The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [61]
Wicked Witches
Of the innumerable myths told about single mothers the most elemental is single status itself. In reality, many are single only temporarily or only in the legal sense. Two out of five women who are unmarried when their first child is born marry before the child’s fifth birthday. One in four unwed mothers lives with a man, often with the child’s fath er.31
On occasion mothers portrayed as single do not qualify even on temporary or legal grounds. In its coverage of Awilda Lopez, the New York woman who brutally murdered her young daughter, Elisa Izquierdo, the New York Post spoke of the man in Lopez’s life as her “boyfriend.” In fact, Lopez was married. As Richard Goldstein of the Village Voice suggested in a critique of the coverage, an intact family might have confused the issue of who was to blame for the horrific treatment of Elisa, especially since the husband apparently participated in the little girl’s abuse, and neighbors said he beat and stabbed Lopez, sometimes in front of her children. Yet the Post depicted him as a man who would “cook, clean, and take the children out to a nearby playground.” 32
Much of the media framed the Elisa Izquierdo tragedy literally as a fairy tale. Time, in a five-page cover story, reported that Elisa, like the princesses in fairy tales, was “born humble” but “had a special enchanted aura” and liked to dance. “And,” the article went on, “unlikely as it may seem, there was even a prince in Elisa’s life: a real scion of Greece’s old royalty named Prince Michael, who was a patron of the little girl’s preschool.” But in this real-life fairy tale, the story went, neither the prince nor any government agency could rescue the princess from the wicked witch, Elisa’s “single” mother. “Some Mothers Are Simply Evil,” read a headline in the New York Post. “A monster like this should have stopped living long ago,” proclaimed a writer for the New York Daily News.33
Time, in its cover article, relayed police reports from neighbors, of little Elisa pleading, “Mommy, Mommy, please stop! No more! No more!” as Lopez sexually molested her with a toothbrush and a hair-brush. When her screams grew too loud, Time said, Lopez turned up the radio.34
That these sordid details made their way into the pages of a family newsmagazine that repeatedly decries graphic depictions of depravity in print, on television, and in cyberspace is telling in itself. There must be something terribly compelling about gruesome tales of sadistic moms. Katha Pollitt of The Nation captured part of their appeal when she commented that “lurid replays of Awilda Lopez’s many acts of sadism, while officially intended to spur outrage, also pander to the readers’ sadomasochism.” An observation by Bruno Bettelheim in an essay on children’s fairy tales also helps to explain the allure of what are essentially fairy tales for adult readers. “The fairy tale suggests how the child may manage the contradictory feelings which would otherwise overwhelm him,” Bettelheim wrote. “The fantasy of the wicked stepmother not only preserves the good mother intact, it also prevents having to feel guilty about one’s angry thoughts and wishes about her.”35
Media tales about monster moms serve a parallel purpose for adults. They say that we—or our wives, sisters, daughters, or friends—are good mothers by comparison. They invite us to redirect (more accurately, misdirect) our self-doubts. When we lose our temper or strike out at our children we may secretly worry about our