THE GREAT HYDRAULIC MORPHING OF GRIZZLY BEARS

Grizzly management in Montana (necessarily in Montana because that’s where the grizzes are) is very much like the story about the wise but blind men deciding what an elephant is.  Each had a different idea because each had hold of a different part of the animal:  a fly whisk, a hose, four trees, two fans.  In fact, there seems to be war among the wise men when it comes to bears.  

I could not understand the term “Wildlife Services”, not even the fact that it is a United States bureaucratic entity, a subcategory of the USDA and APHIS until I saw the organizational chart.  To them a grizzly bear is an agricultural issue about protecting product (livestock) from depredation.  The bureaucratic flow chart includes rabies, genetically altered seeds, insects, birds on airport runways.  

More traditionally, grizzly bears in the Montana bureaucracy are dealt with by “Montana Fish Game and Parks”, in which wilderness with its attractions includes big game but must also deal with safety for people who are hiking or fishing.  Much of it is a boundary problem, defining and maintaining territory.  But that it is based on recreation income is not usually mentioned.  A brief effort to figure out how much a grizzly sighting is worth to the tourism industry crashed when an anti-grizz rancher offered to write them a check per dead bear.

Then there’s the reservation where the BIA has to deal with fish and game, but collaborating with the Blackfeet Tribe, which contains many points of view, now including the traditional culture and the glamorous contemporary virtual memes that have developed about the spiritual and psychological dimensions of charismatic mega-mammals.  Bears suggest humans and humans identify with bears, always have, especially when the bear stands up.  Some famous writing has been about bears: novels, poems, short stories.

Weaving through this are the bear biologists, both hands-on, and those who study not just the molecular and tissue constituents of a bear body and life path but also the "intraguild predations" of the bears in their ecology.  (It means predators who compete for prey and who will make lunch of their competitors.)  Physiologists are very interested in things like hibernation, bear gestation, and how bears handle fat.

There is a thriving market for bear parts used in Asian crypto-medical practices.  A certain kind of person wants to hunt bears and then keep the trophies in their house.  Not many people want a bear coat these days, but a bear carcass CAN be commodified.

Not many people want bears prowling their streets at night, though many of the East Slope towns have always co-existed with bears.  But it's a great commodity for those who market fear.

Order has been kept in the Western world for centuries by devising written rules for human behavior in the form of laws and regulations.  They generally address problems and thus include assumptions about what IS a problem and also the dimensions of response to it.  We classify crimes as disorderly conduct, misdemeanor, felony and capital — and we impose a certain level of obligation on non-criminal people to not provoke, over-react, or misinterpret what happens.  Also, there is a cultural level of manners and wise withdrawal.  We draw boundaries and say,  “Inside you can do this, but outside you must do that.”  So hunters bait bears to come out of protected parks so they can be shot.  But that’s also in a code with penalties.

Bears have their own culture, responding to the ecology and what they learn from each other, particularly their mothers.  A change in memes can be as violently forced as the sudden closing of the big hotel dumps in National Parks, or as clever as teaching cubs how to lift latches on shed doors.  Sub-practices of bears responding to their knowledge of "what works" means that a Yellowstone bear is subtly different from a Yaak bear. A bear specialist from over West tells me that "his" bears in the Selkirk were smaller but with nastier tempers than bears around here. 

The interface between the individual bear’s experience and its ecology, particularly that of the humans and their structures, has a lot to do with what happens.  I have a vivid memory of  driving along a stretch of highway out of Montana to the West, a place where the timber had been cut back along the roadway.  A bear was sitting on its butt with its “arms” relaxed and head up, just watching the traffic.  It was so easy to see that he was thinking “where are all these big shiny wheely things going and how to they travel so quickly?”

Of course, we love to watch bears and one of their uses is in zoos and circuses, which is better than watching bear-baiting, once considered to be legitimate entertainment.  Now we just video them for YouTube and consider it very funny if they try to do something like humans but fail.

Neurologists are opening up the parallel ecological evolutions of bears and humans in terms of “wiring.”  We are "intraguild predators", though we don’t eat many bears these days.  And what is that killing frenzy that can explode both bears and humans into destruction?  Road rage.  Spaniel rage.  Something snaps in the brain.

Teddy bear after brain surgery.  None was found.

These are all generalizations.  Game wardens work with specific bears in specific circumstances, each one unique.  Their tools, from helicopters to foot snares, and their methods often have a militaristic feel from carrying sidearms and wearing uniforms.  Much of their work belongs to the “Theory of Mind,” understanding how a bear thinks in the same terms as trying to understand what an enemy is planning on the field.  Terrain, strategy, logistics, are necessary and some things come directly from the battlefield, like shooting a bear from a helicopter, a bear that can be found because it is wearing a radio collar that will show up on a computer map as well as a handheld antenna.  

The technology of the tranquillizer gun is as demanding of skill as any other weapon.  No drug is entirely predictable.  Children die from an anesthetic when they are having their tonsils removed.  For a while when street drugs were so popular, there was an idea that “angel dust”-- which was the same as the ketamine used to tranquillize bears and which people knew was hallucinogenic -- was making bears psychotic and more dangerous.  It wasn’t so much resolved as it was irresolvable.

Tranq guns are propelled by compressed air, once to propel the dart and — in some models — again to make the syringe plunger inject the liquid.  Compressed air can’t be regulated in the way that a bullet can be made standard by controlling the gunpowder load, so sometimes the dart will fall short and other times, completely penetrate the animal, through and through.  It’s very hard to get accuracy on the target location.  The Portland Zoo veterinarian used a tranq gun to try to address health issues on a giraffe.  He accidentally hit the major nerve through the animal’s thigh and caused that giraffe to limp for the rest of its life.  He wept.

Variation in the chemistry of animals means that the amount necessary, the depth of the unconsciousness, the time lags in how quickly the drug works and how long the animal will stay “under,” can only be approximated.  Transportation of an inert animal can be problematic, esp. when using a sling to air lift them.  Animals can die simply from being handled, but not usually bears, I think.

Tranquilizer pistol kit

When we started researching tranq guns at animal control, I called an advertiser in Texas.  It turned out that he ran a ranch that sold hunting of African animals.  He had a pretty cavalier atttitude:  "Come on down and try out our gun!  If we make any serious mistakes, we'll have 'em for dinner!"  The absolute opposite would be the megamammal cuddlers of some humane groups.

The media is a mess.  They are worse at handling bear stories than they are at not taking a distorting attitude about pets for the sake of a story.  Often they are joking or childish.  But then, they have the same bureaucracy problem of the split between the culture and knowledge of office dwellers -- who demand profit -- versus whose whose experience is directly, sensorily, immediately based on the events. 

Dealing with bureaucratic but emotional issues like “de-listing,” “threatened,” and “extinction”, I hurry to turn out as much reading and writing as I can before the internet and free blogging get closed down.  Many powerful but unacknowledged forces are at work.  The main player governing all else is the surface of the planet and the inevitable morphing flow of life finding its own survival paths, not always the ones humans would prefer.  Maybe not humans at all.  "Intraguild predation."  Hmmm.

WHAT IS PORN?

This is a response to an essay in Aeon called “Pornocopia,” written by Maria Konnikova.

This is an art doll made by Nita Collins

What IS porn? Most folks would assume a very limited stereotype: a male slob watching a pretty teen he would have to pay to get access to. We define it in terms of physical objects or specific language rather than dynamics, which are too hard to render into legal exhibits. Porn is psychological, different for each person. What turns on one person is indifferent to another.

This post will try to broaden that. As the limits of what can be known about are pushed back, like water going out of a bathtub, in recent years a lot of stuff has become publicly exposed. Some of it is hard to sort.

All human behavior is just a big messy mass that we then try to define into categories so we can separate and name them. But categories as dynamic as sex cannot really be captured. We might do better to concentrate on the nucleus of each “named” thing and ignore the boundaries. Maybe sexual displacement is a good example: if the episode is close to the cultural stereotype — say, “Playboy” — that’s one thing. If the circumstances are bizarre, unprecedented, like a particularly ingenious bit of sci-fi, that’s different. I’ve never forgotten a riff on Medusa, pictured as an interplanetary sex worker. Instead of snakes, her “hair” was worms that wrapped up her customer in monster K-Y jelly to enable electrochemical stimulation, putting him into ecstasy, but then turning up the stimulation until it killed him.

by Kathryn Weese

First category division: That which is only imaginary, like writing, photos, art work Vs. that which is physical, like lap dances, or performances behind glass, or a proscenium onstage. Plus, acts that only EMT’s and cops know about. Testimony I’ve heard from them include penises getting stuck in vacuum cleaner hoses or bathtub faucets, or objects getting stuck in orifices. Or relating to animals as though they were humans. One guy was obsessed by giving fellatio to a small horse. This is not porn, but sense-displacement, paraphilia like sexual stimulation from a glove or shoe.

The physical kind of displacement from routinely acceptable kinds of sex is generally not considered porn, but rather some other category like masturbation or sodomy or addiction. Even shopping, if we’re being real. The most troublesome displacement is that which does damage of some kind. Bodies must stay within the limits of homeostasis. Using physical risks that could burst a gut or break an eardrum, or adding chemical danger like drugs or psychological danger is quite possible when operating at extremes. Esp. when children are the object. But we’re talking about porn watching, not doing, using the mirror capacities of the brain. 

So the next division is merely watching erotic behavior. The consideration here is what it does to the larger culture, like maybe encouraging child abuse. I would include both the latency child who may not understand what’s happening and the adolescent who has confused sex with love, so is sexting. 

Now we’re talking CSI porn, which substitutes righteous rage for sexual stimulation. Our culture WANTS this confusion because it is so commodifiable. In a sense, porn is advertising and advertising is porn. If we eliminated porn, industries would go broke. Not just explicit films, writing, sex work, but also the economy of political favors, privilege markers, blackmail, and people having to face some pretty ugly internal dynamics. I’m not saying that these dynamics come from porn but that they can often lead to porn as well as bad behavior.

It’s fashionable to speak of high luxury that most people have no access to as “porn.” “Food porn,” “automobile porn,” and my fav: “house porn.” This is acknowledgment of the status of the porn as “high end.” But status doesn’t have to be a marker for eroticism.

http://aeon.co/video/culture/eleanor-ambos-interiors-how-to-build-an-empire-playing-house/

Eleanor Ambos is a person more like me than most of the people turning out torrents of print about their trivial lives struggling with jobs, fashion trends, friendship issues, and the consequences of sleeping around. She doesn’t write. She is a sensualist who works with space and furnishings and she is appreciated by photographers looking for evocative settings. Ambos is not a writer or artist herself in the sense of creating something — she is directly connected to her objects. That the young (male) observers consider her crazy is labeling her as though she were a pornographer, because she’s not like their own sub-cultures. Crazy is always relative.

To me, this is also a useful distinction when dealing with the observation of things the culture wants fenced and obscured because people want to watch it too much. I think of a man who bred horses too near a highway, which caused many accidents because people wanted to see what was happening. (Horse sexual behavior is like a dance.) The law made him build a high modesty fence.

Nudity — just plain exposure — is suppressed by law, which keeps us from seeing the variousness of human bodies. Many resort to National Geographic, but the fact of only seeing black people with no clothes creates strange conviction patterns. Sex among the most primitive peoples can be pretty matter of fact. “Black is sexy” plays into the forbiddenness, the guilt, and therefore the porniness of white Euro culture. The link with slavery remains, so the highest value on physical characteristics still accrues for a blonde, beautiful, self-possessed person: male, female, or child. Ask a Nazi.

Speaking of which, this link is a very disturbing case that is not porn except that it arouses very strong feelings. It is a real life case, extreme “playing doctor.” http://www.buzzfeed.com/danvergano/this-doctor-wtf#.ivBYExYLD   If he hadn’t been messing around with genitals, he might not have been recognized as an outlier.

The point of playing doctor is intimate, unsupervised access to bodies for the purpose of healing. In order to keep people trustingly going to doctors, they must be portrayed as benign, ethically balanced, conservative people. Like any group, many of them are not. No more than ministers or lawyers or congressmen. Or mothers. Perhaps I’ll wrote a sci-fi story in which the high status and privileged access people are then obliged to provide sexual access to themselves for all their clients. In a masochistic culture like ours, it might become real pretty easily: consider four-inch pointy-toe shoes that are so painful and dangerous that women only pretend to wear them, keeping slippers under their desks. They wouldn’t do it if it didn’t signal power, which is why female cops on TV wear high heels to crime scenes.

Violence entwined with sex takes us to the psychological and neurological set-ups of the individual. The Great Rule of neurology is “what fires together wires together.” Every experience changes the brain by adding, deleting or conjoining neurons. This means that if porn is based on adrenaline, risk and mirrored suffering, it will appeal to a differently experienced consumer. If porn is based on the oxytocin loop, nurturing and kissing, it will attract quite a different sort. People who have grown up in a depriving, punishing, confining sort of emotional atmosphere will be vulnerable to the same things expressed metaphorically in art or sex.

Our technical capacities have deep consequences and I’m not just talking about robot dolls that can gyrate and talk dirty. The fad for vanity plastic surgery is a measure of just how pornographic our ordinary assumptions can be, esp. in relatively young girls trying to be attractive. Consider the pull of websites featuring facial plastic surgery gone wrong, esp. people we know, like celebrities. They are grotesque, compelling and shuddery in a mirror kind of way.

Maybe the case of the doctor is most disturbing because he was imposing helplessness, unconsciousness, and inability to respond — that is, his arousal was based on the impossibility of theirs, like a date-drug rapist. Much less could they consent, not just because of being knocked out, but because they were down the prestige ladder where social powerlessness prevented them from ratting out the doc. Anyway, as Bob Scriver used to say, “If what you do is outrageous enough, no one will stop you because they won’t believe it.” And, “People will do anything they can until someone stops them.” Ask a Nazi.

The best way to avoid destructive porn is to develop full humanity in people, but that’s the first thing that gets cut in our education systems, the last thing to be funded by the government. It’s interesting that the most prudish politicians are so often in trouble over sexual matters. “You know nothing, John Snow.” Our pornographic yearning is for power and specialness — never admitted or even necessarily conscious, but suppressed and displaced.

WHO CAN CONTAIN BOYS?

A child should be embraced in loving arms as the first container of life outside the womb.  This is a given of survival.  Even before birth the child is experiencing and creating the contents of his own brain/body which are interwoven through the process of being alive, centered in the bony chalice of the brain, flickering chemical/electrical neurons weaving patterns that are the floor of the rest of identity.  By the time the baby gets to language, the patterns are entrenched and unconscious.

What the circumstances of birth and the ensuing years will establish to the rest of society is what category to put you in.  The first decision will be “like me” versus “other”.  Then “others to be feared,” and “others who should fear you.”  What all that means in terms of attitudes and behaviors is the source material for novels and psychotherapy.  Some distinctions are so subtle they are hard to understand for those outside the system: can you tell a Hutu from a Tutsi?  Even they had to resort to documentation.

The attitude of separation ends in differences in survival and encourages the polarizing of continuums into binaries.  Lately we’ve been challenging the binaries of gender identity, not least because such dichotomies underlie prejudices that damage the whole culture and destroy lives, even entitling murder directly by violence or indirectlys by withholding the basic needs for life, not excluding meds, but including food, shelter from weather, basic cleanliness, safe sleep.

I’m talking about the category of “boys.”  

Big and little, blonde or black, thin or thick, cheerful or morose, “nice” or “wicked.”

There is another set of binaries that controls how we react to these differences. Among a myriad of reactions is the idea that we will kill the bad ones.  Or we will “save” them by taking them home and making them be like us.  We will use them for our own purposes, whether chimney-sweeping or as sexual objects.  We will consider them toys, playing with them so they are made fools or maybe in "good" play so that they pass small hurdles that improve their skills.  We can teach them to belong to us or to belong to themselves.  But they are not belongings.

We are slow to realize that it’s possible to be a mix of boy/girl -- anatomically. hormonally, psychologically.  A “boy” can feel he is really a “girl” or a “boy” can actually have the nuclear DNA code for “girl”.  More than that, there are many dimensions to being one gender rather than another:  physically, boybrain-shaped (yes, there are differences), and testosterone-powered boys might nevertheless be disinterested in what the culture thinks a male should be, which is to say:  physical to the point of violence; competitive; scientific; dominating; tolerant of grease, dirt and pain; indifferent to aesthetics and nurturing; constantly “up” for sex.  All these are arbitrary markers for the cultural container we call “men” or “boys.”  Conan the Barbarian fits, but the man who invented the character of Conan does not.

A certain kind of man -- obviously an aggressive, powerful, competent person -- might have a son who is thoughtful, even poetic, slight, better at reading than manual labor -- and might interpret that son as “girlie.”  Using the only tools he has, he might try to shape the boy as a blacksmith shapes metal:  hot rage, steady pounding.  Since boys are not horseshoes, the result might be a smashed container for a life.

Now that we’re beginning to accept the container we call gay, we still have a lot of sorting to do in terms of other sub-aspects.  Consider the possibilities.

A boy who is physiologically an outlier on the spectrum of possibilities: an “elf” or an “orc.”

A boy who simply doesn’t match the culture that contains him.

A boy who reaches adolescence and -- when his hormones turn on -- finds his desire is atypical or low-powered or uncomfortably high-powered. 

A boy who realizes that his sexual desire is focused on his own sex instead of the opposite, but not other gays -- only straight guys.

A boy who is abused so much that he is confused about whom to love, how to love, how desire is different from love, which is different from the expectations of the culture.

A boy who desires sex with one gender but prefers forming bonds/attachments of intimacy with the opposite gender.  There are other ways of dividing up the dimensions of gender distinctions among different cultural “containers.”  Aggressively physical in dance instead of sports; delicately creating porcelain objects instead of welded steel public art.

Some aspects of this will be considered transgressive by the culture, at least one culture, and may be punished.  For instance, drug-taking or sexwork.  The punishment may be overt, like confinement by this incarceration-crazed society, the ultimate idea being that containing is what imposes order.  Or it can be exclusion from all containers, even locking the dumpsters that are a source of food for street people.  Like other feral and wild mammals, these boys are forced to find or make burrows, nests, out of the debris of a culture so rich that it cannot help excreting, dumping, trashing -- people as well as objects.  People forced to BE objects in solitary confinement that empties their bone chalice skull, snuffs out the fire that burns there.

Then there are the diseases, but none of diseases is specific to males.  NONE.  (Maybe sperm diseases.)  Microbes don't care about human sex.  They are opportunists of skin, blood, bone and flesh.  TB, Hep C, Herpes, and, of course, HIV.  

Containers can be protective or destructive.  Most are unconscious and managed by metaphor, but if those metaphors are examined -- often through art -- they can be brought up to the surface for moral reflection.  Which assumptions are necessary?  Which walls need to be taken down?  Why do we think a wall will keep people from migrating or smuggling in the first place?  Why do we think that a walled community will guard us against trouble when we are most endangered by those inside with us?  Like our families.

What Lakoff and Johnson try to get us to “see” is that in order to change these categories that punish boys for who they are, we must EXPERIENCE who they are.  More than that, we need to see what they see.  Luckily -- as organizations like Real-Stories Gallery, Smash Street Boys, and Show Me Your Life -- have discovered, there is a container that can do this: digital screens.  Forsaking words as too many levels removed from raw sensoria, the boys themselves are able to take you into their worlds -- both internal and of the streets.

Boys who desire males and identify with that.  (Gay, one style or another)

Boys who do sex work because their bodies are all they have. 

Boys who have been so abused and confused that they are drifting, letting anything happen.

Boys with infected and deprived bodies.

Boys stigmatized, marked as victims and constantly in mortal danger.

Boys who have lost the boundaries of behavior that signal to the larger culture that they are    safe to others.

Boys who challenge and try to smash every attempt to contain them because all of them have meant confinement, torture, invasion.

Why should we embrace them?  Because we are the ones who made them that way and because we know what we need to do.  We just don’t want to.  Asking the reason for the refusal is the most dangerous question of all.  The answer has to be action, resources.  From ALL of us.