This is part #3 of a freeform piece, a personal narrative and memoir that also encompasses the subject of evolutionary selection pressures.
It’s out there for all to see. It’s Rosebud; it’s the Maltese Falcon; it’s a meaningless plot device that drives the narrative. I’ve said it’s a pronoun but it isn’t. It’s kráp! And kâ. It’s a polite particle (pp) in the Thai language whereby men or women, respectively, end their sentences with either kráp or kâ, depending on their sex or gender. I’ve seen gay men and women use the opposite sex pp and the great thing is, unlike pronouns, I now know something about the person that’s important to them, but that’s the end of it. I don’t have to repeat it, as Rameswami put it, like a catechism, every time you speak to the person. It’s a one-way imperative. Woke won’t work in Thailand, at least as pronouns go.
So, now that’s out of the way, I think I can say that these Chiang Mai posts are turning into a bit of a memoir, interwoven with why I’m actually here in Thailand. If you read #1, you’ll know why I’m in Thailand (go read it, it’s free!) To get back to who I am, after being a mother and primary carer for almost 20 years.
Now, why would a woman living in the advanced civilisation of THE WEST have to forsake a career as a writer in this day and age? Plenty do both. The answer is evolutionary selection pressures (I talk about them in #1 too) and life history theory. Two important concepts in evolutionary science.
Back in the 1980’s it was popular for media articles to ask, “Can women have it all?” and recently, Guardian feminist Barbara Ellen scolded Paloma Faith for answering the question with, “No.” Barbera wrote, “(T)his statement may have sent shockwaves through the female heart.” (my emphasis) This ranks with me as one of the most anodyne sentences ever been written, but she went on, “Is there still no such thing as a wholly supportive man? Is this really true, even now?”
No Barbera, because people are individuals with adaptive endowments passed on to them over millions of years of evolution via the barely imaginable struggles of their ancestors to survive and reproduce successfully. It’s something feminism refuses to understand. Humans are not a eusocial species, we’re not clones, we were not born blank slates and those ignorant of evolution (like feminists) are the ones most enslaved by it. How else could she ask such a stupid question?
Too harsh? I dunno. Barbera has made an enviable living for decades from such guff. When I wrote my undergrad dissertation in 2005 called “Shooting the Messenger”: Feminism and the Media”, Barbera Ellen was one of my sources back then. The fact that feminist arguments never develop but are always recycled is the basis of this (free) essay, which uses a lot of the research I did for my dissertation.
The prosaic idea of trade offs doesn’t appear to occur to Ellen and career feminists of her ilk. Perhaps she has the same background as her Guardian contemporary, Marina Hyde who is the daughter of a Baronet whose real name is Marina Elizabeth Catherine Dudley-Williams, and who masquerades as a merely middle class. Money doesn’t save you from mortality but it goes a long way in easing evolutionary selection pressures.
I couldn’t afford to pursue both motherhood and a career. My son was born when I was 34 and was almost 11lbs. It was a difficult birth and I remember the hush when he came out followed by one of the midwives stating, “Fuck me, that’s a big baby!” Still, it’s true what they say, the moment you hold them in your arms, you forget the unimaginable pain you were just experiencing 5 minutes before. It becomes a badge of honour. To the Romans, men & women each had two duties to the state: a man would risk his life on the battlefield and a woman would risk her life in childbirth.
He was my first and only child. My mother had three, and the last one — me — when her husband was dying of cancer. This was a big deal in the 1970s. Single motherhood, widow or not, carried a stigma. I was also, she informed me, a difficult child. I had what’s called cholic, a still mysterious condition where the baby cries during dark hours and cannot be settled. I think autism might have had something to do with it and my son had the same condition. My mother, a seasoned birthing professional by then, reminisced to me on more than one occasion that I almost “went out of the window” numerous times. She, and my sisters, of course, had other things to think of. I can readily appreciate that as my father became sicker and sicker and his diagnosis became eventually terminal, having a needy autistic baby to care for was low down on their priorities and I was nothing more than a nuisance. Knowing evolutionary theory as I do now, I have no problem accepting that in another time and place, she would have taken me out into the bush with her digging stick and buried me alive.
Such infanticide is accepted in non-industrial hunter/gatherer or forager societies. A baby has no personhood until their naming ceremony. If the mother is widowed and already has two children who have survived passed the critical weaning stage, it is culturally permissible. Hillary Clinton is famous for saying, “It takes a village” meaning to raise a child. In many cultures, it also “takes a village” to kill one.
This is another example of an evolutionary selection pressure. Most women who have abortions today do so because they already have children and know their circumstances mean they cannot afford — emotionally and fiscally — to care for another child without it risking the lives of her extant children, and hence her ultimate evolutionary fitness. It’s not just a selection pressure, but an especially brutal one. Over the years, this brute fact of human nature has helped me escape the trap many people who are abused or neglected by their mothers find themselves in — thinking they are unlovable or that they are personally at fault. They aren’t. The fault is in luck, circumstances, and evolutionary selection pressures.
I spent many years in that trap of course, before learning about evolutionary theory. Intellectualising may be a defence mechanism, but it has helped a little. Especially when I became a mother and had to make trade-offs myself. I’ve thankfully never been in a situation where I needed to think about abortion, but I have a pragmatic, not a moralistic, view about it. See here.
The reason why I couldn’t afford to persue both education and motherhood is down to the explanation I gave in #2. I left school with zero qualifications and a recommendation to get a job on the cheese counter at Tescos. I think I got up to me being anorexic in that article. Calories dictated my life. I was six and a half stone (91 lbs) and no one noticed. Then something else happened. I became bulimic. I started eating one Friday and didn’t stop. Within days I had put on two stones in weight. Of course people, especially my sisters, noticed this. “Thunder thighs” was the scoff. Of course, I was still only eight and a half stones. If I were that now I’d feel like a supermodel! But I was devastated. My exams were that week. I put on clothes but couldn’t bear the sensation of them cutting into my waist. I wanted to die. I’ve never attempted suicide, and at that time anyway, I was preoccupied and terrified of death which I felt was behind every corner and which fueled the OCD before the anorexia. I have like many people, however, felt despair. And this was one such time. I simply did not turn up for my exams, I was so self-loathing and ashamed. The reactions of my sisters had been enough. I knew what judgement from other people awaited me if they saw me. I couldn’t bear it. I’d lost control. Everything was ruined and nobody cared. I fact, they were jubilant.
My sister still at home had her reasons, of course. Many a time she had brought a man back home from a night out and, while she was in the loo, he’d declare, “I picked the wrong sister here!” at which point I’d leave and go to bed. That she hated me is an understatement. Or in her own words, “I love you because you’re my sister and I’d fight someone who slagged you off, but I hate YOU.”
I didn’t speak much and when I tried to in these situations, when under attack by my sisters or mother (or any attempt to defend myself) I’d become tongue-tied and stutter badly. Whenever what I had to say was important, I couldn’t speak. (It still happens today when I’m under extreme stress.) They thought I was an idiot. Like a village idiot. Useless. I’d stopped writing too by this point — at least on my typewriter — which has disappeared from my memory here. I think this was around the time I started to go out to clubs — around the age of 15 — and drink. I’d tried worse, glue and gas sniffing hanging out with delinquent kids, but I’d never liked it. I eventually became the lookout. One evening, with a bunch of kids from the local foster home, I watched as one tough-looking girl tried to get her male friend (both high on glue) to break her arm so she wouldn’t need to go to school. I don’t need to tell you how horrific that was.
With alcohol, however, I found it excited my mind and I didn’t stutter. I became a confident speaker under the influence. After two half pints of lager, too confident, and would attract the attention of men. I had the brain I had now, but without the sense or small working class town decorum. The brakes were off and the observations & wit with zero common sense came out. The results were not good
Anecdote: I think this was my first time drinking in an establishment. In the UK we have sports-affiliated clubs such as Rugby Clubs and Cricket Clubs. A school friend (not a typo) invited me to her place. Her parents were landlords of a cricket club. We sat at the bar, and I had one half of lager and started to banter with the middle-aged man next to me. I was in free flow, and have no idea what we were talking about when siddely my friend’s mother took the glass away from me and stated loudly, “You are BARRED!” To this day, I still have no idea what I said.
Which reminds me. Another school fiend (not a typo) called Gillian was very sexually promiscuous. I was a virgin and was quite famous for it and seemed to get away with it because I was also weird. She hooked up with a guy from a visiting fairground one year and asked me to let him send letters to her at my address. I said okay. I didn’t think anything of it until divorce papers arrived at our address. My mother recognised the official stamps and opened them. All hell broke loose. This was worse than Ray fiddling with her own kids. The shame of it!
We took a bus to Hartlepool to visit a solicitor’s office, who I remember took one look at me and said, “Obviously, there’s been a mistake.”
I have no idea what happened then, but a few weeks later my friend/fiend did have to go to court (we were all 15) and while visiting her official boyfriend’s home where we all hung out, I was expressly told not to tell him she was in court. Okay, I had the brief. This was okay. He probably wasn’t even going to ask.
Doh!
Things differ in my memory to what witnesses — all witnesses — then say what happened.
I remember he started asking where Gillian was and most people just shrugged it off. He went around the room, obviously suspicious. He was mentioning “court”. I don’t remember what they said it was so long ago, but then he got to me. I thought I said the same thing as everyone else, but then I remember looking around at people’s faces and they were all looking at me as if I was levitating. I’d apparently just stated, “Yes, she’s in court”. I have no recollection of doing this. It’s only the second time in my life I’ve experienced, I dunno, what is it? Dissociation?
Maybe the event triggered me to remember the first time I experienced something similar. A time when I was perhaps five years old. When my mother kicked out our stepfather of the old house. She let him back, of course.
When he was drunk and I was upstairs hiding. I could hear him demanding to know if my mother had “fucked” anyone while he’d been gone. I didn’t know what the word meant other than being a swear word. Then I heard him say, “Get the bairn1. She can’t lie.”
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/bairn (a child)