In Regard to the State of My Gender

(a very special thanks to my lovely wife Lavenderpanda for spurring some memories and helping me take this disturbing trip back into my childhood.)

So - Winnie the Pooh.   We’ve all grown up at least somewhat familiar with this character and his friends from the books, or the animated series.   As a child in the early to mid nineties Pooh and his posse were an integral part of Saturday mornings.

As children, we often make logical leaps and stiff conclusions about the nature of how things work when we’re presented with something new.  Such was, of course, the case with me and Winnie the Pooh but I never stopped to realize just how much this show had fucked with me until it was pointed out, completely out of the blue that I never got closure on one of the biggest questions that plagued my young mind:

When is he and isn’t he meat?

I’ll explain.

Let’s look at some hard facts about the Winnie the Poohverse and the specific laws that govern it’s nature - setting the stage for logic and congruent plot:

Pooh Laws:

1. Pooh Bear and friends are toys

Specifically they are stuffed animals.  Fine, sure.  I can deal with that.

2. Pooh Bear teaches us lessons

Good, wholesome lessons about sharing and self-love and not being complete assholes to one another.  Cool!  Fine, that’s awesome.

3. Pooh bear is sentient and autonomous.

I mean, sure - Christopher Robin is around sometimes to throw his two cents in but no one can argue that Winnie is a living thing who makes choices and exists in his own best interest.

Got those?  Okay, cool.  Now let’s take a look at some hard facts about the reality we live in every day that were pertinent to my five-year-old understanding of the Poohsphere:

Zoey Laws:

1. That which is autonomous is flesh and blood

Okay yeah I mean, I understood that plants and microorganisms are different but the fact remained to me that if something is alive and making decisions for itself, then it has to have some kind of biology.   Because Pooh Bear is obviously such a complex organism he must be, at least by the pattern of logic, flesh and blood.

2. That which is sentient understands pain

Winnie reacts to hardship in very human ways, which I don’t think any of us can blame him for.

3. That which breaks the laws of reality is bedlam

Because of the way we understand the reality we live in, there are certain laws that we know have to be true for there to be order to things.  Stuff like gravity, friction, etc.  Without basic semblance of our surroundings we are faced with chaos and sanity suffers.

All of these facts smashing together led me to conclude the only logical thing:

Winnie the Pooh was once inanimate, but is now flesh and bone because he was given life. (Possibly by Christopher Robin but that is a different essay)

And hey!  Fine, whatever - as children we swallow some pretty bizarre literature that gets thrown at us, so I was all well and fine with believing my conclusion as the basis for my Pooh enjoyment.  After all it’s really not that bizarre.

That was, until this:

Look at this.  Take a moment to really drink this in.   Do you see why this is so terrifying? 

Here is our hero, Winnie the Pooh in his anthropomorphic obviously post-life-given state.  He is autonomous and sentient.  Yet here we glimpse an intimate and shameless stark reality that forces a complete contradictory: His innards are stuffing - not meat. Ergo he is still a toy.  Ergo he was all along.

What.

I mean LOOK at it -  this is like one of those M.C Escher drawings where you try to follow the path of water but somehow it goes in circles and loops over and into itself uphill.  It makes no. logical. sense.  It’s the very definition of contradiction and the beauty and horror of it all is that it stares you right in the face, forcing you to take it in.  Forcing you to believe it.  But you can’t, because it’s impossible.

And yet there it is.

Frantically, my childhood mind searched the shattered pieces of it’s logical pillars for some answer, some bare semblance of order to restore.

At first, what made the most sense was that Pooh Bear had the same white, Rice-a-Roni innards as the Tauntaun in Empire Strikes Back:

But the more I tried to accept that, and a dozen other cobbled together toppling-house-of-cards theories the more I realized it was all for naught.  The reality was right there, staring me in the face.  Keeping two completely different contradictory laws floating in some sort of perverse, impossible balance.

And the question remained: Is he, or is he not meat?

Conclusions:

Winnie the Pooh taught me a lot.  About friendship, sharing, appreciating the good things in life and what it means to be a good person.  But more importantly, it taught me the following:

Poohverse Lessons:

1. The frailty of flesh

Pooh Bear teaches us that we are not indestructible.  That any time, anywhere - when we least expect it, the frail skein that covers our quivering innards can be torn asunder.

2. Trust Nothing

Sometimes we think things are okay, that they make sense.  Sometimes we make logical assumptions based on the most basic, primal laws of what we understand to be true.   And sometimes that all gets turned on it’s head. Pooh Bear’s very incongruent existence deceives us, and so we learn that not even the most innocent things can be trusted.

3. Chaos is all around us

We look into the enigma of Winnie the Pooh and the question of his state of meat or non-meat and we are met with only further questions.  What does that say about life?  Only that the simple construct of how we view this world is at a tenuous balance, teetering on the edge of complete and total chaos.

4. That which is for all intents and purposes dead, can live

Let’s be frank, Winnie simply should not be.  He should not be alive.  But he defiantly and aggressively continues to exist despite every force of logic and nature moving against him.

Even after all this I am left without closure on my original question.  Does Winnie the Pooh shift between meat and not-meat at will?  Does he somehow exist as both at once?  Or is he something simply beyond the boundaries of what our human brains can understand?

And the more I think about it, the more I realize that the question is the beauty of it all.

So when is and isn’t he meat?

We’re simply not meant to know.