I agreed to have my cat of 15 years euthanized the other day. This was the first time I’d ever had a pet euthanized. The other three long-term pets I had in my lifetime all died naturally by my side. They just slipped away asleep after periods of having gotten weaker and more lethargic. It seemed as if this cat was going the same way.
She had been diagnosed with a hyper-thyroid condition, apparently common in cats. Vets said if that condition couldn’t be corrected with the pills they prescribed, her various systems would just shut down.
That’s what eventually seemed to be happening. She just stopped eating. She wasn’t tempted by any of her favorite tidbits. With increasing feebleness, she would just get up to drink water and then go back to sleep. After the second day of this, I thought the end must be near. I’d go in quietly and check on her every couple of hours. But no, she was always still there. My checking in on her would rouse her to get up, go drink some more water, then retire again.
Into the fifth wrenching day of this, I felt that just perhaps I had been wrong about the inevitability of her demise. So I took her to an emergency clinic, thinking there might be something that could be done to turn her condition around.
But no. The vet there found my cat had some other compromising condition on top of her hyperthyroidism. She said that cats can live for amazingly long periods without eating. But that didn’t indicate there was any hope for real recovery. Correcting both of my cat’s conditions would have required more than heroic measures, and then would have resulted in a brief, sluggish life under medication. So we decided to euthanize.
My cat didn’t make that decision any easier in those last minutes though. As emaciated as she was, she rallied into kittenish animation. She thrived on the stimulation and attention the vets and their assistants were giving her. She played with the scale on the examining table. She explored the examining room with keen interest. She purred in sheer delight at all the patting and praise she was getting. However I knew if I took her home, the wasting would just continue apace. So we went ahead.
I didn’t think I would break down at the prospect of this ending. Frankly, Gammon had always been more of a duty for me than a chosen delight. I had first seen her as an apparently abandoned kitten cadging food in the bushes of the Post Office across the street from me. Every time I went out my front door, she would bounce out of the foliage and attempt to follow me back home. I resisted this forced adoption for some time. I then had an elderly dog whose last years didn’t seem likely to be made any easier by having a bumptious kitten around. But the cat’s persistence began to affect me. I started to worry about her.
I’d look often out the front window to see if I could glimpse her darting through the Post Office shrubbery. Was she still there? Was she alright? If I didn’t see her for a day, I worried she might have gotten run over. Once around midnight, my heart almost stopped in fear for her. I saw a group of 18-19-year-old boys who had all the earmarks of being members of Hell’s Angels sauntering down the street. Their jackets were emblazoned with skull and crossbones; one had a dragon tattoo fuming an inky coil of smoke around his neck; one had a length of heavy tow chain dangling from his belt. As they passed in front of the Post Office, the little cat darted out, stood square in front of them blocking their path, and meowed a plea that was at once both piteous and commandeering. Oh no! I almost wretched at what I thought would surely be the ensuing cruelty. I pictured the gang gleefully twisting the cat’s head off, sadistically pulling out a knife and cutting her legs off.
When the boys didn’t immediately do that, but instead stopped, sat down on the Post Office steps, and extended pinched fingers out to her while cooing and meowing a come hither encouragement, I was not immediately reassured. I thought they were probably playing cat and mouse with her, teasing her with the prospect of friendship – so that they could all the more cruelly surprise her with some horrible pain. But they didn’t do that.
They took turns gently stroking her, talking baby talk to her. Then one of them left the group. When he came back a few minutes later from the 7-Eleven a few doors down the street, he was carrying a can of cat food. He crouched back on the steps, popped the lid off the can, and set it down for the kitten. The boys looked on with good-deed grins of satisfaction as they watched her gobble up what was probably the only decent meal she’d had in days. So they weren’t going to hurt her, all their appearance of brutality to the contrary.
But then after a while, it was plain the boys were starting to get bored. They had meant this to be a one-night stand, no long-term commitment. They got up and started to walk away. The kitten followed them. They looked back, clearly worried that this demanding little creature might attach itself to them. They picked up their pace. The cat matched their speed. Soon she had them on the run! It was the climaxing chase scene you find in every proper action film. It was The French Connection all over again. Except this time, the hooligans being chased weren’t in a car – they were on foot. And their pursuer wasn’t a cop in a souped-up Fury, but a10-ounce kitten intent on finding a home.
The boys ran full tilt to the end of the block – checked and saw the cat was still coming on strong. They shot around the corner and fell silent. They were likely using every evasive tactic in the book. I could picture them cutting through the alley, down the pub’s gangway, then falling in hushed caution under Mr. Bandera’s back porch. “Shhhh! Don’t let her hear us. Maybe she’ll go right past!”
Whatever they did, they succeeded in eluding her, because in a little while, I saw her straggling back into the Post Office bushes - defeated, unadopted.
But not for long. A few nights later, as I coaxed my dog through the front door after our nightly perambulation, I thought I saw a gray flash of something shoot past us into the house. I dismissed it as some trick of my eyesight though – until I saw the kitten sitting in full proprietary possession of my computer desk. I had been in the middle of a computer backgammon game with myself when I’d taken my break to walk the dog. As I watched in amazement at the sheer assurance the kitten had of its right-of-way – she leaped onto my keyboard, brought the computer screen back to life, and made the decisive move that won the game for me. So I dubbed her “Gammon” - and that was that.
As I suspected it might, the cat’s presence in the house probably harried my elderly, failing dog to a somewhat earlier-than-otherwise grave. The dog took back seat to this new arrival’s needs, although Gammon was never very active or mischievous. She was fairly self-contained from the start.
Still, my caretaking of her tended to be done more from a sense of obligation than from the heart. When my dog died, I very much would have liked to have adopted another shelter dog. But the timing never seemed right. When I bestirred myself to do something about it, the potential adoptee’s biography mentioned that it should be an “only pet,” without any other animals in the house, especially without any cats. Then I procrastinated. Then I became the official guardian of a feral colony of cats who have stuck close to me in my back yard. It seemed it would be too much to try to introduce a dog into this reign of cats inside and out. And so fifteen years slipped away.
Because of what I thought was my partial detachment from the project of Gammon, I didn’t think I would cry when it came time to euthanize her. I had fulfilled my commitment to her – better than those Hell’s Angels had been prepared to do. I had given her a good life. So I was surprised when I started to sob uncontrollably in the vet’s examining room as we closed in on our conclusion.
But then the worst of this overwhelming sadness passed. After the decision had been made and it came to actually giving her the injection, I was even able to muster a calmer, scientific attitude towards the procedure. I chose to stay in the room while the vet administered the shots. They first inserted a catheter just above her paw first. Then two quick injections – one to anesthetize her, one to stop her heart. It seemed she was gone even as the first needle approached the port of the catheter.
In my newly becalmed (or benumbed?) state of scientific curiosity, I noted how absolutely painless this passing had been. By contrast, I remembered some of what I’d read about the occasional failure of lethal injections given to Death Row inmates. I’d read that there had been unseemly delayed reactions, and that even a few recipients of this form of capital punishment had had time to report excruciating burning sensations as the chemicals coursed through them. But none of that had happened here. I wondered, if animals can be so humanely dispatched – why can’t they always find the right chemicals and dosages to dispatch humans equally humanely?
By this time, with all the long worry about what to do about Gammon’s failing and when to do it behind me, I became almost inwardly jovial at elaborating the analogy I was making between euthanizing an animal and giving a prisoner a lethal injection. I patted Gammon on the head and silently speculated, “What did you do to have it come to this? Were you a little serial killer? Too bad, you couldn’t beat the rap.”
I guess none of us will beat the rap in the end.
The clinic had made an imprint of Gammon’s paw in a clay medallion – a token they gave me to take home and bake as a permanent remembrance.
I put it on the seat next to me in the car as I pulled out of the clinic’s parking lot. I’d driven a few yards before I realized that I was in the middle of a thick fog. This uncharacteristic daytime fog in Chicago, juxtaposed with that paw imprint medallion resting on the passenger seat - inevitably called to mind Carl Sandburg’s poem:
The fog comes
On little cat feet.
It sits looking over harbor and city
On silent haunches
And then moves on…..
Tuesday, June 18, 2013
Low Self-Esteem Is Not the Problem
Bullying has become a popular subject for media psychologists. When Dr. Phil addressed the subject the other day, he predictably ascribed the problem to a lack of self-esteem. Almost everything is attributed to a lack of self-esteem these days. This plague of low self-esteem is cited, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, in spite of the thousands and thousands of awkward, tone-deaf people who audition for “American Idol,” cocksure of their talent.
When it comes to bullying, both perpetrator and victim are assumed to be suffering from low self-esteem. The accepted interpretation is that the bully torments unpopular classmates because he/she actually feels inferior and needs someone to belittle. In turn, the victim of bullying is assumed to suffer because he/she is too ready to believe the cruel jibes of the bully. Dr. Phil’s recent guest was a woman who was carrying the pain of the verbal assaults she’d suffered in high school on into her adulthood. Dr. Phil assured her that the reason for her pain was low self-esteem. She’d internalized her tormenters’ remarks, become her own worst critic, and perpetuated the pain by repeating the insults to herself over and over, convinced of the truth of them.
Well, maybe. But I think there might be a more basic, yet a more unreachable reason for the actions and reactions behind bullying. The TV psychologists’ interpretation of low self-esteem is too much the standard jargon of 12-step programs. The problem of bullying might be beyond the reach of all those pat self-help dictums.
Maybe a bully’s behavior stems from the age-old, animal impulse to dominate, to conquer, to prevail through brutality. And maybe the victim’s pain stems from a more complex instinct. First, the victim might feel a need to protect herself physically from the kind of mob violence that often has its roots in “mere” playground bullying. But a victim’s more difficult, more diffuse need might be to avoid recognizing that cruelty in others in the first place. People long to feel that the world is a beautiful place worthy of their efforts to enter it and fully engage with it. They long to feel that there are others waiting in that larger world, capable and worthy of receiving their mature gifts - most importantly, their gift of love.
Many people, but perhaps young people and heartfelt young girls especially, long to be enamored, to have a hero who is worth the love they want to bestow. So when a victim meets with the bully’s sneers and sadism – she wants to avoid recognizing that behavior for what it is. She wants to twist the other’s innate cruelty around, to call it something else, to call it deserved. That way, the bully can still be perceived as a wonderful, worthy being. The victim only needs to correct her own faults. Then everything will be all right. That’s ultimately a more manageable project than trying to correct the evil in others. Such evil, if fully acknowledged, would make the world a grim, uninviting place.
We don’t want to see that our world is riddled with profoundly flawed, morally deformed people, people incapable of receiving the bounty of our affection. If we perceived this reality, we would lose all motive to reach out with effort and ebullience to such a world. Such a world would plainly have no room for the upwelling of love. And, as all the songs say, who are we if we have no one to love? Such a prospect is excruciating.
To make an analogy with more extreme cases, we might remind ourselves of the otherwise inexplicable persistence of battered wives and abused children. Why do the victims of such abuse so often refuse to leave their persecutors? Why do they so often refuse to blame them or name them when the police come to their doors, ready to help? Again, these victims’ problem is usually diagnosed as either fear of their bully’s retaliation, or else low self-esteem. But that doesn’t explain the victims’ frequent, ardent defense of their tormentors.
In most of these cases, self-blame is likely just the victims’ cover-story. Deep down, the victims probably don’t fully believe they are at fault. It’s all just a desperate attempt to maintain the illusion of the goodness of others.
I wasn’t bullied in school, but I lived in fear of being bullied. I wasn’t energetic enough to go to all the trouble of conforming to accepted standards. So in order to avoid becoming a target, I kept a very low profile. I made myself a ghost. My school life was built around avoidance. Again, that wasn’t primarily because I had low self-esteem. If I were to have become the target of bullies, I would not have thought any less of myself. I would have thought less of all my tormentors. My shadow existence was my way of protecting myself from the knowledge of others’ cruelty.
If I’d had this cruelty flung in my face, I’d no longer have been able to believe that most other people were deliciously, secretly primed to be my friends and lovers, if only circumstances would allow them to demonstrate their affection. By hiding from the reality of other people’s all too frequent prejudice and hatred, I could be like every Academy Award winner – gushing my thankfulness to my family, my co-stars, my producer – the whole wide, wonderful world. I would not have to face the fact that in actuality, my spouse was cheating on me, my co-stars had all been working to upstage me every step of the way, and that the director and producer hadn’t wanted me to star in the film in the first place because they had crudely declared to each other that “Her ass is too BIG!”
No, as long as I was careful not to elicit or overhear any negative reactions from others, I could still believe in their goodness and good will. I could remain enrapt by the possibility of them. That option, that imagining was left open. As long as I didn’t see the little boy pull the wings off the fly, I could dream him into an ideal friend. As long as I could aggressively deny anyone else’s testimony that the boy did in fact pull the wings off of flies and beat up weaker students on the playground – I was still able to count him among the many who could be loved. I could remain eager for each new day because it held him in it.
The constant struggle of avoidance and denial was exhausting. But I managed it until a relatively advanced age, largely because my family and I had the resources to build our own world and keep carefully inside of it much of the time. But perhaps others who have to be out in the “hood,” out in the “barrio,” out in the more subtle enforcements of condo associations and suburbia, without supportive parents to buffer them from all such ambient tyranny – perhaps they tend to succumb earlier to the hopelessness of there being no one to admire, no one to love.
The Irish say that “Sooner or later, the world will break your heart.” That’s a bitter pill to swallow. Maybe it doesn’t happen with quite that kind of melodramatic flourish. Perhaps the dying takes place more as a downtrodden resignation – more as a whimper than a bang.
I remember the low-key wisdom imparted by Mr. Adams, one of the many itinerant handymen my parents employed to help maintain our odd, echoing quarters. We had a new puppy then. The mutt followed Mr. Adams everywhere, yipping at his feet. We couldn’t corral or control it. It got out of our grip over and over, and before we knew it, was snapping for attention at Mr. Adams’ heels again. I thought its annoyances would soon have to provoke a really angry outburst from Mr. Adams, But no, Mr. Adams remained patient. He was one of the few people I’ve met who didn’t seem capable of rage. I doubt if he would even have yelled obscenities at someone who cut him off in traffic – if he’d ever had a car or ever driven (which was unlikely). But after a while, he did react to the incessant barking for attention. He leaned down forlornly and addressed the dog. “Hey there, little one. You’re not a newborn any more. You’ve got to think about being on your own. That’s what growing up is – learning how to be alone.”
That struck me at the time as being an indescribably sad piece of experience to pass along. I was just a teenager myself then, and didn’t want to contemplate that aging held such a fate. But I feared Mr. Adams might in fact be right.
Love probably won’t happen for most of us. It is rare to find anyone who was never a bully or who wouldn’t become one given the opportunity. It is rare to find someone who doesn’t honk and swear in traffic. And it’s rare for any of us to be so admirably devoid of petty self-interest and petty tyranny ourselves. All most of us can do is struggle along and try to maintain some illusion that we ourselves, but more urgently, that the partners who have come to be our lot in life, might still be worthy of the infinite love we haven’t completely forgotten is our reason for being. We have to hold onto that fiction.
And so we desperately try to get thin, get buff, get stylish, get rich, and generally improve ourselves. If we are in need of correction, if we are in the wrong - then the other person’s criticisms must be right, and therefore the other shines all the more brightly.
Dr. Phil says our desperation is low self-esteem. And we hang our heads dejectedly and agree. We play into the idea. Yes, our parents never really gave us the boost we needed; they never made us feel special; they never praised the artwork we brought home from school. All the while though, we know our struggle is much bigger than low self-esteem. Our struggle is not to feel better about ourselves, but to feel better about other people. We battle, not to be loved – but to love.
When it comes to bullying, both perpetrator and victim are assumed to be suffering from low self-esteem. The accepted interpretation is that the bully torments unpopular classmates because he/she actually feels inferior and needs someone to belittle. In turn, the victim of bullying is assumed to suffer because he/she is too ready to believe the cruel jibes of the bully. Dr. Phil’s recent guest was a woman who was carrying the pain of the verbal assaults she’d suffered in high school on into her adulthood. Dr. Phil assured her that the reason for her pain was low self-esteem. She’d internalized her tormenters’ remarks, become her own worst critic, and perpetuated the pain by repeating the insults to herself over and over, convinced of the truth of them.
Well, maybe. But I think there might be a more basic, yet a more unreachable reason for the actions and reactions behind bullying. The TV psychologists’ interpretation of low self-esteem is too much the standard jargon of 12-step programs. The problem of bullying might be beyond the reach of all those pat self-help dictums.
Maybe a bully’s behavior stems from the age-old, animal impulse to dominate, to conquer, to prevail through brutality. And maybe the victim’s pain stems from a more complex instinct. First, the victim might feel a need to protect herself physically from the kind of mob violence that often has its roots in “mere” playground bullying. But a victim’s more difficult, more diffuse need might be to avoid recognizing that cruelty in others in the first place. People long to feel that the world is a beautiful place worthy of their efforts to enter it and fully engage with it. They long to feel that there are others waiting in that larger world, capable and worthy of receiving their mature gifts - most importantly, their gift of love.
Many people, but perhaps young people and heartfelt young girls especially, long to be enamored, to have a hero who is worth the love they want to bestow. So when a victim meets with the bully’s sneers and sadism – she wants to avoid recognizing that behavior for what it is. She wants to twist the other’s innate cruelty around, to call it something else, to call it deserved. That way, the bully can still be perceived as a wonderful, worthy being. The victim only needs to correct her own faults. Then everything will be all right. That’s ultimately a more manageable project than trying to correct the evil in others. Such evil, if fully acknowledged, would make the world a grim, uninviting place.
We don’t want to see that our world is riddled with profoundly flawed, morally deformed people, people incapable of receiving the bounty of our affection. If we perceived this reality, we would lose all motive to reach out with effort and ebullience to such a world. Such a world would plainly have no room for the upwelling of love. And, as all the songs say, who are we if we have no one to love? Such a prospect is excruciating.
To make an analogy with more extreme cases, we might remind ourselves of the otherwise inexplicable persistence of battered wives and abused children. Why do the victims of such abuse so often refuse to leave their persecutors? Why do they so often refuse to blame them or name them when the police come to their doors, ready to help? Again, these victims’ problem is usually diagnosed as either fear of their bully’s retaliation, or else low self-esteem. But that doesn’t explain the victims’ frequent, ardent defense of their tormentors.
In most of these cases, self-blame is likely just the victims’ cover-story. Deep down, the victims probably don’t fully believe they are at fault. It’s all just a desperate attempt to maintain the illusion of the goodness of others.
I wasn’t bullied in school, but I lived in fear of being bullied. I wasn’t energetic enough to go to all the trouble of conforming to accepted standards. So in order to avoid becoming a target, I kept a very low profile. I made myself a ghost. My school life was built around avoidance. Again, that wasn’t primarily because I had low self-esteem. If I were to have become the target of bullies, I would not have thought any less of myself. I would have thought less of all my tormentors. My shadow existence was my way of protecting myself from the knowledge of others’ cruelty.
If I’d had this cruelty flung in my face, I’d no longer have been able to believe that most other people were deliciously, secretly primed to be my friends and lovers, if only circumstances would allow them to demonstrate their affection. By hiding from the reality of other people’s all too frequent prejudice and hatred, I could be like every Academy Award winner – gushing my thankfulness to my family, my co-stars, my producer – the whole wide, wonderful world. I would not have to face the fact that in actuality, my spouse was cheating on me, my co-stars had all been working to upstage me every step of the way, and that the director and producer hadn’t wanted me to star in the film in the first place because they had crudely declared to each other that “Her ass is too BIG!”
No, as long as I was careful not to elicit or overhear any negative reactions from others, I could still believe in their goodness and good will. I could remain enrapt by the possibility of them. That option, that imagining was left open. As long as I didn’t see the little boy pull the wings off the fly, I could dream him into an ideal friend. As long as I could aggressively deny anyone else’s testimony that the boy did in fact pull the wings off of flies and beat up weaker students on the playground – I was still able to count him among the many who could be loved. I could remain eager for each new day because it held him in it.
The constant struggle of avoidance and denial was exhausting. But I managed it until a relatively advanced age, largely because my family and I had the resources to build our own world and keep carefully inside of it much of the time. But perhaps others who have to be out in the “hood,” out in the “barrio,” out in the more subtle enforcements of condo associations and suburbia, without supportive parents to buffer them from all such ambient tyranny – perhaps they tend to succumb earlier to the hopelessness of there being no one to admire, no one to love.
The Irish say that “Sooner or later, the world will break your heart.” That’s a bitter pill to swallow. Maybe it doesn’t happen with quite that kind of melodramatic flourish. Perhaps the dying takes place more as a downtrodden resignation – more as a whimper than a bang.
I remember the low-key wisdom imparted by Mr. Adams, one of the many itinerant handymen my parents employed to help maintain our odd, echoing quarters. We had a new puppy then. The mutt followed Mr. Adams everywhere, yipping at his feet. We couldn’t corral or control it. It got out of our grip over and over, and before we knew it, was snapping for attention at Mr. Adams’ heels again. I thought its annoyances would soon have to provoke a really angry outburst from Mr. Adams, But no, Mr. Adams remained patient. He was one of the few people I’ve met who didn’t seem capable of rage. I doubt if he would even have yelled obscenities at someone who cut him off in traffic – if he’d ever had a car or ever driven (which was unlikely). But after a while, he did react to the incessant barking for attention. He leaned down forlornly and addressed the dog. “Hey there, little one. You’re not a newborn any more. You’ve got to think about being on your own. That’s what growing up is – learning how to be alone.”
That struck me at the time as being an indescribably sad piece of experience to pass along. I was just a teenager myself then, and didn’t want to contemplate that aging held such a fate. But I feared Mr. Adams might in fact be right.
Love probably won’t happen for most of us. It is rare to find anyone who was never a bully or who wouldn’t become one given the opportunity. It is rare to find someone who doesn’t honk and swear in traffic. And it’s rare for any of us to be so admirably devoid of petty self-interest and petty tyranny ourselves. All most of us can do is struggle along and try to maintain some illusion that we ourselves, but more urgently, that the partners who have come to be our lot in life, might still be worthy of the infinite love we haven’t completely forgotten is our reason for being. We have to hold onto that fiction.
And so we desperately try to get thin, get buff, get stylish, get rich, and generally improve ourselves. If we are in need of correction, if we are in the wrong - then the other person’s criticisms must be right, and therefore the other shines all the more brightly.
Dr. Phil says our desperation is low self-esteem. And we hang our heads dejectedly and agree. We play into the idea. Yes, our parents never really gave us the boost we needed; they never made us feel special; they never praised the artwork we brought home from school. All the while though, we know our struggle is much bigger than low self-esteem. Our struggle is not to feel better about ourselves, but to feel better about other people. We battle, not to be loved – but to love.
Wednesday, June 12, 2013
A Mis-Step in The Stepford Wives
I saw a re-run of The Stepford Wives last night. It was the original version starring Katherine Ross. It’s a chilling classic of a tale, but I always felt its premise was oddly off-base.
I’m not referring to its overall premise – that the people we’ve known, our nearest and dearest, have somehow suddenly be replaced with simulacra. That’s also the theme of another classic movie – Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and it’s the underlying theme of all the legends of doppelgangers. These movies and folktales are so frightening just because they play into an all too realistic and justifiable sense many of us get at times, a sense that someone we considered a friend has turned strangely cold toward us.
When carried to an extreme, this conviction that the people closest to us have been replaced by robotic alien life forms, is considered a psychological problem. It has a name – “Capgras’ Syndrome” or “Capgras’ Disease.” Neurologists such as Oliver Saks have written about such cases. Although there are theories about what portions of the brain might be stricken so as to lead to this twisted perception, no one, as far as I know, has pinpointed the source of the problem or been able to advance a cure.
However, in milder form, a perception that someone we’ve loved has changed into something mechanically subversive of us, is all too common and all too accurate a perception. Often the people we invested ourselves in were actually mercenary from the start, just using us - but we were too bubbly in denial to recognize that. Just as often though, people do change into regrettably joyless versions of themselves. In advanced Western societies, it happens notoriously when children hit their teens.
The little girl who was laughingly building sand castles with us one day, suddenly becomes a seething cauldron of rage. The little boy whose greatest joy was once going fishing with his Dad, turns brutally dismissive of anything connected with “the older generation.” An acquaintance of mine sighed over her boy the other day, “Oh, he’s becoming mannish.” She saw her once eager little “handyman” around the house going the inevitable way of guns, gangs, and profligate parenthood.
There often isn’t such a sense of alien substitution in tribal cultures where children remain continuously integrated into the larger society. They aren’t sent off for lengthy periods into the peer group enforcements of schools there. They also aren’t expected to dissociate themselves from parental mores, and to “lead their own lives.” So no sad and inexplicable, but seemingly inevitable, transformation into teen rebellion plagues tribal societies to the extent it does technologically advanced Western cultures.
However , all over there are medical conditions that snatch our loved ones from us. Strokes and Alzheimer’s happen. More subtle, undiagnosable conditions can also alter people’s personalities in indefinably hardening ways. People can become emotionally as well as physically sclerotic as they age.
So that aspect of the premise of The Stepford Wives reflects a lot of real life experience. The Stepford Wives is a stepped-up version of that suspicion we hold regarding some of our relationships. In a larger sense, it’s a representation of the general oncoming coldness of our human universe.
But something else about the movie’s plot didn’t ring true to me at all. The part of the movie’s premise that I did NOT find reflective of any inner reality – was the nature of the replacement women that the men designed for themselves. I don’t think the resultant compulsively house-proud woman is the ideal of many men. The movie script was obviously designed to play off the model woman implied in the word “house-keeper.” It aimed at being a sinister exaggeration of that role into which women were bound for so long. However, I don’t think the average man is very much concerned with how his wife maintains the house.
There are exceptions. Husbands with some tyrannizing version of OCD, like the husband in Sleeping With the Enemy,” might want a wife preoccupied with the relative virtues of different scrubbing products. But I don’t think typical men rate “keeping the house immaculate” very high on their list of qualities they look for in a wife. Some might hope for a good cook, but even that attribute would probably not rank high among the majority of men. What’s more, I don’t think a majority of men in Western societies would particularly want their wives dressed in frilly long skirts and blouses. Quite the reverse, A lot of men I’ve met are pressuring their wives to wear mini-er mini skirts and tighter, flesh-tone tank tops – at least around the house. But even at that, men don’t generally seem to be consistently particular about, or observant of, what their wives are wearing. Their priorities are elsewhere.
There’s a joke circulating on the Internet about what women look for in a future husband. You’ve probably received the joke in your email. It goes:
A store that sells new husbands has just opened in New York City, where a woman may go to shop for a husband. Among the instructions at the entrance to the building is a description of how the store operates. Women entering the premises are advised that they may visit the store ONLY ONCE! There are six floors and the desirable attributes of the men increase and compound as the shopper ascends the flights. There is, however, a catch. A woman may choose any man from a particular floor, or she may choose to go up a floor. But once having passed a floor, she can’t go back, except to exit the building.
So, a woman enters the Husband Store. On the first floor the sign on the door reads:
Floor 1 - These men have jobs.
The second floor sign reads:
Floor 2 - These men have jobs and love kids.
The third floor sign reads:
Floor 3 - These men have jobs, love kids, and are extremely good looking.
At this point, the woman is tempted, but keeps going. The fourth floor sign reads:
Floor 4 - These men have jobs, love kids, are drop-dead good looking, and help with the housework.
Still the woman is impelled to keep going. The fifth floor sign reads:
Floor 5 - These men have jobs, love kids, are drop-dead gorgeous, help with the housework, and have a strong romantic streak.
It gets better and better, Still the woman proceeds to the sixth floor, whose sign reads:
Floor 6 - You are visitor 31,456,012 to this floor. There are no men on this floor. This floor exists solely as proof that women are impossible to please. Thank you for shopping at the Husband Store.
Quite a few people have added another section to this joke. They have posited a counterpart “Wife Store” across the street from the Husband Store. Same set-up, same rules apply.
A man enters the Wife Store. The first sign he sees says:
Floor 1 – These women like beer and sports.
He proceeds to the next floor. That sign says:
Floor 2 – These women like beer, sports, and sex.
Here the review of the Store Directory ends. When the reader is prompted to ask, “What’s next? What’s on Floors 3 and 4 and so forth?” – the answer is:
No one knows. No man has ever gone beyond Floor 2.
There are a few different versions of this joke addenda about what men want. Sometimes an early floor will include mention of attractiveness – sometimes of wealthy women. But no version mentions a propensity to cook and clean all day.
The Stepford Wives are shown being accommodating to their husbands sexually. But that’s a minor theme. A Stepford Wife is principally characterized by her transfixed affinity for doing housework. And that’s where the book and the movie seem to be so oddly dissonant to me. Based on every know permutation of the Husband Store joke, and based on the predilections of most of the men I’ve been acquainted with – women preoccupied with the relative merits of different oven cleaning products would be scorned rather than married. If anything, many men might appreciate a woman willing to tolerate and even lend herself to the kind of messy casualness that the stereotypical bachelor and husband both tend to favor, as long as things don’t get too far out of control. A man would more likely want to create a partner who would be intelligently available to participate in those beer and sports bashes, and who could be an inventive partner in sex play. In summary, if real men had the power to replace their real, fractious, imperfect wives with simulacra, it’s unlikely that many would create bland scrub women floating around in Victorian modesty.
So there’s a layering of eeriness about The Stepford Wives. There’s the obvious chill factor of its main theme regarding men’s desire to replace real women with some idealization of women. But then there’s the eeriness of what’s shown as being these men’s ideals. That ideal is so contrary to what most men have likely ever really wanted, that it poses its own question. What was going on in our culture in the late 60’s and early 70’s, when Ira Levin’s book was written and when the move was made, that caused this skewed vision of men’s desires to be posited?
That was the era of the Cultural Revolution, of love-in’s, of a push for liberation – particularly women’s liberation. The movie is obviously a reflection of that new consciousness raising. In its terrifying extremity, it highlights the fact that women had for so long been impressed into being, not themselves, but whatever men wanted them to be. However, in the process of advancing such a chilling awareness of women’s subjugation on this score, did the movie inadvertently subject men to an equally stifling falsity? Does the movie advance a very unnatural, prefabricated image of who men are and of what they want?
I’m not referring to its overall premise – that the people we’ve known, our nearest and dearest, have somehow suddenly be replaced with simulacra. That’s also the theme of another classic movie – Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and it’s the underlying theme of all the legends of doppelgangers. These movies and folktales are so frightening just because they play into an all too realistic and justifiable sense many of us get at times, a sense that someone we considered a friend has turned strangely cold toward us.
When carried to an extreme, this conviction that the people closest to us have been replaced by robotic alien life forms, is considered a psychological problem. It has a name – “Capgras’ Syndrome” or “Capgras’ Disease.” Neurologists such as Oliver Saks have written about such cases. Although there are theories about what portions of the brain might be stricken so as to lead to this twisted perception, no one, as far as I know, has pinpointed the source of the problem or been able to advance a cure.
However, in milder form, a perception that someone we’ve loved has changed into something mechanically subversive of us, is all too common and all too accurate a perception. Often the people we invested ourselves in were actually mercenary from the start, just using us - but we were too bubbly in denial to recognize that. Just as often though, people do change into regrettably joyless versions of themselves. In advanced Western societies, it happens notoriously when children hit their teens.
The little girl who was laughingly building sand castles with us one day, suddenly becomes a seething cauldron of rage. The little boy whose greatest joy was once going fishing with his Dad, turns brutally dismissive of anything connected with “the older generation.” An acquaintance of mine sighed over her boy the other day, “Oh, he’s becoming mannish.” She saw her once eager little “handyman” around the house going the inevitable way of guns, gangs, and profligate parenthood.
There often isn’t such a sense of alien substitution in tribal cultures where children remain continuously integrated into the larger society. They aren’t sent off for lengthy periods into the peer group enforcements of schools there. They also aren’t expected to dissociate themselves from parental mores, and to “lead their own lives.” So no sad and inexplicable, but seemingly inevitable, transformation into teen rebellion plagues tribal societies to the extent it does technologically advanced Western cultures.
However , all over there are medical conditions that snatch our loved ones from us. Strokes and Alzheimer’s happen. More subtle, undiagnosable conditions can also alter people’s personalities in indefinably hardening ways. People can become emotionally as well as physically sclerotic as they age.
So that aspect of the premise of The Stepford Wives reflects a lot of real life experience. The Stepford Wives is a stepped-up version of that suspicion we hold regarding some of our relationships. In a larger sense, it’s a representation of the general oncoming coldness of our human universe.
But something else about the movie’s plot didn’t ring true to me at all. The part of the movie’s premise that I did NOT find reflective of any inner reality – was the nature of the replacement women that the men designed for themselves. I don’t think the resultant compulsively house-proud woman is the ideal of many men. The movie script was obviously designed to play off the model woman implied in the word “house-keeper.” It aimed at being a sinister exaggeration of that role into which women were bound for so long. However, I don’t think the average man is very much concerned with how his wife maintains the house.
There are exceptions. Husbands with some tyrannizing version of OCD, like the husband in Sleeping With the Enemy,” might want a wife preoccupied with the relative virtues of different scrubbing products. But I don’t think typical men rate “keeping the house immaculate” very high on their list of qualities they look for in a wife. Some might hope for a good cook, but even that attribute would probably not rank high among the majority of men. What’s more, I don’t think a majority of men in Western societies would particularly want their wives dressed in frilly long skirts and blouses. Quite the reverse, A lot of men I’ve met are pressuring their wives to wear mini-er mini skirts and tighter, flesh-tone tank tops – at least around the house. But even at that, men don’t generally seem to be consistently particular about, or observant of, what their wives are wearing. Their priorities are elsewhere.
There’s a joke circulating on the Internet about what women look for in a future husband. You’ve probably received the joke in your email. It goes:
A store that sells new husbands has just opened in New York City, where a woman may go to shop for a husband. Among the instructions at the entrance to the building is a description of how the store operates. Women entering the premises are advised that they may visit the store ONLY ONCE! There are six floors and the desirable attributes of the men increase and compound as the shopper ascends the flights. There is, however, a catch. A woman may choose any man from a particular floor, or she may choose to go up a floor. But once having passed a floor, she can’t go back, except to exit the building.
So, a woman enters the Husband Store. On the first floor the sign on the door reads:
Floor 1 - These men have jobs.
The second floor sign reads:
Floor 2 - These men have jobs and love kids.
The third floor sign reads:
Floor 3 - These men have jobs, love kids, and are extremely good looking.
At this point, the woman is tempted, but keeps going. The fourth floor sign reads:
Floor 4 - These men have jobs, love kids, are drop-dead good looking, and help with the housework.
Still the woman is impelled to keep going. The fifth floor sign reads:
Floor 5 - These men have jobs, love kids, are drop-dead gorgeous, help with the housework, and have a strong romantic streak.
It gets better and better, Still the woman proceeds to the sixth floor, whose sign reads:
Floor 6 - You are visitor 31,456,012 to this floor. There are no men on this floor. This floor exists solely as proof that women are impossible to please. Thank you for shopping at the Husband Store.
Quite a few people have added another section to this joke. They have posited a counterpart “Wife Store” across the street from the Husband Store. Same set-up, same rules apply.
A man enters the Wife Store. The first sign he sees says:
Floor 1 – These women like beer and sports.
He proceeds to the next floor. That sign says:
Floor 2 – These women like beer, sports, and sex.
Here the review of the Store Directory ends. When the reader is prompted to ask, “What’s next? What’s on Floors 3 and 4 and so forth?” – the answer is:
No one knows. No man has ever gone beyond Floor 2.
There are a few different versions of this joke addenda about what men want. Sometimes an early floor will include mention of attractiveness – sometimes of wealthy women. But no version mentions a propensity to cook and clean all day.
The Stepford Wives are shown being accommodating to their husbands sexually. But that’s a minor theme. A Stepford Wife is principally characterized by her transfixed affinity for doing housework. And that’s where the book and the movie seem to be so oddly dissonant to me. Based on every know permutation of the Husband Store joke, and based on the predilections of most of the men I’ve been acquainted with – women preoccupied with the relative merits of different oven cleaning products would be scorned rather than married. If anything, many men might appreciate a woman willing to tolerate and even lend herself to the kind of messy casualness that the stereotypical bachelor and husband both tend to favor, as long as things don’t get too far out of control. A man would more likely want to create a partner who would be intelligently available to participate in those beer and sports bashes, and who could be an inventive partner in sex play. In summary, if real men had the power to replace their real, fractious, imperfect wives with simulacra, it’s unlikely that many would create bland scrub women floating around in Victorian modesty.
So there’s a layering of eeriness about The Stepford Wives. There’s the obvious chill factor of its main theme regarding men’s desire to replace real women with some idealization of women. But then there’s the eeriness of what’s shown as being these men’s ideals. That ideal is so contrary to what most men have likely ever really wanted, that it poses its own question. What was going on in our culture in the late 60’s and early 70’s, when Ira Levin’s book was written and when the move was made, that caused this skewed vision of men’s desires to be posited?
That was the era of the Cultural Revolution, of love-in’s, of a push for liberation – particularly women’s liberation. The movie is obviously a reflection of that new consciousness raising. In its terrifying extremity, it highlights the fact that women had for so long been impressed into being, not themselves, but whatever men wanted them to be. However, in the process of advancing such a chilling awareness of women’s subjugation on this score, did the movie inadvertently subject men to an equally stifling falsity? Does the movie advance a very unnatural, prefabricated image of who men are and of what they want?
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