Birds and Bees

Chewing The Cud, Part Two

All Cows Eat Grass. And of course Every Good Boy Deserve Football, or maybe Favours or Females. Or maybe some other word beginning with F, depending on how open minded your music teacher was. And while they may deserve it, most don’t get it. Every Good Boy Get Stuck In The Friend-Zone is probably more accurate. Every Good Boy Gets Ignored By Sarah Connelly As She Continues To Sleep With A Succession Of Arseholes While Sobbing On The Shoulder Of The One Person Who Would Never Hurt Her And Ignoring What Is In Front Of Her Face, is definitely so. Though I’m not sure quite what sort of stave you’d need to fit that on.

Faced with that sort of insane female logic, I’m not all that surprised that the current generation of Japanese men is apparently giving up their interest in Females’ Favours and other Fs, opting instead just to Eat Grass. You see, I’m not talking about music at all, I’m talking about Herbivorous men!

Told you it was clever.

No Homer, the whole world's not gay. Not even metrosexual, despite the increased consumption of hair gel and exfoliate. Resolutely asexual. To throw back to last time, if western women are increasingly expected to resemble real life Barbie dolls, then these guys are Ken. Fantastic grooming, great wardrobes, but there’s a distinct lack of what’s necessary to achieve fulfillment.

StagNation

You’ll remember that Japanese culture is to Western culture as does are to stags; basically the same, but with enough outward differences that they can at first appear to be completely different things. In that same post, I talked about the depressing tendency for young men in the UK to get pissed up and scrap with each other as some kind of confused mating ritual. A drunken rut, or lek if you will. This kind of thing happens throughout the animal kingdom. Deer do it. Ass do it. Birds do it, bees do it, even educated...

Actually, no, not the bees. No point. The male drones have a very specific, predetermined function to perform and it’s of no benefit to them to try to push beyond the limits of their role. If they hang around long enough without upsetting the rest of the hive then a lucky few might eventually get to fuck a queen. Which is perhaps where this metaphor starts to fall down a touch.

Let’s change tack. Look at this clip. Observe those great shuddering mounds of flesh slapping repeatedly against each other; over and over as cataracts of bodily fluid gush forth from freshly opened gashes and ruptures. Hark to the pounding, grinding of bodies time and time again in visceral, primal, exultant explosions of dominance and submission until finally they collapse; groaning, heaving, spent and bloodied in the surf.

And you thought we’d finished with the porn last time.

All of that over some ladies. But at least they’ve got something to fight for. It’s an unarguable meritocracy. You get what you can take; you keep what you can hold. I’d hope that as a species we’ve risen above beating the shit out of each other as the primary way to secure sex, but there’s something to be said for a continual testing of fitness.

Or even any testing of fitness at all. It’s certainly preferable to just hanging around gathering dust. Those beachmasters are generally the oldest sea lions, because with age comes guile and wisdom. Actually, that’s not right, with experience comes guile and wisdom, if you’re capable of learning. It’s far from axiomatic that age=ability.

Yet this is what we’re left with in Japan. As so often, it feels like they’ve taken a decent idea and pushed it to the point where it becomes ridiculous. Making it past your 50^th birthday in somewhere like Somalia is a genuine mark of distinction, but not here. This is one of the most developed, prosperous countries in the world. I’m certainly not saying that older people are useless or incapable of contributing, far from it, but neither does their age automatically ensure the opposite.

If your future depends on nothing more than not pissing people off and not dying. Then why would you want to take risks? Risks that are a traditional preserve of idiotic young men trying to impress women. Seriously, it’s the hormones. Young guys generally act like reckless dicks on legs because that’s how you win a mate, because that’s what the ladies like. Mother Nature knows this and compensates accordingly, ensuring that slightly more baby boys are born than baby girls. The natural wastage due to that risky behavior means that by the time a cohort reaches reproductive age the numbers will have balanced out.

Christ, there was even a seriously floated theory recently that war is nothing more than male exuberance seeking an outlet by whatever means necessary. Feel free to link that up to Article 9 and extrapolate wildly in the direction of some kind of constitutional castration. I did and it’s great fun.

This could have been so, so much worse...

But that risk taking behavior isn’t necessary in Japan. In fact it’s downright counterproductive. Keep your head down and try not to get killed. Great advice in an actual war, but not conducive to a vibrant culture and economy. Not compatible with traditional ‘carnivorous’ male behavior.

In The Selfish Gene Richard Dawkins talks about the welfare state essentially ensuring the end of human evolution, severing as it does the link between reproductive success and genetic fitness. Pump out as many babies as you like and the state will care for them, regardless of your ability to do so. In Japan it’s the same thing, except it’s gone so far it’s looping back on itself.

As could this

Older men hold the power in pretty much all societies (for the sake of brevity let’s assume that ‘power’ and ‘sexual attractiveness’ are interchangeable). As such, pairing up with a younger man represents something of a risk for a woman; she’s betting that he’s got enough going for him that he’ll be able to maintain her offspring further down the road. In most cultures when a woman’s studying the form book, a certain amount of aggression and risk taking are positive things. Not here though, in fact thanks to job-security and lifetime employment they’re actually negative attributes. The surest route to obtaining power is not by fighting and beating your rivals, but by ruthlessly outwaiting them.

So, if you’re a young Japanese woman looking to settle down, frankly it makes sod all difference to your offspring’s survival chances who you choose, as long as they’re not a complete fucking idiot. The seniority system and lifetime employment mean that you’ll eventually be pretty comfortable no matter what.

Sorry? What was that? Lifetime employment can’t be taken for granted anymore? Even in Japan? Funny you should mention that. It’s a good point, and thereby hangs a tale. Please join me for part three, as and when, wherein I shall attempt to demonstrate that despite everything I’ve written here I’m not some übertotalitarian Galton-worshiping eugenics freak, advocating some sort of cull for everyone past a certain age. Honestly.

Part 3 here.

Credit where it’s due.