Infats in Fiction

Sung backwoods: Can we get kinky tonight, like Cocoa? I've oft. (en) considered doing it thusly, with the dwindlings up-front like a side-two classic, but only now have I (hum). And why now? Why, I'm surprised you have to ask. In fact I'm downright disappointed. To go further into detail about the erotic and racial implications of hot chocolate would quell any remaining sense of subtlety, so answer I shall not. You must realise I've worked too long and too hard and too sweatily on embedding the clews to risk a careless tear at the behest of my slower readers. But I will say that the following sounds like a preceding for a reason — read on, Josephine!

Some non dits: Hello, blossoms, Fink Fingers here, noting the weather. What sunny potential for a time when my cultural mound has more than halved, and my first choice co-op critic has fled, leaving me with a remainder who makeshifts a therapist's couch at every op. on which to spill his sizable guts and the occasional vestige of coitus. Now I can officially recall a bigger, brighter world and paint an ever bigger, brighter picture of it, which, like all masterpieces, will be too precious to sell and too ugly to look at.

Some hum truths: a deeply familiar face sprung from a quick flick, most unexpectedly, and instigated that funny mix of the shy and the sly the best grins are made of. Though far too brief to set in stone, I got the impression that the intervening growth was pleasingly undrastic, much like yours. Consequently I was flung back to days of progress via proximity (preferable to progress via transmission) and sent into a wretched state of flutter, from which I'm yet to emerge. In effect it's a state whose true shame — measurable to within point-five millilitres — depends on future events, events rooted in effort if ever there were, and thus likely to be displaced by a prematurely resigned F—it. But he remains nonetheless vigilant, and wonders how long a smile at it all can really last.

The Fertile Present

From the relative safety of retrospect, it is of course easy (often dangerously so) to dismiss outdated worldviews as failures of imagination or humanism, implying in the process that enlightenment is much more the product of the soul than of the culture. But were we swifted back to times of slightly greater ignorance by some point-proving deity, I'm certain, in as much as I can be, that we'd bugger up contact with non-agriculturalists too. Ethnocentrism, while not insurmountable, does appear to be prevalent to a certain extent in all cultures, and this could be attributive to a logical, possibly even biological, human reaction to foreign cultures of any sort, particularly when the former dominates the latter. This reaction is invariably compounded by the respective technological advances of the two cultures, with the more advanced claiming a higher place on the evolutionary ladder as a result. Consequently, they not only treat the other race as technologically inferior, but psychologically inferior as well, laying the foundations for what can only be a torturous future for interracial relations.

Phallocentrism, by comparison, goes a little deeper. The implication that womanhood is defined by manhood is widespread indeed, and still very much in effect today, often deeply ingrained in religious belief. Thus the advent of feminism relied on the assumption that manhood was a symbol of gendrical independence, and that a move towards the characteristics of masculinity would yield greater freedom. This assumption eschewed fundamental elements of the feminine psyche on the basis that they were 'weak', a further example of viewing masculinity as superiority. Of course, simply wearing pants and opening doors unassisted was hardly going to change matters, and the strong continued, and still continue, to exploit the weak. It also had the unfortunate side-effect of perpetuating the myth of phallocentrism itself, which overlooks the very reasonable argument that there could also exist a form of yonicentrism, whether subconsciously implanted by maternalism or developed as a yardstick against which a man could measure his power, similar to the notion of the savage and the civilised so often drawn upon in colonial times. In fact, I would argue that phallocentrism could not exist without some form of yonicentrism, and that its perceived power can only manifest itself in relation to the timidity behind traditional notions of womanhood.

Darwinism, or Survivalofthefitism, can be directly linked to these views, and is both the cause and effect of their continued existence. Because it is our reason for being (as we are), it is embedded deep in our behaviour, and even though so-called civilisation occasionally claims to provide equality for the muscular and meek alike, notions of inferiority stemming from power values crop up again and again, even if money has become the new benchmark. But it is also true that we now have a richer mine of knowledge than ever before, and we should not let its cumulation go to waste, biology or no biology. With this in mind, I think that now is the time for us to stumble over the vast mounds of academia in the hope of planting a brighter future on the other side, one free of war, discrimination, poverty, religion and art. You with me?