DOCTOR ZHIVAGO
Bastards and Boundary Riders

I've just watched Dr Zhivago - which is the first film i remember ever going to, at the Esperance drive-in. However, not much of it was familiar.

Got me thinking about the other side of our genetic exchange theorizing, and asking what is the benefit of exchange with the outsider from the man’s perspective?

Sarah has posited that aboriginal groups might have lent their women to men passing through to improve genetic diversity, for the benefit of the society doing the lending and getting the addition genes to add to the pool. And then there is the attraction that so many of we women feel towards these men passing through, still now in our diverse social groups, without the settled tribal connections. What does this mean, if we say that the kind of groupings that we are part of now are not new, unusual or exclusively contemporary?

We continue to be attracted to boundary riding men: adventurers, sailors with a woman in every port, bastards, unfaithful men, men who are exciting and transitory... The main traits these men seem to have in common are
- The ability to instill passion and devotion
- Self confidence
- Risk-taking behaviours
- A desire to keep moving
- Strong male bonds to groups such as gangs and outlaw groups, soldiers and sailors, bohos: all groups of men at the edges of the social order.

I'm not going to directly address the issue of risk-taking behaviour. I'll have a think about that one.

What this other side of the story might be is simply this: that these men have a handful of women to help them survive when times get hard. Such women are devoted when we fall in love with these men. The condition of obsession/devotion (or a loving connection,) allows us to open our hearts and legs at a moment’s notice when the conquering hero returns from many years' absence, and we also open welcoming and protective arms to these returning soldiers (etc). Odysseus.

In the movie the good doctor has a wife and family that he loves in a familial way. He also has a passionate and faithful mistress, who is herself attracted to dangerous types. In the midst of the socialist revolution times got pretty tough, and his wife disappeared, but he was able to find shelter to his mistress: Lara. After an interminable trudge through snow and icey tundra escaping from the war, he finds an empty home...but he goes on to find an available and loving mistress still where he left her last. She nurses him back to health and gives him back a sense of reality, albeit slightly skewed. (And another thing, perhaps a later therory: how often is it that the story runs that the mistress is the one who suffers his post-conflict stress? Not so rarely, huh? So she could be seen, in her slightly edged place in society, as a staging ground in his return to society as a normal functioning member.)

He goes off to war, and when he "returns" he has more than one home to return to, so if one of these homes is destroyed by the war in which he fights (or doctors in this case) then there is a better chance that there will be another one that does survive. On his return he can be fed and nursed back to health in this other home.
Potentially in times of low food supplies he can be fed by more than one woman/family.

Reciprocally, he is cunning, ingenious, resourceful and shrewd. Sometimes he is sly and deceitful, but these are all useful survival techniques, that make him an interesting and sometimes revered man to other men. (In this respect the film is not true to type – Dr Z. is far too moral to be a true outsider in the sense I’m talking about here. Though he does have his devotees.)

His other benefit is that he is providing a safe parent for his offspring: the women he chooses are most probably passionate, strong women... They are capable of transferring their devotion from him to their children – especially as the loving mother desires evidence of his existence. The children help to fill the import place, reserved for him, in their mothers' hearts when he is not around.

The ability to form strong male bonds is another important trait that this man possesses.In his wanderings he makes many and varied social connections with different types of men who can be called upon for assistance and safe passage in times of hardship, times of escape, and when he needs to hide. If he is entertaining and good company, amusing and a socially capable male, and if he commands respect, then other men will look out for him and protect him... If he forms strong social networks, then he commands reciprocal favours.

All this he can use to the benefit of his families, calling on favours in diverse and separate places, in order to provide safe passage if needed. He gives and takes, therefore proving the truth of human survival: diverse social networks maintain diversity of genetics and survival of the fittest – the fittest individuals, but more importantly the fittest social groups. Human survival is about group survival: family groups and community scale groups and therefore species survival...Individaul survival is a outcome of the success of the group.

Conversely it is too often these good points don't play out and they are hopeless bastards we're better off without. But if you've got one, then my proposition might allow you to comfort yourself with the thought that from an evolutionary perspective the exciting and risky man is tempting, desirable, and a suprisingly good bet.