the way young woman continue to be drawn as shadows and don’t actually ‘exist’ as real people. The point is driven home by the rounded complexity of the two young jilted wives who are left to pick up the tab for all the hanky panky.

What is true here of the characterisation of young women, is also true of our understanding of animals – (also, usually in the hands of the male). If we can’t see that here, under this public seat, are a paired couple with all the complexity of association that that implies, and not a couple of waddling female charmers, even as we seek to  protect them, then we are still back at the starting gate, in our floundering attempts to understand animals.

What continues to puzzle us (here), for example, is the response of the female to the parera male in argy bargy. How like human male behaviour this seems to be. Have another look yourself for she isn’t giving anything away as she allows herself to drift closer and closer to the parera male, until the point comes when the aggressive testorone fuelled, mallard feels obliged to intervene. So what cues is the parera male responding to and what would her preference be, should she be free to reveal it?

Track we were listening to while posting this - The Springfields Island of Dreams - Dusty taking a lead in showing the promise of all things that were yet to come...

I wander the streets

And the gay crowded places

Trying to forget you

But somehow it seems

That my thoughts ever stray

To our last sweet embraces

Over the sea to the island of dreams

Jill Studd's blog

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