Department Of First Things First
Happy birthday to Son K.
K at age 29 9, demonstrating both his flexibility and artistic sensibility, neither of which
led to the career in interpretive dance he was considering at the time this photo was taken.
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Speaking of a delightful person’s birthday, which only happened because his mother gave birth to him, let moiself segue to….
Department Of Don’t You Want To Listen To The Entire Podcast Now?
Now as in, after reading this delightful quote, from Cat Bohannon, PhD, researcher on the evolution of narrative and cognition and author of Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Evolution, from her interview on the People I Mostly Admire podcast.
“…I talk a surprising amount about penises
for a book about the evolution of the female body.
But because the penis and the vagina co-evolve,
naturally we’re going to have to talk about dong.”
Naturally.
Here is PIMA host Steven Levitt’s intro to the episode featuring Bohannon:
I did not expect to like this book. I’m generally just not that interested in things that happened 200 million years ago, or even 10,000 years ago…. But in chapter after chapter, Cat Bohannon offers such a fresh and surprising perspective that I couldn’t put the book down…. Are her hypotheses right? I have no idea….But one thing I’m pretty confident about, you will not listen to Cat Bohannon and say she’s boring.
The PIMA episode’s title, Is Gynecology the Best Innovation Ever?, refers to Bohannon’s intriguing proposition re human evolution: more than our discovery of fire, agriculture, the wheel, and other inventions, human’s survival and flourishing was due to reproductive choice and midwifery, the forerunner to obstetrics/gynecology. As our Homo habilis ancestors’ brains (and thus their brain buckets – i.e., heads) expanded, the females’ pelvises did not. Women assisting other women in labor allowed the human population to survive and increase.
Excerpts from PIMA host Steven Levitt’s interview with Cat Bohannon:
LEVITT:
If you ask people’s opinion about the most important discoveries that humankind has made, common answers might be harnessing fire, agriculture, the advent of language, but you give a different answer…gynecology? How can gynecology be our most important human invention?
BOHANNON:
… Tool use is all about manipulating something in your environment to overcome some inherent problem…. What was our most important innovation in our ancestral line? Well, what were our biggest problems? In evolutionary biology, there’s something called a hard selection. That’s when you have problems with your reproduction because evolution, of course, works by generations building over time, literally making babies, having them survive to have their own babies, and maybe produce more bodies that have this trait that your body has.
Well, if you have something that messes up your reproduction, if it’s hard for you to make a baby, then your line is probably headed for extinction. If human pregnancies are the absolute shit show that they are, that is hard selection. That is our biggest problem.
A chimpanzee, one of the animals that we are most closely related to, both obviously and genetically — a chimp mom’s labor is about 40 minutes. A first-time human mom is about 12 to 16 hours….And that’s before we even try to start squeezing out the actual giant-headed babies that our species likes to make. It’s also true that our pregnancies are longer than you would expect for an animal our size.
And it turns out, the threshold for when we give birth is not necessarily how big the head gets, to get out the small lemon-sized hole, which as we know is problematic. No, it’s actually a metabolic threshold. At what point would building this body any further actually be deleterious to the mother’s body because it’s simply too costly to keep doing it? In other words, we give birth, we go into labor when we do, typically at full term, because doing it any longer would kill us.
LEVITT:
Yeah, marginal cost becomes greater than marginal benefit. It’s interesting how biology and economics are basically the same thing.
BOHANNON:
Yeah, exactly. So if it’s the case that you end up with a lot of moms that are crippled for life, that die in the process, (then their) offspring die in the process….
But it isn’t just the moment of giving birth that matters for the advent of gynecology, because there’s a long ramp of reproductive history that comes before, and a long tail of a woman living in a female body that comes after….
…the most important thing we ever did was get our hands on the levers of reproduction to overcome our most basic problem, which is that (humans) suck at making babies.
We should be like the giant panda. We should be a curiosity in somebody else’s zoo. We should never have gotten to eight billion people in the world.
But we did. And the only way we did, to be honest, is by building societies that could support the kind of interdependence that helped females give birth in ways that didn’t kill them and cripple them.
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Department Of There’s (Usually More Than) Two Sides To Every Story…
Some stories are octagonal, when you get right down to counting the sides. The story of the “Central Park birding incident” has at least four sides, including that of
* the birder
* the news media’s shameful failure to accurately report and follow up on the incident (read: correct their mistakes and oversights),
* social media’s (surprise!) rush to laud and reward the party deemed “innocent” while labeling, judging, and tormenting the party deemed “Karen,”
* the Karen who turns out not to be one.
” ‘Slit your wrists,’ strangers texted me.
‘If anyone deserves prison rape, it’s you,’ people I had never met called me to say.
‘The noble thing to do is to remove yourself from society…so please kill yourself.’
I’m Amy Cooper, but you probably know me as ‘Central Park Karen.’ You may not know my name, but you probably know my story—or at least the two-minute version of the story that was broadcast all over the world without key facts or context. “
Amy Cooper’s opinion piece was published in Newsweek (their “My Turn” feature) in November. I just got around to reading it now. IMO everyone who passed judgement upon her – read: everyone who heard the story as portrayed on your media of choice (including moiself ) – should read it.
Most people think they know what happened: the widely promoted narrative was that a racist White woman walking her dog in a Central Park birding area threatened and then called 911 on a Black man, after he told her she needed to leash her dog and began recording her with his cell phone. Most people don’t know who threw the first punch, so to speak –i.e., who made the first threat – in this incident; most people, in their rush to judgement, don’t know that the story they heard and/or read about left out so many crucial details.
“On May 25, 2020, in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, when anxieties ran high, I took my dog—whom my life revolved around—for a walk.
I visited Central Park in the morning, during the hours when dogs were allowed off-leash. [1] On my way home, I chose to take an unfamiliar path, landing in ‘The Ramble,’ a secluded area of Central Park.
Seconds later, I heard a voice boom: ‘Get out of here. You shouldn’t be here.’ I saw a man who began yelling at me that my dog should be on his leash.
Before recording me, Christian Cooper yelled out: ‘If you’re going to do what you want, I’m going to do what I want, but you’re not going to like it.’
Those were his exact words. Words Christian admitted to saying, on Facebook, the very day of the incident.
And yes, I was scared.”
I was a female, alone in a secluded area of Central Park, with a man yelling at me and threatening me. As a victim of a sexual assault in my late teens, I was completely panicked for my safety and wellbeing.”
Right there is a situation most women can understand. Unfortunately, far too many of us (and one is to many) have had experiences with male strangers who’ve yelled at/threatened us. Skin color, schmin color – the fact that Christian Cooper (the man who confronted Amy Cooper; no relation) is Black did not enter my mind when I read Amy Cooper’s report of their initial encounter. Instead, what came to mind were the incidents I’ve faced over the years, as a woman hiking/running/walking – simply daring to exist – outside, “alone,” and facing a man’s harassment and threat, regardless of whether or not he thinks I did something to “deserve” it.
Fuck the man’s skin color; fuck his age, or height, accent, apparel…. Because here is an unfortunate truth that women live with: even without a personal history of sexual assault, most women’s radar would be up in the same situation as Amy Cooper found herself in (my radar went up just reading her account). And although I might not be as “completely panicked” as she was, I’d be urgently strategizing as to how I could protect moiself from a man who is threatening, (Jaysus Fecking Keerist!) I’m going to do what I want, but you’re not going to like it.
“Then Christian, who did not own a dog, bizarrely tried to lure my dog to him with treats, immediately raising a red flag. [2] News stories of poisoned dogs quickly came to mind.
My mama-bear instincts kicked in. I immediately pulled my dog tight by his collar, fearing that something would happen to him.
Acting from a place of panic and vulnerability, I told Christian that I was going to call the police and what I planned to say, hoping that would be enough to dissuade him from his earlier threat.
Instead, Christian taunted me to call the police. Seeing no other choice, I called 911 and described the man who was threatening me. But due to very spotty service in the park, I had to repeat my description of Christian multiple times.
The 911 tape makes it very clear that the dispatcher couldn’t hear me due to the poor connection—yet this fact went unreported, skewing perceptions of my actions. [3]
There were never any racial implications to my words. I just felt raw fear, and desperately wanted help.
Later that day, Christian took to Facebook to proudly describe to his followers that he instigated the encounter and boasted that he keeps a bag of dog treats to lure in off-leash dogs.
Consider that for a moment. He admitted to instigating the incident.”
I’m not a “birder” but I play one on TV but I know a few bird-watching enthusiasts. I like them, and I like birds. I like to look at birds and other fauna and flora and have loved hiking in and exploring “natural areas” and nature preserves since moiself was a wee lass. I’ve been frustrated innumerable times when I’ve encountered people whom I judge as not being respectful of the protocol when recreating in a woodland, desert, mountain, and/or beach environment (e.g., going off trail and thus contributing to erosion; allowing their dogs off leash where it is not permitted; not cleaning up after their dog; dropping trash, etc.). Thus, I think I can understand CC’s frustration with what he saw as yet another scofflaw ignoring the rules of a birding area.
There is another protocol worthy of consideration: how you handle your first encounter with a stranger whom you think/know is violating some kind of rule. Why assume the worst from the beginning – where does that get you? Why did CC assume AC was a scofflaw, instead of considering that perhaps this was her first time in the area and/or she didn’t see the signs about leashing dogs in that area? Why go from zero to 120 at the get-go? Who appointed CC as The Ramble’s protocol enforcer?
“I was not the first or only person Christian Cooper had threatened in Central Park.
Jerome Lockett has stated that Christian also aggressively threatened him, luring in his dog. Jerome said he knows of two fellow dog owners who experienced the same behavior from Christian, but they don’t want to come forward because they are white, and Christian is Black. They fear being canceled—as I have been.
None of this was reported.
Stark omissions in coverage completely altered my life.
and there is no correcting after the fact.
I, and others affected by this incident, could only live in the false, hateful narrative.”
( excerpts, emphases mine, “I Was Branded the ‘Central Park Karen’. I Still Live in Hiding.”
Newsweek, My Turn, 11-7-23 )
There are more details in Amy Cooper’s article which deserve your consideration, including the fallout for her life. After CC’s video went viral, AC had her personal information posted online by trolls, received “hundreds of threatening graphic images, death threats, and hate mail,” [4] was fired from her job by her PR-conscious employer (without a chance to defend herself), has had long stretches of unemployment, had to go into hiding, was falsely accused of filing a false police report…. [5]
Meanwhile, Christian Cooper has parlayed his headline-making experience into a career as “The Black Birder,” including a book contract, numerous video and television appearances, a guest essay with the NY Times, and a gig as a host on a National Geographic show, Extraordinary Birder.
Now then: Black men in the USA face a different world than white women and men, no doubt about it. Shouldn’t Amy Cooper have realized that, given the world we live in, her reporting to the police that she was being harassed by a Black man might put that man’s life in danger? That is certainly what moiself thought, at first. However, if she feared that *she* was in danger, that probability-of-danger-for-him would take a back seat to the urgency of her – of any person’s – instinct for self-protection. And when you call the police to report that a person is threatening you, guess what they want to know? A description of the person, which includes gender, ethnicity, age, height, attire….
Also….
Something that seems to have been forgotten, or at least brushed aside, from the Central Park Birding Incident, ® is a something which has gnawed at me even before I read Amy Cooper’s article:
All women walk through a different world than men of any skin tone.
Why are men not cognizant of that reality – because it’s not theirs?
Why is no one holding Christian Cooper accountable for failing to realize
that yelling at/threatening a lone woman in a secluded area
will cause her to fear for her safety?
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Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week [6]
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Parting Shot: I love it when/I hate it when…
I love it when an Expert In Her Field ® sez, “we’re going to have to talk about dong.”
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May we appreciate that we are not “a curiosity in somebody else’s zoo;”
May we wait for the story behind the story before we pass judgement;
May we appreciate the times when we’re going to “have to talk about dong;”
…and may the hijinks ensue.
Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!
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[1] “Off-leash hours in Central Park are from 6:00 am–9:00 am and 9:00 pm–1:00 am.” (from A Dog’s Guide to Central Park. )
[2] When I read this sentence of her article to MH, before I could go on to the next sentence he said that he’s fear/assume that the guy was intending to poison his dog.
[3] The New York Times reported in October 2020 that Amy had made a second 9-1-1 call against Christian, in which she alleged that Christian had tried to assault her. However, the Times later made a correction, saying that the second call was when a 9-1-1 dispatcher called *her* back.
[4] Which she still gets, to this day.
[5] The NY prosecutor’s office, feeling the media and political pressure, filed the charges, which were quickly dismissed because Amy Cooper had done no such thing.
[6] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists. No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.” Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org
