musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

Beauty and the daemon


Whoa…! Hybristophilia? I love new words; I enjoy trying to figure out what they mean before I look them up. The philia part seems easy enough: it’s from the Greek word for fondness, or love. But the hybristo didn’t ring any memory bells; the sound of the word reminded me of the Nabisco Shredded Wheat breakfast cereal of my youth (now Post shredded wheat apparently).

I can’t say that I ever had ‘Nabiscophilia’ either, but I certainly preferred it to its winter breakfast substitute. My mother insisted that we exchange shredded wheat for lumpy warm porridge breakfasts as soon as the first snow fell; mind you in those post WWII days in Winnipeg, the winters were fierce, and the breakfast choices few, so I think that along with her weekly spoonfuls of cod-liver oil supplements to us she was just being careful.

Still, Hybristophilia seemed foreign and perhaps even dangerous, when I first saw the word -you probably wouldn’t want a hybristophile sitting next to you on a busy downtown bus, or anything… if you actually knew what one might look or smell like, that is.

It turns out that Hybristophilia is from the Greek word hybrizein, to commit an outrage against someone -not somebody you might expect in a restaurant, but it’s nice to have a word filed away for the occasion just in case, I suppose.

Where do I get this stuff, you might be muttering to yourself as you hurriedly move on to another essay? Well, I have to confess to being rabbit-holed into an intriguing-sounding essay in the Conversation[i] because it featured a picture of a large white cat standing over what I took to be a young girl lying in the grass -(I only got part way through it en français and then surrendered to a Google translator).

Many of the bedtime stories read to me when I was a child, were actually allegories, time-honoured myths. Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, among many others, were not only entertaining, but had lessons to teach that I doubt either of my parents on bed-duty fully appreciated. I still wonder about them sometimes…

I enjoyed the stories but often fell asleep before the underlying meaning sank in. Perhaps that’s why the essay (albeit en français) awoke something of a primal memory in the adult me (okay the octogenarian me who finally had sufficient time to gather and collate what memory fragments remained).

It would seem that there is a particular subtype of these tales that feature ‘a symbolic ruse in which the animal is the metaphorical incarnation of the serial killer while the heroine, a young girl in the process of sexual, psychological and social maturation, illustrates the disturbing case of hybristophilia, a condition that designates the morbid attraction that some women can feel towards dangerous criminals.’ I mean, where did that come from? I can’t remember anything read to me which touched on anything as sinister as a symbolic ruse. I suppose the fact that I was a little boy would have doused some of my fears after the lights were turned off, but more likely it was the presence of my faithful dog who was lying on the carpet beside the bed.

Little could I have guessed that years later, the theme of the predatory male in those stories could be transmogrified into a tale more commensurate with the times we now inhabit: one of animal rights. I’m good with that. The essay explained that ‘the narrative logic is reversed. The Beast in the tale is no longer a danger to the girl, but a victim of human wickedness: he is a wolf persecuted by farmers, a lion hunted by cruel tourists, a jaguar whose species is threatened with extinction.

‘Although this call for mercy for the fauna is legitimate in the register of reality, it becomes a fallacious means of exonerating the mythical Beast from the crimes committed in the symbolic telling of the tale: the kidnapping, the sequestration and the repeated rape of Beauty.’

I began to suspect that I had been inadvertently sucked into a disguised jeremiad which was only slightly, yet inadequately, obfuscated by a detour which, after a brief change of scenery soon looped back onto the main road again. Perhaps my enjoyment of the distraction on the alternate route spoiled me, but I found it difficult to rejoin the initial journey.

Far more apposite though, are my real journeys with strange people on the city buses where any hybristic thoughts about dangerous criminals are diluted by the smiles and laughter which usually surround me. I mean there could well be those who, given different circumstances, might be tempted to hybrist (or whatever the verb is), but I think most of those sit at the back of the bus for some reason. At any rate, that’s where I occasionally hear somebody yelling, although am reluctant to turn my head pinpoint the cause, for fear of becoming a target myself.

Anyway, I’m usually riding in the senior section in the front, so I have little to do with any ruckus in the rear, and there’s little about me to suggest I might be tempted to employ any reactive hybristic behaviour even if I were elbowed or ‘back-packed’ by someone beside me swaying in the aisle.

Maybe hybristophilia had been put to bed for a while after WWII; I could grow up believing that stories like the ‘Three Little Pigs’ and their Big Bad Wolf not being able to blow down the house made of bricks were actually enlightening. Same with Hansel and Gretel -I mean, they escape, right? And Cinderella, lived happily ever after, eh?

That’s what my father told me anyway, even though my mother just rolled her eyes whenever he tried to explain the meaning of the stories he read…

[i] https://theconversation.com/craquer-pour-un-predateur-voici-des-contes-qui-font-lapologie-de-lhybristophilie-a-votre-insu-255693?

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