Gluteated Walker

• Sex and Evolution: Bateman, Trivers-Willard, Coolidge, and Their Effects by James Brody, 6/20/97
  
  

I thoroughly enjoy Rob's prose. Hope that you do. I understand that English is his mother tongue.

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I have just found my 'lost' thesis on the 'touchy' subject of buttocks. I was flamed and reviled by a a horde of three women and a tiny troop of sycophantic male 'Galahads'. So I flamed them back (see bottom of post)]

April 1995 In celebration of my birth month and Easter which derives from the old english Godess Eostre which comes from Ishtar or Astarte which probably goes back to an Indo European root aws (dawn or east) + ster (star) and has been variously and rudely celebrated by pristesses of Astarte through the witches who worshipped Eostre to overconsumption of chocolate nowadays which is a substitute for s*x, I knocked up a woefully "substephenjaygouldian" article on the adaptive semiology of buttocks. This will prove to be a highly dispensible contribution to UpperPaleolithic studies and I have been pursued by the Maenads which I dont think is fair because that fool Desmond Morris can say that buttocks are breasts on backwards and get away with it intact. It is dedicated to Ray which he will hotly deny and if they heap faggots about me I will deny I wrote it.

"The Adaptive Semiology of the Gluteal Contours"

Key words:- Suckle, Easter, Buns -------------------------------------------------------------------

Recently there has been a great fuss about the movie posters which depict Michael Douglas gripping the buttocks of Demi Moore (or her buttock double) the premise being that they were a hazard to traffic. Something in excess of 7,000,000 sterling was raised to prevent the Getty Museum getting its hands on the trio of marble buttocked Graces by A Canova.

What is it about the female buttocks that is so alluring? Is this allure adaptive? I am talking, of course to those who share my sense of the "beauty" of Burnet's nymphs clustered about the dying Icarus, or the glorious curves of the relining Maja by Velasques. A fat clue resides in the utility of buttock and thigh fat for the purposes of milk manufacture in suckling the human infant. The anxious paternal friend in me hovers about the nursing ladies of my aquaintance ever solicitous of the health of mother and child. The impertinent scientist in me asks if they experience transient but profound depression in the first 30 seconds of suckling and bye the bye, how are their nether measurements responding to the burden?

I read everywhere accounts of the "Venus" figurines of the Upper Paleolithic. These representations of plump,large breasted,wide hipped, ample buttocked ladies appeared as the climate of Europe descended to its awful ,maximal glacial nadir around 23,000 B.C. to 18,000 B.C. (See the map in T Champion et al 1984 Prehistoric Europe). It has been claimed that " no serious behavioural ecologist really thinks that animals do anything in order to promote the reproduction of their genes, but they frequently say so."

I would say that anthroplogists regularly say that plump Venus figurines are ritual objects celebrating fecundity without reflecting on the circumstances of a harsh environment. Would extra mouths to feed be a cause of celebration? However, the survival of present and loved mouths would be a different matter. I have this picture of triumphant (formerly plump) Cro-magnon ladies emerging from a glacial European winter with not only their own infants alive at the breast but maybe one or two of their "sister's" infants. Now THERE would be something to celebrate!

When you look around at the morphology of women in cultures with a serious marginality of food supply you start to see plumpness prized, in the deserts, on the pacific islands, in the arctic zones...there has to be a correlation.

Comes abundance and the receding anxiety about food and Man's tastes can be teased and perverted by the pull of sensory specific satiety and the subtle persuasion of artists, photographers and couturiers whose preference is for slimmer, dare I say it? More anrogynous morphology!

What I propose is that "yearning, that sense of gut churning desire" that can be elicited by the rich, globular, sloping, sensual.."backfield in motion" is not lust at all! It is an adaptive prompt to mate with the likelihood of infants surviving the winter.

In brief, given the premiss that the only long term or chronic anxiety early man had was the availability of food, we can add bottom pinching to comfort eating , bulaemia and anorexia as a manifestation of our inherited anxiety coping mechanisms.

Robin Walker

Then I got slightly annoyed with 'them'

Dear Some of You,

"Thank you for your posts. Some have been magisterial, kindly, perceptive, impressively reproving and even appreciative of the serious thoughts I have offered. There are clearly, fine intellects on this net whom I would not wish to offend and their advice is valued.

The rest of you should delete NOW! Those of you who switch off before reading will have to ask others if you have been insulted.

That moment when the puppy first attacks the hoover nozzle in a fearful/aggressive way is the instant when a majority of us succumb to the awful temptation to make a pass at the pup's tail with the feared nozzle.

Behaviourally speaking it is a sin.

When I discovered by chance that great, grown up biologists can be sent shrieking up onto their chairs clutching the petticoats of outrage, by the smallest mice words in the language; and that shining, knightly, Sir Poodle-Fakers would come pricking forth to defend the soppy demoiselles, I succumbed.

I should not have.

The battle I engage in is behavioural therapy. I listened in on you to discover insight and ammunition for understanding the war raging on the living room floor among parents, children and pets.

I have read much humbug, soft science tricked out with brave statistical banners trying to look hard (mathematical peer pressure?), and come to the conclusion that mountains of ramstergig corpses have poor epitaphs in some doctorates.

On the question of language I confess to a compulsive punning disorder. The pun, double entendre or spoonerism streaks backstage of my mind like Lady Macbeth in her nightie. I ignore them in my daily legitimate work.

I am not obsessed with body parts.

The distribution of adipose tissue in the human being is farcical and ludicrous. My woefully "substephenjaygouldian" and highly dispensible contribution to Upper Paleolithic studies on the subject of Femorogluteal Adiposity and its Adaptive Semiology was a dig at the ridiculous employment of human form in the sale of automobiles, so called art works and the torrent of pus that is currently soiling our cinemas. And some twaddle about Cause and Function.

As to the snapping shut of little rat trap minds..sobeit. I won't prise against the springs of bigotry for the few stale scraps of cheese therein.

ARE YOU READY? When the music stops..up on your chairs!

My final observation is that unless you are going to remain indoors for safety, with all those declawed cats, you will need to develop a more balanced view of what constitutes misogyny, sexism and obscene language. If you do not, you will be regularly stretchered home in a swoon, from the shopping mall, the cinema, the naughty kids playground, the nice kids playground and in particular from any context where the help of behaviourists is urgently needed.

Yours sincerely,

Robin Walker

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"Buttock Double"??? I wonder of Nick Bottom had one?

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