Peckerin' Time!

"You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake

You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else"

This Is Your Life

_________________________________________________

 

"The souls of beasts are substantial forms, says Aristotle; and after Aristotle, the Arabian school; and after the Arabian school, the Angelical school; and after the Angelical school, the Sorbonne; and after the Sorbonne, every one in the world."

 

In 1764, the prevailing view on similarity between humans and animals was rooted in religious doctrine despite its pretense of Cartesian mechanism: since animals lack a for-realsies human soul, they must also lack human sentiment, so any animal display of human fear, affection or pain must be somehow counterfeit. Voltaire's "Bêtes" entry from his philosophical dictionary took a concise, razor-witted axe to this notion, somewhat unsuccessfully as mammal vivisection was still widespread enough over a century later to inspire Wells' Moreau. By the straightforward observation and logic of "if it quacks like a duck" Voltaire denied the dishonest presumption that something possessed of similar sense organs and reactions as humans somehow lacks similar sensation.

 

On a completely unrelated topic, I took a walk in the woods last month, only to unwittingly land myself square in the middle of woodpecker mating season.

 

The gentleman in the image is not currently pecking wood. He has his beak open because he's rather noisily advertising his presence, flapping his wings as he hops around in a circle midway up a bare trunk, exposed far from the safety of both canopy or underbrush. Two of them, about twenty meters apart, dueled in chirps and hops on two different yet very similar trees. It took me a while to note their motivation: between them and higher, largely hidden by foliage, a third speckle-winged form kept fluttering a meter left and right, wavering undecided between her two suitors. Cherchez la femme, eh? While I lacked the wherewithal to film the proceedings, others on YouTube have done it, so here's what it looks like in action.

 

Males showing off. Female sitting in judgment of their worth. Walk around the woods sometime. Antlers and songs, flitting and posing, dueling and territories, you'll find innumerable species falling into such charmingly complex yet predictable behavior patterns every single year, at around the same time, in almost exactly the same way. Each male picks similar trees, climbs to similar heights in similarly exposed positions, chirps and flaps and hops and circles and flashes his bright red mullet in pretty much the same fashion, generation after generation. ("What is this bird, who makes its nest in a semicircle when he attaches it to a wall; and in a circle on a tree - this bird does all in the same blind manner!") Riverside forests at dusk reverberate with male tree frogs' serenades. Male rodents roam farther from their burrows. Male lizards climb to high ground to stake out their territory. Female rabbits are more likely to bite their owners. Most spider webs you see are likely to be spun by females. Even in the few species which can spontaneously change sex, behavior changes along with the sex adopted.

 

And here you have yet another species, the East-African plains ape, one monkey among many. Its ancestors' remains display sexual dimorphism going back tens of millions of years. Its relatives near and far display a wealth of divergence in behavior by sex hearkening back hundreds of millions, globally. Through all its history and prehistory, myriads of separate cultures have independently fallen into the same predictable male and female roles the world over.

 

But now, in a span of five years, by dictatorial decree, the sexes suddenly no longer exist, and even acknowledging their existence is punishable by ostracism.

 

This hit home recently when a female applied for a job here demanding to be called "they", which very likely I will be forced to do or be universally and irredeemably blacklisted as a political subversive. The real kicker is that (while not particularly ditzy, and from her initial presentation quite competent in her field) she is so thoroughly a tiny little giggling blonde that she could've jumped straight out of any 1960s teen comedy. In fact the department has employed various females over the past decade, all competent professionals, including in the leadership position, all calling themselves women, who are all less feminine than this one. Not good enough. Suddenly, no traits exist, 'CUZ GIDGET SAYS SO!

Saying sex should not influence sapient behavior is a noble aspiration. Claiming that it does not currently influence the behavior of apes is infantile make-believe. We are subject now, via the highest authority not only of academia but of corporate and government power structures, to every bit as pernicious an unjustifiable dogma as that which led centuries' worth of medical students to vivisect countless dogs under the pretense their suffering is not real. The animal continuity pointed out by Voltaire has not suddenly vanished simply because a gaggle of narcissists (who remain human, all too human in every other quality) decide to make believe they've transcended the human condition by this one disparate leap of faith.

 

A distinction which has physically, verifiably dictated animal behavior for half a billion years, for our myriad ancestors and our myriad relatives, does not cease acting upon our minds simply by social activist fatwa! If gender differences are merely a social construct among plains-apes, then so are they among woodpeckers... and deer... and moths... and towering male elephant seals thrice the size and quintuple the aggression of their mates. All of Noah's Ark must be in on the grand conspiracy. They're all just making it up. Every fucking toad and fucking kangaroo and fucking cuckoo and fucking every fucking fucker fucking capable of fucking fucking must just be pretending that sex matters... so all you need to do is clap your handsies and make believe to turn Tinkerbell into Tinkerclapper... right?

 

Reality is not optional.

 

You don't get to "identify" your ontology into irrelevance. It will come back to bite you. Any subliterate Elmer Fudd toting a hunting rifle knows it's easier to shoot bucks when they're distracted by their horns and horniness, and it doesn't matter one bit whether the stags "identify as" does the rest of the year. But Princeton, Harvard, Oxford and the Sorbonne all fall below Fudd intellectual standards! The true perversity of this anti-intellectual obeissance before the orthodoxy of gender fabulism comes from the fact that universities, ground zero for such idiocy, should have been the ones to debunk it in the first place, immediately and mercilessly. We can see that just as those woodpeckers hop around trees and trill their fitness to mate and the female flips between them in anticipation of picking her pecker, human males seek to outdo each other to display the high rank females demand in mates, and the female of the species goes into lordosis at the sight of a Rolex or Ferrari. It is not scientific, it is not intellectual, it is not academic, it is not enlightened, it is not honest to flatly, baselessly claim that something possessed of similar sense organs and reactions does not possess similar sensations. Even if we naked apes can act rational on a good day, mindless instinct obviously still dictates most of our behavior, from sugar addiction to herd mentality, and reproduction with its afferent behaviors is baser and more pervasive an instinct than any other. We have not even begun to shed its influence.

 

We should at the very least admit that proselytism of such fads as social constructionism itself is an instinctive means of establishing herd membership and pecking order, and carries a nuptial undercurrent. Sure, it has male adherents, but gender ideology in general borrows legitimacy from the feminist movement. Having its roots in feminist reinterpretation of sex as Marxist class warfare (with masculinity cast as decadent bourgeoisie and the erasure of sex as another version of universal proletarianism) this willful ignorance cannot but register as a demand placed by women on men, and as such, another hoop to jump through in demonstrating one's fitness. Another head-game. The female consensus decrees that good men believe thus; thus men strive to be good in the eyes of women by believing thus. Gidget makes a demand, but it is my male supervisor who orders me to obey her lack of authority. Remember it does not initially matter that the woodpecker's mullet is red or any other color. Only that once redness becomes attractive, nothing else will do. It does not matter whether the dogma makes sense. Only that proclaiming it establishes one as friendly to women.

 

The virulent spread of this insane notion that all gender is socially constructed should itself (were any still capable of grasping the irony) falsify its own claims.

_________________________________________________

P.S.: I would've titled this post "twitterpation" if the birds in question had been anything other than peckers. (Or boobies, I suppose. (Or tits. (Or any species of cock.)))

How vile!