the globe and mail had some asshole do a hackjob on joan roughgreens new book on sexual selection--mostly calling the book impossible to judge b/c roughgreen used to be a man, and is now a woman (god the politics of that sentence are awful, she is a post op mtf transexual, fully transtioned as a woman...is that better?)

anyways ms roughgreen says that sexual selection has been misunderstood and that it can explain the commonness of same gendered sexual attraction and activity among non humans (i am working from tertairy sources here)

namely, that sex is not only reproductive for everything, and that is is used for things like pair bonding, child raising, recreation, etc. sexual selection then can be about who is the best x to do x job rather then who is the best to breed.

also she claims that our views of gender (ie socially selected rather then biologically determined) could posibbly apply other places.

had to read b/w the lines in the review though, cause it was all about how a tranny cant be objective in these things, and how the soft social sciences are over taking the hard biological ones (note the language)


also, harpers had a throw away line in a review of passolini and givson about aztecs and the spanish that i have been thinking for a couple of days, and actually made me put the aztecs ahead ethically:

namely they happened at the same time and the same place, and they were both ritualized, publicsed, spectacles of blood shed:

there was more respect for the victim in the aztec cermony
it was not shrouded in other things, like good laws or punishing heresey
there was more silence and more ritual
it was quieter, more witnesses, less hoopla
it was more beautiful (can we make an aesthic arguement--can we say something is ethically or morally superior because it is better designed ?)