Fish Stories

Before I ever blogged, or even thought of doing the same, I was a Sex and Gender columnist for the now extinct Anodyne Magazine, what used to be a pretty promising arts and culture monthly. I used to also be the Sex and Gender Editor and the magazine’s Art Director as well as layout artist and occasional reviewer. But it writing my column “Gender Stew” that I got my cultural commentary ya-yas out, as well as the couple full articles I did.

Ever since Kip and Barry posted pieces they had originally written for Anodyne, I’ve been thinking of doing the same. Kip posted his wonderful article entitled “Why You Don’t Read Comics” while Barry posted on his experiences on being a cross dressing duck. Actually, I used to share S&G editing and column writing duties with Barry.

What follows is the first column I did solo, probably not my best piece, but I still like it. And I think it goes some ways in explaining why Colymbosathon ecplecticos amuses me so. As with most magazine pieces, I had to cut some verbiage to make it fit, but that draft is lost on some crashed hard drive. In attempt to be true to a piece of published writing I did six years ago, the only alterations I’ve made was to fix some tenses and articles that suffered from last minute cuts made by editors who had been up for 30 hours at that point, though I did include a couple of footnotes in an attempt to fill in some of the blanks.

I also had to gray out the clip art I had picked to accompany the piece behind the text, originally done by Paul Goold for Life magazine before being collected by Dover Publications:

The Other Fish in the Sea

Mermaids (after a fashion)

…fashion went to final extremes in the mid twentieth revival…nearly nude top and very shrouded bottom…It corresponds to one very tenacious myth about women, the same one that gave rise to the image of the mermaid, the perniciously divided female monster, a creature inherited by the gods only down to the girdle… the upper half of woman offers both keen pleasure and a sort of illusion of sweet safety; but it is a trap. Below, under the foam, the swirling waves of lovely skirt, her hidden body repels, its shapeliness armed in scaly refusal, its oceanic interior stinking of uncleanness.

—Anne Hollander, Sex and Suits

I’ve recently found out something startling about the seahorse. I’m not talking about scientists erroneously supposing that the male seahorse was more docile than the female just because he carries the eggs. (I was a bit puzzled by that assumption. After all, the male seahorse is also the sperm carrier, supposedly possessing all those neat chemicals that make him a he. Hormones were considered the big key to aggression for quite a while.) Nor do I mean the discovery that the male doesn’t carry a placenta-like substance to nourish the eggs that are deposited in his incubator pouch. No, the shocker for me was the revelation that the male seahorse was key to the feminist debate over the division of labor between women and men.

“It was thought that they did all the rearing of the young, but it turns out that the females do most of the work,” was the tag line accompanying the New York Times Service article by Natalie Angier—one of the most interesting pieces of sensationalist journalism I’ve come across in a long while. The article, carried in the October 29th [1997] edition of the Oregonian, covered the results of a study by Heather Masonjones, Of Amherst College, focusing on the dwarf seahorse, one of 35 species of seahorses to be found in the world. Provocative headlines aside, the truth is neither parent puts any effort in to the actual rearing of the children.

As for the breeding, the female does indeed put enormous effort into producing hundreds of fertile eggs. This done, she indicates her condition by nodding her head to likely male candidates. After she has found the one she wants to hold tails with for a turn around the sea floor, she inserts a special nipple into an opening in the male’s pouch, deposits her eggs, and then swims off until next season. The male, meanwhile, discretely fertilizes the eggs inside his pouch, incubates them for about ten days, then spends several painful hours “giving birth” to hundreds of offspring. Which seems like a mighty amount of effort on the male’s past, whether her eggs or his non-existent “placenta” provides the nutrients for the embryos.

Let’s go back to how these new findings “demonstrates once again the dangers of making simplistic assumptions about the reproductive behavior and the ever-shifting dialectic between male and female.” Well, I never recalled how the male seahorse had “long been viewed with awe, as a kind of submarine saint.” It is odd how I‘ve always seemed to know that the male seahorse “bore” the young. But I remember it being presented as an oddity of nature—not a shining example of manhood—right along with the bower bird, who takes months building a color coordinated nest for his potential mate’s approval, and the fact that earthworms are hermaphrodites.

But, just to see if I missed something, I checked out a few popular animal biology books from the public library with references on seahorse breeding from the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. Contrary to Angier’s claims, the female was not forgotten; her unique role was well noted by the authors. True, they did dwell more on the uniqueness of the male, but none painted him as “a martyr to his children.” In fact, it was mentioned that he’d often scarf a few of his own newborn offspring as an after-birth snack. Then he swims off, leaving the remainder to fend for themselves.

Now, the male stickleback fish actually cares more for his kids—though he doesn’t actually carry the eggs, he does tend to them in the nest he built, guarding them till they hatch and then watching over his brood until they can actually take care of themselves. All without the help of the female , who he will actually chase away after she lays her eggs. there are also examples of female fish who go to great lengths for their young, but the most popular way fish go about reproduction is for the female to lay her eggs, the male to fertilize them and both to leave the scene without a second thought.

But why are we looking for parenting role models here at all? When all is said and done, these are fish. You know, creatures dumb enough to be caught with a line, a hook and some bait? I find it amazing that people still try to justify the social order between men and women by citing examples of nature. As for biological differences, well, yeah, in many species the male is bigger and better armed. Many are also covered in fur, shuffle along on four legs and piss in order to define their personal space. Another tout of male superiority in the animal kingdom is the finer plumage of male birds. Which is to say they wear the equivalent of lipstick and high heels, engage in elaborate dances hoping to capture the heart of some female who didn’t appreciate all the effort he put into looking nice for her. It’s all rather ridiculous, but then people have always needed to give everything around them human personas, like Father Time and Mother Nature.*

To be fair, people also assign their fellow humans animal characteristics; that one has a heart like a lion, this one struts like a peacock, lawyers are vultures, women are fish.

I’m not sure how many people are aware of the insult of “fish” for women, which was especially prevalent among the gay male community I knew a few years ago. It’s a term of a rather indelicate origin; however, the comparison between women and fish is quite an old one, much older than the derogatory connotation used today. It was partly due to the prevailing belief that women were cold and clammy (as opposed to a man’s dry heat). There is also the concept as fish as Other, a strange creature from a world totally unlike our own, down to the substance they breathe, Ancient mythology is full of mermaids, sirens, river maidens and ladies in lakes.** This concept found its way into the poetry and prose of the Renaissance (and beyond) with analogies to the sea and other nautical references.

Despite all this, I feel no kinship to fish. And while I find some of their variations and answers to the problems of life interesting, I have no desire to emulate them or look to them as examples of a better life. not that I’m against giving eggs to my husband for him to incubate and bring to term. I hear that the Rockefeller Foundation will give us a million bucks if we succeed…

*Chronos and Gaia.

**I realize there are also plenty of watery males, I was tracing a particular heritage of Western thought. Plus the females did seem the dominate ones, the ones with the most screen time, especially in being part fish. Males tended to be the river itself or fully human in appearance, and not so often carved in statuary.