Desmond and Mickey

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Mouse Closely allied to this gamy is enforced by law, ey Mouse. organised by the Labour Party. There'll De woren's banas, stalls, theatre, open-air be women's bands, stalls, theatre, open-air discussion forums, a rally with national and discussion forums, a rally with national and international speakers, plus food, kids' international speakers, plus food, kids' entertainment & creche, and lots more. entertainment & creche, and lots more. LYING IN bed last week, sleepily listening to a programme on Charles Darwin (it was the 100th anniversary of his death), I suddenly got a rude awakening.

Desmond Morris was explaining that Darwin was the single most influential person in the history of human thought. I halfexpected a mighty crack as the vault of Westminster Abbey opened, and Charles Darwin rose up to protect his name.

It's not that the comment itself was particularly wide of the mark. But from Desmond Morris? With heirs like that, who needs monkeys?

The descent from Darwin to Desmond Morris would be tragic were it not so farcical. It seems to be the fate of revolutionary ideas to be taken up by counterrevolution as it rearms. And that certainly seems to be poor Charles Darwin's fate.

Animal

Darwin was pilloried by the Church and the Establishment for locating Man land we'll look at that word later) as part of the animal kingdom (another revealing term), and subject to the same laws which determine the diversity of the animal world. •Religión held that Man was a unique creation, made in God's image and obedient to higher, Godgiven laws. Woman, of course, had her own special, morally-inferior place in the scheme of things, created as she was from a bit of Man's superfluous anatomy as his plaything and obedient to his bidding.

A hundred years on, Darwin's revolutionary ideas, spiced up with a dash of sexual titillation and dished up with a flourish of quackery, are used to return us to a position that prevailed before he came onto the scene.

And, big surprise, not least among the 'new' reactíonary ideas is the reinstatement in suitably pseudo-scientific garb of the Adam's Rib theory of women's existence.

Species

Darwin pointed to the process whereby, under the pressure of natural selection, in the face of a changing environment, species have to adapt to the new conditions or die out. Something very similar seems to have happened to the concept of 'natural': it has evolved and adapted to a changing ideological habitat.

In the religious schema, it acted as the negation of all that was uniquely human, spiritual, moral. 'Natural' meant animal, bestial, dirty, carnal, uncontrolled, i.e. BAD, that which should be overcome by the Godloving spirit. And woman, in this picture, was closer to nature and therefore more in need of suppression and control.

As the climate changed, as evolution took over from creation and the precepts of religion were more and more undermined, 'natural' had to find a new meaning or perish alongside predestination or the flat earth.

And now we see it emerging from its 100-year metamorphosis. 'Natural' now equals GOOD, or at the very least unchangeable, inevitable. It has become the new Eternal Truth, and like every grand abstraction, it can be brought to bear in the service of the most abominable acts.

The fault is not in ourselves but in our genes. Ergo, there is no possibility of remedying it.

So, for example, you get Man the Aggressor. The argument runs: we are descended from hunting primates with fierce teeth, we developed to humanity through clubbing other animais to death, so how can we be expected to do anything about war/imperialism/genocide: they're only giving expression to our natural aggressive and territorial instincts.

As for rape, don't you know that certain species can't mate until the male has cowed the female into submission by displays of his superior force? So lie back, sister, and enjoy it, it's only natural after all!

Of course, all sorts of things are 'natural' which we don't find desirable or even tolerable, like famine and disease, and we have the human capacity, if not the social will, to eradicate them.

Now Desmond Morris is by no means the worst in the field of animal behaviourists turned moral philosophers. In fact, he seems quite an affable fellow, which is why his ideas on women can be particularly pernicious.

He specialises in an archly-detached expositi ion of human sexual behaviol ur. And it certainly gets 1 his books sold.

He offers this wondro Ius explanation for womer breasts: when Man starti ed walking upright and enga iging in face-to-face sex, l he was deprived of the natur ral stimulus of the fema ile buttocks, which play : important role in arousi ng male primates. • But abun ant nature came to t he rescue: women developi larger breasts as buttoc surrogates to raise the menfolk's flagging ardour So there you have it. You're pleased you fou nd that out, aren't you? Y ou always wondered wh lat those things dangli ng round your armpits we Are for, didn't you?

Nose

Now, I love this story. It has a certain poetic absurdity, like the Dong with the Luminous Nose, but it has as much in common with Darwin's years of painstaking research and rigorously argued conclusions as has Mickey Mouse. Still, it does reveal some of the more common devices used by these people to arrive at their spurious conclusions.

The first centres round the use of 'Man' • However much it is protested that 'man embraces woman (ho ho)', that this term refers to the. species and not the gender, there is a constant slippage between the two.

Why does 'Early Man breastfed her children and carried them round with her as she searched for roots and berries' sound weird, while Early Man was a hunter, and was often away from his women and children for long periods' already sensitised to it by feminist arguments ahnut language!

This isn't just a linguistic accident, it represents a thoroughly male-oriented perspective. In the above example, a change in women's anatomy must be for male consumption. What else are women for?

Playboy Which leads on to another question: even if it could hon narayan that coulu vt proveu lnal a certain type of body had a particular 'function' should the individuals of that body-type be defined by that function?

MARCH WITH US TO WOMEN'S FESTIVAL AND RALLY Then there's the problem of projecting back the social categories of an advanced capitalist society onto prehistory, like our Playboy centre-fold catapulted back a million years. Apart from anything else, it's illogical.

If normal healthy women have flat hairy chests, what advantage is there in going for a bald freak with lumps in the wrong place? Looks like a recipe for an evolutionary wash-out.

Monogamy THE IU Come and join us on June 5th. Come and join us on June 5th. We'll be assembling at County Hall, Waterloo, from 10.30 and the march will start to move off at the march will start to move off at 11, and go to Battersea Park for the 11, and go to Battersea Park for the national Women's Festival and Rally national Women's Festival and Rally 10p st Coutty and Hally no tury

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