Fun_People Archive
23 Oct
P.C. Monkey Business

Date: Fri, 23 Oct 92 17:54:20 PDT
To: Fun_People
Subject: P.C. Monkey Business

[Well, Daniel Steinberg sent it to me, but you never know where it's been.]
[Apologies to Eve, Mark, & anyone else on too many lists...]
[Lots of forwards unashamedly deleted.]

Since we are ranting about sex, I thought I'd describe in a little greater
detail the piece about monkeys in Science I mentioned a week or so ago.
It's pretty interesting.

The old patriarchal theory of animal sex (including and in particular
primate sex) was that the boys beat each other up and whoever won got to
fuck all the girls.  This theory was promulgated by boy scientists.

About ten years ago, some girl scientists observed that this bad old theory
was bad and old.  So they promulgated their own theory of animal sex
(including and in particular primate sex).  The new feminist theory is that
the girls figure out which of the boys is most p.c. and fuck him.  (I'm not
making this up, you know.  ``P.c.'' in this case is instantiated as
``nurturing,'' among other things.)

Both of these theories were just fine, because they were Rational.  They
were Rational because they Explained how fucking served the higher good,
namely Species Fitness.  The patriarchal theory explained how species get to
be more and more macho and therefore Fit, and the feminist theory explained
how species get to be more and more self-sacrificing and therefore Fit.

This brings us up to last year, when a scientist, who happened to be a girl,
went into the field in order to watch tufted capuchin monkeys having p.c.
sex like her girl thesis advisor had taught her.  This girl scientist, I'll
give long odds, was a pervert.  (A common anthropological dictum: ``every
anthropologist gets the tribe he deserves, and vice versa.'')  Since she
was supposed to confirm the ``female choice'' theory, she went around with
her clipboard keeping track of who the girls fucked.  Courageously, she
discovered that:  girl tufted capuchins are total sluts.  When they are
horny, they'll fuck anybody.  They go around and shake their ass in the face
of anything with a penis.  (The Science article had a picture of this.  I
mean it quite literally.  The boy capuchin looks bored and somewhat annoyed
at having her cunt waved a few inches from his face.)

Now this is a Big Problem, because sluttish behavior is Not Rational.  It's
Not Scientific.  It doesn't serve the Higher Good.  Evolutionary biologists
are running scared.  Dangerous perverts are breaking out the champagne.
There's a substantial danger that someone will propose that animals fuck
because it feels good and they choose to fuck whomever turns them on.  The
breakdown of American family structure is imminent.

© 1992 Peter Langston