Most of my least favourite expressions come with the word “natural” stitched in like a lucky charm. Actually I could put that more strongly if I said that natural is a thoroughly mischievous, occasionally dangerous word in the armoury of some commentators. Advertisers, of course, like to use the word at least three times in any label concerning food or beauty products. ‘Natural’ medicine claims a get out of jail free card by using the word all the time. I always used to counter it by mentioning Foxgloves as a natural product capable of doing great harm except that I now take Digoxin which is a synthesised version of the same thing and so I’m obliged to admit that some natural products are only dangerous if not properly prescribed. Maybe I’ll move the critique to Hemlock Water Dropwort for which there are no uses that wouldn’t lead to a grisly death.
Anyway my target today isn’t herbal medicine or even rejuvenating creams and psychotropic substances. My target is the use of the word natural as part of a slam-dunk argument in favour of whatever beige, magnolia or vanilla flavoured eight figure referenced point on the broad surface of the sexual behaviour of all living things the speaker happens to inhabit.
This entertaining thought came to me as the result of my ID binge this week, trying to sort out a group of very similar looking plants. I’ve always known that living things have evolved a multitude of ways of reproducing themselves, and that getting it on is very different between, let’s say, a Red Campion and a tangle of Couch grass. Obviously I have my own preferences as a human, and so I’m particularly glad not to be a fern whose reproductive journey is so complicated that it can only be described with the aid of diagrams which explain that the parents never actually meet one another but have to wait for an intermediate stage involving sperm, gametophyte and moisture to happen in a quiet place somewhere else. Others involve the birds and the bees but not in a fun way and yet others seem to be able to produce males and females on different plants or even in some separatist communities only to produce females. Other living things change sex for reasons unknown to science or Sunday School teachers. In fact, flicking through the glossary of my most respectable flora and reading between the lines of Latin camouflage ; it looks as if Nature more closely resembles the 1930’s Berlin depicted in “Cabaret” than the chaste discourse of a Jane Austin conversation. I’d say it’s a jungle out there if that too didn’t carry a 12 bore normative shotgun.
So natural is not a word I need to use very often. It’s too much like putting a smudge of makeup on after a particularly big or bad night out. If someone asserts that something isn’t natural I wonder which of the multitude of other naturals this particular behaviour is being teased out from. The core of the argument is this; if we are trying to situate ourselves within the natural world instead of above it then we surely have to accept that we also share the diversity of its reproductive and affective means. We have to accept that the natural world is more diverse and much more dangerous than the skinny latte version of our so-called human nature that does far more to promote hatred than it does love.
