“Danish Mother Seeking…” and Fast Women in Folklore

I guess since I’m Danish and a woman, I ought to comment on the infamous “Danish Mother Seeking…” video that the Danish tourist organisation VisitDenmark issued this month, in which a pretty blond Danish woman named Karen allegedly seeks the father of her infant son August whom she reveals to be a tourist whom she met during his stay in Denmark. Karen’s identity and her story were, of course, fake. If you haven’t already seen the video, you can watch it here:

I am deeply offended and disgusted by this marketing stunt, as is every Danish woman I know. The campaign has since been withdrawn by VisitDenmark who have also issued an apology for the video, but I still cannot believe that they actually went as far as to make this stunt in the first place. It is extremely demeaning towards women, and I find it utterly tasteless that a serious tourist agency would market Denmark as a country where you can go to have unprotected sex with promiscuous women.

The video got me thinking, however, about folklore and how there’s a tradition within (modern?) societies to boast of their only too willing women. We’ve in fact been doing that for decades in Denmark before Karen and her baby boy August came along, in the shape of an urban legend about a particular Copenhagen sculpture namely The Lure Players:

This monument showing too vikings playing the lure stands on a high pillar right overlooking the Copenhagen city hall square, and according to the legend, the lure players will start blowing their lures whenever a virgin (in the sense: virginal woman) crosses the square (in some versions it’s a virgin over the age of 18). The joke being of course that the lure players never do blow their lures (because they’re made of bronze…), thus indicating that Danish women are a promiscuous lot.

I always thought that this was a unique Danish legend, but I found out via Snopes.com, that I was mistaken. In the U.S.A. there are similar legends about a number of colleges, including one about the statue of a soldier who will shoot his rifle if a virgin walks by (and, accordingly, he is nicknamed ‘Silent Sam’), the statue of a university founder (Duke) who will tip his hat, and a pair of stone lions that will roar. The message is always the same: “Look! Ours is the most fun college – all our women are wild and willing!”

I’m not blind to the lure (heh) of such legends – I can see the joke, and legends about sculptures getting up and moving are always somewhat fascinating in a fairy-tale kind of way. But even so, I think it’s important that we at least consider the consequences of these attempts to equate a society’s appeal with how easy it is to get the women there to spread their legs. That we at least pause to consider what kind of gender roles legends this gives rise to. Especially when the tendency spreads beyond folklore and into the sphere of advertising and branding, as has so blatantly been the case with VisitDenmark and their viral marketing stunt video.

Mariager Mass of the Death – A Danish Ghost Story

I meant to post this for Halloween last year, and then I completely forgot about it. Here I go now then, slightly delayed:

I’m a sucker for ghost stories and eerie folklore, and I thus I really treasure a book I was once given as a present by a dear friend who knew of my folklore partiality. It’s called Our Old Churches and Convents (“Vore gamle kirker og klostre”), written by folklorist Gorm Benzon, and in a series of chapters it describes old churches and convents and, more importantly, recount old tales that are connected with the places. It’s such a fun read, and very inspiring if you’re ever to make a trip through Denmark and would like an alternative travelling guide.

Last summer, The Boyfriend, my parents and I made just such a trip across the country, as we went from Copenhagen to the North-Western coast of Jutland where my family always goes in the summer. On our way up there in the car, we passed closely through the town of Mariager, and thanks to Gorm Benzon, I suddenly remembered an old eerie folk tale that’s connected to this particular little Jutlandian town and their church, Mariager Church. I mentioned this to my father, and he decided that we should go see the church, and then I could tell the rest of the company the ghost story.

There’s something eerie about Mariager Church that’s difficult to describe. When my paternal grandfather was alive, he lived near Mariager, so my family has been there a couple of times before. My mother tells me that once when she and my father brought my older brother to see the church when he was two years old, he was horrified and started crying the moment they entered the church: He’d caught sight of the suffering, crucified Christ hanging on the wall. My brother was inconsolable, and they had to take him out again.

Visiting it last summer, I had to wonder if it was more than just the crucifiction representation that scared him: Maybe he picked up on a general atmosphere of something uncanny? There’s something in the very architechture of the church that’s slightly intimidating. Danish churches are usually quite small and mild-looking buildings - Fanefjord Church being an excellent example of Danish churches. Mariager Church, however, is different: It was originally (in 1445) initiated as a convent by Saint Brigitta, and while the building went through a thorough reconstruction in the 18th century, the sense of something ancient still clings to the place, along with an air of solemnity, and the imposant architectural style differs a great deal from your average Danish church:

It’s hard to make the church look intimidation on a bright summer day. I tried to accomplish the eeriness by means of a crooked angle. Not quite sure I succeeded. I hope you get the idea regardless. 

The church also houses a few historical gems in the unsettling department, most notably two figures carved in wood, preserved from pre-reformation times, showing Christ as a so-called Man of Pain (“Smertensmand” in Danish), comtemplating with pain his wounds from the crucifiction, and the Tomb of Christ, showing a life-sized Christ in a wooden coffin. Even when you walk down the aisle of the church, your path is paved with ancient grave stone memorials of once-important Mariager residents.

An atmosphere of death, suffering and times past embues the vaults of the church, and despite the beautiful summer weather we were having that day, my parents, The Boyfriend and I were all in the perfect mood for a ghost story when we assembled outside of the church after our visit there, so that I could recount the piece of folklore. The following was the story I told them, as well as I remembered it:

Once upon a time at Christmas, back in the day when it was still common to have Chrismas mass very early Christmas morning, a Mariager woman awoke on Christmas night. She lived alone and didn’t have a clock, and it was dark outside, but she decided it must be about time to go to mass, so she got up, wrapped her shawl around her, and ventured out into the cold wintry air.

When she reached the church she found that mass had already started; the music of a hymn reached her as she approached the church. Eager not to bring anymore attention to herself, she crept as quietly as she could into the church and hurridly found an empty seat for herself. But then she started noticing something strange: The hymn that was being sung was not one she recalled ever having heard before. Furthermore, she didn’t recognize any of the other church-goers surrounding her, although a number of them seemed strangely familiar to her. Even the preacher was unfamiliar to her and he, like everyone else in church, was alarmingly pale with deep, dark eyes.

She felt a tap to her shoulder and turned around to face the woman sitting next to her. To her horror, she found that the woman was none other than a neighbour who’d been a good friend of hers, but who had died several years ago. “Hurry out of the church the second the minister says ‘amen’” the deceased neighbouress whispered, “and take care to hang your shawl loosely, or else no one can save you!”.

The woman was terrified and wanted to get out of her seat straight away, but she found that she couldn’t move a limb. Now she started recognizing more and more of the churchgoers as people she’d known from Mariager who had been dead for a long time.

But the second the minister said his “amen”, the woman was able to to move again, and she got up and rushed to the door. She didn’t stop to look back, but she could feel all the dead church-goers pursuing her, reaching out for her. She hurried through the church door and let it fall behind her as she ran. The door caught her shawl, but since she’d hung it loosely, like her deceased neighbouress had advised her, she easily freed herself and ran on.

She made it back home and realized that it was only one a clock in the morning. In her alarmed state, she woke up her neighbours and told them her frightening story. They laughed at her, certain that she had either gone mad or dreamed it all up.

Except when the community went to church that morning, they found her shawl stuck in the church door. The part of the shawl that was inside the door was shredded to little pieces..

PS: In the interest of folklore, I actually asked my father to tell me the story as well as he remembered it, a couple of months later. Interestingly, he told me pretty much the story, except in his version the shawl was not shredded to little pieces, it was mouldy and falling apart. I liked this zombie-esque twist to the story a lot better than the rather odd idea of ghosts ripping up random material, and have actually decided to start using this version instead of the original one when I re-tell it. So I guess the story lives on as a piece of lore, with the eerie old Mariager Church lending inspiration to it, even in the 21st Century, and I kind of like that thought.

The Big Book of Urban Legends

As I have revealed before, I am an absolute sucker for urban legends, and I’ve spent more time than I care to think about on the excellent Snopes Urban Legend Reference Page.

 

I’m simply fascinated that there’s a literary genre out there with a composition so strong and effective that it can flourish despite being completely stripped off such refinement as imagery and metrics. Plus, as a Comparative Literature major it’s hard for me not to be enthusiastic about the fact that man is obviously so dependant on fiction that he’s ready to believe anything or to make up lies about the most obscure things.

For anyone out there as fascinated as me by the genre I recommend this book:

The Big Book of Urban Legends by Jan Hrold Brunwald. The book graphic collection of short stories and features 217 pages of comic strip-recounts of classic urban legends, created by a vast number of different comic strip artists.

Jan Harold Brunvand has been in charce of the selection of urban legends, and he’s quite the expert on the subject, having previously released too books about urban legends; The Vanishing Hitchhiker and The Choking Doberman. His expertise shows in the edition; all the selected urban legends are wonderfully juicy, and ingeniously, Brunvand has made the book more easily accesible by dividing the stories into eight different chapters, ranging from “Comic Calamities” about the tragi-comic, via “Caught in the Act” about sex-and-scandal urban legends, to “Campfire Classics” featuring those horror stories we all heard and believed during summer camp as kids. My favourite category is definitely the horror one, for the simple reason that I like torturing myself with terrible stories about dorm girls who wake up in the morning to find that their room mate has been slaughtered or parents who accidentally leave their baby to starve to death in a high chair as they go away on a holiday.

The idea of presenting the urban legends as comic strips works beautifully, as it lends to these popular story a very appropriate Roy-Lichtenstein-ish pop-art kind of look.

Check it out! But I speak from experience when I advise you not to read the book too close to your bedtime if you happen to be an impressionable person such as myself. The comic drawings do serve to disarm the horror of the stories somewhat (because no artist can compete with the gore you’re able to envision yourself), but the horror, it is still very much there.

/marie

The Horror of Progesterex! And the power of urban legends…

A while ago I got an e-mail from a friend – it was an e-mail that she had obviously gotten from another friend and had forwarded to me and all of her other female friends. The message of the e-mail was this:

“According to Police and Hostpital, a woman was abducted from a nightclub, raped several times and abandoned. She was incapable of remembering what had happened, but medical examinations betrayed the repeated rapes, and along with traces of Rophynol in her blood, Progesterex was also found, which is a small sterilisation pill. The drug is now being used by rapists at parties to rape and sterilize their victims. Progesterex is available to vets to sterilize large animals. Rumour has it that the Progesterex is being used together with Rohypnol, the date rape drug. As with Rohypnol, all they have to do is drop it into the girl’s drink. The girl will then be unable to remember any of the events that took place on the night before. Progesterex, which dissolves in drinks just as easily, is such that the victim doesn’t conceive from the rape, and the rapist needn’t worry about having a paternity test identifying him months later.

The drug’s effects are not temporary – they are permanent! Progesterex was designed to sterilize horses. Any female that takes it will never be able to conceive. The scoundrels can get this drug from anyone who is in the vet school of any university. It’s that easy, and Progesterex is very likely to become big in the night life. Incredible as it may sound, there are even sites on the internet, with instructions on how to use this drug. Please forwards this to everyone you know, especially girls. B careful when you’re out and don’t leave your drink unattended. Kindly share this with everyone you know, and guys – tell your lady friends. Kind regards, Bobby Knudsen.”

(There was then an address for this spokesperson who claimed to be from the security insurance company Falck, and two phone
numbers, his private and his work number were added.)

My initial reaction was one of pure terror. I felt chilled to the bone and was actually so startled that it took me several minutes to start considering the whole thing logically. Then, however, I started asking the questions that seemed ridiculously obvious. First of all: When has a rapist ever – since, like, the Middle Ages, that is – been identified by his victim having his baby? Thinking about it, of course I couldn’t remember a single case where a rape victim having a baby nine months after her assault as having been part of a potential police investigation. Medical examinations of the girl revealing semen etc. would give the rapist away long before a Rapist Jr. might do so, and really, in these days of free abortion and morning-after pills, how many women would carry a baby to term that was conceived as a result of rape anyway? For a rapist to fear such a thing would be completely out of the blue. And then there was the matter of this alleged employee at an insurance company, spreading the word via forwarded e-mails like chain letters. It did not seem quite credible to me that that would be the way the authorities would handle the situation, should a new and dangerous drug appear in night clubs. Surely the press and news agencies would be notified?

So I did a few quick searches at the search engines of some news sites – with no results whatsoever on the word “Progesterex”. Fully convinced by now that this was a hoax, I did my last round of checking by going to snopes.com – the brilliant urban legend site that deals with the origins of urban legends – and sure enough; the “Progesterex” story has been popping up in people’s mailboxes online all over the world since 1999 with little or no varieties, and it is nothing but a hoax. There is no pill by the name of Progesterex, no veterinarians use pills as a means of sterilizing horses, and there have been no cases of rapists trying to sterilize their victims.

But this only goes to show how powerful and how brilliant urban legends really are. Relying usually quite heavily on the fear factor and mixing facts with fiction, they manage to capture our attention, so much, very often, that we pass on the legend. In this case, of course the fear factor in question is that of rohypnol rape, which is a very real threat to the modern woman. Since late childhood we’ve been warned about rohypnol rapists, about how we are not to leave our drinks out of sight when in a bar. The rohypnol rape is so scary because the rape victim is turned so effectively into a thing by the offender. She is rendered motionless, like an object that the rapist may do with as he wishes without considering the individuality, feelings and protests of the woman, and can discard her afterwards to wake up on her own, offering her not even the possibility of recalling the trauma she’s lived through.

What the progesterex legend does is that it takes this fear and intesifies it. In this legend, the woman is not even given the opportunity of recovering from the objectification of herself: Her whole future as an adult is determined by this brief moment where she was violated, as the rapist decides for her whether or not she is ever to have any children. And even if this horrible scenario weren’t enough to scare young girls all over the world, I’m sure the name “Progesterex” will probably have helped: Most young women know the word “progesteron” from their packages of birth control pills which they take in order to avoid pregnancy.

Chilling, isn’t it? Thank God, it’s not true. I’m not going to pass on the Progesterex story by forwarding it to my woman friends, and I would advice anyone else not to do it either, because it’s not nice to go around scaring people like that. But I have to say that I find it hard not to be at least a little charmed by the brilliance of these made-up horror stories.

/marie