MOORE AND HIS LITTLE SILVER GUN

Moore and his Little Silver Gun

It was a phrase I haven’t heard for a long time.  “If it bleeds, it breeds.”  For those who can’t figure it out, this is a statement that any woman who is old enough to menstruate is old enough for sex.   "Should be fucked."   The criteria precedes legal definitions of the “age of consent,” meaning when a child is mature enough to decide what to do.  It refers to sexual ethics that developed in times and places when people were so poor and endangered that if they didn’t produce babies as early as possible, the adults wouldn’t live long enough to raise them.  I don’t mean “send them to college,” I mean, keep them from starving to death.  Not all of people in that situation are in Third World places.  The idea is so deep in the survival imperative that it’s at a fleshly emotional level very hard to get at.  

These conditions of survival still exist, esp. in the American South.  Young legal ages for marriage vary across the continent but are probably the lowest in the South.  This is not like the customs in countries where the woman may be taken into the man’s family as a child and raised there until she transitions from daughter to wife.  Often there are multiple wives, so the girl doesn’t stand alone against abuse.  

“Breeding” youngsters is also an idea from when slaves were not just chattel but also cattle.  In the rez resort towns there used to be an influx of nice Minnesota girls every summer who came to serve in the “big hotels.”  They were called “the dry herd,” which is a reference to heifers who need to be bred.

Reproduction-based ethics are reinforced by the idea that a man “owns” his wife and her children, the same way that he owns his cows.  This idea also lingers in US laws.  It is a bulwark against neighbors or even relatives intervening in cases of abuse.  The Bible, for those who take it as a guide, defends beatings and even stoning to control human chattel, without ever defining slavery.  The first humane society laws were used to protect children from abuse, though they had been written to prevent people from beating and starving their horses to death.

Recent factors impact the situation.  One is the idea that a human being should be self-determining and “free.”  For a child entering adolescence this is a seductive idea.  If he or she is not happy or protected in the family, it encourages defiance, leaving, and attachment to strangers.

The other unsettling force is chemical.  First the pill and other contraception which can take “getting pregnant” out of consideration, so that a girl can have as much sex as a boy without having a baby.  (Which is not to lessen the great good of a grown woman controlling her own body, even in marriage, even if her husband wants the “crop” of babies as though they were calves.)  And second are the many street drugs that eliminate consciousness and judgment, so that contraception that depends upon behavior (a daily pill, a condom) is not as useful as bodily modification: inserts under the skin, IUD’s, cutting or blocking the tubes of fertility in either sex.

Decades ago my ex-step-granddaughter, convinced that the early death of her mother was due to the pill, relied on abortion, the worst measure possible.  The last time she got pregnant was by her high school classmate who specialized in using alcohol to get girls unconscious so he could rape them.  He had made half-a-dozen girls pregnant by the time he got to my ex-step-granddaughter.  His mother thought it was cute until I threatened to castrate him with the biology kit scissors I used for animal control projects.  I actually waved them at him and he was impressed.  The mother never made contact with me.  At that point the girl decided to live lesbian.   She died in a car accident not much later. 

This kind of convoluted and unreal reasoning is partly due to the separation between the generations, so that the information and support that’s supposed to be passed down is knocked aside by reliance on classmates and buddies of one’s own age, who seem to be able to understand the modern streets, relying on street youth media and word of mouth.  The kids are justified by the failure of adults to BE adult.

We forget that only 2 or 3% of our “thinking” is conscious.  Even if we’re honorable ethical thinkers, there are primitive knee-jerk loops and responses we don’t even know are happening, much less have control over.  But somewhere in between ape-reactions and high-thinking modern principles supported by prosperity is a convoluted, childhood-deep, collection of shadows and rationalizations left-over from twisted and misunderstood religious ideas that cause people to think in terms of Christmas pageant concepts.  

SOME EXAMPLES

The only sex that is good is what produces babies, so if a person — male or female — is fertile, then they should have babies —however they come about.  This works best if the whole community accepts responsibility for taking care of the babies.  But righteous Christians stigmatize babies outside marriage to spare the expense and trouble.

Warriors are potent and aroused, therefore it is only natural that they should want to make babies.  And then they will increase the tribe.  Besides, rape in war is effective aggression and intimidation.  HORRIFY THEM!!

The ability of a woman to control her own reproduction (the pill) is achieved, justified, and valued because it is based on prevention by herself.  Impregnation, gestation, birth and the subsequent duties of motherhood ask a high price — even death.  (We forget that now.)  My great-grandmother died from childbirth and the consequences to the family dynamics rolled down to me.  I’ve been terrified of pregnancy.

And I’ve been aware that my fear is entwined with economics.  It’s like rez sovereignty or state primacy — it means paying your own bills.  The ability of women to earn enough money to support babies is part of contraception.  Not having to dedicate every penny to babies is what allows economic capital to build up.  But it lessens the need to maintain family, esp. extended family.  Often, economic challenge is what triggers abuse from men who are aware they can't hold women except through need of a man's salary.

The morality controlled by reproduction is older even than ownership or matrimony.  But there is also morality controlled by disease, which is another valence in encouraging sex with young women on the premise that they are less likely to be infected.  There is also cult superstition in “virginity” which is exacerbated by the Christian idea of the Virgin Mary as evidence of a miracle.  Much of Christian thought comes out of impossible opposites: eternal life coming out of gruesome death; immaculate birth in a stinking stable; conception without penetrating sex.    

If I were to compose a new cultic miracle story about birth, I think I would use the idea of a boy giving birth.  There have been cases where a fertilized egg, a potential twin, lodged inside a male fetus but didn’t begin to grow until the boy entered adrenarche (ages 9 to 13).  Then it attached to his intestines, forming a placenta and so on.  It didn’t go to term and had to be removed by surgery.  But that’s enough of a thread to build a story.  I would have the story describe the birth of twins, conjoined, one named Heaven and one named Earth.  It’ll take a bit of figuring to devise a birth, a tearing open of some kind, maybe deadly.  To avoid secondary binaries, I would imagine them as intersex or a third sex.Then the point would be that if heaven is crowded and sullied, the earth will die.  But if the earth is polluted and the seas are dry, then heaven will die.  

On the way home today I had to stop to buy cat treats or they wouldn’t let me back into the house.  My fav checker was on duty, the one with scripture tattooed on her wrists.  She’s an End of Days believer.  She said, noting the cat treats, that she’d never had a cat — just dogs.  I said I’d had both but would also like a horse, a giraffe, a hippopotamus and . . .  and . . .  “That day will come,” she said.  And she believed it.  “All the animals will come to be with us.”  Impulse is with us.  Myth and story abide.

But Moore’s crude, self-serving idea that he can stick his tongue in pretty girls and wave his little silver gun around at a microphone — well, it just won’t do.  He’s a loser.  I have more to say.  More than Moore is happening.