Carnivorous Cow

Carnivorous Cow is puzzled. Did the builder who wolf-whistled at her expect her to be flattered, or had it simply not occured to him that she might even have a response to his expression? Because he was employed by an outside contractor, she couldn't remind him of Codes of Conduct or University Policies, and so needed to resort to the kind of threats he might understand, but clearly 1994 has been long in arriving in the building industry.

She asked Gramsci what he thought of it all. Was the threat of plugging his larynx with his genitalia to prevent him whistling a little over the top? Might some Maoist "re-education" programme be a better strategy? Why did the perpetrator feel the need to remind everyone that he could expel air through his mouth, too?

"Maybe he meant it as a compliment," shrugged Gramsci. Shrugging with eight legs requires sophisticated co-ordination, and Carnivorous Cow always enjoyed the sight. But she didn't understand. "A compliment is meant to make the recipient feel good, surely?" she asked. "Not violent and aggressive towards the perpetrator? Surely that's not the effect he wanted? So why embark on a strategy doomed to fail?"

Gramsci shrugged again. "He probably didn't think about it too much. Robin Williams famously remarked that men had been given brains and genitalia, but only sufficient blood to run one at a time. Maybe the other system was operational at the time."

Carnivorous Cow thought about that. For many people on Campus, brains were not required at all during the execution of their work - in fact, for many, they were under strict orders to leave the at home. She could understand then that this unused blood supply found its way to other areas of the body - despite this being outlawed by numerous policies and rules. But the interpretation and application of policy often required the brain to function, and this contradiction was overlooked by the procedures.

"Perhaps," she suggested timorously, "it might be a better idea to allow them to think?"

Carnivorous Cow sighed loudly and slurped her take-away coffee dramatically. Falling in love had never been part of her plan, and falling in love with someone on the other side of the planet had most certainly not been part of her plan. She felt awkward about the new soppiness, the sighs that slipped from her lips, and the size that slipped from her hips - though that was possibly due to the tummy bug that stayed around altogether too long.

She did quite enjoy the buzz that zinged through her veins, giving her a better rush than any amount of caffeine, and she was slowly getting used to the amount of beauty she'd started noticing in unexpected places, all around her, but she worried that she might be losing her grip and so made a point of practising random acts of snarling on hapless victims like Mr Timberland / Mr Sunshine to stay in form.

She'd also caught herself once or twice acting grown-up, instead of leaping at the chance to make sport of opportunities that presented themselves. Well, she'd exercised some discretion - but discretion, like bodies weakened by resistant tummy bugs, is lazy, and shirks exercise when it can.

Still, the exercising of discretion didn't require long sweaty conversations about the bandwidth situation, which was what almost all conversations in the gym tended towards given the opportunity. No wonder UCT was so populated by sad bodies, she mused, there were only so many conversations one could have about the complete absence of any bandwidth to speak of on Campus before one's blood pressure produced B-grade horror movie special effects.

What she found most difficult about it though - the love bit, not the bandwidth bit, which would require more space than a polite blog to elucidate - was the karmic balance it seemed to exact. All around her relationships were decaying, divorce lawyers working overtime and copious amounts of Ignatia being gulped. Her bright eyes and bouncy gait seemed to mock their pain and suffering, a discordant note in the melancholy music of misery intoned across the Campus and beyond.

But then the benefits of congenital superficiality asserted themselves as the music moved on from Tom Waits to Van Morrison, and she shreiked with pleasure as she cranked the iPod louder and galloped around the office, singing loudly and tunelessly. Ah yes, fretted Gramsci, jamming his legs into his ears, love had a lot to answer for...

"Did you notice him flirting with you in the meeting?", Carnivorous Cow was asked recently. Her radar, in better repair than P's, had indeed picked this up at the time, though she knew better than to make too much of it. It was clearly the result of sibling rivalry, rather than anything to do with her dazzling bovinity. She was merely the owner of the resource - her attention - for which the competition raged.

But flirting was definitely out there as a tactic through which to get one's way - she had seen women in management positions use it to great effect with men in still more senior positions. She had seen women in rather more senior positions refusing to use it, and coming up against a wall of frustration and resistance as a result. She had seen men of all ranks using it as and when it suited them, merely as one choice within an armoury. And she'd wondered why the women hadn't expanded their repertoires in a similar way, to allow them other tactics besides flirting through which they could be effective.

Crying didn't count.

Carnivorous Cow wondered if anyone had ever studied the efficacy of flirting as a management tactic. It must work well enough at least often enough to provide its practitioners with reasons to continue with it, but she wondered if there were not other tactics that might be used to better effect that were simply not being attempted. Like clear, unambiguous communication. Though she accepted that the minute more than one gender was involved, such possibilities slipped into the domain of intricate statistical formulae, stochastic modelling and science fiction.

Still, it was a nice idea. And rather less effort than mastering Flirting For Beginners...

"I just got hit on!" announced Carnivorous Cow as she bounded into her office. Gramsci scuttled out from under the keyboard and looked up, expectantly. That the Cow seemed amused rather than angry, flattered or embarrassed intrigued him, and he wanted to hear the gory details.

But Carnivorous Cow wasn't telling. She didn't think it was something to add to the grapevine - her love life generated far too much speculation at the best of times, she didn't need this added dimension of horror-mongering. And playing "Twenty Questions" about it was also not going to wash.

"So..." ventured Gramsci, firing up Safari and surfing to the UCT home page, "Was it a welcomed sexual advance?" Carnivorous Cow shrugged. "If you mean, did my knees turn to jelly and my hormones leap at the prospect, no. If you mean, did I run screaming to the nearest shrink for counselling, no. It was an advance, not one I was seeking nor one I'll follow up on, but I've not been scarred for life by the experience!"

Gramsci made a tick on the page next to "unwelcomed". "Tell me," he continued, "was it repeated?" The Cow shook her head. "Flagrant?" Carnivorous Cow burst out laughing. "Oh, I'll say! There was absolutely no disguising the intention! I think even P would have gotten the message, and you know how naive he is about these things!"

Gramsci ignored the diversion, and proceded with the checklist. "It would appear," he advised sagely, "that you have been subjected to sexual harassment. Would you like to hear how to proceed on the matter?" "What?" shrieked the Cow. "Sexual harassment? You're saying, pretty much, that any kind of sexual overture is inappropriate, unless it's welcomed? And how is someone supposed to know if it will be welcomed or not until they try?"

Gramsci wasn't entirely sure. "Perhaps..." he ventured, "if the advance was ambiguous, rather than flagrant...?"

"Yeah right!" snapped Carnivorous Cow. "Imagine the murky terrain that steers you into! People would be retired, or graduated, long before they'd established what the agenda actually was. What's wrong with being upfront? A clear request, with the space for the recipient to accept, reject or defer. Or ignore..."

Gramsci started up on a monologue about power relations and structural constraints, but the Cow rolled her eyes and interrupted. "Yes yes yes," she sighed, "but doesn't the Statement of Values encourage us to love, to laugh, to enjoy life? how can one love if one is prevented from testing the possibilities for this?" "Sexual harassment is not acceptable!" fumed Gramsci, "Policy needs to be clear on that!"

"Absolutely!" agreed the Cow. "But to trivialise real incidents by lumping them together with the clumsy efforts of individual staff and students to get laid... Surely that's not the intention of the policy, either?"

Gramsci wasn't entirely sure about that. If we were really only so much human capital, then energy expended on carnal pursuits was energy not invested in productivity, after all....

Carnivorous Cow found herself trapped in a discussion with no way out but self-contradiction. Actually, this happens rather frequently, as the logical inevitability of a grasshopper mind, but she found herself acutely aware of it and unable to backtrack gracefully.

Mr Fixit was grumbling about a colleague who resorted to tears as a means to get her own way, and how unfair this was because his gender would militate against this tactic working for him. Consensus held that tears at work were unprofessional, manipulative, and generally irritating. They also led to sweeping generalisations and were thus profoundly anti-feminist.

Carnivorous Cow felt a bit awkward. She hated manipulation, she hated games, she preferred directness and honesty, and frankly didn't buy arguments of structure overwhelming agency in most of the cases she encountered of such manipulation. These were not victims on the fragile end of a power dynamic, but strong personalities who'd grown up with all the cultural capital and structural advantage available to white women of the comfortable classes. Her sympathies were limited.

But at the same time, she resented the neo-liberal attempts to reduce people to "human capital", assets (or liabilities) on a balance sheet, stripped down to the single dimension of their productive power and potential contribution to the "knowledge economy". She felt strongly that people were _people_, that their nukke en grille were as much part of them as their capacity to manage their budgets, and that all of that needed to be accommodated in the place in which they spent most of their lives. Whether that took the form of allowing them their children's photos as wallpaper on their PC, or the subversive flirting around the photocopier, or their predilection for odd ringtones on their hellphones - well, that was who they were. So long as it wasn't offensive or toxic to the environment or hampered colleagues in the execution of their duties, she saw little harm in it.

Which created a contradiction. Colleagues were always grumbling about Sybil, who had 28 distinct personalities dependant on her hormonal cycle. "She should leave her moods at home," they grumbled, "or take industrial strength hormones to control them better. And put up a biorythm calendar on her door, so you know when it's safe to approach!" Like male vs female nipples, this showed signs of gender war terrain. Which made Carnivorous Cow feel obliged to defend the right of Sybil to vagaries of her hormones, though she also found the fallout difficult to live with.

Which presented her with a real problem - principles vs pragmatics. What you say and what you do. And whether crying was something to condone, tolerate, or decry (sorry!). She felt trapped by the conflict between What She Felt She Should Say, and What She Wanted To Say, and didn't know how to backtrack gracefully out of the cul de sac into which she'd argued herself. Anyone who's seen a cow would know that backtracking gracefully was not physically possible, but that didn't absolve this bovine of the discomfort. So instead, she did what grasshopper minds are also renowned for, and changed the subject.

"Do you guys prefer badger badger or the Llama Song?", she asked brightly.

Carnivorous Cow muttered into her Gauteng earring in bemusement. Behind her the stone edifice, built to commemorate that servant of imperialism whose statue oversees the mowing of the rugby fields here, resounded with the enthusiastic harmonies of some christian church group. Before her, the neo-classical lions stretched out in feline indolence and the rider and horse twisted in erotic extension as the Cape Flats baked in the spring sunshine. Her friend asked languidly, "Do you think they'll ever rename the Hottentots Holland?" but her attention was elsewhere. "Gramsci," she chuckled, "who do you think old Cecil John had in mind as his heirs when he left his slice of empire to the citizens of Cape Town?"

And indeed, beyond a couple of hungover Americans, there wasn't a white face to be seen. The church group bussed in from the Cape Flats, the families picnicking in the shade on the mountain slopes, the wedding parties rolling up in kilometers of tulle and tafetta for photographs, the children's birthday parties racing up and down the stairs... reflected a celebration of the spectrum from whipless mocha to double espresso. Not a fleck of cream, beyond the three sunburnt Americans who took their photos and then left, leaving the monument (erected in celebration of imperialism) to the colonised.

Carnivorous Cow looked up slowly and asked Gramsci: "Tell me, do you think these liberated single mothers are doing their sons a favour, bringing them up as Enlightened Young Men?" Knowing there was no right answer to that, Gramsci wisely chose to pounce on a passing muggie instead, being far too polite to speak with his mouth full.

Not that Carnivorous Cow allowed him the chance to answer. If Gramsci couldn't recognise a rhetorical question, that was _his_ problem. She shook her head slowly. "These poor boys don't know whether they're Arthur or Martha. They're more girly than the girls, without being camp or effeminate. But they're _sensitive_. They have active listening skills, they have empathy, they talk about _feelings_" - a shudder passed through her bovine bulk - "and, worst of all, they have political correctness." She sighed, dramatically.

"Girls love them, but like gay best friends. They love discussing their boyfriends with them, the problems in their relationships. They love to go shopping with them, or to chick flicks or art house movies - stuff they can't do with their boyfriends. Or their girlfriends, mostly - would you trust the sartorial advice of someone who's planning to outdazzle you at Friday's party? So these poor boys get dragged along like fashion accessories, and discarded whenever a piece of eye candy with more testosterone than sensitivity comes along."

Gramsci hesitated. Was this not the Ideal Man, much vaunted by an industryful of women's magazines and talkshows? "Gmf!" exploded the Cow. "The media might think they're reflecting a social trend, but what they're really trying to do is create one in the face of resistance! That kind of thing might be popular with senior undergraduate students, who can afford to be both PC and irresponsible, but it's a short-lived phase. What teenage girls want is a butch, stunning piece of male physique who'll take them out, buy them lots of Red Squares and get them legless, then take them home and have their way with them. That way they can have all the fun without the responsibility of having made the choice to abandon their virtue. They want to be able to say they did it, but they don't want to have to own up to having made the choice of their own volition. These boys that see them as more than just sex objects, empowering them to make their own choices, they're never going to get out of the starting blocks on this one!"

Gramsci mulled over that. It certainly did resonate - teenage girls wanting it both ways, the experience without the reputation. There was still very much a double standard in place when it came to matters of sexual reputation. But surely they outgrew that?

"Oh, it just gets worse as women mature," Carnivorous Cow rolled her eyes dramatically. "Why do you think toy boys are still such a niche phenomenon? Women might like equality in the bedroom, but they don't want to have to do all the teaching, take charge, set the pace and all that! They're too busy running their workplaces, their families, their social schedules, their lives - they want someone with a bit of initiative, a bit of drive - someone who's at least an equal. They spend all day negotiating deadlines and project plans and lift schedules, they don't still want to spend forty-five minutes negotiating who's turn it is to be on top. That's time that could have been spent reading a few chapters of the new Van Heerden novel, or finding out when the new Wallace and Gromit is set for release locally, or tuning the Lamborghini. And they especially" - more eye rolling - "don't want to talk about _feelings_!"

Gramsci was getting the picture. And it looked to him pretty much like damned if you do, damned if you don't. But he knew better than to open his mouth. After all, if a great mind like Sigmund Freud couldn't puzzle out what it was women wanted, what hope did a mere spider have?

No, that's not an exciting planned addition to O-week activities. Rather, it follows on from a conversation Carnivorous Cow reported on elsewhere concerning nipples, and the comment that drew about "leaving out the most interesting part of the conversation".

Carnivorous Cow was left wondering, why should someone's sexual orientation be remotely of interest to someone else, unless that person had plans to use that information in an algorithmic "Yes worth pursuing / No not worth pursuing" manner. And why should a straight man find a "lipstick lesbian" more palatable (sorry!) than the more butch variety? It was all very puzzling.

Particularly as two conversations two lesbian friends over the weekend left her wondering about her own sexual orientation - having moved rather beyond the 80s when forms asking for "race" routinely received "100m" as a response, and "sex" elicited "yes please". Is sexual orientation simply about whom (if anyone) one choses to bed, or does it reach deeper down into questions of identity and how one chooses to present oneself in different contexts? In which case, most colleagues wondering around Campus would definitely warrant classification - in their work contexts, at least - as asexual.

Carnivorous Cow has never been big on labels, simply because her grasshopper mind doesn't allow her to swear allegiance to any state of mind for too long before boredom kicks in, but keeps bumping up against the driving need here at UCT to attach labels and categories to people, to define them and tie them down. One is a colour, a gender, an academic or its converse, one is a rank, a performance category, a permanent or contractor, a member of an organisational unit or a discipline. And, it seems, one is a sexual orientation.

Carnivorous Cow strayed into an interesting discussion about how to tell a colleague they had bad body odour - apparently a real problem in a certain department on Campus - where proposed solutions ranged from creating anonymous email accounts to inform the person via mail, to presenting them with bars of soap and deodorant on their birthday, with various other possibilities such as making it the line manager's problem.

Which of course raised the issue - is someone exercising an inalienable human right by flaunting bad body odour, or might they be contravening some (possibly less than explicit) behavioural code about What Is Acceptable In The Workplace?

Which led to the even more interesting discussion of... nipples. Are nipples allowed? Mostly, male nipples are allowed out in public - though possibly not in polite company - and female nipples are liable to be considered "publicly indecent", unless of course they're attached to nubile African dancers in traditional outfits luring Deutschmark out of the pockets of tourists on the Waterfront. However, the question here was not so much as allowing them out in public, but allowing their visibility through clothing. Should nipples be visible at all?

Carnivorous Cow failed to see the difference between the male and female varieties on this score - both genders had them, why should visibility be tolerated of one gender but not another, simply on the basis of, well, prominence?

But there was contention about even the first part of that - one of the males present argued that he had no nipples. Photographic evidence was sought - see "more", below - and a random sample of people consulted, and all agreed that, yes, those were nipples. And if their owner could walk around with them scantily covered, visible through a thin cotton shirt or a babygro, how could he object to a colleague similarly allowing hers to be visible?

Cows, of course, are used to their mammaries being commercially exploited, so are perhaps not best placed to make the call, but somewhere, in a department which is suffering through the thick fog of bad body odour, some line manager is currently facing the prospect of deciding Whether or Not Nipples Should Be Allowed.

And Carnivorous Cow is willing to bet that nothing in that person's job description prepared them for that!

 (More)

"What a tragic place this is! Men only want you for your budget, never mind your body!" fumed Carnivorous Cow, stomping into her office. Gramsci the spider scuttled for cover under the keyboard, just in time.

"And there I thought," Carnivorous Cow blinked away a tear, dramatically, "that it was my smooth flanks, my dreamy eyes, my delicate hoofs.... But no! It's my unspent budget that's turned me into a man-magnet!"

"Mr Timberland again?" asked Gramsci, consolingly. Carnivorous Cow snorted, derisively.

"Dr Jersey stopped us in the road, commenting on the fact that we're always seen together. And instead of gallantly provoking his jealousy by acting smug, Mr Timberland revealed his true motives! Not even," she sobbed, "my incisive *mind*! Just... my... budget....!"

Gramsci tutt-tutted sympathetically. What were things coming to when people who seemed even to _like_ each other had a purely pecuniary interest in each other - nothing remotely physical? Why, they might as well be married!

For - oh! Far too long now! - patrons of the coffee outlet in the Leslie Building have had to endure the discordant screeching of an electronic raptor shredding a bird, courtesy of a green device affixed to the pillar beyond reach.

Its intention, apparently, was to discourage the regular avian patrons, whose currency was less desirable than that of their human counterparts. It's outcome has, predictably, been the exact reverse. Even Carnivorous Cow and her band of hardened caffeine addict accomplices have struggled to talk sufficient drivel sufficiently loudly to drown out the sounds of raptorial indulgence, as their own chocolate croissants cool with neglect and their coffee sticks in their teary throats. Sensitive souls, these - this is Leslie *Social Science*, after all.

In Leslie Commerce they'd probably have hawked (forgive the pun) it as a marketing opportunity - enjoy your morning coffee among the authentic sounds of the Cape Inner City Wilds! Feel the warmth suffuse your system as one fewer avian pollutant threatens to spoil the new wax job on your Toyota Camry (or whatever it is Commerce Clones drive these days)! Feel the rush as Natural Selection ensures, once again, that only the fittest survive. Revel in your shared status as a winner. Celebrate with another cappuccino - low fat option available for all the portly, over-stressed beancounter types!

But having assumed all along that this was a commercial venture, instituted by the profit-seeking capitalist who enslaves us all to caffeine, Carnivorous Cow was gobsmacked to discover earlier that this was not a correct assumption. Having suggested discreetly to Linda that the fine power cable find its way into the toaster until it fried, she was startled to hear that it was not, in fact, Wayne's innovation. The device had been installed by UCT!

What??!! Somewhere, someone employed by this institution whose noble sensibilities are listed in a fine statement of Values on its website, has decided that it's OK to traumatise staff every morning, afternoon and anyother time they venture over for coffee, with the murderous sounds of avicide? (And, what's more, had the budget to act on this... at this stage of the year? And managed to jump it through all the bureaucratic hoops and hurdles to get it installed, functioning and still operational...? Seems unlikely, but clearly these things *are* possible. And all this time, we thought stochastic ooze was a myth...!)

It reminds one rather of the aversion therapy the old SADF used on boys of a homosexual orientation - Carnivorous Cow can only imagine that someone, somewhere within Toad Hall strayed across the article about Coffee and Sex and decided to take action. Come to think of it, the coffee this morning did taste strangely reminiscent of blousteen...

"Why is it," grumbled Carnivorous Cow, "that so many things are underscored by food? Weddings and funerals, sure - gluttony is a good way to distract one from the misery of mourning - but why more joyous pursuits like seminars or romantic encounters?"

Gramsci waved his front legs, nonplussed. Arachnoidal seminars were rare, and among his species, carnal bliss ended in prandial delight, with the female devouring the male... so for him the idea of living on love and fresh air didn't really resonate. But he thought other species - aside from the praying mantis, of course - were different.

But Carnivorous Cow was on a roll - the thickening one around her middle. "Moonlit walks along the beach... firefly spotting in the kloofs... stopping on the way home for a drink... staring into molten chocolate eyes over candle light... somewhere along the line food smuggles its way in, every time!" she muttered. "By the end of a week, no amount of couch rugby can undo the realisation that you're consuming more energy than you're expending!"

Carnivorous Cow flopped back into her chair. She felt relieved in a paradoxical way to have become ill, allowing her to pick listlessly at a naked salad instead of engaging yet another competitor for the freshest linefish, or continuing the eternal debate about whether baked or fridge cheesecake was better by continually expanding the sample size. It was never just the sample size that expanded...

Carnivorous Cow recently took some time out to do what animals do in the spring. And so it was she found herself one evening staring meaningfully into the deep brown eyes of an assortment of whisky glasses arranged in front of her. The presenter - one of five qualified whisky masters in the country - was doing his best to instill an appreciation for the finer aspects of whisky in his audience, beyond the taste and that warm glowing feeling that increasinly replaces job satisfaction in this globalised age.

Perhaps he was inspired by the presence of Carnivorous Cow and her stud bull in the audience, or perhaps it was the memory of the sociologist wife he'd be returning to later, but the presentation was punctuated with repeated references to whisky drinkers being a "better sort of person" generally; specifically, whisky drinkers having a tertiary education.

Carnivorous Cow was off-duty, and so didn't ask about the research methodology which informed such statements - she limited her questions to "please may I have some more of this one?" - but it did strike her as a little odd in the context of the small coastal town where most of the community were employed in the tourism business and concerned with Higher Education only insofar as the salaries of HE staff allowed these to melt their plastic at the local restaurants and craft shops, and their own location protected them from the hordes of students who would rather go to Hermanus or Koeëlbaai and vomit on the beaches there instead.

Carnivorous Cow did learn a lot from the experience, including that Jamesons had a purpose other than making post-prandial coffee more interesting - especially once it was old enough to vote - but was also very pleased to hear emphasised what her years of experience had taught her: that whisky (and even whiskey) doesn't leave a hangover.

And the more she thought about it, and remembered back to her student days, the more she wondered - was this perhaps the real link between whisky and Higher Education?