Little Miss Muffet - 'Eek, A Mouse!', Women, Biological Destiny, And Their Surprising Reversion To Form

Amanda Potter never thought of herself as one of those Fifties, often caricatured ladies up on a chair shrieking at the sight of a mouse nibbling breadcrumbs; but she had to admit that the thought of it or any other creature crawling up into her was unthinkable.  Of course any such thing happening was impossible, but then again... 

 

Duke Medical School psychologist and Associate Dean, Harlan Fiske wrote this about what he called 'The Eek Phenomenon':

Even the strongest, must self-assured, demanding, and strong women have gotten up on chairs in the kitchen when a mouse comes out of his hole and intrudes on the status quo.  How could that be? How could such a woman of inviolable strength, courage, and forwardness be so frightened? The old wives' tale about virginity, the innate, prehistoric determination to keep chastity intact, and fear of penetration as reasons for this primal fear has been roundly laughed at, but from a psycho-social perspective, and a bio-evolutionary perspective, perhaps not so far-fetched. 

When this article appeared in the Duke Medical Quarterly, the objection on and off campus was deafening.  Somehow the article got copied, reproduced, and sent viral on social media, and there was no end of demands for the university to recant, apologize, and withdraw the whole magazine from circulation. 

'An outrage...a demeaning, sexist, ignorant view of women...horrendous...a throwback to the worst misogynistic ages...' are just a few of the rants heard. 

The arguments heard pro and con from the editorial board were equally telling.  It was a matter of free speech, academic integrity, and tenure, said some, while others reacted with indignance - 'How could this have seen the light of day?', but in the end, the editors published only an encouragement to its readers to keep an open mind. 

And then one day, a mouse did appear from under the stove, scurried across the kitchen floor, under Amanda's legs, and into the pantry.  Before she knew what she was doing, she screamed bloody murder, grabbed a chair, and stood on it.  

After a few minutes she gathered her wits, climbed off the chair, and berated herself for such a caricature.  She, Senior Vice President and partner at Burnham, Locke & Brandeis, a feared courtroom Genghis Khan, an eviscerating, merciless destroyer, afraid of a mouse!?

She hoped no one in the house had heard her scream - her husband in his study, Maria the scullery maid in he basement, or the next door neighbors through the Springtime open windows. 

For most, a minor episode; but for Amanda a telling, defining moment. What Jungian world soul, what prehistoric fear, what suddenly triggered Paleolithic incontinent fears had caused this unseemly outburst?  Was there really something to women's emotional febrility?  Could it be that despite everything, her courtroom sword, lance, and guillotine, her feral desire to kill in the courtroom, that she was 'the inevitable woman' as George Bernard Shaw had once famously remarked?

The old nursery rhyme which she had repeated time and time again as a child, came before her:

Little miss Muffet, she sat on her tuffet
Eating her curds and whey
Along came a spider, who sat down beside her
And frightened miss Muffet away

  

The majority of genuine arachnophobes are women, concluded researchers at the University of South Wales, with some studies suggesting as many as 90 per cent of arachnophobes are female. These researchers surmised that female sex hormones could be behind that imbalance.

One woman in the Australian study confided to researchers, 'I make myself sound a bit like a crazy person but I always have a bit of a countdown of how long it's been since I've had any encounter with a spider.' 

Duke Professor Fiske thought that the same bio-emotional factors might be at play with other crawling, potentially invasive creatures. 

Women are not afraid of ants, but desperately concerned about cockroaches.  Ants congregate and go about their business, but cockroaches can be aggressive and insistent.  There is a logic to such seemingly unusual fears. 

One day while visiting her mother, a squirrel came in through an open door and ran through the house.  Her mother, her maiden aunts, and her elderly cousin all shrieked and climbed up on the divan, the sofa, and the loveseat. Did it run in the family? Was it a woman thing only? And why after so many millennia did it persist?

This episode of the mouse was not innocent and meaningless, for it threw Amanda into a tangle of unanswerable questions.  For all her Sturm und Drang, her famous courtroom beheadings, and her take-no-prisoners rise to the top of her law firm, was she more a woman than anything else? Did hormones and the X chromosomes determine more who and what she was than any environmental factors. 

If she could get excited seeing an attractive, confident, sexually attentive male - clearly a limbic response and nothing to do with conditioning - then why weren't hormones also responsible for other similar responses?

The media were filled with the absurd question, 'What is a woman', only asked because progressives had asserted that sexuality was indeterminate, that men could be women and vice versa, and that biology was not destiny; but every time she saw a clip of some foolish give and take on the subject, she, thanks to the mouse incident, asked herself the same question.

If I am so determined by my hormones, or even by some combination of DNA and Jungian world soul, then my agency is little more than a princess outfit, a fanciful coverup for reality.  

To dispel these anarchic thoughts, she was particularly vicious in the courtroom, and literally besieged the prosecution witnesses until they broke down in tears.  She was particularly hard on women as if a frontal, brutal assault on her sisters would prove her ascribed worth. 

She didn't cry a lot, and there was a lot to be said for that in her reconsideration of her femaleness.  Most of her friends cried and cried a lot, unable to help themselves when times got tough.  Didn't that, too, confirm the epiphanic nature of 'the mouse episode'? 

 

Of course all this was of only academic interest.  Her climbing onto a kitchen chair or her mother and maiden aunts scrambling up divans and loveseats meant nothing in women's social ascent, finally reaching top dog status.  What is a woman?  A being of intelligence, determination, will, and desire. A being of...

Here Amanda stopped her train of thought. Needless, pointless, and proving nothing.  A lawyerly argument meant only to justify.  The real answer could not be admitted in today; but as long as she had done the math and come out close to solving Fermat's last theorem, all was right in the world.