In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Category: relationships

L.A. Cancels Bikini Contest for the Kitties

What a stupid idea.

Since taking office last summer, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has urged his employees to be creative and think outside the box.

Taking that advice to heart, the chief of the Los Angeles Animal Services Department paired with a Hooters restaurant in Hollywood for a bikini contest to raise money for city neutering and spaying programs.

But the howls of protests that greeted animal services chief Ed Boks’ fundraising plan forced him to reconsider. On Tuesday afternoon, he canceled the city’s role in the contest.

LA does have a problem with animals — they euthanize about 19,500 animals a year. That number would be much, much lower if people spayed and neutered their pets. But using half-naked chicks as bait to promote an otherwise worth-while cause? No thanks.

As a disgusting side note (stop reading now if you’d prefer to remain in the dark about the meat you eat — really), a few days ago I was watching a show on Greek TV about the American meat and fast food industry, and they showed all the stuff that U.S. television typically won’t — slaughterhouses, pigs twitching as they bled to death, the horrendous conditions that these animals live in, etc. It was sort of like a PETA brochure in motion, except even more disgusting. I had to turn the channel after a few minutes, but I did catch a piece where they interviewed a former cattle rancher about beef industry practices. He was talking about how they feed cattle all kinds of antibiotics to increase their growth, and how they also feed them all kinds of animal by-products, because meat fattens up the cows faster than grass. In addition to other cows, he casually mentioned that they also feed the cattle ground-up dogs, cats, roadkill, etc — and that euthanized animals from Los Angeles contribute quite a bit to the cows’ diet, because they’re plentiful and cheap.

I almost puked, too, and I’m seriously considering a return to vegetarianism — and barring that, I am now only buying beef from free-range cattle who only ate grass. Bon apetit.

How to Train a Man

Here’s an idea for the recalcitrant man in your life: train him like a dolphin.

These minor annoyances are not the stuff of separation and divorce, but in sum they began to dull my love for Scott. I wanted — needed — to nudge him a little closer to perfect, to make him into a mate who might annoy me a little less, who wouldn’t keep me waiting at restaurants, a mate who would be easier to love.

So, like many wives before me, I ignored a library of advice books and set about improving him. By nagging, of course, which only made his behavior worse: he’d drive faster instead of slower; shave less frequently, not more; and leave his reeking bike garb on the bedroom floor longer than ever.

We went to a counselor to smooth the edges off our marriage. She didn’t understand what we were doing there and complimented us repeatedly on how well we communicated. I gave up. I guessed she was right — our union was better than most — and resigned myself to stretches of slow-boil resentment and occasional sarcasm.

Then something magical happened. For a book I was writing about a school for exotic animal trainers, I started commuting from Maine to California, where I spent my days watching students do the seemingly impossible: teaching hyenas to pirouette on command, cougars to offer their paws for a nail clipping, and baboons to skateboard.

I listened, rapt, as professional trainers explained how they taught dolphins to flip and elephants to paint. Eventually it hit me that the same techniques might work on that stubborn but lovable species, the American husband.

The central lesson I learned from exotic animal trainers is that I should reward behavior I like and ignore behavior I don’t. After all, you don’t get a sea lion to balance a ball on the end of its nose by nagging. The same goes for the American husband.

Clicker training for dogs is based on the same principle, and was based on dolphin training. Negative consequences don’t work on dolphins, who can just swim away from you if you start yelling. But take away their bucket of fish, and they notice. With dogs, you use treats to motivate the dog and mark the behavior you want with the clicker, which makes a consistent reward. Click-treat. Works great. At least it worked great with my previous dog. Junebug was terrified of the sound of the clicker when I first got her and still isn’t over it.

The thing is, once you figure out how well the technique works on your dog, you start seeing everything in terms of clicking — getting the behavior you want through positive motivation. And, yes, it does work on people. I mean, how well does it work when people yell at you when you do something wrong? Do you feel motivated to do it right the next time? Or are you happier getting rewarded for the things you do right and just having the things you do wrong not get those rewards?

But as easy as it is to letting the click-treat mindset when you’re training a dog cross over into other areas of your life, it’s just distasteful to read an article like this, setting out in the New York Times the idea that men are just there to be shaped and women are manipulative.

But why do I expect better from Sunday Styles?

Alpha Males

One thing that always comes up in discussions of Nice Guys™ is the idea that in order to be a “success” with women, one should act like an Alpha Male.

Ah, yes, the Alpha Male idea. It’s a concept readily invoked by Nice Guys™ and evo-psych types, who love to wave in the general direction of the animal kingdom and say to themselves: yes, yes, that is how I should act, and the women will flock to me. Dominant. Aggressive. Chicks dig that.

But here’s the thing: they never really pick a species and stick with it. And if they do, they never seem to have really, truly considered the social structure of the species in question.

F’r instance: the great apes, just to keep things limited to primates, usually referenced because of the genetic similarities to humans. Orangutans, which lead solitary lives, and bonobos, who are matriarchal and egalitarian and who pretty much bonk all day long without aggression, are passed over in favor of the gorillas and, to a lesser extent, chimps.

But the social structures of gorillas resemble your average Colorado City compound — the older, dominant males hoard the females and run off the young males who might pose a threat to the senior males. The chimps are hierarchical as well, with one alpha per troop. Methinks this isn’t what the average horny young man who has convinced himself that he deserves female attention NOW, not when he’s old and gray, and that the secret to getting it is acting like an ass, has in mind.

So, chimps and gorillas? Perhaps not so much. What about canines, then?

Canines, such as wolves, arrange their society in packs, led by alphas. In the case of wolves, there is both an Alpha Male and an Alpha Female; this Alpha Pair is usually the only pair in the pack who gets to mate.

Hm. Doesn’t sound like a very appealing prospect to that Nice Guy™ lookin’ to be a hit with the ladies.

So, what’s a reverse-anthropomorphizing guy to do? Acknowledging that the bonobos might just have something there — after all, they are our closest relatives — doesn’t ever seem to be an option, because that might mean that the Nice Guy™ theory of How To Get Chicks might be all blown to hell.

Well, I suppose that if the Nice Guys™ are determined to do the Alpha Male thing, to study up on how to be a dominant male, they might consider plunking themselves down in front of the National Geographic Channel and taking in an episode of The Dog Whisperer now and then. They may find that their conception of the aggressive, dominant, jerky Alpha Male isn’t what’s going to get them anywhere.