A salacious South Seas post (part 4)

So far, we haven't much touched the matter of same sex sex in the Pacific.   From this review of a 2003 (very academically oriented, by the sounds) book, it would seem that being a good looking fellow on a trip with Captain Cook could get you involved in a bit of unwanted attention with the local royalty:

Although most commentators focus on the relationships between Cook's men and the Polynesian women, his journals show "an inscription of masculinity that is not yet our own" (p. 45), particularly in the form of the aikane, comely young men who were apparently sexual favorites of the Hawaiian royalty. According to one report from Cook's voyage, "their business is to commit the Sin of Onan upon the old King" (p. 45). Strikingly, the aikane does not exhibit gender inversion, as do the Tongan fakaleiti, the Tahitian mahu, or the Samoan fa'fafine, which will be discussed later. Perhaps because of the influence of Said's model of the male Western conqueror and the feminized subaltern, these gender-inverted figures are far better known than the aikane.

Wallace is particularly interested in the attempt by Cook and his men to write about the phenomenon of the aikane with objective disinterest, which stands in contrast to their reports of active participation in the sexual customs that take place between men and women on the islands. There are, however, breaks in the record, when Cook and his men reveal some level of participation in the erotic relations between men in Polynesia. The Hawaiian nobleman Kalinikoa reportedly asked to retain at least one of the attractive men from Cook's crew as an aikane. Far from rejecting the proposal out of hand, Cook, his man, Kalinikoa and his aikane exchanged names "in the Tahitian manner" (p. 47), which Westerners at least conceived as a kind of Polynesian male-male marriage ceremony. Subsequent scholars have found in these reports evidence that there was "something about" some of the sailors, particularly Captain Bligh. As Wallace argues, the point is not that scholars and film-makers have used such anecdotes to question Bligh's sexuality, but that these pejorative representations produce--and continue to reproduce--a modern understanding of homosexuality"(51).

  More about the cross cultural confusion here:

Funny how none of this intrigue during Captain Cook's time in Hawaii seems to get a mention in popular histories about him.

Must be about time to wind this all up.  One more part to write....

A salacious South Seas post (part 3)

OK, not exactly South Seas this time, but if you thought the Tahitians were relaxed about sex, seems to me that they may have had some fierce competition from the pre-contact Hawaiians.

This chapter from a book gives an eyebrow raising account of societal sex arrangements, and there are too many matters of explicit detail to mention here; but in terms of general description of a relaxed attitude to sex and relationships, this section is worth reading:

Until fairly recently, the birth of an infant to an unmarried female in Hawai‘i, as elsewhere in Polynesia, was not a problem for her or society. Her fertility was proven, and the infant was wanted and taken care of by the extended ‘ohana (family). illegitimacy, in the Western sense, is inapplicable in regard to traditional Hawai‘i (Pukui, Haertig, and Lee, 1972, p. 96).

While betrothals occurred, occasionally arranged by parents of chiefs or by other prominent persons, such formalized relationships were uncommon (Kamakau, 1964, pp. 25-26). Specific words for “husband” and “wife” did not exist; he was simply called kane (man) and she wahine (woman) (Handy and Pukui, 1958. p. 51; Sahlins, 1985, p. 23).

Individuals stayed together or not by choice rather than by commitment or obligation. One member of a pair could be monogamous while the other was polygamous. While public announcements of intentions to stay together among ali‘i were noteworthy and often elaborate affairs, they were uncommon. David Malo, an advisor to King Kalakaua III and an Hawai‘ian convert to Christianity, wrote in 1839: “Of the people about court there were few who lived in marriage. The number of those who had no legitimate relations with women was greatly in the majority. Sodomy and other unnatural vices in which men were the correspondents, fornication and hired prostitution were practiced about court” (Malo, 1951, p. 65) ⁹.

A “pairing” ceremony among commoners was even more rare (Sahlins, 1985, P. 23). Couples that wanted to sleep and live together just did so (Sahlins, 1985, p. 23). Typically, no contract was expressed openly, although there probably was a vague set of expectations that linked the couple. Sahlins (1985, p. 23) expressed the situation thus: “For the people as for the chiefs, the effect of sex was society: a shifting set of liaisons that gradually became sorted out and weighted down by the practical considerations attached to them.”

Monogamy, polygyny, and polyandry coexisted among ali‘i and among commoners. Often, polygamy involved siblings (Morgan, 1964, p. 361).¹⁰ Taking another sexual partner usually was acceptable if the first mate knew about the relationship and sanctioned it. Secret relationships were not approved of, however, although the discovery of such a relationship usually was disruptive only temporarily. Such sexual license greatly disturbed the early Christian missionaries. The “crimes” most commonly reported by the haole (foreigner, now refers to Caucasians) to occur among the Hawai‘ians, recorded as being 4-5times more common than theft or property crimes, were fornication and adultery (Sahlins, 1985, p. 24); these terms, of course, had no meaning to the Hawai‘ians.

“Adultery” came to be defined by the Hawai‘ians as “sexual activity with a nonregular partner within the hale. If the coitus occurred outside the house in private, it was not a problem to the Hawai‘ian, since it did not disrupt the status quo.

Sexual exclusivity was not associated with “marriage.” Such an idea would have been unusual to Polynesian society (Danielsson, 1986, p. 115). Gregersen (1982, p. 250) reported monogamy in only 30 of 127 Pacific island cultures studied, the rest of the cultures being polygamous. Worldwide, Ford and Beach (1951, P. 108) found multiple mateships permitted in 84% of the 185 societies in their Human Area Files sample.

Relationships were dissolved at the desire of one or both partners. Sex with others was not seen as a cause for separation. Jealousy was considered unwarranted. Handy and Pukui (1958, pp. 57-58) wrote: “… where love of one man by two women were involved [and vice versa], it was considered bad manners (maika‘i ‘ole, “not good”) for apunalua (lover) to hold spite or malice in their hearts towards each other. The very existence of the formal [punalua] relationship. . . worked against ill feeling...

The Christian missionaries really had their work cut out for them!

But it's funny:  no matter how libertine a society can organise itself in some respects, it seems that it can't resist having silly rules about something:

 Under the kapu system, there were forms of bondage and slavery, human sacrifice (Valeri, 1985), and infanticide (Malo, 1951, p. 70; Kamakau, 1961, p. 234). While adult females were afforded many rights and some had great status, it was kapu for them to eat certain foods; they could be put to death for eating pork, certain kinds of bananas or coconuts, and certain fish (Malo, 1951, p. 29). Poi and taro⁴ (basic staples of the Hawai‘ian diet) were not to be eaten from the same dish by males and females. Furthermore, in certain circumstances upon threat of death, adult males and adult females were not allowed to eat together, although they could have sex together. Religious laws controlled eating more than they controlled sex.

(Yet another instalment to come...)
 

A salacious South Seas post (part 2)

Reverting back to the story of the first European ship to arrive in Tahiti (The Dolphin) in 1767, a review of another book makes it clear that the sailors did not, ahem, waste any time:

Salmond recounts the moment the trade of sex for nails began in 1767 via the landing of a food-gathering party from Captain Samuel Wallis' ship HMS Dolphin, with "a Dear Irish boy, one of our Marins" having sex with a Tahitian woman in front of his companions. He got a thrashing from his fellow sailors for his lack of decency in not going behind a bush; his excuse was that he was afraid of losing the honour of being the first.

The watching Tahitians may have made a different sense of this public display. Their arioi (a largely male religious and aristocratic society, to grossly simplify their multiple roles in Tahitian society) would occasionally perform ceremonial public sex in their symbolic negotiations with 'Oro, a god associated with thunder, power and consequently sex.

In another of the Tahitians' efforts to manage the assumed ancestral power of the arriving strangers, women of the islands would circle the Westerners' boats, stamping their feet, grimacing, exposing their genitals and yelling. This potent display of unrestricted feminine power was meant to demean and work upon the restricted power of men, but the sailors seem largely to have interpreted it as a simple offer of sex.

I'm sort of interested in the matter of whether any English captains actually ever thought they could control their crew's behaviour.   It seems that Cook didn't try, but a bit to my surprise,  at least the Spanish may have tried to keep their sailors on the leash.  From the same link as before, there's this story of cultural differences causing serious issues when played out in front of others:

Vehiatua, a Tahitian ari'i, visits a Spanish ship whose crew have been forbidden to have sex and whose ceremonial cross has already been planted on shore, and he proceeds to have oral sex with his "servant" (possibly a mahu, a man who lived as a woman) in the sergeants' mess. The pair are discovered and roundly thrashed by a common sailor, setting in motion orders and counter-orders of offence. The Tahitians' dignity is assaulted by their leader being beaten by a sailor; the sailor's dignity is assaulted by a male-to-male exchange so differently managed in ship-board life.

What about these arioi?  A description of their rather charmed life (save for the fact that they practiced infanticide - I gather that having kids around would be considered a drag on their lifestyle) is found in a paper with the hi-falutin' title "Getting Nailed: Re-inventing the European-Pacific Encounter In the Age of Global Capital":

Not entirely sure how one got to join this caste.  Invitation only, I guess?

Anyhow, it's worth at least one more post...

A salacious South Seas post (Part 1)

I suppose we all know of the reputation of the South Pacific as a place of sexual liberty from the (flawed) work of Margaret Mead in the 1920's; and a viewing of Mutiny on the Bounty would indicate that sailors encountering welcoming parties of scores of topless Tahitian women may have pushed its sensual reputation back much further in history; but I didn't really know much about this topic.

So, it's with some interest that I stumbled across this subject yesterday.

Here's an extract from Michael Sturma's South Sea Maidens:  Western Fantasy and Sexual Politics in the South Pacific:

OK, time for a diversion.  Can't say that I've heard the story of Jeanne Baret before.   She was, however, the subject of a book that was discussed at NPR.   Unfortunately, it appears that the story of her "outing" as a woman may not be as harmless as Sturma believes:

Glynis Ridley, author of The Discovery of Jeanne Baret: A Story of Science, the High Seas, and the First Woman to Circumnavigate the Globe, says Baret would have been the obvious choice to serve as Commerson's assistant on the Etoile's journey, except for one thing.

"A French Royal ordinance forbade women being on French Navy ships," Ridley tells Weekend All Things Considered host Guy Raz. A little theater was necessary.

"The couple formulated a plan for Baret to disguise herself as a young man [and] offer herself as his assistant on the dockside."

After Commerson "accepted" Baret into his service, the couple was able to keep their secret from the crew of over 100 men for some time. Baret's real identity was cruelly revealed, however. The commander of the expedition claims it happened when the Etoile landed on the island of Tahiti.

"Bougainville said that a group of Tahitian men surrounded Baret and immediately identified her as a woman," Ridley says. "Because she was worried about what might happen, she supposedly revealed her true identity so that her countrymen, the French, could save her from what she took to be an imminent sexual assault."

But after poring over the diaries of crew members, Ridley doesn't believe Bougainville's tale.
"That story is peculiar to Bougainville's journal," Ridley says. "In fact, three other members of the crew contradict this story and say that Baret was, in fact, brutally exposed." According to the other journals, Baret was discovered and gang-raped by her crewmates in Papua New Guinea.

Back to the Sturma explanation of the allure of Tahiti:  as we all know, Captain Cook kept visiting the island, and while he was restrained himself, his famous young passenger Joseph Banks didn't:

 ......

There is much more of interest on this topic, but I think I'll have to break it up across a few posts...

Pell, Minchin et al

I think most people would assume that George Pell has, in the past, not been as sensitive to the issue of clerical child abuse as we now expect Church leaders to be.  He may deserve some criticism for that.    On the other hand, as far as I can tell, the worst claims about things he is supposed to have said are from single sources and are unlikely to warrant serious findings against him.  I could be wrong, but in the terrible matter of child abuse, not every claim made by victims recalling events decades ago is necessarily credible.

That said, I am tired of the circus like quality to the media interest in Pell giving evidence again to the Royal Commission.  I don't know, for example, why all media outlets (including the commercial ones, not just the ABC - despite Bolt's silly frothing that they are following the story closely) have given such huge coverage to Minchin's song.

I've never cared for Minchin - he's always struck me as the embodiment of arrogant and crude Left wing comedy.  (And I say that fully aware that virtually all comedians are going to be Left leaning; it's just that some are more annoyingly arrogant and self assured that they understand every issue the "right" way.)

I also don't know why, with cheap and reliable video calls being the norm these days, the Commission did make such an initial issue of Pell appearing in person.

But having said all of this, in a broader sense, the value of this commission has been much greater (in the sense of the public feeling that grave wrongs have had the full airing they deserve) than any of  the politically motivated Abbott enquiries into the Labor government.   It's an absurd Right wing meme that it was called to harm Abbott - a man who left the seminary because he felt it wasn't macho enough, and whose connection with Pell seemed to be largely diminished in recent years anyway.

But it will still be good to get this over with.

A domestic issue

I was wondering:  does anyone know if there is a way to stop an 8 month old Jack Russell/Shitzu cross from sniffing out cane toads, biting/licking them, and then frothing at the mouth and requiring her owners to wash it out and rub her gums with a cloth (being the recommended "first aid" for cane toad poison in the mouth)?  Is our pup evidence for the urban (possible) myth that some dogs like the trippy effect of cane toad poison?

Oh, and for those who have good reason to kill cane toads (such as having an 8 month old Jack Russell/Shitzu pup), this product, of which I was previously unaware, does kill toads in a pretty efficient but not painful looking way:

Available at Bunnings.

Update:  the toad licker in question:

Not your average looking drug user, but you never know...

I'm thinking of sending her to military school to straighten her out.

Gosh

Update: never mind "our knowledge", what about me personally?  I see that according to a post at io9 a couple of years ago, estimates of the storage capacity of the human brain range from 300 MB (ha - too low) to 2,500 TB (seems too much.)  One simple estimate based on synapse numbers is more like 100TB.

Being generous, if we allow 300TB, I expect to be preserved in glass for at least 10 billion years. 

Meanwhile, in Egypt

The extraordinary amount of effort that goes into pursuing people who cause offence in some Muslim countries surely must detract from them doing more useful things?:

Cairo: Egypt’s chief prosecutor on Tuesday issued an arrest warrant for a blogger over his controversial TV remarks against rural women, sparking outrage, legal sources said.

Taymour Al Subki claimed on the TV show Possible, aired on private television station CBC, that wives in conservative Upper Egypt are unfaithful to their husbands who work outside the country.

The remarks prompted dozens of lawsuits against Al Subki. The ensuing uproar prompted CBC this week to halt the programme after making an apology to the nation’s women.

Parliamentarians, representing Upper Egypt, also condemned Al Subki and the broadcaster. Some Upper Egyptian men reportedly threatened to kill Al Subki in retaliation.

A dangerous holiday

Nearly 90,000 hospitalized during three days of Lunar New Year holiday in Vietnam

Apropos of nothing, I decided to look at a Vietnamese news site, and learnt that the holiday season there is kinda dangerous sounding:

The combined number of deaths and fatality prognosis cases was 88, a
one percent drop, while the number of people under emergency care rose
113 percent against the previous year.

Over 17,000 people fell victim to traffic accidents nationwide in the
period, the newswire quoted the ministry as saying. Eleven percent of
the victims suffered brain injury, the ministry said.

Some 2,000 people were admitted to infirmaries in the country due to
physical confrontations, an 83 percent year on year decline.

Ten people died in the conflicts, six cases more than last year, according to the Ministry of Health.

It added that 2,000 cases of food poisoning were recorded during the three days, the peak of the Lunar New Year holiday.

The National Traffic Safety Committee said in a recent report that over
64 people died in traffic accidents that happened across Vietnam
between February 7 and 9.

Mind you, I see that its population is nearly 90 million (much higher than I would have guessed), so I suppose you have to take that into account.

A complicated political and sex life

Funnily enough, although I have read probably 95% of his books, I've never really bothered digging into the complicated personal life of Robert Heinlein.  

I see that it was summarised in this post at io9 in 2014, which I may have missed.   Strangely, it seems he was clearly on the Left of politics prior to World War 2, then moved to the libertarian right with his second wife.  But both marriages were (apparently) open, with the first one including a 3 way relationship with L Ron Hubbard for a time (!)

He really was a very odd character.

Laser pen menace

How dangerous are lasers to planes? - BBC News

Laser pens are not illegal in the UK and are widely available online,
costing anything from £20 to £500. Those sold in the UK are usually
classified in accordance with the current safety standards.

However, stronger lasers can be imported via the internet. One South
Korean-based website offers to ship the "world's most powerful handheld
laser" to the UK, starting from $199 (£137).

According to David aylor, of National Police Air Service (NPAS), it is "extremely easy" to
pick up lasers on the internet that are about 5,000 times more powerful
than the strength of a typical classroom pointer.

 

At a loose end, Andrew?

Andrew Bolt has lost his TV show (for now, at least), and appears to have additional time to be more aggro than ever on his blog.   (His show had, I take it, failed comprehensively in terms of ratings comparison with Insiders, despite having a good start early on.  This was hardly surprising - even his fans at Catallaxy used to complain about his chronic presenter interruptus.) 

Bolt is enthusiastically joining in with a revival of "the ABC must be attacked at all costs" at The Australian, which is looking more right wing than ever.  But I think his rush to take offence on behalf of Tim Wilson, the recipient of gushing praise from George Brandis, was over the top in the way it decided to talk about the gay relationships of ABC staff.  

Really, Andrew should get out of this commentary business, I think.  It's doing his head in and leading him down an isolated path of unhelpful contribution, to put it mildly.  

Feels like an El Nino summer...

The latest figures from NASA indicate that January was hot globally, especially in the Arctic, where ice extent for winter is at a record low too.  (See the same link.)

As far as I can make out, this summer's been a mixed bag in Australia:  it seems to have been exceptionally stormy in Sydney (but not in Brisbane);  Adelaide and Perth have had heatwaves;  Melbourne I think hasn't been exceptionally hot at all; but back to Brisbane - it's been a summer of stifling humid hot nights which I seem to recall being the hallmark of the last big El Nino summer in 1998. 

It's rather unpleasant, this night heat without the benefit of cooling storms.

Not very encouraging

New NASA data show how the world is running out of water - The Washington Post

 OK, perhaps that headline is misleading, but the article is about water in aquifers, and it seems many of them around the world (often in the poorest parts) are dropping due to overuse.

Douthat does his balancing act

Ross Douthat does a neat bit of balance in this column.  He at least, amongst conservative columnists, talks honestly about Republican economic fundamentalism being a problem:

But the Clintonian synthesis has been orphaned for ideological reasons, not because it was tested and found to fail. Liberals simply don’t want to believe that low-income Americans, black and Hispanic as well as white, might benefit from public paternalism in welfare policy, soft “values” rhetoric on marriage and family, and restrictions on illegal immigration — even though the working class’s best recent decade featured a Democratic president who embraced all three.

They don’t want to believe that soaring incomes for the 1 percent, their great bugaboo, can coexist with real gains for the middle class – even though the two coexisted in the late 1990s.

They don’t want to put any limits on soaking the rich and their investments — even if that means going way above the tax rates that prevailed during the economy’s last impressive boom.

Not that conservatives have been all that interested in learning from Clintonism either. Two decades after the G.O.P. insisted, wrongly, that any tax increase on the rich would devastate the economy, the Republican tax agenda is still founded on a supply-side absolutism the ’90s boom should have laid to rest.

This leaves our politics in a peculiar place. Within the memory of everyone save the youngest Bernie Bros and social socialists, there was an era that delivered something for the many, that put almost every trendline on a better arc.

Yet the politics of that era are orphaned — so much so that not even a Clinton will defend Clintonism anymore.