High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [33]
There’s a simpler way to sum up the “is-ought” problem. A man I know, whenever he hears a story about philandering husbands or conniving wives, pipes up: “Sociobiology could explain it!”
And I intone: “Explain, maybe, but not excuse.”
A creature with a big enough head to make a contract should have the sense to make one it can keep.
Of course, “See you later!” does not mean the same thing as “See you in court!” We make contracts on dozens of different levels. Hierarchies of urgency are understood, and so are the intrinsic values of different loyalties. Athletic contests are not marriages, although both are sweated out within bell jars of arbitrary rules. The advantage of sports is that they are quick—you decide what’s important, stake your claim, and win or lose, you still go home unscathed. It might not look possible to an anthropologist from Venus, but life here really does last beyond the Super Bowl.
In a book called The Stronger Women Get, the More Men Love Football, Mariah Burton Nelson points out that sports are also about distinction, and perhaps that is why they assume such importance in our culture. “Who is better?” she writes. “One inch, one point, or one-hundredth of a second can differentiate winner from loser.” Nelson lists at least six sports in which women and men now compete together at the elite level (dog-sled racing, horse racing, marathon swimming, equestrian events, rifle shooting, and auto racing), and many more recreational sports in which a wife and husband can typically find themselves evenly matched. And yet, she says, many people continue to rely hard on five games that showcase upper-body strength (football, baseball, basketball, boxing, and hockey) as reassurance of a certain order, gender-wise, in the universe.
Me, I bear in mind that women live seven years longer than men, on average, and figure that’s the sport I’ll sign up for.
So pick the rules that suit you, but just remember a game is no more than the sum of its parts: a stick, a ball, half an inch, two hundredths of a second. A cubic millimeter of muscle, or skull. A point of IQ. Come to think of it, things not much bigger than ants running into their hole.
All right, then. Back in your den, the game is winding down. Here is what you do: remind yourself that what you’ve been watching is a rigged arena. It’s vastly popular simply because people flopped supine on furniture get to be muscular and sweaty by proxy and, for a short time, contrive their own rules about what makes who the best. Every day will dawn on a different “best,” so the proxy contestants get to hitch their wagon to a new set of stars each time around. This says worlds about human nature, and nothing about real life. Game over, the river flows downhill again, and all the blue-eared pupfish go home to their mates.
You can give him a test, to make sure. “If I weren’t around,” you ask casually, “would you go out with my cousin Gloria? We’re related—members of the same conference, you might say.”
Your cousin Gloria is a blue-eyed version of Sonia Braga. Your sweetheart, though, is no fool. He gives you a hug and answers, “Don’t be ridiculous. She’s bowlegged.”
Those are the rules. So what if there is no joy in Mudville, if at your house there’s a place for everything, and every tentacle in its place.
THE MUSCLE MYSTIQUE
The baby-sitter surely thought I was having an affair. Years ago, for a period of three whole months, I would dash in