The Earth Hearing

by Daniel Plonix

Brandon and Susan exchanged glances. First David went off the deep end, now Aratta.

  “I have not heard of those societies,” confessed Gary. “But actually, you don’t even need to travel to the past to note the physical allure this age bracket has held for men,” he said. “In the Haute Matsiatra region, Madagascar, there are ox markets, where teenage girls come in groups to connect with cattle owners for a few days of sexual escapades, attempting to hit the jackpot and land marriage contracts.”

  Susan shifted in her chair with unease. “Have there been no con­sid­erations for marriage that had little to do with physical attraction?”

  “Of course. For one, the hard-wired physical appeal is only the subterranean layer,” Gary said. “Above it are the social constructs. When a young woman got sexually active, the prospects of offspring required the female to have a support framework: marriage. And back in the day, a young woman needed to get sexually active. It was a matter of family and community survival,” he explained. “A female could start reproducing, you put her to work—making babies and breastfeeding them throughout her physical prime years. The math was simple enough. A human female got about twenty prime childbearing years. If she didn’t dillydally and got going in her teens, she conceived enough offspring to keep population numbers stable over the long run. During the Iron Age and Neolithic periods, women may have averaged six kids, compensating for offspring who died in their youth due to illness, famine, and drought; compensating for childless women; compensating for women who have died prematurely and could not carry out their civic duty in full.”

  Lee was slightly taken aback. She had not thought of it quite that way before.

  Gary noted and chuckled good naturedly. “In present-day developed countries, females have, on average, their first child at the age of twenty-eight, rather than at around fifteen, as was likely the case during ancient times. A shorter child-bearing window means having fewer kids. Our women tend to have fewer kids not due to welfare programs not due to social equality not due to political rights not due to more enlightened conventions. Ultimately, society can afford this because nowadays maternity and child mortality rates are close to zero. Few younger people die. If we ever go back to Iron-Age mortality rates—say, owing to some genetic mutation making children vulnerable—women will once again be tasked with giving birth, nursing, and raising many offspring—or the human race is to fade away in a handful of generations.”

  Susan looked at him skeptically. “In a handful of generations?”

  “Sure. A society whose women average only two births but need to give birth to six to keep things at replacement levels will see its numbers plummet in a hurry.” Or even more in a hurry, he thought to himself, in countries where women typically had only one child, such as in Taiwan, Portugal, and Singapore.

  “Looks like back in the day it did make sense for women in their teens to get married off,” Susan admitted. “But it may have been more about survival than about sexual attraction to younger women.”

  “It was both,” said Gary, growing flustered. “Obviously.”

  “How do we know that?” Susan persisted, uncomfortable with the notion.

  “Regard situations where sex appeal had pretty much been the only factor at play,” suggested Aratta. “In the coastal regions of Togo and Benin, some women were chosen as the wives of God. In addition to learning chants and dances, they were to satisfy the lusts of the seminary residents, but in truth, availed themselves to all. They selected women based on their physical appeal to men. And so it is telling they chose women in their teens. Same thing in India with the Servants of God, devadasis. In the rainforests of Paraguay, back in the pre-missionary days, virtually all adolescent, unmarried Ache girls had sex with one or more adult males. And among the Comanche, when members of the elite warrior society, the Lobos, returned victorious from a campaign, they had dance parties to which only the younger adolescent girls were invited, with orders to comply with every sexual desire of the warriors.”

  “The physical appeal of females in their mid and late teens cuts across time and culture,” Gary echoed. “In the sixties and seventies, untold numbers of GIs had sex in military camp towns in South Korea with young women, a significant number of whom were underage. Three-quarter of females in Belgium reported being catcalled before reaching the age of seventeen. And a broad swath of the adult male population in Japan had compensated dating, enjo kosai, with high school girls, the underlying reason being their sexual appeal.”

  “Point being?” asked Susan.

  Gary gestured widely with his bottle. “Like I said, females in this age bracket are included within the range of what men find sexually appealing.” He set the empty bottle down and screwed open another one. “The rationale to secure a female in her mid-late teens may be long gone, but the attraction firmware is still there—alongside physical attraction to women who are in their twenties and beyond, of course.”

  “My, so that’s what passes for an intellectual discussion?” said a new voice. A striking-looking, older man stood at the entrance to the drawing room. “Up until twenty minutes ago, this was the age a female has attracted and secured a male on Earth. Hell, that’s the age they needed to be the most marketable.”

  “Everyone,” said Aratta, rising. “This is Rafirre, a guest of mine. Raf­irre, this is everyone.” The man bowed smartly in the general direction of the seated guests and walked in. He took a seat in one of the leather armchairs, legs outstretched, ankles crossed. The people in the room eyed him with curiosity. There was nothing soft or tame about the features of his broad face or piercing gray eyes. With his trimmed white beard, mid-calf black boots, and coarse wool coat, he looked like someone more at ease on horseback leading a cavalry charge.

  “Well, I guess this is the case, anachronistic as it may be,” Susan said eventually. “But just because young women in their mid-late teens are included within the range of the attractive, doesn’t mean nowadays anybody ought to act on it.”

  “Obviously,” said Gary, making an impatient gesture.

  “Speaking of anachronism,” said Brandon, “from Mali to Egypt to Sudan, tens of millions of girls are undergoing in this day and age female genital mutilation.”

  “Barbaric in the worst sense of the word,” said Susan, disgust clear in her voice.

  Puddeck frowned. “What about around here, in the United States?”

  “Noooo. Illegal in most states. Anyway, it is not a part of the American culture.”

  “Like hell it’s not,” said Puddeck.

  “Like hell it is,” said Brandon.

  “Puddeck.” Susan leaned forward. “Whatever else you may say about us, we don’t commit such…things. Here we protect children from any form of abuse.”

  “That is, if you don’t count paddling in some school districts in the South,” muttered Brandon under his breath.

  “With my own eyes, I saw a newborn boy strapped down and his genitals mutilated,” said Puddeck. “I was told about a million babies are mutilated here each year.”

  For a moment, everyone was silent.

  “Oh, circumcision,” pronounced Brandon.

  “We thought you were talking about girls, of course,” clarified Gary with a thin smile. His eyes were bright with irony.

  “Huh? What difference does it make?” Puddeck was bewildered. “So you are all compassionate and humane when it comes to girls but okay with doing it to boys?”

  “It is not the same thing,” stated Susan. “The foreskin is not—”

  “But it is,” said Aratta, his brows pulled together in a fleeting frown. “At least the type of female circumcision that removes the clitoris hood. What evolves to foreskin in boys evolves to clitoris hood in girls. Cut off the hood or cut off the foreskin. Same general idea.”

  “I think circumcision ought to be a matter of personal choice,” Susan said louder than necessary.

&nbs
p; “A reasonable statement.” Aratta lowered his head in acknowledgment. “Let the boy or girl grow up and when they are old enough to make a decision…”

  Susan looked angry. “No. I mean this ought to be a personal choice of the parents.”

  Rafirre threw back his head and laughed. With their wacky reasoning, the Earth people were adorable. He loved them for it. This was to be their undoing during the hearing—commencing a few hours from now. He loved them even more due to that.

  Puddeck launched into one of his colorful stories about some practices he observed during his travels in Papua New Guinea.

  Gary had moved next to the piano, drink in hand, humming a tune to himself. Lee walked over and slid next to him on the piano bench. “I’m curious, what did you mean earlier with the talk about firmware?”

  “Caveman firmware,” Gary said, glancing at Lee before returning to examine the piano. On the other side of the room, they could hear Puddeck chortling over something. “The obsolete DOS still running under­neath the Windows,” he added. “A wiring of the male brain that evolved as an adaptation to a world long gone.”

  “So what’s this firmware?”

  “Does it really matter? Those are relics, merely some anachronistic pieces of code.”

  “Out with it,” commanded Lee.

  “Okay, right. Cavemen.” He sighed and looked up at her. “It is true maximum fertility comes a few years later. But when we talk about securing a long-term mate, it was not about seeking out a flower in full bloom; it was about going for someone with a maximum reproductive value. The expiration date of young women, what now society tags as ‘teenage girls,’ is the farthest. Securing a twenty-five-year-old female was like purchasing a car with eighty-five thousand miles on it before the car was even out of the dealership lot.

  “Males have also been wired to invest in their own progeny, not someone’s else. After all, it is about passing on one’s genes.”

  Gary fingers flitted over the black and white piano keys. “Put these two evolutionary drives together, and you arrive at the caveman firmware: secure a young woman without children.”

  “How did that express itself?” she wanted to know.

  “Shying away from physical cues indicating prior childbirth—from sagging breasts and flabby midsection to stretch marks. It also meant being drawn to physical and behavioral cues of the fresh and the un­m­arred.” He shrugged. “It is no accident that the youthful Jap­anese anime figure of a high school girl in a pleated mini­skirt and perky breasts is one the most searched for type of erotic figures online.” Gary smiled inwardly, recalling a travelogue he’d read. Over two centuries back, when Boug­ainville’s expeditionary ships dropped anchor in Tahiti, a young-­adolescent native girl came over and draped herself on the upper deck. In plain sight of the hundreds of French sailors, she casually removed her loincloth. To the throng of laboring men who strained to get an eyeful of her naked body, Bougainville had noted, she appeared to be Venus incarnated, that is, the goddess of beauty and sex.

  Lee pondered this. “How does a modern-day self-possessed, confident, strong woman in her thirties fits into this?”

  “She doesn’t,” responded Gary. “Any more than a dominatrix whipping an executive who is tied up and crawling on all four. Or jerking off to the sight of two women making out. Or doing it on an airplane. Or fantasizing doing it with your neighbor’s wife precisely because she is unavailable.” His eyes were bright with humor. “What I spoke of is but a small part of a vast spectrum of male sex drives and related cues.”

  He laughed disarmingly. “I gave up on trying to come up with the Sex Unified Theory of Everything. I fancy the male brain possesses an amalgam of desires and software routines, some of which may be leftovers from eons before humans were humans and some are cultural conventions that evolved in recent times. And mind you, the female system of drives and priorities is more complex yet.”

  “I have wondered about the difference in software between men and women,” said Lee, loud enough to be overheard.

  “Obviously, they overwhelmingly overlap,” responded Aratta from across the room. He thought about it some more. “However, no matter how much the contemporary messaging and norms strive to shoehorn the sexes into a unisex mold, there are some behavioral traits typical to each sex. On average, men tend to be more assertive, dutiful, and emotionally stable. On average, women tend to be more anxious, warm, and sensitive. Modest differences across numerous traits add up to substantial differences when viewing each of the genders as a whole.”

  “Hear, hear!” called out Gary.

  Aratta gave a little smile. “Some men like to play with model trains, tactical shooter games, and trading card games. Few women do. Some women like yoga, scrapbooking, and jewelry making. Few men do. Across cultures and societies, men tend to gravitate to machines and to complex abstract systems. They are also more prone to danger-laden and high-stake pursuits. Across cultures and societies, women tend to gravitate toward socially engaging pursuits, which involve interaction with animals, people, and communities.” He went on, “Predominantly, it is men who are the computer network architects, surveying technicians, and oil rig toolpushers. Predominantly, it is women who are the veterinarians, event planners, dietitians, and speech-language pathologists.”

  “That is evident,” said Lee. “But how much of this is nature and how much is nurture?”

  “I don’t think it is possible to tease these two apart, as they continuously interact and affect each other,” replied Aratta. “That being said, underlying differences manifest among infants, namely, before people socialize or are aware of gender roles. A higher percentage of female infants like faces; a higher percentage of male infants are drawn to moving objects. And across cultures, little girls tend to engage in play-parenting and little boys tend to play with wheeled toys and pretend weaponry.

  “In fact, the kernel of the male pattern is induced prenatally by a testosterone surge. Not surprisingly, girls who were exposed in the uterus to elevated levels of testosterone are more likely to hang out with boys and gravitate to male-typical activities.

  “In addition to distinct gene expressions, there are differences in functional connectivity in the brain among males and females already in utero: Fetus males tend to have higher connectivity within the cerebellum and also a greater whole-brain volume at birth. Fetus females have connectivity between posterior cingulate cortex and the left temporal pole.”

  He went on, “Adult females and males typically have different neural wiring patterns and different volume and tissue density in the various brain regions. In addition, rates of growth within the brain differ too. For instance, the amygdala’s volume tends to peak around the age of thirteen among females; in males, around the age of twenty.

  “No single variable can cleanly differentiate the sexes; however, considering the brain mosaic as a whole, there are distinct female and male brains.

  “These things are echoed by the predisposition of the two sexes for differing expressions of parental care, territoriality, thinking patterns, depression and anxiety tendencies.”

  “This sure makes you wonder about the push for sameness in recent decades,” commented Gary.

  “It was tried before, you know,” said Aratta. “An all-out attempt.”

  “And?”

  “It is not an equation, Gary—where you plug in some variables and out comes the answer. If you want, I can share with you the story of those young people. Draw what conclusions you may.”

  “Please do.” It was Susan.

  “In the traditional family,” Aratta told them, “it is women who raise children. Consequently, females are socially and economically dependent on men, their husbands. Furthermore, the all-consuming child rearing and homemaking hem in women and preclude their participation in the public sphere of work, politics, science, and the arts.

  “These were the pr
emises. The time was the 1920s. The place was Palestine.

  “The goal of the thousands of young idealistic settlers was to establish a commune, a collective, with conventions and a setup that would allow women to have access to opportunities and activities that traditionally had been the domain of men. They reasoned the only way to bring this about was by having men and women perform the same roles.

  “To this end, the economic basis of the family was removed; the marriage bond between the two people was to be based solely on romantic feelings. In addition, from birth, children were to live not with their parents but in age-graded houses and looked after by dedicated caregivers.”

  “In short, you talk about a feminist-based community,” interjected Brandon.

  “No,” said Aratta. “Feminism has been about women’s self-interest. Conversely, those young people were about bettering society and men-women relations. The two different aims led to different outcomes.

  “In fact, the differences were apparent right from the start. Seeking egalitarianism—that is, increased privileges and obligations —the young women in Palestine willed themselves and quarried stones, dug ditches, and plowed. In contrast, modern-day Western feminists have not urged women to redress the gross gender inequality in the workforce and en masse become roofers and sewer cleaners. Side by side with the men, the young women in Palestine took on guard duty and put themselves in the crosshairs of marauding bands. In contrast, modern-day Western feminists have been less than vocal about extending conscription to include women, notably for troops likely to be shelled on the front lines. In short, feminists have only laid claim to the more attractive components of the male sphere. Cushy boardrooms, legislator halls, and upper management positions? Let us break the glass ceiling. Crawling into mine shafts, hazmat diving, and collecting garbage? Let us not break the wood floor.”

  He continued, “The many thousands of young men and women in Palestine have undertaken one of the most comprehensive, all-out endeavors in gender egalitarianism. Soon principles were to meet with reality. With little financial cushion, their choices were to have a direct and clear impact. Willful ignorance of material facts could have cost them dearly in very immediate and concrete ways.