The Metaphor That Made My Head Explode
Originally published at Welcome To The Dollhouse. You can comment here or there.
ometimes you find the most intriguing information on Twitter. Not too long ago (OK, it was about 2 weeks ago, but you try to find time to blog coherently with a job as nutty as mine has been lately) a tweet from Feministe popped up giving a teaser for a new posting. The title is what caught my eye: Once Again: Rape Is NOT Your Personal Metaphor. Of course with a title like that, I just had to click on the link. How could I not?
The author was writing a way pissed off reply to a posting on Gawker by someone who called himself CajunBoy. I don’t know about the Cajun part, but after reading Cara’s entry, I knew that the Boy part of his name was certainly appropriate. There was no way that he could be CajunMan or even CajunGuy. Someone spewing that kind of drivel had to be stuck in sociopathic boyhood pulling the wings off of flies or something productive like that.
By now you’re thinking, too much build-up, Liana. Just cut to the chase. Yeah, well, the build up is half the fun, no?
OK, so back to the dreaded CajunBoy. He wrote a whinging little post that included an analogy (or perhaps it was an extended metaphor). I think I can safely say that this was one of the worst analogies/metaphors I’ve ever heard in my life. It was an analogy/metaphor so offensive and officious that I wanted to scrub my brain after reading it. To add insult to injury, it was also both nonsensical and ridiculous.
I’m still building you up for it…
It was so bad that I encouraged AdoringHusband, who is also known as the Master of the Analogy, to read it himself.
“You just have to see this,” I told him, “It was so horrible, that I think my head exploded. I’m offended as a woman. Hell, I’m offended as a sentient life form!”
“Describe it to me,” said the wanna-be slacker I’m married to.
“Oh, it’s something you have to read for yourself,” I replied.
“Can you summarize for me?” the slacker tried again.
“Nah. I couldn’t begin to do it justice.”
I handed him the iPhone that was logged on to the webpage and watched his jaw drop as he read.
TRIGGER WARNING FOR WHAT FOLLOWS
From the creative end, developing a television show these days is sort of like giving birth to a daughter, your work, a daughter that you raise and nurture with tremendous care, and then one day you bring her, beautiful, statuesque, perfect in your eyes, to the church to walk her down the aisle, where a dashing groom, the American television viewership, is waiting to embrace her on the other end of the aisle. But just before the organist plays that “Here Comes the Bride” song so she can begin her walk down the aisle, out pops a herd of groomsmen, television executives, who proceed to throw your daughter down and violently gang-bang her in the back of the church, and by the time they’re done with her she’s bloody, beaten, and battered, almost completely unrecognizable to you, the person who raised her. Both of her eyes are swollen completely shut, one of her legs is broken, she can barely function at all, and then the very groomsmen, the television executives, who just finished violently raping her turn to you and say, “Okay, now make her walk down the aisle,” and you, the person who conceived her, nurtured her and cared for her for all those years, has to walk with her as she hopelessly flounders her way down, and all the while you’re hoping beyond hope that she a) makes it all the way down before completely collapsing and b) that her groom, the American television viewer, isn’t so freaked out by her when he sees how hideous she now looks that he turns and bolts out of the church.
Yes indeed my friends, CajunBoy is using the extended metaphor of assault and gang rape to describe what television executives did to his…his…(wait for it) his television show! Oh the trauma for him! The agony!
Now I am as annoyed/angered/frustrated as many sensate people are with the overuse of rape as a metaphor in everyday life:
You paid THAT MUCH for your ticket?! Dude, you got raped!
Yet as much as that annoys/angers/frustrates me, I wouldn’t devote time that I could be spending watching some of the fine TV taking up space on our DVR sitting here blogging about it. But CajunBoy’s metaphor rankled on a much greater scale. It went on and on and became more and more egregious with each word. And the clinician in me couldn’t help thinking, what kind of sick-ass mutha comes up with such a scenario in the first place?
Shall we deconstruct some of the glaringly obscene wrongheadedness that make up this metaphor?
1. My Daughter: My TV Show
Okay, okay. Call me a little strange, but even metaphorically attempting to relate creating a daughter to creating a television show jangles for me. Your daughter isn’t your Frankenstein’s monster. Sure you (hopefully) nurtured, guided, and supported her development into womanhood, but lookit, CajunBoy, a parent does not create an adult child in the same way you created your TV show. A TV show is a thing. A human being is not a thing (in the insensate chair or doorknob example of “thing”). So in your gangbanging/assault fantasy metaphor you’ve left out what the daughter might feel in the aftermath of her ordeal. But (smacks head) that’s right, your creation doesn’t have feelings, does it/she? She’s raped, broken and bloody, but it’s you who has to deal with the mess and palm her off, right? What she wants/thinks/needs is of no consequence to you the creator/Daddy. Objectify much?
2. Gang Rape By Groomsmen
So let me get this straight. According to CajunBoy’s thinking, Daddy is about to walk his beautiful daughter down the aisle when she is set upon by groomsmen and is assaulted and gang raped. Where is Daddy while this is happening? Watching? Having a sandwich? Taking a leak? What’s wrong with this picture?
I’ll bet you a fat man (something my crazy stepfather used to say that somehow seems appropriate now) that if someone ever tried to even step towards Zizi, the only way he/she/they would get near her would be after hubby and I had expended our last breaths in defending her. And they would have experienced extremes of blood and pain in that endeavor. There would also be pieces missing from their bodies. Oh yes, flesh would be rent.
So where in crazy CajunBoy’s metaphor does he account for a father’s (or parents’) protective love and defense of his/their daughter? Hmmm, maybe in his mind neither daughters nor TV shows are actually worth defending. Now sons, OTOH…
3. The Aisle Walk
Now if there weren’t already enough seriously FUBAR with this metaphor, CajunBoy decides to ice the cake at the end of his little nasty imagery. The groomsmen have done their horrible misdeeds. Daddy appears back on the scene and sees his traumatized and mangled daughter. Does Daddy:
- begin to rend flesh and mangle groomsmen?
- run to injured daughter and get her away from these villains?
- call the police?
No, no, no, my friends. You are thinking way too logically. Remember, we are in CajunBoy’s teeny brain. What does Daddy do? He listens to the groomsmen who tell him to walk her down the aisle looking like death on a stick, beaten, raped and bloody, to be married off to her groom, who Daddy hopes will not be so repulsed as to bolt from the church upon seeing her.
BOOM
That was my head exploding again.
When challenged about his choice of such an awful metaphor to describe what happened with his TV show, here’s what he replied:
Yeah, I can see that. I actually hesitated right before posting it worried that some might find it offensive, but I decided to go with it, if only because I think that there’s a feeling of being violated that goes along with having something you create utterly destroyed by idiots.
But regardless, sorry if that metaphor offends you. I mean no offense, obviously, I just couldn’t think of a better may to put it once I spit it out onto my screen.
Yeah, right. Couldn’t think of anything better. That says a lot about his TV show development abilities right there.
I’m going to pick up the pieces of my head now. Goodnight.