Romeo Gómez López

When the first fossils came to light, the Catholic Church had trouble accepting them as it contradicted their belief in a single Creator of all things. The Christian response on the 17th century was that the devil put those bones in the ground to question the faith of the children of God,  aided by the curious children who dared to delve into the land.

Today, Charles Darwin’s Theory of evolution is more popular than the creationist theory. Nevertheless, it is prudent to question it, since the (re)productive elements that the so-called natural selection celebrates are governed by a society that, in the 21st century, perhaps has more in common with the Christian tradition than with the scientific method.

In her essay “When Did Sex Become Fun?” paleontologist Holly Dunsworth explains: “Female orgasm is, in fact, more common during female masturbation or homosexual intercourse than during actual heterosexual intercourse.” She later concludes: “So it is manual labor, not that of the manhood’s, that culminates pleasure in the female half of the species. I have never heard a paleontologist, most of whom are men, describe an ancient finger-fossil as evidence of the beginning of pleasurable sex. Why do you suppose that is it?”

In the same way, anal stimulation, in the case of men, is generally completely ignored by science, just as it is prohibited by the church. In 2017, in Mexico, then Cardinal Norberto Ribera explained to the Mexican Catholic people the correct use of the anus, and pointed out that if something was introduced through it, a door was created through which we invited the devil into our world.

Extrapolating these absurdities to the plastics, in “Homo Hábilis” we can see the bones of an astrolopithecus, one of our first ancestors, carved from quarry, a predominant stone in Mexican churches and in the houses of conservative upper-class society. In the center of the pelvis the specimen has an anal plug lock, a sexual control toy that expands after being inserted,  and is secured with a padlock in such a way that it cannot be removed without the key. Reflecting on the ephemeral and the permanent, this piece contrasts different materials as well as opposing ideas: evolution and religion, sexuality and reproduction, and also pleasure and power. Some attributes and social behaviors are lost in the fossilization process so the final Scientific interpretation depends on the reading.  We can ask ourselves how objective the scientific method is within the borders of a “Guadalupan” society?