Feeding, being part of the ANS, is about triggering hunger and cuing the individual when he or she is full, but what food is considered attractive to one individual or another is a different matter. It has been my experience that different cultures have different eating habits. Different families also have different eating habits within the same culture. My oldest brother very much enjoyed his breakfast of hot oatmeal whereas myself and my middle brother disliked oatmeal. We tried many ways to avoid eating it. Nevertheless, my mother always outsmarted us. She was a great believer that oatmeal was the best form of nutrition with which to start the day. In this sense certain foods have an attractiveness to different individuals regardless of cultural differences. Attractiveness is about how choices are made regarding the individual’s response to the triggering of the feeding and breeding feedback loops.
Attractiveness is not static. It is dynamic because it changes in intensity and focus. As you know from my earlier recount I was aware that girls and boys were treated differently and that I must have had a strong sense of self and of my body. My curiosity about the female body started early. It is important to clearly understand the difference between the reality of curiosity and the reality of attractiveness. I was curious about female bodies at an early age but to assume that I was attracted to the female body would be an error. Attractiveness began its ever increasing pull with the onset of puberty. Attractiveness toward the female body has not diminished to this day. I am of the mind that the female body is one of the most beautiful displays of nature. There are other displays of nature that I find to be beautiful as well. It is important to acknowledge that the LGBTQ+ community, more than likely, will have their similar but unique issues of attractiveness. Attractiveness is the compelling reality of choice.
It has already been documented that I, more than likely, have objectified females due to the innocence of young children and the naiveté of foolish boys. Every individual must learn how to behave well. This learning to behave well is greatly accomplished through instruction. The first line of instructors is that of the parents and/or the significant adults who are to nourish and care for the offspring upon the child’s birth into the world. The second wave of instructors are the teachers and significant others who occupy the school system of the culture which the innocent and naive also occupy. There are other cultural institutions that have a strong bearing on the development of the growing individual’s ultimate behavior. The next significant institution of influence is the religious institution that the young attend. While these are recognized by many or most adults as significant developing influences, they are not the only source of significant influence upon behavior. At a certain point in the development of the growing offspring, the peer group of that offspring begins to assert a stronger influence than the aforementioned influencers. The emergence of the peer group is known to be a strong influence on the behavior of the individual(s) as demonstrated through the common parental warning that “The company you keep will help or hurt you.” The young individual ultimately becomes responsible for his or her own behavior once that individual gains independence to care for him or herself and live under his or her own roof. To this array of influencers, we must add other influencers of developed and developing individuals. These influencers are extremely significant in influencing behavior. These influencers can be lumped into a conglomerate known as environmental stimulus that bombards the vast mass of individuals. Members of this bombarding stimulus are advertisements, music, photographs, television, movies, books and the endless world of the internet with its chat rooms, Facebook, Twitter, bogus information transmissions, and many other mediums of “information” (real or invented) broadcasted 24/7 globally to anyone with the needed computer technology to access it. This list is far more extensive than I record here. I mean only to point to the onslaught of forces targeting the senses and the mind of modern Homo sapiens.
My mother’s attempt to instill the ingestion of healthy foods did not stick with me. Once I left home at eighteen, I never ate hot oatmeal again. Growing up, I ate it almost every day until I was off to college. After that and up to this day, I have eaten it only on very, very rare occasions as an adult.
It is obvious to my thinking that surviving in the modern world environment is significantly different than surviving the ancestral hominid world before the onset of language and village development when hominids were becoming more bipedal and were hunters and gatherers. If the requirements for survival are significantly different, then the attractiveness regarding mate selection is likewise different. Requirements for survival, more than likely, influences attractiveness. Just as polar bears, bald eagles and cardinals have unique mating habits which reflect the attractiveness of one possible mate over another due to the unique requirements of their respective issues of survival, I had to learn what requirements of a prospective mate were essential to my survival and the survival of my offspring.
Issues of attractiveness developed as my own character developed. At this point in my life, I have come to understand that character development is interwoven tightly with the development of my consciousness. As has been stated, my curiosity involving females began early in my life but attractiveness toward females emerged with the onset of my entering puberty. Attractiveness toward females first is dominated by the eros that resides in the formation of my biochemical-neurological feedback loop of nature’s command to breed. It was a hell of a start to my journey toward discovering how best to be and what it is to be a modern human male. For me, it has been a journey full of frustration, competing opinions, diverse environmental displays of how to be the perfect male, and such a tantalizing visual presentation of how to attract the perfect female portrayed in advertisements, motion pictures, books and so forth and so on. I compare this journey of mine to my imaginings of the world of the hunter-gathering youth of my ancient ancestral hominids. To my thinking, theirs was more simple to resolve.
In years past, when and while I was healthier, I hunted with firearms as well as with bow and arrows. I am more of an archery enthusiast than a firearm devotee. Hunting for the modern male has its roots in the world of our ancient ancestral hominids. Hunting for the most modern humans is a hobby. Modern humans do not have to hunt. Hunting is not a required skill for the survival of modern humans. As such, hunting is not a requirement for attracting a female mate. This is not to say that some females might find a male who hunts very attractive, but modern humans predominantly get their food for survival from food markets. As the domestication of plants and animals progressed, the requirement for individuals to hunt for their food has diminished.
My participation in modern hunting practices afforded me the opportunity to gain some insight into similar experiences that might provide a sensitivity to the upbringing of young ancient ancestral hominid males. What must be understood is that my experience in the woods of a modern, industrialized civilization does not offer the same level of challenge as that of the wild woods of the early bipedal hominid-walkers of ancient times. That noted, it is possible with concerted reflection, meditation and honest self-awareness that I could obtain at least a better understanding of the difference between cosmopolitan life in a large metropolitan city over the more sparsely populated and developed area of rural, small town America. Understanding this distinction and with further reflection, meditation and honest self awareness, I might arrive at an even better sensitivity to understanding some of the significant differences between the development of modern youth and that of ancient hominid youth and how that pertains to érōs, philía and agápē.
I did not begin my excursion into hunting until I entered college. At college I had a few male friends who had been hunting early in their youth. Their fathers and/or uncles took them hunting. Many males with whom I have hunted started hunting around age twelve. While they may not have carried a rifle into the field when they first started, being in the field with men who did carry weapons and did harvest animals gave them a strong leg up to becoming very competent hunters when I first met them.
One afternoon, two or three hours before sunset, my son and I were hunting for deer. It was in October so we were armed with just our bows and arrows. It was archery season when the hunter in my state can harvest any deer (male or female). We had not seen any deer and the sun was close to setting. We had our cell phones set to vibrate with no sound so that we could communicate with each other while we were in the woods and fields.
I did not begin my excursion into hunting until I entered college. At college I had a few male friends who had been hunting early in their youth. Their fathers and/or uncles took them hunting. Many males with whom I have hunted started hunting around age twelve. While they may not have carried a rifle into the field when they first started, being in the field with men who did carry weapons and did harvest animals gave them a strong leg up to becoming very competent hunters when I first met them.
One afternoon, two or three hours before sunset, my son and I were hunting for deer. It was in October so we were armed with just our bows and arrows. It was archery season when the hunter in my state can harvest any deer (male or female). We had not seen any deer and the sun was close to setting. We had our cell phones set to vibrate with no sound so that we could communicate with each other while we were in the woods and fields.
Andy called me to check on my status. I reported the inactivity in my area. He thought that he had heard something in his area but did not have a visual on what was making the leaves rustle. We agreed to call it a day and return home since it is illegal to hunt after sunset. On our way into civilization, Andy called me to say that he was eyeballing three coyotes. This set off a warning in my head. Coyotes travel in packs. We were hunting on our land (about 40 acres) and I had heard coyotes yelping to each other in their pack when they were hunting deer at night. If you have ever heard a coyote pack yelping in the night when impassioned to hunt or right after a successful hunt, then you would be very nervous to know that three were within striking distance of you as the sun was setting. I would have been less nervous if I had brought a side arm (hand gun) with me but I had only a bow and six arrows. Andy and I had picked a place to meet on the outskirts of a hay field leading up to the house before we would travel home. This field had been hayed and big round hay bales were still sitting here and there all over the field. I determined in my head that I would use the round hay bales as cover once I made it out of the woods and to the edge of the field. The field was not actually flat. It had a gentle rolling feature that created some shallow valleys. These were significant enough that at places a standing deer could eat grass and not be seen by a hunter standing at some other spot in the field. Knowing that a coyote is shorter than a deer, I was not sure if I would inadvertently walk into the path of these three coyotes. As I neared the rendezvous spot I saw one of the coyotes standing on top of a hay bail not 25 yards from me and he was big. I did not see his companions, nor did I see Andy. Three to one are not great odds when facing wild coyotes and then there was the possibility that the pack might be larger and that Andy had only seen a part of the pack.
What is important in this experience is not the particulars that were running through my head at the time (like how fast could I nock an arrow, shoot it – accurately – and nock two other arrows to repeat that sequence before one coyote jumped on top of me). The particulars were merely the workings of the mind of an individual who was scared. The fear was genuine. I was on my own in the woods with wild animals that were not governed by any laws except the law of the wild woods. If they were hungry enough, if they were bold enough, if I was hesitant or off in my aim or too slow in performing the needed coordinated physical actions to demonstrate my prowess over the coyotes, then there might be a severe cost to pay for my venturing into the world of the coyote pack.
Experiencing this type of fear (real or imagined) is the important lesson of my experience.
Another time I experienced the fluttering of this fear in the ‘wild’ woods while hunting was with two other male friends who were far better hunters than I. We decided to go bird hunting on a beautiful Saturday. The sky was clear and the temperature was just right. One friend took his black Labrador retriever because according to him, his dog was way overweight and was in need of some serious exercise. The three of us fanned out. The man with the dog took the extreme right side of the line. I took the far left side of the line and the other hunter was in the middle. Since we were hunting birds, our shotguns were loaded with birdshot. Birds are small game so we did not want our ammunition to tear up the food we were to harvest. Each of us knew the general location of our companions but we were not in direct sight of each other. We knew the expanse of woods that we were going to walk and we would eventually reach a road which bordered the far side of the woods we were hunting. All was good and off we went.
I greatly enjoy the woods. I have lived in Baltimore City, Maryland for many years, so I know city living. I know metropolitan life and rural American life as well. They are as distinct as night and day, not better or worse, just uniquely different and robust in their own nature. I was delighted to be out in the woods on a beautiful afternoon with friends, and the soft sounds of nature and her wonderful smells. I had not seen bird one but I was overjoyed nonetheless when I saw a four legged bouncing ball of an animal running toward me from a pretty good distance. I stopped and squinted to try to focus on the details but it was too far off to make it out clearly. “Damn,” I thought, “That Labrador is running around chasing all of the animals away.” I stood still so I could grab his collar and take him back to his owner. However, as it got closer and closer (It was running pretty fast.) I could see it more and more clearly. It had small round ears. These were not the ears of a black Labrador and it was smaller than my friend’s dog. It was a black bear cub that ran ten yards in front of me on a forty-five degree angle cutting across my path. “A black bear cub! How cute! Wow, what a great surprise! But wait, where is mother?” You do not want to be between the mother black bear and her cub. And, bird shot ain’t going to do the trick. Quickly, I decided to walk to my right to find my friends. They would need to be informed about the cub and the absence of the mother. They should know of a possible danger in the area.
This was not the same magnitude of fear that I experienced when I encountered the three coyotes. Had I encountered the mother black bear, I would have had a different magnitude of fear and quite possibly some serious injuries. The fear was intense enough to interrupt my hunting to warn my friends of the possibility of a more dangerous situation.
These two and other experiences allowed me to feel the danger present when walking alone among the wild animals of the woods, a land without laws unlike the metropolitan city which is a land of many laws. Had I encountered the mother black bear, I would have been on my own and reliant on my own wits, my own brawn and what luck might have provided. These are the experiences that I have been given to facilitate a glimpse into the past and gain some sense of what those ancient ancestral hominid youths faced in their lives. I am certain that the level of my surviving these two situations by no means constitutes the same level that they needed to overcome. However, hunting in the woods with only a bow and an arrow to collect food transports me closer to their reality than living in the concrete jungle to fight to survive in the land of laws. The question to ask is: Has our evolution from our ancestral hominids facilitated a characterological shift that distinguishes us from them and, if so, how so? A corollary to that question is: What character traits, if any, have been maintained throughout that evolutionary path?