The pistol-whip redux
Please note the words below are by no means my own. They are a cut-and-paste adaptation of a recent post by another blogger. I thought it would be interesting to switch names and gendered pronouns to see what happens. Yes, interesting, but it’s the first time I’ve ever felt queasy about my own blog. I’ve never deleted a post, but this one I might take it away in a day or two.
Copy in italics is the modified original, with ed’s notes in square brackets.
“Back in the 20th century it was called a cock-up. A husband would wear the pants and rule the roost, and treat his spouse with a lack of respect that sometimes developed into contempt.
Taken to extremes, a man’s sadistic delight in the humiliation of his wife could lead to murderous consequences. This is what happened to Tammy Taljaard, her husband and their daughter.
[Changed names, pronouns, cut some adjectives]
Tammy looked the part. There was little flesh on her, she suffered from a mild form of spinal curvature, she wore spectacles and developed alopecia, and when she laughed nervously her upper incisors protruded.
[Changed pronouns, cut some adjectives]
Mr Taljaard was the same height as his wife but weighed twice as much. When he raised his voice in order to berate and belittle her, it was always in the same monotone.
[Changed pronouns, cut a bit]
When she was at home, Tammy spent most of her time in the garage sitting in her car looking through the windscreen at the paint that was flaking off the wall. This was preferable to the constant goading she was subjected to the moment she stepped inside the house.
[Cut two words]
This went on for many years until one day it occurred to her that hell couldn’t possibly be worse than purgatory, and she might as well get on over there. That night, when her husband and daughter began rolling on the floor and screaming in agony after eating the meal she had poisoned, she called an ambulance.
[Didn’t change anything other than pronouns, but had a moment’s silence for Ellen Pakkies]
When her tormentors had been carted away she returned to her refuge, fitted a hosepipe to the exhaust, and then got behind the wheel for the last time. It was in the 1980s that this took place.
Nowadays it’s not quite the same. Instead of being slapped around, women get pistol-whipped.
[Modified two verbs]
There’s a difference … It has something to do with social changes that have taken place over the past 30 years.
[No changes. Penciled something about social changes in the margin, but, oh, blast pencil, so vague. Feint.]
…
[Cut a paragraph. Took two Panados.]
Take what happened to Edie Delikat. Born and raised in a small town, she joined the local municipality and rose to the position of Supervisor in the Water and Sanitation Department … She enjoyed getting drunk in the local bars and was happy to participate in a good brawl. Then, in her late twenties, she met Mike.
Yes, Mike was handsome, but he was also a hard case. Edie only discovered just how hard a case he was once they were married. Her pregnancy was a difficult one but still she was required to so most of the household chores. [Looking for that note I penciled in the margin earlier, but can’t seem to find it now.]
Edie wasn’t particularly suited to domestic service and she often tried to shirk her duties by coming home late after getting drunk with her buddies down at the pub. However, Mike soon put a stop to this.
“If that’s how you want to behave,’ he told her, “Then you can sleep on the couch and keep that thing well away from me.”
In order to get that thing anywhere near her, Edie found it necessary to jump through a whole lot of hoops. Like coming home straight after work, regularly walking the dog, dandling the child on her knee, and putting the rubbish out on a Monday morning.
[Note: Must adapt this into a screenplay. So touching and unbelievable, tragic, really, that a person should be expected to help take care of a child they helped to create. Dandling the child on her knee. The irony. The pathos!]
“We don’t see much of Edie these days,” one of her pals commented. “I think that poor woman is so pistol-whipped by she doesn’t know the difference between a pistol and …”
[Pronouns. Deleted some references to genitalia.]
… Mike used sex as a weapon to bludgeon Edie into fulfilling her obligations as wife and mother…
[Cut some stuff, building the suspense, tried to find a nice cursive font, but made do with the colour pink instead]
He made no bones about it. Behave yourself, or else. Mr Taljaard had probably been playing the same game with Tammy, but the sexual dimension at that time wasn’t out in the open like it is today. That’s the difference between cock-ups and pistol-whipping.
[Cut some more stuff.]
It struck her one day at work that Mike no longer had any hold over her. But sometimes she wonders if it wouldn’t be better for all of them if she’d poisoned him and the kid and then went to gas herself in her car.
[Probably a realistic place to end.]
I suspect the writer of the original post won’t praise me for this, but that doesn’t matter. I suspect he doesn’t like … certain people. Imagine if you know somebody strongly dislikes, say, surrealism, and you present them with a Dalí print. They’ll tell you they don’t like it one bit. You’ll say it doesn’t matter, because we all know you hate this kind of thing anyway. Same-same. No different.
