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jwaneeta at 11:57pm on 29/01/2004Okay, I'm gonna say it. If there is one thing I don't like, anywhere in fiction or film, it's the Pervasive Type of the abused kid as a psychotic killer.
I know, I know. Everybody's on the bandwagon these days about their own little tribe as The Misrepresented. It gets to be yammery noise after a while, a contest for volume, signifying nothing.
But let me, please? Since I love this episode so much, it's in another category altogether. I understand that Dana is a horror convention, and it works for me as story. Dana as a murderous psycho is a fine driver, and I like the writing throughout. But if we are going to examine writerly weaknesses like vampire circulation, Slayer dreams and battle strategy, please permit me to say something about kids who are abducted and/or suffer serious physical abuse.
Serious physical abuse is a medical term. It means torture, or attempted murder that the child happened to survive. It means the breaking of bones. It means stuff that can be found in X-rays and cat-scans: caved-in skulls, busted ribs that were not treated and left to heal. Boiled skin from scalding. Wandering eyes, drooping lips.
There are many myths about this level of assault, some of which are used in fiction.
The fiction is: this is a once-in-a-decade kind of horror, so bad it produces once-in-a-decade kinds of psychotic killers. A Jeffrey Dahmer, a Green River Killer, an abductor-by-night. This is a construct people are making to explain inexplicable evil. People want to believe that this sort of thing is rare, and sprouts serial killers like rare mushrooms, and that's
Untrue. This shit happens every day.
The fiction is that it is mostly perpetuated by men. Untrue. Child-murder and torture is mostly perpetuated by women. Mothers.
The fiction is that most of these kids survive: Untrue. Infant and toddler death by strangulation, scalding, neglect, battery, suffocation, stabbing, shaking, live burial and exposure is perpetuated overwhelmingly by mothers, and most of these infants die.
The fiction is: that kids who are so used, and survive it somehow, are psychotic. Untrue. Kids are almost inhumanly strong. It takes a good deal more than attempted murder to make a healthy child mind psychotic. If the child had inherited a genetic weakness or schizophrenia, well. But a normal child mind sorts trauma into neurosis and becomes, if anything, an even weaker and more law-abiding member of society, in order to separate from the Murdering Other.
The fiction is: Mother Love. Stay with me. I believe Mother Love is a myth, but that makes me honor good mothers more. There is no magic infusion of chemicals or light from heaven that makes a woman good to her child in the long day; the coroner's rolls are full of tiny names that show that the natal experience turns many women to savagery. There are even laws in the books that exculpate women who kill their infants within 24 hours of birth. So if you are a good mother, it means you have exercized character and will. The Mother Love Myth survives because it is threatening for people to think that love and nurture might be left to human will rather than Natural Law, but it robs you good mothers of a lot of credit. Consider yourself credited.
I am a practicing Catholic, no secret. And Catholics are against abortion. But it is very hard for me, now. The old days are gone, in which the church funded orphanages and schools and colleges for unwanted babies. Now the church says: have that baby! to a woman who resents the baby before it ever takes breath. It is harrassing women bent on aborting, harranguing them into delivery; delivering an innocent into the hands of a person who, is at best, willing to abort because she has no means, options or character. An abortion, and then the Catholic Church walks away, congratulating itself! The rosary-shakers get to feel like martyrs for getting cited by the police, without ever putting thier own asses on the line, the hypocrites. Why don't they offer to adopt these children they "Cherish?" The Roman Church gets to stand by its smug endorsement of the Myth, while no longer putting personel,money or even thought into the question of murdered/abused/unwanted infants.
I may be a very bad Catholic for thinking this, but what is worse? For a child with some brain activity in the womb to be subjected to suction and cutterage, or for that child to be born thinking and seeing, and bond with the creature that covers its face with a pillow (or lets her boyfriend beat it to a lingering death)?
If anyone (the Catholic Church, Islam and others) says no to abortion, they need to put their money where their mouths are.
Feh, sorry, I get all worked up. I started by saying that most kids who are broken-bone abused are not psychotic murderers, etc. Doesn't mean their lives have been a picnic, or that they are totaly un-ranty, when provoked. *g* I can appreciate the idea as a plot driver in a good Angel episode. But sometimes a gal feels driven to share her little corner of the world, in re.
(no subject)
I'm very glad to see someone point that out. (No, you don't know me, I'm just bored and reading Friends of Friends)
the myth of Mother Love
There's a wonderful book out there by Sarah Blaffer(?) Hrdy, called "Mother Nature", which is all about the mothering instinct, mother love, etc. She looks at all kinds of species including humans, and here is her conclusion: bullshit. There is no instinctive "mother love".
What there IS, instinctively and hard-wired, is Baby Love. Babies love their mothers. It is their best and only power in a world in which they are completely helpless, to induce the person who matters more to their survival than anything on earth to respond favourably to them.
And we do. Mothers respond to their baby's love, to that heartbreaking smile of open delight lighting up the room whenever the face of mummy looks in the doorway, by learning to love them in turn (and are heavily supported in this response by their entire society of course). It happens with greater or lesser speed, but it happens a lot of the time. Most of the time, probably. Without it the human race wouldn't survive.
But while all babies love their mothers, mothers love - and raise - the babies they can afford to love and raise. Which isn't all of them,all of the time.
My sister, an activist, disapproves of Mother Teresa because she disapproved of abortion. But I think at least Mother Teresa was putting her money where her mouth was, as you say. If you oppose abortion, there are consequences. Who will raise the children whose mothers had decided before their birth they could not afford, for one reason or another, to keep? If you oppose abortion, you had better give them an option.
Re: the myth of Mother Love
And this is what drives me apeshit. In times past there were options -- not great options, but at least the Church established and sustained Foundling Homes in every parish. Not today: even as Catholics fulminate against abortion and throw themselves on the pavement before women entering Planned Parenthood clinics, the last institutions for orphans close for lack of money and staff. People who try to open homes for unwed mothers are hounded out by upstanding Catholics, who yell about the sanctity of life but don't want messy pregnant girls living down the street. It's insane.
(no subject)
I know children experience horrors everyday, perpetrated upon them by people they love. I know mothers like yours exist. But - though they may not be rare, neither are they common. Most of us mothers lie somewhere in between Mother Love and Wicked Stepmother.
Re:
When I see Good Mothers, I think they are heros, measured against the daily influx of stories about murdered toddlers, but Good Mothers are not credited: good mothering is considered an instinct, an overpowering natural impusle common to all women who give birth. Thus the Church thinks all they have to do is force a woman to deliver, and when she sees the child all will be well.
To me, this is simply madness. If it put only one helpless creature into the hands of a woman who resents it and has unlimited power to act out that resentment, it would be one too many. But it's not just one. Child murder and horrific abuse/neglect are pandemic.
The notion that ALL women instinctivly love their babies (and are empowered by that love to raise them well) doesn't sort with the sheer multitudes of children in foster homes or brought into ERs on a daily basis. And it does no honor to the women who actually do love their children and shoulder massive burdens to protect and provide for them.