PANDA PORNO The annual ritual of watching dichromatic quasi-ursine captive animals hump (or not hump) has begun again. (link via Cacciaguida)
When I was a kid, I was crazy for pandas. I had a stuffed-animal panda, purchased at the National Zoo, who went by Pandy Lincoln (he occasionally wore a miniature stove-pipe hat that I made out of construction paper). Pandy Lincoln was my Velveteen Rabbit, and even now I have a certain sentimental fondness for the species in remembrance of that long-lost toy-who-became-real.
That said, my interest in pandas is more than just sentimental. There's something about the national fascination with whether they will or will not reproduce that intrigues me. Certainly it emerges in part from purely zoological and environmental concerns - giant pandas are badly endangered, and every time they fail to reproduce they move, in some sense, one step closer to ultimate extinction. But I wonder, perhaps, if it isn't something more than that, if it doesn't fall into the strange matrix of the culture's relationship with reproduction more generally. At the risk of generalizing wildly, our culture seems to delight in defying what seem to be the natural processes of reproduction. Huge amounts of money and effort are expended trying to get pregnant things that seem to have a substantial natural difficulty getting pregnant - women over 40, sterile or lesbian couples, giant pandas - through all sorts of fancy scientific procedures. At the same time, equally large amounts of money and effort are expended trying to keep from getting pregnant things that seem to have a relatively easy time getting pregnant - women in their teens and twenties, cats and dogs - through widespread use of birth control or through spaying / neutering. I suppose those aren't inherently inconsistent ways of going about in the world, but it still seems a strange pairing to me. And I know, of course, that a great many people reproduce themselves quite naturally.
No substantive recommendations here (I hope you haven't come to the fox for advice), just observations. Make of them what you will.
When I was a kid, I was crazy for pandas. I had a stuffed-animal panda, purchased at the National Zoo, who went by Pandy Lincoln (he occasionally wore a miniature stove-pipe hat that I made out of construction paper). Pandy Lincoln was my Velveteen Rabbit, and even now I have a certain sentimental fondness for the species in remembrance of that long-lost toy-who-became-real.
That said, my interest in pandas is more than just sentimental. There's something about the national fascination with whether they will or will not reproduce that intrigues me. Certainly it emerges in part from purely zoological and environmental concerns - giant pandas are badly endangered, and every time they fail to reproduce they move, in some sense, one step closer to ultimate extinction. But I wonder, perhaps, if it isn't something more than that, if it doesn't fall into the strange matrix of the culture's relationship with reproduction more generally. At the risk of generalizing wildly, our culture seems to delight in defying what seem to be the natural processes of reproduction. Huge amounts of money and effort are expended trying to get pregnant things that seem to have a substantial natural difficulty getting pregnant - women over 40, sterile or lesbian couples, giant pandas - through all sorts of fancy scientific procedures. At the same time, equally large amounts of money and effort are expended trying to keep from getting pregnant things that seem to have a relatively easy time getting pregnant - women in their teens and twenties, cats and dogs - through widespread use of birth control or through spaying / neutering. I suppose those aren't inherently inconsistent ways of going about in the world, but it still seems a strange pairing to me. And I know, of course, that a great many people reproduce themselves quite naturally.
No substantive recommendations here (I hope you haven't come to the fox for advice), just observations. Make of them what you will.
<< Home