High Tide in Tucson

Kingsolver considers the original meaning of the word “slut”—a colloquialism for a woman who does not dedicate her life to housework. Kingsolver and her friends have formed a secret “slut” society, reveling in their acceptance that housekeeping does not have to be a full-time job. Most of them have interesting jobs that actually pay money, in contrast to their own mothers, most of whom were midcentury housewives. During their childhoods, homemaking was an exhausting full-time job: “Cleaning houses in 1960 took ninety hours a week and the mind of a rocket scientist. Cleaning my house, in the nineties, takes a lick and a promise. Maybe fifteen adult hours per week, for everything: laundry, dishes, a semiannual dust-bison roundup” (60).

Kingsolver wonders how housework could ever have required this kind of dedication, and how the myth of the American housewife became such a dominant feature in the collective American consciousness. Other than a short period of economic boom after World War II, it has rarely been possible for families to exist on a single income, despite the popular evangelical belief that women’s place is in the home: Early-20th-century female factory workers would hang their babies on hooks while they worked.

In the modern era, Kingsolver believes, it is almost impossible to expect women to dedicate themselves entirely to keeping the home. Most families need two breadwinners to live comfortably, and even if they do not, women should prepare themselves for the workforce in case their marriages end. Besides, women in the midcentury became expert housekeepers only because social pressure prevented them from striving for other things. Kingsolver imagines that she would have been a fantastic housewife, but she came of age in an era where that was less of a viable option. She is happy to have a full career and a daughter who can grow up seeing that her options are endless.

Kingsolver asks her female reader to imagine watching a basketball game with their male loved one. The man roots for UCLA, a team that a week ago he hated because they beat his favorite team. To the man this makes perfect sense: UCLA is in the same conference as his favorite team: “Two weeks ago they were playing us. But now Arizona’s out of the tournament, he explains, in that masculine sort of voice that can make any wild thing sound reasonable” (66). While Kingsolver isn’t interested in following sports (she would rather watch ants run in and out of a hole), she is interested in them as an exemplifier of loyalty.

Kingsolver examines the concept of loyalty from a number of angles. Her dog, a species that is almost proverbially loyal, would play with coyotes until she saw her humans, at which point she would performatively chase her fellow canines away and come inside for dog food. Wild animals, from pupfish, to elk, to praying mantises, have mating systems that show no inclination toward loyalty, or loyalties that shift depending on environmental conditions.

In humans, the question of loyalty in mating is incredibly complex. Kingsolver notes that virtually every kind of relationship can be found in human society, and that no theory has proven why the human race approaches relationships in the way that it does. Biological determinism and sociobiology, both of which contend that human behavior is mostly, if not entirely, dictated by genetics and other biological programming, both display copious logical fallacies. For example, the sociobiology book On Human Nature focuses too heavily on the innateness of prescribed gender roles while ignoring the reality of human society. The fallacy of this kind of argument lies in researchers beginning with the assumption that gender difference is a basic truth, and then working to prove that it has existed all along.

For example, many 1960s and 1970s anthropologists categorized skeletons as male and female based only on their size, despite having no proof that the larger skeletons were all men and the smaller ones all women. When they thus found that larger, more robust skeletons appeared to have different social roles than smaller skeletons, they concluded that women and men had different roles in early human society. This type of thinking has been applied not only to studies of gender difference, but also to intelligence and brain capacity. Skull measuring was a popular pseudo-science in the 19th century; many white male scientists like Samuel George Morton perceived differences in skull size to draw wide conclusions about racial variation in intelligence. Their methods always ended with the conclusion that white male brains were superior to all others.

Although skull measuring has fallen out of fashion, Kingsolver warns that biological determinism’s racist and sexist tendencies have not lessened. She points to the 1994 book The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray. The book is full of data and gives the illusion of being a scientific analysis of human intelligence. It was promoted in mainstream circles when it was published. However, it rehashes many of the same racist tropes found in skull measuring, and ultimately concludes that white people have higher intelligence than people of color. The same problems that have led to such racist conclusions have caused biological determinists to lean too heavily on sexist assumptions.

Returning to sports, Kingsolver references the book The Stronger Women Get, the More Men Love Football by Mariah Burton Nelson. She largely agrees with the book’s conclusions, which suggest that as culture achieves more gender equality, even in many athletic arenas like car racing and long distance swimming, patriarchal society puts more and more emphasis on promoting sports like football and basketball—sports that require a particularly large amount of upper body strength, so those with male bodies are usually more prone to excel at them. Kingsolver believes that men love these types of sports because “people flopped supine on furniture get to be muscular and sweaty by proxy and, for a short time, contrive their own rules about what makes who the best” (79). Just as it is impossible to learn anything by measuring skulls or determining sex based on skeleton size, it is impossible to determine who is best. Games, which can be determined in a few seconds or by a stroke of luck, allow viewers to construct narratives that fit how they imagine the world to be.

Kingsolver joins a health club and is embarrassed to admit it. She describes the social scene within the gym, where pale muscular men, many of whom have workout-themed vanity plates on their cars, furtively examine each other’s fitness and try cheesy pickup lines on the female clientele. She compares the gym to a lek, the breeding arena for prairie chickens. Kingsolver offers her grandfather, the last person in her family to have muscles, as a contrast to these men. He was fit because of a lifetime of hard construction work. She images that he would have laughed out loud to see her in the gym surrounded by people covered in pointless sweat. To her grandfather, free time well spent meant watching Ed Sullivan or napping after a week of physical work.

Although she knows that the desire for fitness is often bound to a desire to be healthy, she sees that the people at the health club are more motivated by vanity. She sets modern fitness standards alongside historical markers of wealth, such as foot binding. Through much of history, fatter bodies were considered more beautiful because fat indicated that the person had enough money to eat fine foods and not become thin from physical labor. In the modern world, calories are more easily gained and most jobs are more sedentary, so that standard has switched. Now, fatness is seen as a sign of being too poor to afford weight loss programs and gym memberships, while perfectly toned muscles signal that the person has free time to spend working out.

Kingsolver does not particularly care about looking in shape for others, but she has always had a desire to be strong. She spent her childhood as a laughing stock in sports, and she finds that in her adulthood she can often be bested by a particularly tight pickle jar or a jammed gate lock. She eventually quit the health club, as she got tired of the competitiveness and vanity, and writes that she has accepted her position as the “before” picture. She will never be the kind of person who would buy a vanity plate reading PRSS 250 (a plate she saw at the gym, referencing the driver’s supposed ability to bench press 250 pounds). Instead, she aspires to a plate reading OPN JRS.

Kingsolver meditates on the concept of childhood independence. Her daughter lives life at a leisurely pace. One morning, when Kingsolver asked her to make sure not to spill her orange juice because it would make them late, the child intentionally tipped the glass all over her clothes. At first Kingsolver was upset, but then realized that her daughter’s action was a sign of the independence and resistance to authority that she always hoped she would have.

Kingsolver believes that concepts like the “terrible twos” and unruly teenagers are self-perpetuating, since children tend to rise to whatever expectations adults set for them. No two year olds are truly terrible; they are simply showing themselves to be autonomous beings for the first time. The same can be said of teenagers, who are on their way to adulthood; many of the things that make teenagers difficult are just side effects of their impending independence. Kingsolver believes that society often wants teenagers to be independent mini-adults and subservient children simultaneously.

The essay compares parenting across generations, and the different styles of childhood that result. First, she examines the differences between parents who strictly control their children until they leave the house, and those who allow freedom and exploration. She decides that while she leans toward the latter style, a balance is probably best. Overall, Kingsolver hopes to be a parent much like her own parents, but she has a full time job, while her mother’s job was her and her siblings. Still, Kingsolver disagrees with the idea that 1960s families were more child-focused than those of the 1990s. As an example, she points to family vacations. When she was a child, she and her siblings were resigned to counting to a million in the backseat, because her parents did not want to be distracted as they drove. In contrast, when she travels with her daughter, they play games and enjoy each other’s company. Her job is not her child, so being with her daughter feels like a vacation.

The essay ends by examining the benefits of being a working parent. By having a life outside childcare, parents like Kingsolver micromanage their children less. Being a writer and a mother are inherently intertwined for Kingsolver, who cannot imagine one without the other. She ends the essay by saying that she must stop writing because her daughter is asking her to come watch a play she has written.