Ode to the Slattern
This is a republication of a piece from May of 2024.
I spent a considerable amount of my childhood dressing up in flimsy negligees and costume jewelry cadged from grandma's closet, barreling around the house as a sloppy harridan bent on killing children. My mother did not understand what a tribute it was.
Costume pieces from Avon and Sarah Coventry and rayon nighties were perfect for embodying the unsung anti-heroine of children’s books and Disney movies: the slattern. The jewelry’s tacky beauty was perfect for the role; glittering and flashy but cheap and disposable.
There are two main phenotypes of the villainess; the beautiful and haughty, and the sloppy and frowsy. The Wicked Queen from 1937’s Snow White is the first type. Beautiful but cold, she was appropriately modeled on Joan Crawford.
Madam Medusa from The Rescuers is the second type. She’s the kind of woman whose home is perpetually dusty and she leaves food out overnight. She goes to sleep in her makeup even though she peels off her false eyelashes in front of others. When she drinks, she has one drop too many. She pronounces the word as “jew-ELLz.” Her morals are loose, but she isn’t quite a slut. She’s a slattern.
Miss Hannigan, the ever-drunk headmistress at the orphanage in Annie is another. Nothing delights her like tying one on and doing night-raid-style inspections of the children’s dormitory, the better to put them to work at 2 am.
As a young boy, these women fascinated me. Using my Disney record-album (full-length LP played on a Fisher-Price thank you) with the accompanying illustrated book, I practiced Madam Medusa’s voice and lines until I could mimic them perfectly. In young adulthood I often answered the phone with, “Madam Medusa’s pawn shop boo-TEEK?”
What’s not to love about an aging broad who lives on a busted-ass steamboat in a Loo-zee-anna bayou with a cuckold for a secretary, two alligators for guard dogs, and a determination to make that orphan bitch get the world’s biggest diamond out of a flooded pirate cove?
Dressing up like a villainess was my favorite fantasy play. Depending on my mood, I might be Nellie Oleson, Mrs. Oleson, Madam Medusa, or Miss Hannigan. My mother did not allow it, and punished me if she caught me fooling around with some of the necklaces and scarves I’d liberated from grandma and stuffed behind the bed. She was especially disturbed at my love for Nellie Oleson.
“Why do you like that mean Nellie Oleson,” she’d ask, brow furrowed. “What does that say about what’s going on in your mind?”
Had I been older and more daring, I would have shot back with a then-current commercial line: “I learned it by watching you!”
Being a latch-key kid in the 80s gave me just enough freedom to practice my craft, though. Especially on my younger brother and sister.
“What do we say, children,” I’d croon at them pretending to be drunk with a piece of fabric safety pinned on and a string of baubles around my neck.
“We love you Miss Hannigan!”, they’d say in that sing-song voice.
I made them say it over and over and over until they sounded like they meant it; like mother, like son. My mother was not beautiful or put together, so she could not be The Wicked Queen. While not a drunk, she acted like one. You don’t need booze to act like a female lunatic when you have Borderline Personality Disorder (but it wouldn’t hurt!).
She was a slattern. Dressed in the most casual of thrift store clothes, often without a bra under her shirt. The ever-present Merit Ultra-Light 100 between her right index and middle fingers. The tottering piles of mail, some decades old, on the kitchen table that you could never touch for fear of “messing it up.” The piles became boxes that followed us around for decades; we never lived in one place for more than about a year.
Children mimic what they love, and what they fear. I loved my mother as a child, too intensely. Our bond was a trauma bond, and it was too strong between a mother and son to be healthy. I also feared and sometimes hated her.
I suspect this dynamic is behind the obvious love so many gay men have for Bad Women. The statistical correlation between being an adult male homosexual and having had a borderline-enmeshed-narcissistic mother and an absent or violent father is factual and strong. It’s not all of us, but it’s lots of us. And everyone knows the gays love their Cluster B women. Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland, Cher, Joan Crawford, Madonna. Our goddess pantheon looks suspiciously like our mothers with a larger costume budget.
Because so many proto-gay men are enmeshed with our mothers from a young age, we see and hear parts of her that most children won’t know about their mothers. And that’s as it should be; a young boy should not know about his mother’s romantic life or the specific disappointments men have brought to her bedroom.
But when you are young, you don’t know that you’re not supposed to be your mother’s “girlfriend” or her surrogate husband. When my mother cried to me over her disappointments and narrated the men who abandoned her, I cried along with her. Knowing something of the deprived and difficult childhood she had, I knew there was a reason for her sadness. I wanted to make it go away for her, but of course, I could not.
One develops sympathy for the devil. Though I did not know it in my boyhood, my emulation of the wicked and tragic Hollywood woman was an unconscious negotiation with my mother. And with myself. Like my borderline mother’s vacillation between loving and hating me, I wanted to become my mother and also to escape and be nothing like her.
You see it in the drag queen, both the classic “female impersonator” comedy drag lovingly featured in the old movie Torch Song Trilogy, and in the deracinated modern version that looks literally demonic. He wants to be the most powerful bitch in the world and look good doing it.
Stomping around the house screaming about “you ungrateful brats” as if I were the queen of an orphanage or a decaying steamboat was a thrill. I loved the feeling of power, being able to boss my brother and sister around and make them recite their love for me in unison. Don’t get me wrong—I didn’t hit them or actually abuse them, and these play times were for the most part great fun for all of us. But yes, I was trying out being an abusive harridan.
Marilyn Monroe was raised by an insane mother, an insane foster mother, and a series of cold orphanage matrons. Joan Crawford grew up in the back of a dirty home laundry boiling clothes and being predated upon by her mother’s husband. Miss Hannigan and Madam Medusa, we can be sure, came to their adult selves the hard way. I feel sympathy for them, and at a bit more distance, sympathy for my mother.
What they’ve done to children, real or imaginary, is a crime. But stipulating that, leave the real suffering aside and just think of them as characters. They’re great. The dissipated lush is one of the best characters in Hollywood lore. And she’s a hell of a lot of fun to play.
Pour one out for the slattern; she needs it after last night.
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This line is genius: “Our goddess pantheon looks suspiciously like our mothers with a larger costume budget.”
It's a relief you didn't grow up now. You could have been put on puberty blockers and could have been castrated to prevent you killing yourself. Ironically after you grew uo and realized what was stolen from you, you would want to kill yourself. The curse of overdiagnosed trans.