The Ying and the Yang

Does everyone know what a yinyang is? At this point, I would be surprised if you did not, especially among my usual body of readers, who tend to be well-educated. Let me lay out out, just to be sure. A yinyang is that funny symbol with a white swirl and a black swirl meeting each other, in identical sizes and shapes, making up a circle when placed together. The white swirl has a black dot in its largest area, and the black has a white dot in its largest area.

The yinyang is a Traditional Chinese symbol. European mythology has generally contrasted light and dark with good and evil, or with purity and sin. Buddhists don't do this. The yinyang represents, not enemies matching each other with equal power, but two differing and unopposing powers of equal strength, who need each other to survive. The white brings out the black; the black brings out the white. Remove one, and they both suffer. In the excellently-written "Avatar: The Last Airbender" series, the Moon and Ocean spirits are depicted as a black and white fish swimming around each other. The Moon and the Ocean, as mythical creatures as well as scientific entities, act upon each other, but are not considered adversaries.

The element "yin" is female, and the element "yang" is male.

So let's pretend for a moment that you are an old practitioner of Chinese Traditional beliefs. You have a little shop in town, where you sell yinyang pendants, other pendants like the multicolored, five-pointed star, herbs and spices, and about eight different flavors of Pocky. The adults like the spices, the teens like the pendants, which they wear carelessly (but that doesn't bother you), the kids love the Pocky.

One day, a young woman enters your shop, wearing a pendant that depicts a big black spot. Trying to make conversation, you admire her black spot pendant. To your surprise, she screams and curses at you and tells you that it is a yinyang. Puzzled and confused, trying to pull yourself together under her onslaught, you try to explain the concept of the yinyang and why it is not a black spot... why the yang is as important as the yin and the yin as important as the yang. She tells you that you're a racist bigot and an idiot, threatens to burn down your house, and storms out of the shop, leaving you shaken.

Over the next few months, you start seeing this more and more. People enter the shop with black pendants or white pendants and insist that they are yinyangs. You don't really care if they want to wear black or white pendants. You are a bit concerned that they think these are yinyangs, but any attempts to explain otherwise are met with open hostility and, at times, threats. You keep up your shop, you are happy to explain your traditions to those who ask, and you delight in explaining how yinyang equivalents can be found in almost any other culture out there, including their own... but you have learned to tense up and shut up when you see someone wearing a black pendant or a white pendant.

Then the government, one day, declares that since you sell yinyang pendants (to anybody who wants them, as always), you are required to manufacture and sell white dots and black dots to anybody who wants them (which you honestly wouldn't mind doing and have already done a few times), and you are specifically required to label them as "yinyang pendants" (which is the part that bothers you). On that very same day, people come into your shop, screaming insults at you when they realize you haven't decided whether to lie about Traditional Chinese symbols for the sake of your income or close your shop entirely. "Your rights aren't being affected," they insist, "because you are allowed to say that the black and white symbol is a yinyang as long as you do it very quietly in your house while you're engaging in acts of meditation." Then they start mocking you. "The government hasn't redefined yinyang at all, and I bet you can't prove otherwise!" they say, and when you try to explain the history of your people and the yinyang equivalents of other cultures, they tell you that you are stupid and uneducated, and, therefore, nothing you say matters.

But most of all, since you have never objected when they simply wore the black or white dots, and, though you may have been perturbed when they said it was yinyang, you would not have forbidden them through the government from making their claims, you are saddened and perplexed by their insistence that you not only follow their terminology, but sell those black and white dots specifically as yinyangs in your own shop.

And now, in the aftermath of the government's decision, what seems strangest to you is that the people who won, the people who decided to "redefine" your symbol and shut you up with threats of government punishment should you disagree, seem to be the angriest of all the parties once involved in the now-stifled debate of whether a yinyang can exist without the yin or without the yang.

Daddy's in Mexico with Sally

One of the bigger controversies of 80's films is Steven Spielberg's decision to replace guns with walkie-talkies in the DVD version of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. Remember that? Spielberg made a pretty little speech about how he felt the guns were 'too scary' for youngsters and he felt it was wrong to depict them in the movie.

Happily, Spielberg has seen the light, and regrets that decision. The guns will be back for the Blu-Ray release of the film.

That didn't stop me from thinking, though, as I listened to some E.T. soundtrack music while pinning and cutting a new dress on the dining room table. (Yes, I am that weird.) Spielberg was responding to a lot of criticism he received about that part of the movie. Apparently, there are many parents who believe that showing guns in a children's movie is just too scary. I have to wonder about their priorities. The scariest thing in that movie, for the children, has nothing to do with weapons or aliens.

Early in the movie, we are introduced to a family in crisis. The mother is obviously overtired and has little control over her kids. There is no sign of a father. We soon find out why, when the little one blurts out that "Daddy is with Sally in Mexico." From the way her older brothers hush her up, and her mother's shattered poise, it was obvious that only one member of the family did not know. The theme emerges a few more times. The boys are very obviously keeping important problems from their mother to spare her feelings and keep from burdening her further.

I was about eight years' old when the movie really hit the market and started being shown and reshown everywhere. I saw it at friends' houses, with that familiar green thing on the VHS tape making it easy to pick out from the others. I saw it at school for an 'afternoon treat' during a Christmas party. I saw it in a summertime drive-in theater. Right around that time, my closest neighborhood friend's parents got a divorce. It was like that in the mid-80's. You were going along your merry way and suddenly a friend, a neighbor, maybe even your own mom and dad were getting a divorce. In a way, it was like a battlefield. You never knew which of your fellow soldiers would fall next.

Spielberg chose to remove those guns from the DVD edition of the movie. Do I wish he had removed the parental abandonment angle from the movie? After all, in other famous kid movies, like Iron Giant and Toy Story, the missing father is barely alluded to, and his method of disappearance is never explained. No, I wouldn't want it removed. It is one of the major reasons, perhaps even stronger than the alien himself, this became such an iconic and important movies of the '80's. It dared to do what so many movies do not, and show all of us just how badly it hurts a family when "Daddy is in Mexico with Sally".

In this day and age, divorce is no longer a new and strange phenomenon. Our children are growing up with peers who never had a father, whose mothers never even married the guy, and they are being taught that this is fairly normal and no big deal. On top of that, we have seen all sorts of new gun legislation and attempts at gun legislation, enforcing and reinforcing the notion that guns are just too scary for children. Fatherlessness, though, that's just no big deal...

The idea of facing an adversary bearing weapons is practically second-nature to these kids. The guns aren't ever even pointed at them. Not a single shot is fired. What scares them is the lack of a parent, or the fear that, at any time, one of their parents may simply walk away... and go to Mexico with Sally.

Spontaneous Storytelling for Morality

This morning, I looked around at the general mess left from yesterday's birthday party. I started loading dishes into the dish drainer as my eldest finished his breakfast. Then I told him to clean up the dining and living room.

Cue the angst. "But I just did it yesterday!"
"Does it look clean?"
"Nooooo! But that's because it got so messy so quickly!"
"It needs to be done, then."
"It's going to take me all day! It'll take five hours!"
"Then perhaps you need practice. I should have you do it every day."
"Then I'll never get any schoolwork done at all, because I won't have time!"

I'll spare you the rest. It went on for a while, and got ridiculous. Yes, more ridiculous than the notion that picking up toys and carrying dishes to the sink will take up five hours of every day, and taking up five hours of a day at any activity will prevent him from having the time to finish a curriculum that typically takes him 4-6 hours depending on the day, including breaks and food. (With a recent average of two, since we are close to the end of his year and half of his books are finished.) Anyways...

Improvisational storytelling in such situations comes to me so easily that I used to assume that every mother gained it as a natural skill, like the ability to change a diaper and remember what your five-year-old had for lunch. Since then, I have heard from people who tell me that my gift is not all that common. If it is inherited, I definitely inherited it from my mother, who does it all the time. On my father's side, my semi-famous great-uncle poet credited his mother's ability to invent songs and rhymes on the fly while cleaning the house, and engaging her children in the process as if they were playing a game. (They didn't exactly have television, or radio, or electricity, in the late 1800's Ukrainian slums.)

The skill is definitely strong in my line.

"Do you know what comes of this? Do you? The way you treat your mother is the way you will treat your wife. Oh yes, it's true. The way you treat your mother and your sisters, growing up, is the way you will treat your wife. Do you know what will happen? Let me tell you.

"At first she'll ask for your help when the house needs to be cleaned after a party, or when the kids are acting up and she can't keep ahead of her chores. You'll whine and complain just like you're doing here, try to blame everything on her..." I approximated (and may have exaggerated) the whine in his voice. "'Oh I won't have time for my job if I do that, and then I'll lose my job, and we won't have any money anymore!' So she'll ask at first, but she'll get tired of your emotional abuse, and she'll stop asking. She'll do everything herself. She'll be afraid to seek help from you.

"Guess what happens next. She burns out. She gets burned out, so exhausted she can't think, just working and working all the time, doing her chores and yours. And then do you know what she'll do? She'll divorce you." This produced a moment of silence, which I allowed to cultivate for a moment before picking up my narrative. "She'll divorce you for neglect, and for emotional abuse. And do you know what she'll say when she exits the courthouse after signing the divorce papers? She'll say..." Here I paused and changed my expression (and tone) from dramatic to a mixture of relief and slight disbelief. "'I don't have to wash his socks anymore. I don't have to take out his garbage anymore." The relief gives way to excitement. "I'm going to go out and see a movie tonight! I haven't gone out to a movie in ten years!"

Back to lecture mode. "How would you feel if your wife divorced you and then said that? You wouldn't like that, would you? Who do you think washes Daddy's socks? I do. And you know what? I don't mind doing it! Do you know why? It's because when I have a house to clean, or a party to set up, or misbehaving kids, I know he's got my back. You want to be like Daddy. He's a hard worker, and he cares for us. He might grumble a little when he has to take out the garbage, but he does not gripe at me, and he does not blame me. He does not say, 'I bet you fill it up so fast just to give me more work to do!'" Here, of course, I had cut in the kid-whiny tone again.

"So I'm going to make sure you learn. You're going to learn how to clean, and how to do it without complaining. I'm doing this for the sake of your wife, so that she will never have to go through what you put me through this morning. Do you understand?"

A mumbled yes. This is actually the first full vocalization from him, since all of my repeated questions have not incorporated any answer-me pauses, implicit or explicit.

"Good. Now clean the living room and dining room."

The scientific argument for monogamy

I've heard this one before. Have you? "Humans might be naturally promiscuous," they say. Then they bolster their opinion with, "After all, our closest ancestors are apes and monkeys, and they're promiscuous." Now what do you say in response to that? You know that men are not apes, and that we aren't supposed to act just like them. The argument against their talking point has generally taken that tack (apes also engage in rape and infanticide, and we wouldn't want to make that part of society, would we?) or simply the emotional/spiritual form (we have the ability to act beyond our instincts, it separates us from the animals, etc.), which is hard to explain to someone who doesn't think we're anything special.

So in interests of advancing a new argument to bring into the mainstream, I would like to introduce you to the Prairie Vole.

The prairie vole is a curiosity among voles because of it's monogamous behavior. It has, in fact, *very* monogamous behavior. It forms a life-long mating bond. The mated couple live together, groom each other, engage in various animal forms of affection (rather than only showing interest during mating time), and the male even helps the female nurture and raise the children. Promiscuity is very rare, mostly because the mated vole comes to dislike the very scent of other voles of the opposite sex.

Why should we care about the prairie vole? After all, doesn't the whole "we are promiscuous because apes are promiscuous" argument hedge on our similarity to apes? Well, that's the interesting thing. We share DNA with the prairie vole. Specifically, our sexual-behavior DNA is an identical strand. It has the same information, and it repeats the same number of times. Does it make a difference? Yes. When that DNA strand was fitted into a sample group of the ardently promiscuous meadow vole, they turned just as monogamous as the prairie vole.

Curious, I did a search on "prairie vole" and "homosexual". The best I could come up with was a study that showed that prairie voles formed temporary same-sex relationships under certain conditions. However, though the relationships involved shared sleeping space and some grooming, they did not mention anything about actual *sexual* behavior.

Benefits without Benefits

I stumbled across an oldie but goodie while reading a discussion of gay marriage. One of the people referred back to this Family Research Center writeup, citing numerous studies and statistics to call into doubt the notion that the typical homosexual relationship is basically just like the typical heterosexual one.

This leads me back to an old SSM argument which claims that being able to legally marry will stabilize gay relationships, and the main reason why gays are so promiscuous and so many of their relationships are so short-lived is because they don't receive the state benefits. Frankly, the early information on the length of gay marriages in countries and states that permit them are not promising.

Gay activists like to pull race into the mix, comparing any disapproval at all with homosexual sex with the kind of racism that once enslaved an entire people. I'd like to pull in the racist angle and give it a bit of a twist.

When blacks were enslaved, they had no rights. They had no legal standing. Nevertheless, they married each other all the time. On 'friendlier' plantations, the master would oversee a pretty little ceremony. On less friendly places, they would hold their ceremonies quietly, but they still married and were given in marriage.

Now when I say that blacks have no rights, I should remind my readers that this went far beyond simply lacking tax status. They had no inheritance, because they could not own property. Furthermore, a master was fully able to sell the wife away from the husband, or their children away from their parents. The environment was not simply unfriendly to marriage among the black slaves. It was downright hostile.

And yet despite this, the marriages prospered. When slavery first ended and the Civil Rights era began, the family values of the black culture put white culture to shame. Marriages lasted.

It is clear to me that the simple legal acknowledgement of a relationship as "marriage" is not what lends stability. Marriage is a term that is not so much defined as derived. It is the inherent qualities of marriage, the hormonal/chemical/physical/emotional/psychological workings of a sexually exclusive, opposite-sex couple that makes marriage what it is. Slapping the label on a group known for their promiscuity and short-term relationships will not transform them into upstanding pillars of family values.