The Christians Have Become The Pagans

At the height of Christian power in Europe, the Pagans and Heathens lived outside of town. Farmers, they were secluded from the society engulfed in Christianity and controlled, in large measure, by the Church, though many Pagan practices lived on with a thin Christian veil. The Pagans followed the old ways and were looked down upon as being old fashioned, cliquish, and superstitious.

Today, secularism dominates most American cities. While many people remain religious and churches still play a strong role, God is kept out of law (mostly) and most activity in cities occurs without explicit influence from religious affiliation or doctrine, and The Bible doesn't have much direct influence on behavior (though a keen eye shows Christianity's foundational social role). But look to the rural South, small mountain towns, and midwestern farming communities. The church there is often the hub of activity, Christianity (and usually of a less-contemporary form) plays a large part in public life, and city secularists joke about and dismiss such outsiders as hicks.

In America, Christians have taken the role of Pagans and secularism now stands in the place once held by Christianity.

Interest Haiku #9: Watership Down

Watership Down -
Forsake birth warrens
Cross rododil; fight; face death
Rabbits come of age

Watership Down is a novel by Richard Adams, but I came to it as a child through an excellent animated movie adaptation. (And apparently now a bad TV series.) When I read the book in middle school I was amazed that out of 425 pages, astoundingly little didn't make it to the screen.

Talking rabbits aside, the movie is very much not in the Disney style. It's PG, back when that was rare for animation, and deservedly so. It features death by suffocation, death by dog, death by rabbit attack, and death by train, not to mention near-death by gun and barbed wire, and graphic lupine violence. Several young rabbits set out to make a new life for themselves. They discover the challenges of the world and of life on the road (literally). They learn to be careful, and that not every potential home is safe. They find an strange bedfellow of an ally and realize that settling down involves females. In their attempts to win females, they use stealth, cunning, impersonation, physical strength, and sticking it to the man. I only recently realized it's a coming of age story recently, but it probably had a profound effect on me as a child. The two movies I watched most as a kid were Watership Down and Pee Wee's Big Adventure. Only one would I choose to watch today.

For your participatory exercise today, comment with a coming-of-age story or moment for you. (I'll think of one later and post it, too.)

Yes, I'm still listening to the same song (It's 53 minutes long). Yes, I am wide awake and journaling at a quarter to three in the morning. Yes, I should be in bed -- I'm leaning out of my hammock to type, since I had my Christian::Pagan insight.

Interest Haiku #10: Voluptuous Women

Voluptuous Women -
Curved hips, round belly
Generous breasts, rosy lips
Goddess embodied

I have this as an interest in part because I think "voluptuous" is a wonderfully fun word to say. You have to move your lips in and out several times, it begins and ends with a fricative, it has several opportunities for long and sensual vowels. Voluptuous well represents voluptuousness.

The postmodern feminist party line focuses on phrases like "socially defined standards of beauty," which seem to imply that if we as a society decided that sexy is puss-ridden bed-bound centenarians on oxygen, we could. The evolutionary psychologist comes along and says "Ein minuten, bitte." Men are attracted to features which indicate the ability to bear and raise healthy children. So in every culture, men are attracted to people who display youth, health, chastity (so they aren't carrying someone else's children), strong gathering skills, and so forth. Many of these differ in practice from society to society -- the color of healthy skin depends significantly on the base rate of skin color, for instance. The amount of leisure time a person seems to have is also a factor. If a woman is a good gatherer, she'll have extra time and if she's healthy she'll have more energy to devote to things like growing and maintaining her hair. I remember reading that in places where most people work in the sun, fair skin is considered more beautiful, while tans are more desired if most people are rather pasty. So despite their hard-core nativist image, evolutionary psychologists propose a fair amount is learned based on environment.

However, anyone who looks at the wide physical variety of people who successfully find a mating partner, there is anything but a single desired form. I suspect that this is due in part to the many parameters that go into the attractiveness equation. Small stature can indicate youth, but it can also indicate sickly stunted growth. High body fat could indicate health with lots of resources to devote to children, it could indicate laziness (which is often a good thing -- if someone can afford to be lazy, they probably have plenty of resources), or it could indicate that a woman is already a mother.

So how do the factors play out in my brain? I find women of many shapes and sizes to be attractive for different reasons. But I think voluptuousity deserves special attention for several reasons. First, voluptuous usually means a soft armful to hug, which is my favorite physical thing to do with the opposite sex. (My favorite thing overall to do with the opposite sex is holding intellectual punversations. I'm a fan of nerd-sluts :-)

I think voluptuous is great also because it usually means a curvy figure, and curves are much more interesting to look at than linear functions. (See? Nerd-slut again.) The emaciated models in the check-out aisle look almost like teenage boys with boobs, and that's not a turn-on for me.

For the evolutionary psychologist, voluptuous is a good sign of childbearing potential. It also means if she gets stuck in Siberia, she'll have a higher R-value (to keep warm) and will be able to last longer on reserves. Plus, she'll float better in Lake Baikal. (Did I mention I'm also a barren landscape fetishist?)

Voluptuous women have more room to play with clothes, assuming they can find a store that sells clothes that fit them. (At Dragonfest, I loved the sign on the clothing merchant booth that said "Clothes for goddess-sized women.") Voluptuous women can wear big flowy clothes with grace and beauty. They can wear revealing clothing to enhance and advertise their natural assets. And I think female speed skaters (who have huge voluptuous-but-firm thighs) look waaay hot in their skin-tight drag-resistant suits. For girls without many assets, the beauty rests largely in the clothes themselves, but for voluptuous women, it's about how they wear them.

Voluptuousness often indicates power. From an angry earth goddess to a black mother of four from the ghetto, when a big and powerful woman makes demands, you're a lot more likely to follow instructions than when a quiet waif asks for something.

Finally, the EP has room to say that people would find attractive people who other people find attractive. That is, if all Timmy's friends think Jessica is pretty, Timmy might pick up on that and say to himself (in a module, natch) "She must have something going for her." Thus, it's not necessarily contrary to Neo-Darwinian theory that there are social standards of beauty and that people feel pressured to conform to them (which they do). The evolutionary psychology camp just thinks we have much less control over these standards than the postmodernists and feminists assert we do. The advertising industry (and, implicitly, mass media as a whole) has an interest in people spending lots of money on products to make themselves look a certain way. (Perhaps the food industry should advertise with non-anorexics.) Thin is in (though it wasn't even as recently as Marilyn Monroe and Mae West). So voluptuous women at some level fight the herd and the flow and express beauty in their natural body shape. And I think that's my fundamental beauty ideal -- the ability to be beautiful without putting too much effort into it. Because every five minutes that's spent on trying to look a certain way are five minutes that could be better spent geeking out. And I'd like to encourage that behavior. (Yay nerd-sluts!)


Incidentally, as indicated by my icon for this post and the frequent geek references, the most important features for me in a relationship are intellectual- and personality-based. Aside from snuggling ramifications, body shape and size and other appearance factors are about who I like looking at and daydreaming about.