Overthinking Folk Songs: Geordie

Having listened to Maddy Prior & June Tabor’s album ‘Silly Sisters’ several times at work the other day, I found myself with their version of Geordie stuck in my head — only, annoyingly, I couldn’t remember all the words, so had just snippets. Thinking to exorcise it through fuller knowledge, I opened up a songbook, Rise Up Singing, that I knew to have a version of it, to scan the lyrics.

Now, I am no stranger to folk music; I’m well aware that there are about a bajillion versions of every song, especially older ones, and that they vary considerably in both words and music. This, however, was a broader divergence than I ever would have expected. The very story changes dramatically! The basic story of a man called Geordie being condemned, and then his wife coming to beg for his life is the same, but they diverge in almost evey other aspect. And I know they are supposedly the same song, as well, since the songbook lists the ‘Silly Sisters’ album as an example recording!

In Prior & Tabor’s (which turned out to be this version, originally transcribed by Robert Burns), Geordie was a nobleman framed for the murder of another. His lady rides to court and is told his life will be spared if she collects a ginormous ransom, which she does, and so buys his freedom. In the Rise Up Singing version — as in most other, especially English versions, it turns out — Geordie is a poacher, and when his wife comes to beg for his freedom, she is turned away, and he dies. Talk about alternate endings!

A musician, identified only as ‘Ian’ in this Mudcat thread describes his own recording of the song as “an English song about a disproportionate punishment for a crime which evolved from a Scottish song about a frame-up”. The Scottish versions do seem to generally pre-date the English ones (though they also seem to have become less common), and I guess changing the condemned man to reflect a common-ish crime in your area, for which the punishment is widely seen as vastly unjust, does make a sort of sense. As, given the former, does having him actually die rather than get ransomed at the last minute. But at this point, is it even still the same song? Could there have been some other English song (or several) that got morphed into this one because the tune was catchy and the story was distilled and familiar?

Oddly, this recording by Ewan MacColl seems to combine elements of several versions, but seems mostly drawn from this one, known as Gight’s Ladye. Geordie’s wife is still a noblewoman of some sort, but Geordie’s crime is poaching. She isn’t turned away out of hand, though, and goes through with the begging for ransom money as in the other Scottish versions. However, it seems to me that her success in this is left ambiguous while the narrator is distracted by telling the tale of her verbal harrassment by a bawdy lord. Though, granted, my impression of ambiguity could merely be from an inferior understanding of Scots; it’s certainly not ambiguous in the ‘Gight’s Ladye’ version given on Mudcat. But why this “Bog o’ Gight” stuff? Well, a little googling proved illuminating: ‘Bog-Of-Gight’ is an old name for Gordon Castle, and the earliest historical event to be associated with this song/set of songs was the story of a George Gordon, who would have been lord of said castle at the time — although the actual events of his life, at least as given on Wikipedia, don’t quite line up with the song, and they CERTAINLY don’t line up with the ‘Gight’s Ladye’ version, though at a stretch they could be described by Burns’ ‘Geordie’.

So what is going on here? It seems unlikely that an earl — who’d have his own hunting preserves, after all — would be brought up for poaching. Yet the ‘Gight’s Ladye’ version preserves an awful lot of specific names and places, far more than Burns’ ‘Geordie’. Could the crime have been changed to make the song more populist in one area, while in another the events were recorded more faithfully even as the names all dropped away? It’s nearly impossible to tell. Though for those who feel like making minute comparisons between versions (woefully void of any information about where or when or how they were collected), it turns out Wiki has transcriptions of all of Child’s collections.

Meanwhile, a few thoughts on the Burns/Child A version. In it, Geordie is framed (or blamed for the death, anyway, regardless of guilt), and his lady, upon receiving the news of his captivity, rushes to Edinburgh with all of her men. Later on, after she’s made her tearful case to the king, but before the aged lord suggests a fine instead of death, we get this verse, which on first listen seems to break the pattern of the story considerably:

The Gordons cam and the Gordons ran,
And they were stark and steady;
And ay the word amang them a’
Was, Gordons keep you ready.

Then we see the king’s advisor suggesting that a fine might be the wiser course of action. Because this lady brought a freaking army with her to “beg” for her dearie’s life. Conclusion: the ‘fairest flower o’ woman-kind’ is a lot more badass than you might expect.

Identity Politics

I was born in the ’80s, which means I was a child during the ’90s. I remember them, but with the perspective of a child; I saw things on the news; I overheard grownups and parroted their opinions. I didn’t start to become politically aware in my own right until the early ’00s, and didn’t start to become an ‘activist’ until midway through university, by which point the “Coalition of the Willing” was deeply entrenched in Iraq. My first exposure to the broad Left, then, was the Stop the War movement. (I was also involved, actually rather more heavily, in an Injustice of the Day student campaigning group, but as they were mostly of an age with me, they didn’t have the depth of campaign experience that is relevant for what I want to discuss here.)

StW, or at least my acquaintances within it, seemed to be made up mostly of anti-nuclear activists, longtime pacifists (obvs.), socialists (or at least sellers of The Socialist Worker), and the regrouped remnants of the anti-globalization movement. Most of these, having found common purpose, seemed to share a collective scorn for the ‘Identity Politics of the ’90s’, which had so divided and derailed the movement from fighting the real enemy: capitalism, neoliberalism, the military-industrial complex. My memories of the ’90s include an awful lot of people emphasising their racial, gender, and sexual identities, and terms like ‘political correctness’ and ‘affirmative action’ were forever on everyone’s lips; and so I took these older campaigners at their word — their narrative certainly made a lot of sense, and helped me explain to myself how I could have reached the age of 18 without knowing that living socialists existed in the West, or how academics like Fukuyama could write bullshit like “The End of History”.

However, I am starting to grow skeptical of my activist elders. I know that, for all intents and purposes, I just wasn’t there in the ’90s, and therefore can’t really comment on what it was like, but when I see things like discussions about women’s safer spaces within the occupy camps repeatedly derailed by comments like “let’s not let this movement get bogged down in identity politics like the protest movements in the ’90s did”, I start to wonder. Did they? WERE the ’90s a time when anti-capitalists laid down their ideologies in order to focus on the colour of their skin or the composition of their genitalia, as the mainstream narrative would have us believe? Or was it simply that women, people of colour, and queer people of all acronyms looked around them and saw that the broad left, just like the rest of society, was silencing their voices and their concerns, patronizing them, and telling them that their problems would be dealt with after whatever other big problem they were protesting had been solved? The ’90s, after all, saw the rise of the anti-globalization movement, in opposition to the towering capitalist globalization movements coming out of the most powerful world government and inter-government agencies of the day (and now), as well as the same old pacifists and hard-bitten anti-nuke campaigners and all the other “yes that’s what I’ve been saying all along” fringe activist movements that are always with us. They clearly weren’t a time when no one was focusing on ideology. But, you know, what do I know. I was only a kid; I wasn’t really “there”.

Rape Culture and the Occupy X Protests

Like many feminists, I’ve been incredibly dismayed not only at the flood of reports of sexual harassment, assault and even rape in the Occupy camps, but also at many of the Occupiers’ responses to them. It is, of course, completely unacceptable for the camps to distance themselves from women who have been raped, and to shame and chastise them for even thinking of taking action to protect themselves in the way that they’ve been taught to their whole lives — namely, calling the police. And it is absolutely shameful that so many of these incidents have been intentionally downplayed or even hidden by the protesters in an attempt to keep the movement from “looking bad” (as if it didn’t look worse to simply ignore the sexual harassment problems).

However, I have also been disappointed by the response of some of those who have been similarly appalled by the situation. Sadly, many of the articles and commentaries voicing a strong critique of the sexual safety within the camps, and the camps’ responses to them, have proposed the same dead-end solution: end the occupations.

This response seems kind of bizarre when you compare the situation to many analogous ones, which don’t involve protests. If someone is sexually harassed or assaulted within a company, for instance, no one expects that company to be dissolved; they expect the perpetrator to be dealt with and the organization itself to continue. Or at more physically similar events — say, a large outdoor concert, or one of these music festivals the kids are all so fond of these days — when someone is raped or sexually assaulted, the situation is dealt with, and the show goes on. And in ordinary life, if, say, one person rapes another in a dark alley, WE BLAME THE RAPIST, NOT THE DARK ALLEY. Or at least we should, because blaming the physical situation is really, really uncomfortably close to blaming the victim h/erself.

Furthermore, it is not clear to me what, exactly, ending the occupations would accomplish other than muffling the voices of thousands of rightfully angry citizens. The sad truth is that, in a misogynistic society such as we live in, any situation in which women are placed in vulnerable positions, in crowds, and especially where they are sleeping in relatively exposed places, many will take this opportunity to sexually assault them (and some men, too). I am not a fatalist; I do not think this is in any way ‘inevitable’, nor do I think that the fact that it does happen is an excuse for allowing it to. However, it is important to acknowledge that it does, and that these atrocities are not unique to the Occupy camps. People are sexually assaulted all the time — at concerts, at festivals, at parties surrounded by friends and acquaintances. And no one would argue that this is a reason not to have concerts, or festivals, or parties; nor should they.

I am skeptical, too, about some of the outrage against the anti-police sentiments of many of the Occupy protesters. Personally, I would never condemn someone for calling or going to the police when they felt their safety was in danger, quite simply because that is how we are taught to react, and for most people, reaching for these perceived authority figures is an act of self-defence. At the same time, it must be acknowledged that the police and the courts have an extremely bad track record when it comes to dealing with rape reports — often harassing survivors so badly that they have sometimes said that the results of making the report were almost as bad as the rape itself — which is among the reasons so many rapes go unreported. Unless there happens to be an officer on hand to actually stop the assault from taking place, there’s probably not much they’re going to be able or willing to do to help you. The system of legal redress for sexual crimes is hopelessly broken (if ‘broken’ is even a term that can apply to a system that has been weighted against the victims from the beginning; that has never brought anything like justice or healing to survivors, delivering only petty vengeance at best, and a humiliating ordeal at worst or in addition). Given this inefficacy, and the fact that many people — especially long-time activists, the poor, and people of colour — have either been physically or sexually assaulted themselves by police, or have had it happen to those close to them (not to mention the police violence that has already been inflicted on several of the Occupy camps themselves), it is hardly surprising that many wish to find other ways of dealing with the problem of sexual attacks in the camp communities that they are creating, to develop their own systems of security.

What, then, is the solution? I have to admit, I don’t really know. It’s easy enough to name the source of the problem: patriarchy, misogyny, and (duh) the perpetrators of sexual attacks themselves. But I have no more idea of how to prevent sexual attacks in the Occupations than in any other area of life. The basic advice seems to be the same: 1) Don’t sexaully harass, assault, or rape anyone (simple!); 2) If you witness a sexual attack taking place, INTERVENE — say something, do something, call for help, call the attacker out on their behaviour, even (or especially) if it is as “subtle” as leering, making inappropriate comments, or using sexually threatening body language and the like; 3) When you see your comrades (or “passers-by” or “free lunchers” who are, like, totally unconnected with the camp, obvs) engaging in sexist language or behaviour, or voicing sexist opinions, CALL THEM OUT ON IT. This last is the more long-term solution, as obviously calling someone out on their sexist language today is probably not going to stop them raping someone tonight, but if complete non-tolerance of sexism becomes the norm, then (and only then) we will have hoisted ourselves out of the rape culture, and THAT will have a serious impact in reducing rape and other sexual assault and harassment.

Finally, it’s worth pointing out that, as spaces in which people are trying to build an intentional sense of community and communitarian spirit, the Occupy camps are exceptionally good places to practice this sort of community-based rape prevention. They’re certainly better suited to tackle sexual assault problems than, say, a music festival or a concert or even most larger house parties. The first step, though, is for the protesters to acknowledge the problem and tackle it head-on; if they continue to equivocate and distance themselves from those who have been sexually harassed and attacked within the camps, then they will only perpetuate the rape culture of the wider world. They will sow discontent among themselves and, ultimately, the movement will fail. There can be no class liberation without women’s liberation. We can’t wait until after The Revolution to tackle patriarchy. We have to do it NOW.

Action and Knowability

I haven’t been getting out much, but last weekend I did manage to go to a party, and got talking to a woman I met there, mostly about Kant. We argued with vehemence and gesticulation: she was of the opinion that all of Kant’s theories were BULLSHIT because he said that even space and time were merely constructs of the human mind and thus not actually real. I found this to be both a serious oversimplification and gross misunderstanding, although because she was one of the hosts I did not use those words. My own over-simplistic understanding of Kant’s metaphysics is that the business about space and time being constructs of the human mind is mostly an epistemological point: that the “true nature” of the universe is ultimately unknowable because, although we perceive things spatiotemporally, we cannot know that our perceptions are accurate. This does not rule out the possibility that our perceptions are in fact accurate regarding the extension of objects in space and time; it simply means we cannot know for sure. (Or rather, more subtly but also more accurately: that we cannot understand our perceptions except through scema, such as space and time, which we introduce ourselves; but again this does not ultimately mean that they are somehow “inaccurate”.)

I’ve also been watching lots of Star Trek lately, which, like most sci-fi, has a tendency to play out weird ethical thought experiments. Viz.:

The captain always defends the deontological position; the first officer, the utilitarian.

(Drawing is from Hourly Comics Day, which I did not complete with enough pizzazz to share any but this.)

There are questions, of course, about the extent to which Kant’s metaphysics were important to his ethical theories, but I maintain that in the most important ways they are effectively separate. Kantian ethics can be effectively summed up in his Categorical Imperative, which is to “Act as if the maxim of your actions were a universal law” or various other effectively similar formulations. It is commonly dismissed for the somewhat ironic reason that it is often impossible to know the consequences of one’s actions. And of course for the impossibility of correctly formulating “maxims” by which one purports to act.

Meanwhile, at work, I have a copy of Rawls’ A Theory of Justice reserved for myself, so that if I ever get around to reading it all the way through, I can disagree with it more intelligently. In a nutshell, though, Rawls provides the last possibly defensible gasp for Social Contract Theory, via a thought experiment in which one is meant to defend the state which one would find most palatable even if one did not know which position one would hold within it. We are meant to hedge our bets, of course, because we want it to turn out that, even if we were the lowliest of the low, the society we “chose” when we were in the “original position” (from which one sets the parameters of the society) would not be so bad. It is a fine thought experiment, except for the conclusion that the obvious choice of society would be a liberal state. When I run the experiment in my own head, the society I imagine is an anarcho-socialist one.

How I Ruined Science and Other Stories

Today I came across one of those hi-larious comic flowcharts, this one about alternative medicine. Now, it’s hardly new or innovative to make fun of ‘alternative therapies’ (though this is a fairly well-done piece of humour), but I want to draw your attention to one corner of it in particular. That is, the options for those wanting a “wholly ‘natural’ remedy” and who believe that “Yes, Big Pharma are the devil”. The choice is then based on the “Quantity of active ingredients required”. “Bugger all” leads to “Homeopathy”;* “An unknown, uncontrolled & untested amount” leads to “Herbal Medicine”.

This idea of testing has been at the centre of most of the more civil debates I’ve had or seen about herbal medicines, and it’s an important one. Many arguments are marred throughout by both sides’ tendency to argue as though more committed to being on a side than to striving towards Truth, no matter what they may claim. That is: typically, someone on the anti-herbal side will point out that little or no medical testing has been done for most herbal remedies. Then someone on the pro-herbal side will either bemoan the lack of funding for testing in most places — at which point arguments usually end because the opponents see that they are on the same ‘side’ really, the side of scientific testing, they are just coming into it with differing hypotheses — or else the pro-herbalist will question the validity of medical testing itself. And that is when it usually gets nasty.**

It’s this sort of oppositional attitude, I think, that leads people to ridiculously extreme positions of either disregarding all scientific research, or blindly accepting it all just because it’s *~*~science~*~* (though it’s worth noting that the latter view seems to be much more prominent among rationalistic non-scientists than practicing scientists or especially scientific researchers). The trouble, of course, is that a lot of scientific research, and — this excellent article in this month’s Atlantic magazine leads me to believe — medical research in particular, is often filled with methodological flaws. Some are the result of bias or fraud, but many are simply unavoidable, and probably many more are simply oversights. It is simply not healthy — literally or figuratively — to accept all research uncritically.

In the above-linked article, meta-researcher Dr. John Ioannidis claims, and has come up with a mathematical proof to demonstrate, that under normal conditions, most medical research turns out to be wrong. Moreover: “His model predicted, in different fields of medical research, rates of wrongness roughly corresponding to the observed rates at which findings were later convincingly refuted: 80 percent of non-randomized studies (by far the most common type) turn out to be wrong, as do 25 percent of supposedly gold-standard randomized trials, and as much as 10 percent of the platinum-standard large randomized trials.” And yet, of course, it would be wrong to say that this is a reason to automatically distrust all medical research — though it certainly appears to be a reason only to trust randomized trials, and even to take those with a grain of salt. It is still less reason to think we should abandon the concept of medical research altogether. It just means that we need to work to make that research better.

An example from my own life has been niggling at my conscience for years now. St Andrews is a major centre for certain kinds of psychological research, as well as having a host of psychology grad students with their own research projects, and as such it is fairly common for students to earn bits of extra money by participating in experiments. Now, St Andrews is also a small town, and the university is small, and quite a lot of students know each other, and even more students, I would think, will know each other within the set of current students who participate in these experiments, because a lot of them find out about them through friends who’ve done them too — I mean, really, what student anywhere would give up the chance, or fail to pass on word of the chance, to earn almost minimum wage for pressing buttons for 45 minutes?

For most experiments, the fact that a lot of participants know each other is surely a non-issue. But one of the bigger labs within the department is one that researches perceptions of faces. This surely must be affected by the participant’s familiarity with the faces they view within the experiment. In the one I did, I was first given a basic colour-blindness test and then asked to rate how “healthy” various faces looked. There were fifteen or twenty faces in the cycle, and I knew close to a third of them. Two were close friends! I’m sure this must have made a difference, because I could tell where my friends’ faces had been digitally manipulated or stretched or discoloured, which I generally couldn’t with the strangers’.

I tried to tell someone this at the time, but they were all so busy and I was so shy that I didn’t work up the courage to demand one of their attention long enough to point out this potential (and potentially serious) methodological flaw. Then they took my picture to add to their database, gave me my handful of coins and sent me on my way. Ever since, I’ve been idly wondering whether or not I should email someone, but I don’t know who I would email, and the more time passes the more embarrassing it would seem to be, to initiate the discussion. But REALLY. It’s probably not something that most experimenters would need to think to control for, if they were in larger cities or had larger or older databases or whatever, but in that particular situation, it seems like a gross oversight — and one quite easily corrected within the experiment, with just a button or something the participant could click if the face generated was an acquaintance’s. Or by having a time lag of a good few years in between entering a participant’s photograph into the database and having it show up in experiments. Or something.

The good news, though, is that Dr. Ioannidis’ work has been exceptionally well-received by the medical community. Yet there is apparently controversy within the meta-research community for exactly the reasons described above: some fear that seeding public doubts about scientific research will simply drive people to seek “alternative” therapies or ignore the medical establishment, or their own health, altogether. I much prefer his proposed solution. To quote the Atlantic article: “We could solve much of the wrongness problem, Ioannidis says, if the world simply stopped expecting scientists to be right. That’s because being wrong in science is fine, and even necessary—as long as scientists recognize that they blew it, report their mistake openly instead of disguising it as a success, and then move on to the next thing, until they come up with the very occasional genuine breakthrough.”

* As well it should.

** Let us be clear: it also gets nasty because of the anti-herbal camp’s tendency to lump herbal remedies together with all other “alternative” therapies, like homeopathy and crystal healing and bullshit like that, and equivocate between them in their refutations; and by the tendency of many proponents of herbal remedies to also believe in bullshit like homeopathy and crystal healing.

Gender Politics: The Next Generation

I’ve been watching a lot of Star Trek recently. (Don’t laugh.) I find it pretty nostalgic, even having seldom actively watched it as a child, since my mother’s been a Trekkie ever since the days of Captain Kirk and the first interracial kiss on television. Not that I ever watched Captain Kirk, since there were always new episodes of new series, and the ones I associate with childhood are those from the early ’90s: The Next Generation — Captain Picard, Geordi La Forge, Data. It is cheesy and wholesome and sweet, but with space aliens.

Something’s been bothering me, though, and it’s not just the utterly nonsensical physics, or the ideological mallets banging through the plot of every show. Well, related to the latter. Closely related.

See, the original Star Trek was intentionally cast with a crew that was racially and sexually diverse, the better to display Gene Roddenberry’s vision of a socially egalitarian future society. See above: first interracial kiss on television (though for some reason the many inter-species kisses did not cause such a stir… presumaby because the actress playing Uhura really was black, while all the ubiquitously blonde aliens were obviously just safe white girls with a little bit of facial putty.) I read somewhere that in the pilot episode, the First Officer was played by a woman, though this was changed for the series because network execs didn’t think a 1960s audience would find a female commander plausible. This changed over the course of the series, of course, with Star Trek: Voyager even having a female captain. (And, for what it’s worth, in TNG we are introduced to a number of female admirals in Star Fleet.)

So as far as women having the same economic power as men, the show does okay — though, I’m not sure whether ‘economic’ is an appropriate term here, since the show seems to operate in a (blessedly) post-capitalist society where money does not exist. In terms of sexual politics, however, the 24th Century appears to be gloomily like the 20th — and, though the makers of the show may perhaps be forgiven for their lack of prescience of their own near futures — to have even lost some of the advances of the 21st. I am talking, of course, about gay characters. Or, more accurately, the total lack thereof.

It’s hard to criticise something for an absence. It could be incidental. However, it’s pretty hard to stomach a show that tries so hard to be ‘inclusive’ in the ’90s Liberal sense of the word, with its many Powerful Female Characters and racially diverse crew (albeit mostly-white main cast — and, for that matter, a crew only ‘racially diverse’ by the standards of the United States, not the globe. But nevermind.) Homosexuality seems conspicuously absent. And it’s not like they haven’t given themselves opportunities to talk about it.

In one episode, Dr. Crusher, one of the ship’s Powerful Women, falls in love with a visiting science officer, who turns out to actually be a symbiotic parasite living inside the body of the ‘person’ she had fallen for, and when that body dies it has to be temporarily housed in Commander Riker’s body, while it awaits a new host body from its home planet. Yet, through a bit of personal angst, Dr. Crusher finds that she can still love this person, even when it is in the form of her (male) colleague, and not the body she originally fell for, because love conquers all!. Skip to the end: Dr. Crusher sits in a room awaiting Her Love, which has just been installed in a new host. A woman enters. Female: INSURMOUNTABLE OBSTACLE! So she breaks it off. She, uh, just can’t deal with all of this constant changing of her lover’s body — despite the lack of any indication that this body will last less than a good few decades; the other had only been lost due to a freak accident. The End.

Another episode (117: ‘The Outcast’ — Spoiler Alert!) seems like a clear allegory for the repression of sexual ‘deviants’ in our own society. The Enterprise meets a totally androgynous race of aliens, one of whom feels like she is, deep inside, really a woman (and thus, of course, falls in love with Commander Riker). This genderedness is heavily repressed in her society; she is discovered, and psychologically “reprogrammed” to “fix” her gender back to neutral. But… the episode does nothing with this potential allegory, and if anything, allows it to re-enforce the heteronormativity that permeates the entire show.

Because, of course, it’s not the lack of any non-heterosexual characters that makes the show heteronormative. That, as mentioned, could simply be incidental — in the same way that there are not representatives of every human ethnicity among the crew of the Enterprise; identity politics can get a bit silly that way, and I want to be clear that that’s not what I’m criticising. Rather, it is the fact that, as evidenced by their conversation, the questions they ask alien races, and the questions that alien races (even androgynous races!) ask them, all characters are automatically assumed to be heterosexual. The mere possibility of a female being attracted to other females, or a male to other males, is never broached. Not even once. Granted, I have a few more seasons of TNG left to watch, and I haven’t seen most of Deep Space Nine or Voyager… but given the Very Traditional nature of what few actual relationships and marriages exist in Star Trek thus far, I don’t have much hope.

Voting the Bastards Out

I guess I’m a little late to the UK election commentary game. Most attention now seems to have turned away from the contest itself and, quite rightly, towards plans for how best to mitigate the disastrous result that nobody wanted (with the exception, perhaps, of a handful of libertarians who probably didn’t like any of the major parties anyway, but were oh so torn between the Tories and the LibDems). It’s over now, the UK’s been ConDem’ed. Smarmy git Cameron is in 10 Downing Street with Judas by his side. Now the question is how we can prevent this from ever happening again.

The Rest of the Robots

I’ve just re-read Asimov’s ‘The Rest of the Robots’. I don’t actually remember reading it the first time, it’s only that every time I started a new story, I realised a page or two in that I’d read it before. I persisted, though, because they are pretty entertaining, Asimov’s hard-on for Susan Calvin notwithstanding (oh man, that is such a topic — but for another time). Anyway, this time around I have Some Thoughts.

Pro-Choice: variations on a theme

I am female. This means that for as long as I can remember, people have inquired about my intention to procreate. I recall being asked at the age of about four how many children I intended to have, and being encouraged to seriously contemplate the question. And I did, too, as did my sister.

My brother did not. It didn’t matter. I mean, obviously if a male child discussed the issue, it was seriously discussed with him (my cousin Alex used to say he wanted 12 kids), but the matter never seemed to be pressed on them if they didn’t bring it up.

As I got older, the messages started to change, for a while. The topic of procreation became more about how it worked and how to prevent it, and for a while it seemed that we females were on somewhat equal footing with the males; our bodies were different, but it was impressed upon us that we had equal responsibility for preventing unplanned pregnancy (a stance that older feminists inform me is a recent one).

… But a few years later, as the conversation turns towards the question of having kids rather than preventing them, all the weight is shifted back onto the women. Women are encouraged, at every stage of their fertile years, to think about their potential to have children, and the consequences thereof. In particular, we are asked to consider how to “balance” this with our desire for a “career”. Countless articles are written about it, ranging from go-getter encouraging to pessimistic and downright demeaning.

The left hand giveth, and the right hand driveth millions more into poverty

There’s this old parable I heard once. I don’t know how old, actually (and it might have come from one of those Chicken Soup for the Soul books my mother used to be so fond of), but it goes like this:

A storm out at sea has washed thousands of starfish onto a beach, and a man is walking along the beach, picking them up one by one, and flinging them back into the sea.”What are you doing?” asks an incredulous passer-by, “You’ll never save them all! There are thousands of starfish on the beach, and you’re only one man; you’ll save maybe a hundred, tops. You can’t possibly make a difference!”

The man doesn’t stop, doesn’t even look up. He just picks up another starfish and tosses it into the sea. “I sure made a difference to that one,” he says. Boo-yah!

But … what if storms like that are totally uncharacteristic for the area, but are becoming more frequent (and thus likely to kill many, many more starfish) due to global warming, which is contributed to, in part, by, say, offshore oil wells near these folk’s seaside town? And all of this is allowed (and even encouraged) by their government? Wouldn’t it be more productive for citizens to spend their time lobbying their government and campaigning against the oil drilling, rather than throwing starfish into the sea? Or at least for that man to say “Hey, I’m gonna handle these starfish right here, why don’t you go fight the oil companies?”