March 05, 2004

Tales of Monkey Love and Loss. Monkeys raised alone in an environment without mother and peers prefer to be with a cloth-covered mother surrogate without a milk bottle rather than with a wire-cage surrogate mother that provides a milk bottle, even when hungry. I don't know whether the most frightening thing about this 70's documentary is the monkey experiments, or the shocking voiceover: "Children deprived of a mother's love become serevly retarded"... (Searched out after reading this)

Anyway, after that I needed some cheering up. So I bring you love: Monkey Love. Hot Monkey Love. Red Hot Monkey Love. Simple, sweet monkey love. Powerful, frightening big monkey lust. Post-coital monkey love. The sweet love of thanks and gratitude and friendship, more powerful than any hatred. Also, T-shirts and badges. And if the monkey love is still eluding you, try the Voodoo Monkey, manipulator of love and desire. He should help. Just avoid the Vampires. They don't love you. Oh, no. The sweet love of thanks and gratitude and friendship, more powerful than any hatred, revisited: Monkey Longing and Desire and Lust.

posted by dng 20 years ago
  • Oh, man. I meant severely retarded, obviously. that wasn't just some appalling joke.
  • i'm familiar with these studies, how sad! researchers also studied infants and children in hospital isolation wards back in the 1960s. parents weren't allowed to visit back then. of course that caused all kinds of psychological damage -- can you imagine being a little kid in a big, scary hospital full of needles and stern nurses without your beloved parents for days on end? CAN YOU? CAN YOU? yes, one of those children was me. *sniff* but i'm all better now. :-) (though still not normal....)
  • poor little monkeys *gently tosses bananas*
  • I hear ya, SideDish. I hear ya.
  • Without going into too much autobiographical detail: as a husband, my primary job is to be the soft monkey. Can be hard when I lose sight of this.
  • Awesome post, dng. I've heard these studies before too, but there's really not much to add.
  • What I find so hard to believe is that it took so long to figure out that children need to be hugged and rocked and played with. Isn't that everyone's response to a baby or small child? Did no one have any common sense?
  • Not B. F. Skinner's response, anyway.
  • Though in Walden Two, Skinner's utopia seems to have a definate "every child needs a village" approach, with children raised communally, but not without individual attention and rocking. At least, that's how I remember (been years, so please correct me if I'm wrong). I was really thinking of the primary care givers - I just find it so hard to believe that people put in charge of looking after children don't automatically begin to do that. But it may be a factor of the sheer numbers of children foisted on one caregiver. Though families have had dozens of children, they generally come more spaced than a dozen or more infants in a ward.