Natural roles

I have seen, read and talked more about animals in the last seventeen days than in any such period in my life. As well as seeing various marsupials and birds on national park walks, our Whitsunday sailing trip, which included snorkelling, enabled close inspection of turtles, rays and a large variety of fish. Then there have been toads, reptiles and insects I’d never seen before. Brisbane New Farm Library’s “The Qi Book of Animal Ignorance” has been supplemented well by a copy of Bill Bryson’s “Down Under” which I’ve had for years and can (after carrying it for seven weeks and reading it cover to cover) justify off-loading. Bryson has a fascination with all that can kill in Australia though never gets close to a wild animal, his most significant animal story involving guard dogs.

I enjoyed the quote in the introduction to the Qi book, that there is “only one unambiguous truth: that the word ‘natural’ is meaningless. Animal strategies for feeding, reproducing or just getting about are so madly various, so utterly, gloriously perverse that you end up believing that anything is possible”. The lack of human imagination concerning what is normal, then, remains a disappointment. I am guilty of that lacking.

As a male of the species, latterly I have behaved as though cooking were the preserve of the female. I know I am not alone in expecting a role to be played by the woman in my life I call “mine” but it is the recent observation of what has become natural or normal elsewhere that has heightened or reawakened my awareness of my own ongoing complicity in this lack of imagination concerning sexual roles. I have settled and others have settled too. Some, perhaps, (after all, who am I to judge) have lost much more than me in the settling. That those I am thinking about are female would not surprise anyone with any feminist instincts.