CAGED MEN, CAGED WOMEN

There is something primal, I suppose, about men fighting. In this case they were fighting in a cage, which has its own primal connotations. My wife and I went because her daughter's boyfriend was one of the fighters. There were eight fights in all, each composed of three rounds of two minutes duration. A couple of the fights were rather fierce, with evenly matched, strong competitors. The others were quite one-sided. The occasion sparked a few conflagrations in my mind. Evidence of a Lost City, of course, attempts to uncover something primeval: it occurs mostly in an archetypal, Jungian underworld. A primitive battle between two gladiators would not be out of place. Does masculinity, at its deepest level, always display itself as battle? Let us suppose for a moment that it does. In our modern world this urge is sublimated, as a rule, into such pesky competitions as who makes the most money or drives the toughest car or scores the most women; but we still have athletic contests, which are mostly male and overtly physical, especially sports like boxing and wrestling and this cage fighting. But why fight in a cage? It is not to protect the audience, not like the cages in a zoo which separate the beasts from the tourists. It seemed to me the cage was a kind of emblem: society takes this masculine fierceness and isolates it, encages it. This is what culture does. That primal urge to do battle is dangerous. This urge, uncontrolled, erupts occasionally, sometimes in nationally approved ways--Bush's war in Iraq, for instance--but more often in irrational angry outbursts: husbands murdering wives, dissed gang members exacting revenge with a pistol. We do our best to keep these emotions caged, quite properly, and offer some symbolic, safe ways to channel and express them.

The audience, as we can see from the photo, was sparse. It was composed fairly evenly of men and women. We can understand what the men are doing here, but what about the women? Let me suggest that women's primal battle has to do with attractiveness, and is expressed most obviously in beauty contests. In their everyday life women collect suitors in the way men collect conquests. They vie for the priciest gems, the most desireable designer outfit, the wealthiest husband. Occasionally they murder an errant lover or a too attractive competitor, but in general their rages are channeled just like those of the men. We are a safer world because of this channeling. At this event, I wondered if I would see--well, lets call them primeval women, attracted to a primeval battle. And there was an official "primeval" woman: the round announcer, in this case a young, slender black girl who paced within the cage with a placard announcing each round. She wore very short cut-off jeans and a halter top, and bounced around quite happily. Within the ring she was barefoot, but outside she wore high-heeled gladiator sandals, which I thought were quite appropriate. But she was the only woman thus dressed. Well, my wife's daughter wore high-heeled boots and tight pants, and looked quite charming, though not overtly sexual. Otherwise I saw the usual flip-flop sandals, baggy clothes, graceless unisex outfits for both the men and the women. You could hardly tell the genders apart. This, I mused, is the result of a great cultural shift that has been occuring in our world. The line between maleness and femaleness is largely erased, or at least turned into a vague gray area. We are no longer men and women, we are consumers (which reflects the triumph of the Corporation) and wage-earners and practical people, and we all dress alike. In a perverse sort of way this gives rise to some interesting channeled effects: women can covet and buy some very expensive high-heeled shoes, for instance, designer shoes, even if they never wear them. I know women whose closets are filled with designer dresses that never see the light. This primeval femaleness is closeted, encaged, just like the fierce maleness of our cage fighters, and--alas--is seldom given an opportunity to express itself.

I am old enough to remember when women generally wore dresses. They kept one eye on the men: what would a man like to see? Tight skirts, high heels, makeup were all more common years ago. Stockings, too, which I particularly like. Girdles and corsets: a whole underwear/underworld convocation of primeval desire. I acknowledge that I miss that world. I would have liked to see, at the cage fight, primeval women: bright red lips, slinky dresses. Silken legs. Which leads us to my novel-movie: Evidence of a Lost City is filled with these women. There, at least, the primal can still exist.