Riddles

[jlh]

Those of you who've been around the flat know that I've put What's My Line, that classic 50s game show, on the DVR. Two or three regular folks with unusual jobs try to stump the panel (which included Random House founder Bennett Cerf, featured in this icon), and there's also a special celebrity guest, who the panel has to guess while blindfolded. Game Show Network shows it every day at 3am, and at 7x a week for a show that was originally on once a week it doesn't take long to burn through a year. One of the pleasures of the show is the sense of time and place—often the celebrities who come on the show are in the spotlight at that moment. And it's fun to see them try to disguise their voices; on today's show (which I've left on the DVR for you, aethelflaed2) Louis Jordan does a surprisingly good, and hysterical, American accent.

Often the producers try to stump the panel with a woman who has a "man's" job, but the two ladies on the panel generally see right through that sort of thing. And that got me thinking about that classic riddle of the 70s feminist movement, and why it still works, just not the way that those feminists thought it did. (And blackholly, if you're about, I'd love your thoughts on this, since you write a lot of riddles!)

The riddle: A man and his son are in a car accident, and the man is dead on arrival at the hospital. The boy is rushed into surgery, and the surgeon looks down at the boy and says, "Find another doctor. I can't operate; this is my son."

The answer, of course, is that the doctor is the boy's mother, and the point it was supposed to make was that we so don't think of women being surgeons that the actual answer doesn't occur to us. But the thing is, I know a lot of women doctors and yes, surgeons—friends, mothers of friends, and physicians I've seen myself. So why does this riddle still work?

I wonder if part of it is that riddles work through obfuscation, or distraction—they give you lots of extraneous detail to keep you from seeing the answer, or put the question in a way where if you try to answer it head-on, you get nowhere, but turning it on its side, and all becomes clear. One example is that classic St. Ives riddle, where there's all this detail about the people you met on the road, but you're the only one going to St. Ives because you met them on the road going in the opposite direction. So the riddle, in stressing all this stuff happening to the father, gets you thinking about the father and momentarily forgetting about the mother.

Another thing, and this is just a suspicion and a bit gender essentialist so feel free to challenge me on it, is the construction I've always heard, "this is my son." In my own experience, "my son" is a referent more usually used by fathers, in that father-and-son sort of way. Mothers, again in my experience, and I include the moms I know of my age, are more likely to say, "this is my child" or "this is my kid." So the "this is my son", which is always how I've heard the riddle, also cues us that the person speaking is a father, rather than a mother.

In any case, I don't think that this riddle is a particularly good barometer of how free of chauvinist or anti-feminist assumptions one is, which was the whole point of the riddle in the first place. Thoughts?

Comments

[scrabble.livejournal.com]

No, I agree with you. I think it works exactly the same way as other riddles, which you've just outlined. It's not that your brain is hard-wired against the possibility of a woman being a surgeon, but rather that you aren't even thinking about the existence of a mother based on the rest of the story. I mean, it's much like the, "Two coins add up to 30 cents and one of them is not a nickle" riddle.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

Thanks, yeah, because then it doesn't make the point that people want it to make; instead, it just is a good riddle.

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

I agree about the riddle--also because there's something so male about the line "This is my son, I can't operate on him." It's hard not to imagine that not being said by a man, probably looking kind of stiff and authoritative. It seems like mom would be more emotional--I think that might be another clue. Not that a man wouldn't be emotional, but traditionally that's the way the father would be portrayed rather than the mother.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

Excellent point re the line. It is usually said in this flat emotionless way, when the riddle is told. Which is also interesting in a second wave feminist sort of way, because as much as they were trying to move beyond gender roles they were still enmeshed in them to the extent that the woman doctor would still behave in that way—or even better, that no doctor would show any kind of emotion, when of course either a mother or a father would in that sort of situation.

[lillijulianne.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think it's not a great barometer because of the obfuscation. I wonder how it would work in reverse, though there's probably no way to do that without bias because it's an old chestnut and everyone knows what the point is. (And now I'm picturing Archie Bunker trying to pick up that damn chair.)

The "son" thing is interesting- I never thought about that. My own gut reaction is that men may be more likely to use it in some situations- a guy who had two boys might say "my sons are at camp," while a woman would say "my kids"- but that a woman would use it here. If God forbid I stumbled across K or A in an accident, I'd say "this is my son" or "daughter," not "this is my child."

[jlh.livejournal.com]

Generalizations are definitely fail, but I think Meg makes a better point than I did above about how the entire phrase is set up to sound very emotionless and authoritative, when IRL I'm not sure either a mother OR a father would actually react in such a flat way just because they're a doctor. After all, they're saying they can't be cool enough to operate. And then that brings us into that sort of second wave feminism where women had to prove they were as good as a man, rather than just bringing their own strengths to the table.

[sisterpandora.livejournal.com]

I'm going in the direction you've fully come to expect of... off to the tangenty left where no one else has gone or is likely too and completely in a direction other than the one so nicely pointed out by your end question.

On the St. Ives riddle (i've actually been thinking about that riddle the last two days from out of the blue), and it always got me because the book I first saw it in (a large tome with shiny teal binding and cover), they showed the lot in a what looked like to my mind, a boat or ferry. So I always wondered if they were getting on the ferry with the narrator or off the ferry as the narrator got on. And even if they were exiting, how many unnamed others got on to the ferry with the narrator, and if the narrator wasn't manning the ferry alone, how many staff members were there?

Clearly, I thought too much about it.