Bump Watch

The wife of the second prince in line to the Japanese throne has announced that she is pregnant. A boy will end what has become a succession crisis.

In the meantime, given the failure up to this point of a male heir to appear, a major issue on the Japanese political front has been whether to repeal a 1947 law banning empresses. Reading about this, I was filled with all kinds of thoughts.

Foremost was the notion of an entire nation of tens of millions of people working together to understand the impact of the gender of a single individual. It made me think of bees, and of the insane myriad of different mating and kinship practices that exist in the animal world. Species that can change sex in response to changes in their role in a group, and other such exotica. Is the way humans can obsessively focus on the reproduction of a single family the expression of a mating gene that was once dominant? Not just emperors and kings, but the continual cycle of celebrity bump watches that floods our society's comm channels.

Species where only the alpha male gets to reproduce seem relatively common, even among big mammals like us. Perhaps it was not so long ago that our genes programmed in us a slavish voyeurism that let many take pleasure in a single coupling pair.

Another interesting thing related to this is that human sexuality itself takes myriad forms. We have men with many wives, women who mate with women, men who mate with men, not to mention the millions of people wandering around who are neither male or female. And this has made me wonder in the past if this is one thing that has allowed us to adapt and be so successful in so many different environments and different forms of economy. I can imagine hunter/gatherers operating most efficiently on a very different set of sexual mores than arthur and guinevere, or for that matter from those of a crazy winner like Barney Frank. It's yet another way in which we are supremely adaptable creatures. Sexuality polymorphism of a certain scale may be the provenance of big-brained creatures like ourselves and giant apes, and it may exist because, as we all know, being part of a large group means knowing that their are so many ways to be a bitch :)

Like being a breeder. This can be at once this an exalted position and one subject to sometimes impossible, yet undeniable, demands. Saul Bellow writes of an African king who is worshipped by all and supplied with an unending train of rapturous virgins until the day he is no longer able to perform five times daily, when he is ritually killed and replaced with a musky 18 year old.

Crown Princess Masako is certainly the breeder poster child. I hope to God her sister-in-law has a boy and I will certainly be following it very closely!