The notion I am about to share with you came to me by free
association while driving.
Many of you know of my music addiction. In the car, I listen to random playlists of
my wildly eclectic collection of songs.
In this case the number was “December 1963” by Frankie Valli and the
Four Seasons:
The phrase that started me thinking was “…I didn’t even know
her name…” The singer remembers that it
was “late December back in ’63,” and other vivid recollections of his
experience with the lady who “walked in the room.” But not one detail about her as a person. This is how men think about willing women, I
guess.
Only a few hours before I took that motor trip, I had
read—on the blog Crime Writers Chronicle—a piece by Mike Welch called “Sex and
the Hard-Boiled Private Eye,” in which he opines about the female characters of
Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammet.
Mike describes those women as “scheming, untrustworthy, manipulative and
dangerous. And they are all smoking hot,
too…female sexuality in these writers’ hands becomes perhaps the most polluted
and corrupt thing in a polluted and corrupt world.”
Also swimming around in my hyperactive consciousness as I
negotiated the Lincoln Tunnel were sights I had seen during my recent trip to
Kenya: Lions mating, the courtship and
mating of ostriches. And there in the
wilderness where mankind had evolved I also heard about lions killing lion cubs
in order that their mothers would come more quickly into heat and give the new
guy a chance to reproduce his own genes.
Without my really knowing it, my brain started to wonder how
all these ideas fit together when it came to the sexual behavior of us—the
supposed “higher animals.” And then it
occurred to me. That once human
intelligence began to emerge, if the genes of brighter, more cerebral men were
going to be reproduced, they were going to have to show the ladies something
more than their muscles. And if anyone
was going to guard the tollgate on the evolutionary turnpike, it would have to be
the women. And so I came to the
conclusion that deep in our species’ past, perhaps it was late December 1,963,000
years ago, at the dawn of human intelligence, there came a time when if a
Neanderthal lass was approached by a lad in heat, she wanted to know more about
him than that he was the toughest guy on the rock. The females developed a preference for males
with brainpower as well as biceps. And
they readily mated only with males who could figure out how to woo the lady.
Or maybe I could be full of baloney.
Annamaria - Monday
Posts
I see pitfalls here, before and aft, port and starboard, and so will choose the better part of valor and defer all comments to Jeff, who appears to be more flexible than me and thus more able to orally ingest his foot.
ReplyDeleteEvKa, Oh, my. I am not at all sure why a blog post that starts with Frankie Valli and ends with the word "baloney" should be all that intimidating. The whole things seems pretty silly to me. I even posted the G rated photos of the animals.
Delete:-) I've learned a FEW things in my 60-odd years, not MANY, but the few that I've learned include treading VERY carefully when discussing certain things with women (not that women are any different from men, and I'm not saying they're NOT different either). I guess what I'm trying to say is that, being a man (sort of), I know what to expect from most other men, but in dealing with not-men, well, I think it's safest to say that I'm a complete idiot, clueless, hapless, and any other self-professed adjective that will keep me out of trouble with those that I'm too stupid to really understand and whose reasoning processes completely escape my meager faculties. Subjects best avoided in these situations are food, sex, cultural attitudes, religion, philosophy, gardening, house design, interior decorating, selection of automobiles, vacation destinations, and garage sales.
DeleteOther than that, I'm open to discussions on pretty much any subject.
I can't believe I thought I'd responded this the day it first posted (for that's when I read it on my handheld device) only to see I had not. Perhaps it was the gods' way of giving you and EvKa a quiet moment together...
DeleteAt this point I will take the high road, sit back, and contemplate the meaning of life...or better yet, the Freudian implications of "Also swimming around in my hyperactive consciousness as I negotiated the Lincoln Tunnel..."
Jeff, is that what they mean by "auto-erotica"???
DeleteSpeaking of silly! Jeff, good thing you were a lawyer in your previous life and not a psychotherapist. EvKA, I have noted with relief that neither human evolution nor Frankie Valli is on your list of forbidden subjects. Otherwise, I would not have had your amusing comments on this blogpost.
ReplyDelete