The show starts off painfully, I am cringing inside (and maybe on the outside) at this balding middle-aged white guy rapping about Darwinian evolution, looking a lot like my fourth form science teacher who would try to be ‘cool’ with science. Baba Brinkman is the epitome of un-cool; what popular culture would refer to as a ‘try-hard’. There is only one way out of this situation that I can see, and then BAM, he does it all in one uber-long rapping sentence.

He refers to the audience’s boredom, their criticism and his un-coolness, and then he goes on to imply that this taste judgment is all a part of the evolutionary process, and that if we as an audience decide he is not good enough, we will naturally replace him with something else. Without even knowing it, we will have played our part in so called ‘artificial selection’.

This freedom to decide instantly relaxes me, and I feel okay about hating this entire performance and Brinkman himself, and – thanks to this freedom and Brinkman’s offering of it – I immediately feel the opposite. I feel like a victim of hip-hop styled propagandistic manipulation.

Throughout his performance, Brinkman makes a courageous stand against Christianity, and he even makes hints towards criticising feminism: a place not too many people (especially men) are brave enough to go, articulately.

However, his criticism becomes cringe-worthy when he attempts to compare the low female wage rate in comparison to men, to the low female homicide rate in relation to men. The implication here being: why are we paying so much attention to female/male wage equality when we should be focusing on male homicide rates? The latter hardly cancels out the former, but Brinkman nevertheless implies that it does.

Two thirds of the way through, Baba Brinkman confesses that, having researched all this evolution stuff, he can’t help but form an opinion and wish to share it.

By differentiating this section (in terms of his opinion) from the rest of the show, he is essentially fooling the audience into assuming the first two thirds of the show are plain fact. This reminds me of science in general, which often lays claim to being ‘fact’, but I believe that the human brain and all it perceives is entirely subjective. And therefore science is just a series of interconnected subjective hypotheses that get along with one another.

The personal point that Brinkman wishes to share is that throughout history, it has been proven that if women collectively refuse to have sex with men who are at war, then all war will stop. He pulls this concept from the Greek play called Lysistrata by Aristophanes. This is an excellent point, and well explained and understood by Brinkman, which is why I am surprised by the slogan he uses to sums it up: “Don’t have sex with mean people.”

I feel he has totally missed the point here.  This slogan is aimed at women because, according to Brinkman, statistically women’s sexual selection is more significant than men’s. However, his slogan totally throws out women’s power of collective abstinence, and instead directs the women’s energy towards deciding who is ‘mean’ or not. This term ‘mean’ removes the war element completely, leaving the general public unaware of the original intention.

Some women may feel that whilst war is ‘wrong’ that the individuals involved are not ‘mean’ per se, but victims of circumstance. Others may get confused: are the mean people the aggressors on the frontline only? Can I still have sex with the manager of the company that supplies first aid equipment to the New Zealand Army? He’s not a mean guy is he?

There are too many anomalies in his concept; the only way it can work, and work fast, is if all women agree to simultaneously have a sex strike with all men and women. There would need to be an understanding that all citizens are connected through a nationalistic identity of a warring society, and that we all participate even in our silence.

At the end of the show I am given an opportunity to share my criticism, praise or question in the form of an arm raising situation. In this moment I am dying to say my point, but my nerves get the best of me and I only grab the courage at the last question, at which point another audience member is chosen.

I am impressed that Brinkman allows this feedback to be a part of his show; he is a firm believer in ‘performance, feedback, revision’.  The vulnerability he possesses at this point is refreshing, and he takes it further by weaving the three questions asked into a freestyle rap. I hope he is open to reviewing his ‘Don’t have sex with mean people’ campaign, given that he has already invested in t-shirts and CD’s promoting the slogan.

Which brings me to an intriguing train of thought; one that involves monetary investment in relation to evolution….

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