Razorblades in apples, babysitters on acid, killers in backseats and "rainbow parties": In this episode, Mike and Sarah investigate the scary stories Americans tell each other and discover the actual anxieties behind them. Turn on your high beams for this one.
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Razorblades in apples, babysitters on acid, killers in backseats and "rainbow parties": In this episode, Mike and Sarah investigate the scary stories Americans tell each other and discover the actual anxieties behind them. Turn on your high beams for this one.
Continue reading →
Support us:
Subscribe on Patreon
Donate on Paypal
Buy cute merch
Where to find us:
Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads
Mike's other show, Maintenance Phase
Mike: Although to be fair, one time me and my brother got super high, and we put a frozen pizza in the oven without taking the plastic off of it first.
Sarah: Well, but it wasn't a baby.
Welcome to Your Wrong About the show where we look at things that we thought were scary for one reason and it turns out that they're scary for a different reason. And the different reason is always the same reason and it's that America is not great at a lot of stuff.
Mike: Spoilers.
Sarah: Is that a spoiler for yours too, cause it's a spoiler for mine?
Mike: I am Michael Hobbes. I'm a reporter for the Huffington Post.
Sarah: I'm Sarah Marshall and I'm a writer for The New Republic, and Buzzfeed, and a writer in residence with The Believer.
Mike: And we've been looking forward to this episode for weeks now because we are talking about urban legends and all of the spooky, scary, urban legends that pass around Halloween. And most of them weirdly it turns out are not factually accurate. So we'd like to talk about them and where they come from.
Sarah: What? Yours did not turn out to be factually accurate either.
Mike: Turns out they're all true. That's the spoiler for this episode. So we're going to talk about the razorblades in the apples, babysitters, and acid trips. We're going to talk about high beams and then we're going to talk about rainbow parties, which are scary in a different way.
Sarah: Oh boy.
Mike: So I think we're going to start with the razorblade in the apple.
Sarah: I want to hear about, I'm very excited about this one.
Mike: Do you want to tell me your memory of that story, what is the urban legend?
Sarah: I feel as if I have memories of teachers mentioning, don't take apples, don't take popcorn balls when you're trick or treating, don't take homemade stuff because there could be razorblades in it. And I actually do, I remember hearing a story about someone's cousin's friend who bit into an apple and there was a razorblade inside. And it's something about, I heard about razors in other places, but I feel like the image of the razor in the apple was so present in my head, it was so scary. But also, when I was a child, when I was in second grade, my family lived in a rural area, and we went trick or treating one year. I think the year that I went as a bunch of grapes.
Mike: With razorblades in them, of course.
Sarah: Yeah, that was pretty hardcore. One of the houses gave me an apple and then I came home, and I laid out all my candy because I really liked counting my candy, but I hardly ever ate my candy. And I laid out all my candy so that I could stare at it and then while I was looking at it ate the apple that I've gotten trick or treating, which my mom was completely delighted by and not freaked out about at all.
Mike: The wildest thing about this is that I always thought that one of the least plausible things about this urban legend was that any kid would ever eat an apple that they got on Halloween. So you're debunking the debunking now, you're ruining this for me.
Sarah: I was the rare child that just candy was his too sweet for me, basically. I feel like the razor blade in the apple thing is based on the fear of going to this anonymous house or of something that a stranger would do to a child. So I feel like that was why she was okay with it.
Mike: So I want to read you from a 1983 column by Dear Abby, which is now infamous called a Night of Tricks, Not Treats.
Dear Readers, It's Halloween again, and time to remind you that this year somebody's child will be seriously injured and killed in a Halloween related traffic accident. Somebody's child will be badly maimed or fatally burned due to a flammable costume. Somebody’s child will become violently ill or die after eating poisoned candy or an apple containing a razorblade. Somebody’s child will be coaxed into an automobile or lured into a secluded area and sexually assaulted. Make sure that child isn’t yours.
Sarah: I’m surprised she did not mention Satanists, to be honest.
Mike: I know she's like playing all the hits.
Sarah: And now singing their hit song strangers want to maul your child soft palette for some reason, it's Tommy James and the Shondells.
Mike: I mean, the only one that's true is that your kid might be in a Halloween related traffic accident, which to this day, of course, is a much greater threat to your child than any of these other things. The flammable costumes thing was another urban legend that went around for years.
Sarah: Children going to be bursting into flames all over America tonight.
Mike: And there's also weirdly a 1995 Ann Landers column called, Twisted Minds Make Halloween a Dangerous Time. The second paragraph of the article, she says, “The dark side of this holiday is that hundreds of children will be injured, and some may be killed. No longer, can you allow your youngsters to roam the neighborhood and knock-on strangers' doors in search of goodies. The world has changed since you and I went trick or treating.”
What's really difficult and interesting about this myth, the razorblades and the apples is that it's true. So Snopes lists this as true because it has actually happened. But what it really demonstrates, I think is the difference between technically true and meaningfully true. The country is a big place and with 300 million people in your country, any human behavior is going to have happened.
Sarah: Yeah, with a sample size like that, I mean.
Mike: Yeah. So there are actually cases of people putting razorblades and pins and other pieces of metal and poison in Halloween candy, but it's extremely isolated and it did not warrant anywhere near the fear and the panic that we had about this for years and really the reaction to it. You know, there were like police departments that were giving advisories and there were lots of medical centers would offer to x-ray peoples’ candy.
Sarah: Oh, I remember that and then aren't they really just contaminating it a little bit with radiation.
Mike: It does not seem like a great idea to like to irradiate your children's candy.
Sarah: It's like the cold war playing out. It's like, well, we're afraid of communism and so we have to have the kids do nuclear fallout drills. We're afraid of stranger danger, and so we have to irradiate the children's candy.
Mike: The first real incident of this is that in 1959, there was a guy in California named William Shine who gave candy coded laxatives to trick-or-treaters, it's not clear why he did this. He was charged with something called outrage of public decency, which is a dope law to say you broke and unlawful dispensing of drugs.
Sarah: So did he just make a bunch of kids poop their pants?
Mike: Yeah. I mean, it's more like a prank. The real place where it starts though is in 1964, there was a woman in Greenlawn, New York and her name is Helen Pfeil. I was not aware of this, but apparently there are people who feel very strongly that children over 12 should not be trick or treating.
Sarah: Here's a lady who's spreading an early note of the now epidemic belief that there should be age limits for trick or treating, which is just.
Mike: It's just a weird thing to feel strongly about.
Sarah: Just silly lady on Long Island, alright.
Mike: So what she does is she takes like dog treats and steel wool, you know, those things that you scrub pans with, she takes ant poison. The story eventually changes, but the actual reality of it is that she labels all these things. So she takes a dog treat and labels it like wraps it up kind of gift wrap and labels it as dog treats. And whenever somebody shows up at her house that she determines is too old to be trick or treating, she gives them one of these sorts of prank trick-or-treat gifts. You're too old for this, here's some ant poison. You're too old for this, here's a dog treat as a way of discouraging them.
Sarah: Okay. So she's not trying to trick anyone into consuming ant poison?
Mike: She is doing it as a way of just being a terrible busy body and just like ruining somebody's night or like expressing her disapproval in like a cute gift-wrapping sort of way. This is in 64.
Sarah: Well, it's like Charlie Brown getting a rock.
Mike: Yeah. So this is basically where the rumors start. So this story of this woman, she eventually gets charged with a misdemeanor for this. Nobody gets poisoned, nobody you know, quote unquote, accidentally eats the ant poison that is clearly labeled ant poison, but like it's a mean thing to do. So people point out this is a mean thing to do, but then that begins to morph into, she was handing out ant poison without labeling it. She's trying to poison the children is the version of the story that travels.
Sarah: So why do you think that happened?
Mike: It's one of these stories that goes around in the same way that stories go around now of just bad etiquette. We love to focus on bad etiquette and make that the basis of urban legend. And so, this becomes something that the whole country is like, can you believe this woman in New York who did this? It's terrible.
Sarah: So it is like the 1964 equivalent of a photo of a woman in an airport ignoring her baby.
Mike: Yeah. And there's like, there's a couple other cases that adds some nuance to this too. And basically, what ends up happening is there's a lot of cases of this that do in fact happen, but none of them match the urban legend. In 1974, there's a guy who kills his son by poisoning him with cyanide. So this guy took out a life insurance policy on all three of his kids then he poisoned their pixie sticks with cyanide.
Sarah: Oh, that's horrible.
Mike: For some coincidental reason, only one of his three children actually ate the pixie sticks and died.
Sarah: Because pixie sticks are gross.
Mike: But then this guy tried to pass it off as my son was victimized by a Halloween poisoner. So it's like basically a standard terrible story of a father murdering his son for money, but it gets mixed up in this urban legend and kind of incorporated into this urban legend. And this is actually where we get the term Candyman. This is called Candyman Murder.
Sarah: Really?
Mike: Yeah. This is where apparently this is like where the Candyman legend came from.
Sarah: He didn't deserve that.
Mike: There's also one in 1970 where a kid accidentally gets into his uncle's heroin stash and like essentially eats the heroin and dies. And so that's another one because it happens to have occurred right after Halloween that the kid's body is found and everyone's like, oh my God, it's after Halloween, he must've been poisoned. And then of course, you know, months later, once they do the toxicology report and they interview everybody. They're like, oh, this kid just happened to find his uncle's heroin and accidentally poison himself in the way that children do. It's just a coincidence but of course, that kind of debunking of the story appears on page 13 and like, doesn't make any of the tabloids, whereas this kid dying does make all the tabloids.
Sarah: It's so interesting that we are so eager to support these terrifying stories. Maybe one of the most surprising things is that we want them to be true so badly.
Mike: And that's the thing it's like what we keep coming back to, what do we not need evidence to believe. After those accidental poisonings, we then get a huge spike of hoaxes after the Tylenol poisonings in 1982. Do you know about these?
Sarah: Yeah, I do.
Mike: So basically, someone poisoned Tylenol with, I forget the actual poison, but anyway, they poisoned a bunch of Tylenol in Chicago. They killed seven people. This person was actually never found, although they did in prison, somebody for trying to extort Tylenol for threatening Tylenol, and saying, if you don't pay me x dollars, I'll do this again. So that person went to jail, and we think that's the guy that did it. His name is James Lewis, but we don't know that he's the one that actually did the poisoning. He might've just come in after the fact and tried to extort the company. But of course, this was a huge deal. They recalled every single bottle of Tylenol in the entire country.
Sarah: In the country.
Mike: Yeah. It's one of those cases that you read in corporate social responsibility literature.
Sarah: As one does.
Mike: In your CSR book club, yes. But anyway, this was a huge deal, right. I mean, this was one of the biggest stories of 1982. And so, after the Tylenol thing, there's a couple more poisonings. One of the standard ones is this insurance salesman put poison in his wife's Sudafed because he wanted to kill her. There's another one where a woman wants, this one's really fucked up. There's one where a woman wants to poison her husband. She wants to kill her husband after the Tylenol thing happens. She's like, ooh, here's my chance. She poisons his Excedrin, but then because she's like, oh, well now I have a motive to kill my husband. So, if only my husband is dead, then people are going to come looking for me. So she poisoned someone else too, make it seem like, oh, it's a random, it's like a rash of murder, so she kills this other woman.
Sarah: That is the way people behave in British mysteries.
Mike: This is what starts happening and so these are, these are all about medication, but of course this general sense of poison there's poison out there. There are people that are out to poison you of course, leaches into the Halloween thing. And so, there's all these extra columns that are published, watch out for poison apples, watch out for poison everything.
Sarah: And it's like, no people in your family want to poison you. Strangers don't care about you.
Mike: Exactly. So what happens is it's not clear how the actual razorblade and the actual apple thing come into this. The poisonings predate the razorblade thing, when that shift happens and how that shift happens, it is not clear, but by the 70s, there's the poisoning thread of this urban legend and there's also the razorblade thread of this urban legend. And so what happens is there's a couple cases where women and especially children are finding pins, like safety pins, those thin safety pins in candy bars. And there's one guy who puts a needle in a Snickers bar and hands them out to children on Halloween. But that's not until 2000. The first actual case of these actually being handed out on Halloween, isn't until 2000, so we've got 30 years of fear about this.
Sarah: Yeah. And it's being done by people who grew up hearing about how they should be careful while they go trick or treating.
Mike: Yes. And so there's a guy who was really the patron saint of this episode of Your Wrong About this guy named Joel Best, who's a sociologist at UCLA who studies urban legends. He shows up in articles about this rumor and articles debunking this rumor for the last like 25 years. Every time somebody is writing an article debunking this, they refer to him and he did a study where he looked at every single incident nationwide of this phenomenon, real incident.
And he found 78 cases throughout the country from 1958 until 2008, I think. There's been 78 cases, which again, 78 cases is a lot, but it's a country of 300 million people and that's over 50 years. And even among these 78 cases, he only finds 2 deaths and that was the kid that accidentally ate the heroin and the guy that poisoned his kid. So both of the actual deaths are not actually this urban legend coming true.
The vast majority of the other cases, it turns out are pranks. So, what happens is over and over again, kids will say, oh my God mom, I found a razorblade in my apple. What Joel Best mentions is that, you know, as a kid, if this happens to you, if you find a pin or a razorblade in your Halloween candy, you get a lot of attention.
You know, the police are going talk to you, the newspapers are going to talk to you. You might be on TV. There's a huge incentive for kids to do this and so what happens is children quote unquote discover a razorblade in their apple, but they never bite into it. It's very, very, very, very rare that somebody actually gets injured.
There are one or two cases where somebody does actually bite into a pin in a Snickers and somebody put it into the Snickers bar in a store, but not necessarily handed them out at Halloween. But even those might actually be hoaxes because sometimes people are just weird enough to do that to get on TV. And then the vast majority of them are like, oh my God, I found a pin in the side of the Snickers that I didn't bite into but luckily, I saw it before I bit into it.
Sarah: I happened to notice this extremely miscible, losable, tiny object.
Mike: Yes. So, it's one of those you can't say it's a false, like a completely false legend because it sort of has happened and some of these things that look very likely to be hoaxes might not be hoaxes.
Sarah: Or like we've made it true, we've imitated it.
Mike: Yes. It's not meaningfully true. And then it's not something we should actually be afraid of. The urban legend creates incidents of this rather than incidents of this creating the urban legend. So what I think is really interesting is Joel Best has written all these articles about urban legends and how they spread and one thing that he points out, he does all this anthropological research of other societies and times of history. And he says usually urban legends are built around an old society, confronting a new society.
Sarah: Interesting.
Mike: He calls it folklore, which I think is a really interesting way to talk about it. It says orally transmitted tales often depict a clash between modern conditions and some aspect of a traditional lifestyle. You've got home baked treats, right? An old lady who lives on the block and then you've got a society where fewer people are knowing their neighbors, fewer people trust their neighbors, fewer people trust the institutions.
And so you've got this kind of old, small town society, and then you've got this new, urban much more impersonal society. And this legend of the razor blade in the apple is really depicting the intersection of those two things that we're transitioning from a society where we know each other, and we trust everyone on our block. So we don't know everyone on our block, and we don't necessarily trust the people around us. And so we need these really commercial products to make these things safe, right. That even though it happens quite a few times, if there's pins in Snickers, that's not the legend that travels, the legend that travels are home-baked treats, apples, things that are much more organic or you don't know the provenance of them. Whereas it's teaching us to trust things like commercial candy. So this works out very well for the commercial candy industry, because it's like, no, no, don't bake brownies.
Sarah: Do you think that big candy was involved in propagating this in any way?
Mike: Weirdly the American Confectionary Industry releases a lot of information debunking this rumor, because what they're afraid of is that Halloween is going to go away all together.
Sarah: That would be like the way, you know, how florists would deal with weddings disappearing.
Mike: Exactly. Candy makers need to prop up Halloween, but they also need you to be buying Mars bars and not baking cookies for your neighbors.
Sarah: We need to be like medium scared in order to be ideal, a capitalist subject.
Mike: Another thing that Joel Best mentions is that the razorblades and the apple is the perfect combination of two of the major themes of urban legends worldwide and throughout history. One of them is children are in danger. This is something that shows up in like Ukrainian folk legends. There's always some new threat to your children and weirdly lots of urban legends around contamination of food. So, when you think about like the finger in the KFC bucket, I don't know if you've heard that one.
Sarah: No, but I was thinking earlier of the lady who put, what was it, a finger in her Wendy's chili.
Mike: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sarah: Which is again like someone making an urban legend feel true by actually imitating it.
Mike: There's also one about a mouse in a soft drink bottle. There's one of a mouse in a McDonald's apple pie.
Sarah: Or the Kentucky fried rat.
Mike: So this is something Joel Best even mentions is that the dangers of eating commercially prepared food were detailed in 19th century stories about cat meat in baked pies, and more recently about tales of rats sold at fried chicken franchises. So this idea that food is in danger when you think about it, it makes a lot of evolutionary sense for a species to spread rumors of food contamination.
Sarah: To be a little paranoid.
Mike: So there's two last things I want to say about this one. First of all, that in Joel Best's analysis of this, and why this rumor spread so far. He actually says that the press isn't to blame. What's interesting is there's only these 78 cases and strangely in news stories, the news really didn't cover these things all that much. There were some tabloid things, but he says, it's really a word-of-mouth phenomenon. Like it's one of these things that spreads under the radar that you can't track the spread of this rumor because it really is like a virus person to person. There are very few press reports considering how widespread this belief was.
There's actually very little support of it in the media. It's something that really is folklore, that it really did spread as an oral tradition. He also points out and I think this is so useful to think of it this way, that if Ann Landers was right, that hundreds of kids are being poisoned and injured every year, there would have been a much bigger response.
Sarah: There would be legislation, people would be banned from handing out candy on Halloween ideally, you're right. The only way this story functions is logical is based on our apparently unspoken belief that American infrastructure doesn't really give a shit about our children's safety, which is true in many ways.
Mike: It's like we overreacted to it on the social level, but then we under reacted to it on the institutional level. It's almost like we all sort of knew this was bullshit all along, because if we really thought that was true, why weren't parents calling up police stations every day and being like, we need to ban this holiday.
Sarah: There's this weird thing where like, so do we believe this? Like we're saying that we believe that it's true, but we're also not dealing with it in the way that you would expect to see some kind of actual response.
Mike: Does this link to babysitters, do you want to set us off on the babysitter tracks?
Sarah: This links so much to babysitters, yeah, and the first babysitter story that I want to share with you is that parents hire a babysitter, classic beginning to all of our worst nightmares. They go out for the night, they call back and some point to check in and the babysitter is like, oh yeah, everything's fine. And I put the roast in the oven, or I put the turkey in the oven and the mom hangs up and thinks, and is like, we didn't have a turkey.
Mike: I know where this is going, noooo.
Sarah: Where is it going?
Mike: She put the baby in the oven.
Sarah: She put the baby in the oven.
Mike: I hate this one, it is so bad.
Sarah: Yeah, it is so dark.
Mike: Yeah, oh God, ugh.
Sarah: And then it turns out that she did it because she was on acid or PCP or whatever drug we're most afraid of it.
Mike: Yeah. Wow. I know where you're going with this one because I'm just seeing all this stuff, I've been reading this week about how urban legends are really a reflection of society's anxieties. My like society anxiety bell just dinged like three times.
Sarah: Yeah, and some of the versions, her boyfriend comes over and gives her drugs.
Mike: Nice. So where does this one come from?
Sarah: It's similar to the razorblade or poison and the candy and the apple story and then it seems like a sixties a whisper network thing. It's not published just starts getting recorded in the sixties predictably. My favorite research tool that I found while I was reading about this was this really fabulous book by Miriam Forman-Brunell called, Babysitter: An American History. And one of the things that I learned from this book, and I had no idea when I picked this topic when I decided to focus on babysitters that this is where this was going, but it just ended up going in this direction. In the sixties, babysitters increasingly in America were attempting to unionize.
Mike: No way, really.
Sarah: And so the legacy babysitting in America that the author of Babysitter: An American History sketches out is basically that it's always been something that girls were supposed to be more enthusiastic about than they tended to be. It was this thing of like, you can earn your own money and learn responsibility, and it's this great job for you and really from early on, starting, you know, around the time that women or teenage girls are more and more typically becoming wage-earners. So, around the time of the industrial revolution, girls were like, really this is the only job that I got to do, right. And when they had an alternative and could find other employment, they tended to. Also, interestingly, a lot of parents preferred to have boys or men.
Mike: You're kidding?
Sarah: Take care of their kids.
Mike: What?
Sarah: Isn't that amazing? Because now if you're a man who wants to do childcare, like I would hate to be in that position because people are so suspicious of men who want to spend time with children. They just assume that they must be molesting them.
Mike: Totally.
Sarah: Yeah. It is just the idea of women are a nerd in that way. You can just trust them to be a safe pair of hands, even if they don't really know how to do anything. There's a babysitting guide. A parenting guide published in 1965 that says you can understand why mothers and fathers feel safe having a man around the house. Babysitters also in the sixties are coming in and providing relief for women who perhaps would like to leave the home.
So they are enabling women to leave the home. Regardless of the fact that they might be coming in, you know, tripping and being all groovy and liberated. They're also helping older women, the mother of the house to go off into the public sphere. So they're a very subversive figure in the sixties and they're unionizing because there are all these local babysitting unions, you know, there's no organization or anything. Across America, girls in various towns start basically setting up organizations and bylaws because they're tired of being expected to do housework while the kids are sleeping. They're not getting paid enough. They're not getting driven home. They're finding their working conditions to be intolerable and so there's a sense in the sixties, especially that's been growing for a while, but I think especially in the sixties that the babysitters are getting uppity. And so you can see why this would be a convenient time for there to be these stories.
Like you were saying, this folklore that is about an old diversion of society losing ground to the new, feeling threatened and essentially telling stories about the babysitter slips up and accidentally murders the baby, or gets murdered herself, or is at fault for something horrible happening. And has to be punished in this awful violent way.
Mike: Are there any cases of this actually happening?
Sarah: I mean the same as with the Halloween candy stuff. This is in Snopes; Snopes has aggregated cases of people who have killed babies in a microwave or an oven or a toaster oven.
Mike: I remember the microwave one too.
Sarah: Yeah. And drugs were sometimes involved or potentially involved, but these tended to be parents. Again, your dad is the one who's gonna poison you. Your mom is the one who's going to microwave you. So this is a quote from the babysitter social history book. This is all from the sixties that this is, you know, the babysitters are starting to get riled up.
“The results of a joint survey conducted by the YWC and child labor committee and sent to 250 Y leaders nationwide revealed major problems for sitters who still had to quote cope with abuses. Hours, indefinite too long and too late, wages, low, no payment and unfair wages, no transportation to homes after babysitting. Extra duties, sitters are involved in household tasks for which they had not contracted and the care of animals, some of which are unfriendly. Having yet to devise a category to describe a rising problem. The YWC added alone in isolated areas, intoxication of parents on return home from parties.”
Babysitter is another word for teenage girl. This is often the only job that they have available to them as a family wage earner, especially if they're in the suburbs, but that starts changing. The equal pay act is passed in 1963 so teenage girls can look at what's going on for adult women and be like, huh, maybe it's inappropriate for me to be paid $4 for eight hours of taking care of multiple children and then cleaning the house while they're sleeping. And parents at the same time, have their own narrative of like all the kids, the teenagers, the babysitters just come over and drop acid and hang out with their boyfriends and monopolize the phone and eat all the food.
Mike: Right.
Sarah: Really what's happening is this kind of crucible of babysitters demanding workers' rights and what they instead get are scary stories.
Mike: Right. And it's also a weird inversion of the actual danger because of course, babysitters are the ones that are much more endangered than the parents. If you've got parents who have an incredible amount of power over you, there may be drinking. They can falsely accuse you of something they can refuse to pay you.
Sarah: And this is from a babysitter's guide published in 1965. It is words of advice to young babysitters. “Some men forget, or almost forget that sitters are sitters. They try to treat them like girlfriends instead of babysitters. You'll probably never run into such a man, but it pays to be on your guard. “The babysitter. She was great with kids and even better with daddy.”
Mike: I mean, that's another thing is like dad coming home.
Sarah: Yeah.
Mike: That seems like a much bigger danger than Jessica putting babies in the oven.
Sarah: Right. It's like, well, you know, we have a situation where teenage girls are potentially alone with intoxicated adult men and they're playing the woman of the house. And, you know, but what we should really be concerned about is that they're going to get stoned and bake the baby. And so, this connects too with, you know, the power of the acid myth at this time too, because this is not me down this rabbit hole of looking at the urban legends. Going around about what happens if you use hallucinogens and they're all completely terrifying.
Mike: What are they?
Sarah: One apparently going around in the sixties and still propagated is that if you use acid seven times, you will become legally insane.
Mike: Is that one not true?
Sarah: No.
Mike: I'm having like a light bulb moment right now.
Sarah: Right and the terror that people had of hallucinations in the sixties. I mean, the more I think about it, the more I feel like it suggests this omnipresent social fear that sanity is a very fragile state. Which like, yes, that's true and then, you know, another is some guy drops acid or, you know, he accidentally gets a megadose is often how this is supposed to go down. And then he thinks that he's an orange for the rest of his life.
Mike: Nice.
Sarah: Like you end up on the perma trip. And then of course the classic is that, you know, someone takes acid and becomes convinced that they can fly and then they jump off a building and die. Like, I feel like that's the biggest one of all.
Mike: Totally. I've definitely heard that one.
Sarah: Yeah. And I feel like the way that the babysitter gets terrorized in the sixties urban legends is that if you make one little mistake, everyone will die. You know, if you're not on your guard and even if you are things could still be terrible. And so, the other babysitter myths, it's the story of, you know, the babysitter has put the kids to bed she's alone in the house and she gets a call and the voice on the other end says, have you checked the children?
And she gets freaked out, she hangs up. Crucially she does not go up to check the children. She gets another call, he says, have you checked the children? And so she calls the police and has them put a trace on the line. The call comes again, he says, have you checked the children? And then the police call, and they say, Jessica, cause all the babysitters are named Jessica. Jessica, get out of the house right now. The calls are coming from upstairs and so she flees and then it turns out that the madman upstairs has killed all of the kids. And there's, you know, some vindictive details where, you know, he's left a note pinned to the body of the mangle baby saying, I told you to check the children and it's like, the babysitter wasn't attentive enough or maybe she was.
But it's just this idea just by doing what she's doing, she deserved to be punished. And so, this, you know, again I think started off as just a story that got passed around, went from person to person, and then it appeared in black Christmas. And it also was in seventies, horror movie called When a Stranger Calls, which just plays out that story and actually has the initial terror and then the babysitter grows up and starts her own family and the madman comes back for her.
Mike: Nice. Is there ever any truth to this? I mean, do we know like the nugget from which this urban legend grew?
Sarah: So there are cases that are reported on and some of which are significantly sensationalized about babysitters being attacked while on the way home from babysitting. You know, inevitably babysitters become the victims or the, the target of random violent crime. You know, I haven't looked at the numbers on that, but there's a specific case I'm thinking of that I came across where a babysitter was being walked home by the father of the house and they were both randomly attacked by someone.
And that made a lot of news because it was this thing where a girl was outside of the protected realm of her own home of domesticity and this weird thing where she'd gone out in the world in order to go be in another household. But also, to run it a little bit and to be in this position of responsibility and that she had to go out into the world to get there and just being rendered vulnerable by that.
So there are lots of stories at this time of girls being the victim of violent crime more broadly, just because of being out in a world that seems hostile and dangerous. I have never found anything that suggests there's any kind of have you checked the children type of murder that ever happened anywhere. Another thing that's interesting that Miriam Forman-Brunell talks about Babysitter: An American History is that in the fifties and sixties, the interstate system is being built and suddenly the suburbs aren't isolated the way that they were before. Because we have all these roads, all of these freeways, all of these newly, all this newly built infrastructure that allows the people who live in the suburbs and work in the cities to commute back and forth fairly easily.
And what that also means is that we've opened the gate to people coming from the cities to the suburbs or people traveling anonymously across America, using the interstate system and showing up in places where they've never been before and never will be again. And, you know, potentially terrorizing vulnerable members of society like babysitters because of that. So it's like this it's this period when the safety of suburbia is feeling very threatened. The babysitter because she's a young woman going out into the world and taking on responsibility and being seen as someone who has to be both responsible and conscientious and also completely obedient to the grownups. It feels like the babysitter inevitably is the person who these urban myths tend to be about
Mike: Also, can I just debunk, like, does this home have two phone lines? I don't get how that's happening. We didn't have cell phones back then. So how is physically, how's the call coming from inside?
Sarah: Yeah, it would be two phone lines.
Mike: I mean, is that another subtle little nugget of wealth in there too that it has to be a wealthy couple, like who has two phone lines?
Sarah: Who the fuck has two phone lines in the sixties and seventies like Melvin Belli?
Mike: That is another weird thing. That's always bugged me about this myth.
Sarah: And imagine the maniac, you know, he's in this neighborhood. He keeps breaking in house after house. He's like, ah, no upstairs phone line in this one, got to go break into the next one. You know, it's just exhausting. These fucking Philippians. Miriam Forman-Brunell says, “Babysitting became a site of powerful conflict between the babysitter trying to achieve economic, social, sexual, and cultural autonomy, and male monsters seeking retribution for the diminishing of male privilege.”
So babysitters are the people who are helping wives get out of the house. They're the extra pair of hands that also can come in and help what's seen at the time is the disintegration of the nuclear family structure. They're very dangerous people. So I feel like it makes sense that there's also some sense of anger, violence directed at the. The figure in all of these stories, whoever runs the most afraid of is the babysitter herself.
Mike: Right.
Sarah: She's the real monster.
Mike: So speaking of shadowy threats to the suburban status quo, this brings us to the high beams myth.
Sarah: And this seems like an old one to me. This seems like maybe an even bigger classic than the stoned babysitter.
Mike: There are a couple different versions of the high beams’ urban legend. In the most common one, it's a gang initiation. This is from an email forward from 1993. Please don't flash your headlights at any car with no headlights on. Police officers are working with the D.A.R.E. Program and have issued this warning. So, you know, it's true if D.A.R.E. is involved, you know, D.A.R.E. is Bible facts. If you are driving after dark and see an oncoming car with no headlights on, do not flash your headlights. This is a common Bloods gang member initiation. The new gang member under initiation drives along with no headlights and the first car to flash their headlights is now his target. He is now required to turn around and chase the car, then shoot and kill the individual in the vehicle in order to complete his initiation requirements.
Sarah: White people in the nineties loved talking about the Crips and the Bloods, like nobody should have told us about them.
Mike: Yes. So the version of this that I heard when I was a kid, so I heard the gang initiation one too, but I also heard another high beams-related one where a woman is driving down the road at night. There's a truck behind her and he keeps flashing his high beams every once in a while. And she realizes after a while that this truck is following her and every once in a while, he's honking and she's getting more and more terrified. And eventually she pulls into her driveway. The man gets out of the truck with a shotgun, he runs up to her window. He pulls her out of the car and she's like, please don't kill me, please don't kill me. And he says, actually I'm trying to save you because there's a killer in your back seat. And he's been trying to stab you. So, every time he pops up and he's about to stab you, I flash my high beams and he encroaches back into the back seat.
Sarah: Why would you stab someone while they were driving?
Mike: I know. So there's like 51 things about this story that make no fucking sense.
Sarah: And you know what, and I've heard that story and that freaked me out.
Mike: I mean, one of the things I think is really interesting about these is that both of these versions of the story travel on mostly through email forwards. There are very few accounts of them in actual newspapers. There's also, I think we've totally edited this out of our memories, but people also used fax machines, like fax machines were the original email forwards that people would do mass faxes, which I think is totally bananas.
Sarah: So you would just be sitting there, and your fax machine would spit out, like don't flash your lights and you're like, Tom, this is a work number.
Mike: Yeah. And there's regional variations. Like in one of them, she doesn't pull into her own driveway, which is insane. She pulls into a gas station, which makes actually much more sense and then if a gas station attendant who saves her rather than the trucker.
Sarah: Because sometimes when you go out into a sea of threatening men and murderers, it's like Jurassic Park and the T-Rex saves you from the Velociraptors.
Mike: So this story is based on a real thing that happened.
Sarah: What?
Mike: Yes. So in 1964, an escaped murderer did actually find an unlocked door in a car, hid in the back seat. But then this, I love this story. So first of all, it was not nighttime. That's another modification that ends up getting made. The car is not driven by a woman. The car is driven by a police detective who shoots the murderer within like minutes. So the murderer starts like trying to choke the detective and the detective just like reaches back and shoots him and that's the whole event. It's basically this like kind of freak weird event and an insane coincidence.
Sarah: And again, it's just random violence between men. Like, you can see how you have to juju it up to get people to care about that story.
Mike: That is the thing and so somehow the story gets twisted around and of course, to make it more folklorish you have to change the protagonist into a woman. You have to change the time into nighttime to make it scarier. And you have to add this thing of a rescuer.
Sarah: Why couldn’t the woman just like noticed the guy trying to stab her and stab him herself? That'd be a better story.
Mike: In all the variations of this, various like regional variations, different email forwards, whatever. It is always a woman and the attacker, and the rescuer are always men. So those are the things there's other random details that change. But those two things it's always at the woman is passive. The woman is in the dark about everything. She never figures it out. It's always someone else who figures it out. And it's always dudes, like dude killer and dude rescuer.
Sarah: It's funny, I think we would have more urban legends about girl-on-girl violence because it happens a lot and it is really quite titillating if that's your thing, but we don't do it.
Mike: So, this myth, this high beams, one killer in the backseat ends up merging with the gang initiation one and the gang initiation one is actually much more common. This is something that's still goes around. Like you still find people sending this out in 2008, the Canadian minister of defense sent this out to his entire contact list.
Sarah: Because he got a fax about it.
Mike: This whole gang initiation thing. So eventually it becomes what the killer in the backseat thing.
Sarah: It's gangs.
Mike: Yes. You have to kill somebody from the backseat. You have to sneak into somebody's car, kill them as a gang initiation.
Sarah: Oh, come on.
Mike: There's also a version of this where a woman obviously is getting into her car at the mall. It's always the mall for some reason, she's putting her key in the door. Someone is hiding under her car, who then slashes her ankle with a razor blade, and she falls down and then it starts out that then he kills you or kidnapped you or whatever. But eventually it morphs into a gang initiation thing where they have to steal a body part of a person as a gang initiation. So they have to like hack off your foot or hack off your arm or something.
And this one insanely also shows up in a fucking Dear Abby column. So there's a Dear Abby column from like 1989 where somebody writes in and says, I am 16 and terrified to go to the mall. At our local shopping mall crimes have been going on that are never reported in the newspaper because there are so many of them and then she describes this ankle thing.
Sarah: Wait. She said, it's not reported in the newspaper because they're so many.
Mike: It is kind of like a virus, you know, viruses evolve to like harm you, but not kill you, so the virus can spread. The urban legend evolves to have this function within it that it also describes why it's not showing up in the mainstream media. So, for this one, the mall is suppressing it, big mall is so powerful that it's keeping this story out of newspapers.
Sarah: And they don't have security cameras or anything. They don't have their own police force like a mall that's prone to recommend the arrest of a loitering person of color isn't going to take any action about gang initiations happening in their parking lot.
Mike: So the insane thing is instead of Dear Abby being like this is insane and it makes no sense, let me describe to you, let me debunk this for you. Dear Abby says, “Since the crime rate at the mall appears to be more than the security can handle, it might be better to consider shopping someplace that is better policed. If that's not possible, do not go to the mall unless you were accompanied by at least one friend. Do not enter the parking structure, unless it is daylight or well-lighted, or you are carrying a flashlight powerful enough to illuminate the underside and the interior of your car from a distance and large enough to be used as a weapon should you have to.”
Sarah: Also, if you're hiding under someone's car, like I'm sorry, it's just like, what if you miss your moment and they drive away and then you like get dragged over a bunch of speed bumps. I feel like one of the hallmarks of an urban legend or just something that is based on fear rather than proof is the bad person always behaves in really illogical ways and their behavior is dictated by like the plot needs of the story. And then if you actually try and figure out, like, why can't they just steal stereos? You can sell a stereo.
Mike: Yeah. Like how long is he lying down underneath your car? Does he know how long you're shopping for?
Sarah: But I also remember getting like some forward or a friend getting a forward about it and I remember it being like a black man approached my friend in a parking lot and tried to sell her perfume. And it's actually, they're like roofing you because you smell it. It's actually like a repeat of the old, you know, Robert comes to the door in 1910 with a handkerchief soaked in a formaldehyde, something, whatever you used back then. And that was also at the mall. So it's like, wow, the one place where suburban white women are supposed to be safe from the strangers who are constantly trying to kidnap them for some vague personal gain that no one ever explains.
Mike: Well, this transitions very well into the origin of this whole gang initiation myth.
Sarah: I'm so excited.
Mike: I remember years ago, listening to somebody talk about subliminal advertising, you know, how like they used to hide penises and vaginas in like Coca-Cola ads. And he was talking about Joe Camel, and he was saying that in most corporate mascots and like Disney movies, you really have to look for the penis. But with Joe Camel, you have to look for the fucking camel. I think this is a very useful metaphor for going through this urban legend, because with most urban legends, you have to look for the racist explanation. Like you have to really stretch it to fit. This one you have to look for the fucking non-racist interpretation. This one is really blatant othering. So, this gang initiation myth originates, the first time it gets written down anyway is with Jews in the 1800s.
Sarah: Oh my God!
Mike: Around Britain, there's all these myths that Jews are out to get your children and that Jews will cut off their hands or bleed them or steal your children. And so, Joel Best, who we met in razorblades in the apples has also written about this myth and he talks about how there's common threads of this myth. Because this myth shows up everywhere. It shows up throughout time, it shows up in different countries. And essentially there's always some sort of other group that is within society. It's always a minority. Sometimes it's Freemasons, oftentimes it is Jews where there within society, but still other from it and mistrusted.
Sarah: Oh and Catholics. Catholics were also supposed to be like sacrificing babies when there was a lot of anti-Catholic sentiment.
Mike: You just fill in the blanks with like whatever group you want, right. And there's always this gang initiation, it's always random, right? That they're picking up random people. They're knocking on random doors. That's an element of it. Another element of it is that it's always severe. It's never like a Jewish person is going to like to flick your ear on the subway and then run away or like deliver you a bunch of pizzas that you didn't order. It is never like the thing, gang initiations and like frat initiations actually are, which is mostly pranks. And it's almost always somebody innocent. So it's always a woman or a child or some other group that is incapable of defending themselves.
It's never that they, you know, pick a fight with a random guy, right. It's never somebody that can fight back. It's always somebody that's getting victimized. And so, this starts as Jewish people and then, you know, it goes through Catholics and various immigrant groups and stuff. I mean, by the 1960s, there's an urban legend called the castrated boy.
Sarah: Oh, I know this one.
Mike: Yeah. Where a boy goes into the bathroom often in a mall and is castrated by a group of older children from another ethnic group. So oftentimes when you look at these old accounts a bit, the gang initiation isn't just that you have to kill somebody or you have to castrate somebody or something, it's that you have to kill or castrate a white person. So this is very explicit in a lot of the early accounts of this gang initiation myth is that white people are specifically being targeted.
So, in 1991, there's a rumor in Wichita, Kansas, that black teens are initiating new members by requiring them to grab white children and throw them over a second level of railing to the level below. That is when in 1993, there's one in Philadelphia, teen thugs are knocking down young female shoppers and slashing them across the cheeks in a gruesome rite of passage demonstration.
Sarah: Oh my God.
Mike: There's also one in California that a gang initiation involves drive by shootings of trick or treaters.
Sarah: Synergy.
Mike: Yes. There's one in Dallas that they have to rape a white woman, that's another one that goes around. Oh, there's another one in San Antonio, that they're walking around with vials of HIV and they're infecting you with HIV.
Sarah: A vial of HIV!
Mike: For many reasons that doesn't make any sense, but there were, you know, pre-existing anxieties about HIV at that time. The first thing to debunk about this, I mean, obviously the racist stuff is bananas, but there's also, there's literally no evidence that this is true. There's a lot of anthropological work on gangs and so this thing of gangs, I don't know if you've heard about this, where they jump you into a gang as an initiation where like everyone else beats you up. That always felt fake to me, but that's actually true. That's like a real thing that is documented in gangs across the country.
Sarah: What we've seen over and over again throughout the show and in this episode is that people tend to commit crimes against the people that are in their lives and in their communities and just near them because of that's how opportunity and motive work.
Mike: And the only group where there's anything remotely true about this myth, but there are some reports that skinheads do actually do this with gay bashings. That part of becoming a skinhead is you find a random gay guy to beat up.
Sarah: The one group of people we haven't made a folkloric version of the story about white dudes.
Mike: This idea that it's like the majority that is under threat from the minority is completely backwards. I mean, and so one of the things that Joel Best notes in his sort of folklore history of this miserable conspiracy theory is that one of the ways that it spreads again, it's barely in the newspapers, but one of the ways it spreads is from cops. Cops are just as gullible and likely to believe things without any evidence as everybody else in society.
But you have police chiefs that are clicking forward on these things because it's always some other community, right? It is never this week where I live, this happened, it's always like, oh, it's happening in New York, and it might spread to Philadelphia. So the cop in Philadelphia will then forward it, right? And then in California, it's like, ooh, it's happening in Oregon, and it might be spreading to California. So when the cop in California will spread it, it is always happening somewhere and always to people you don't know personally, right? That's always how urban legends spread, but what happens is cops perceive the early days of email forwards. They're not really realizing how much more weight these things take on when a cop is actually spreading them. My boyfriend heard this myth from his Dare officer was actually warning the kids in class, don't flash your high beams when they were all like 15 in Georgia.
Sarah: Grownups believe all sorts of things it turns out.
Mike: People are people. There's one, my favorite one was cops in Chicago had forwarded an email warning people that it was going to be lights out weekend for the black Gangster Disciple nation, which is not even a real thing.
Sarah: Nooo.
Mike: There is also one where cops are warning people that this weekend is blood initiation weekend. They're turning it into a holiday of like, hey, what are you guys doing for blood initiation weekend? Oh yeah, we're going to drive up to Portland and that's not a thing, but of course, timestamps on these email forwards make you more likely to forward them. Cause you're like, oh shit, I have to warn people because it's happening this weekend.
My favorite point that Joel Best makes about this is that we have this idea of, you know, random violence and ritual symbolism is a way of making sense of the senseless. That when you live in a world where they’re just active violence that you can't explain. A really powerful idea is that there's some shadowy figures behind them and shadowy figures that are doing them at random and orchestrating them somehow. So it all comes back to this kind of myth of savages, right?
That there's these de-humanized people among you that are so morally adrift that they're just choosing the most vulnerable members of society at random, right. They know it's children, but not a particular child. They just want random children to murder. It really reinforces this idea that these groups, whether they're Jews or black people or whatever are so other and so different from you that they just have no humanity that's worth recognizing at all. And I think that's really the most powerful idea at the heart of these things that, why should I be nice to Jewish people? If you know, they're in a giant cabal, that's like stealing people's firstborn kids and bleeding them dry, you know, whatever.
Sarah: Whatever.
Mike: It's always like, well, you know, did you know that they're actually in the secret society? And I think that's, that's the power of this idea and that's why this story keeps getting told over and over again.
Sarah: Yeah. And it allows white people to then knowingly or unknowingly have the idea of, well, you know, prove to me that you're not one of the baby killing ones.
Mike: Or do you know about this and you're not telling me? Like this whole idea of like, they know secrets increases this distance between you and other people.
Sarah: It is a very convenient way of taking the anxieties that you feel naturally about. Anything that you see as an ethnic other and about wanting to rationalize the prejudice or the hate that you feel. Suddenly you have this nebulous account of someone somewhere in a way that theoretically exemplifies the depravity that you feel you see in people that are different from you anyway.
Mike: Yes.
Sarah: Is doing this horrible, this unspeakably horrible thing. By I mean it is a great damn against all possible empathy.
Mike: Yes. So because I have no transition. This is probably where we put an ad break if we had advertisers. But do you want to talk about rainbow parties now?
Sarah: Let's have an ad for fax machines. Back to our show, rainbow parties.
Mike: Yeah. This is not like a scary urban legend or spooky. It's just one that we keep doing.
Sarah: Well it is scary because it's about adults who should know better warping their children's attempts to explore their sexualities. That's the scariest urban legend of all.
Mike: Yes. So what's a rainbow party, do you remember what it was?
Sarah: Rainbow parties are something that I heard about as a private school student as something that public-school students allegedly did.
Mike: I mean, as a public-school kid, I heard that private school kid, like Catholic school, people were doing it.
Sarah: Oh boy. What I remember hearing was that the girls would all put on different shades of lipstick and then they would all go down on the guys. And then you had to get a full rainbow on your dick.
Mike: Yes.
Sarah: There's so many better structures for a nice teenage orgy. That's the constructive criticism I would give to that.
Mike: I mean, I think the first debunkable thing about rainbow parties is that just mechanically that makes no sense.
Sarah: They also don't make lipstick that's readily accessible in those shades. Like where are you going to get orange? Green, green is going to be tough.
Mike: That's a good point. You'd get like an ombre sort of gradient effect more than you'd get actual rings. And also is it like one person like throats and then the next person is like deep throat minus eight centimeters and the next person?
Sarah: Someone would be micromanaging. She'd be like Jessica, you're smudging mine. And it's funny to cause like, I don't see that being a great scenario to imagine as a teenage boy, like it requires a lot of dick discipline that as a teenager, I don't imagine having.
Mike: The biggest thing to me, the most unbelievable thing about this myth is that most people don't like putting things in their mouth that have been in six other people's mouth. Regardless of what that object is, like we don't do a lot of like toothbrush sharing and lollipop sharing as a society.
Sarah: Also people's lipstick is gross. Like if you're sharing a cigarette with someone and they've got lipstick on it, you're like, oh.
Mike: I mean, again, it's a big country and maybe in the history of the world, this thing has taken place.
Sarah: It's like, if I really wanted to do it, I could do it. I could like organize my friends and put it together but like, why I don't want to, it sounds boring and unsexy.
Mike: That is thing it sounds extremely unsexy and like, not that much fun for anybody involved. The origin of this begins in a book, actually a nonfiction book from 2002 and you can tell that this book is a robust examination of the scientific literature from its title which is, Epidemic: How Teen Sex Is Killing Our Kids.
Sarah: Wow.
Mike: I just love this. I found excerpts of it online. It's like an actual joke, the author of it is named Meg Meeker. Her next book is called, Praise for Hero: Being the Strong Father Your Children Need. It gives you a sense of where her heads at. This is an excerpt from a review of it that says, “Spicing up her statistics with obscene rap lyrics, and learned reports of teen orgies in the high-school craze for oral sex. She blames the usual suspects. Post sixties permissiveness, the misguided equating of condoms with safety and sexualized media imagery, in for example, Cosmopolitan and Ally McBeal.” Again playing the hits, the greatest hits of 90s panic.
Sarah: Ally McBeal.
Mike: I mean the idea that Ally McBeal was ever controversial is just adorable. This is also from the review, “Meeker advocates teaching teens to postpone sex as long as possible and when they don't to reflower themselves as secondary virgins.”
Sarah: What if as long as possible was like 40 minutes into the first date because sometimes that's just what as long as possible is.
Mike: I made it past the appetizers, but then what's really interesting is so this book is not like a particularly huge bestseller, just like a random. I don't know, there's probably one or two teen sex panic books that come out every year. And so, she hears stories of rainbow parties, she puts that in, but it's not really like the center of the book. It's just something that goes in. So, she hears this from teens, she reports it and then what happens is it shows up on fucking Oprah, 2003.
Sarah: Oprah also propagated a lot of satanic panic and the MPD type stuff. She's really, she's Dear Abby at a lot of dodgy ideas and to the American consciousness in her day.
Mike: I love Oprah as a cultural figure. She is a super nice lady, but you have to acknowledge all the bad shit that she has spread. She's responsible for Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz, like two of the most odious pachyderms in American life. She infamously did an entire episode on rainbow parties.
Sarah: Really?
Mike: Yes. So I found a really interesting essay about Oprah and the propagation of the rainbow party myth. So, guest Michelle Burford, a journalist for O magazine warned the studio audience hold onto your underwear for this one. She proceeded to describe a scary new phenomenon among young people, the rainbow party. Then she describes what a rainbow party is, then Oprah asks her, is this common? And she says, among the 50 girls, I talked to, this was pervasive.
Sarah: It's like claiming that you were about to bite into this pin that you noticed in your Kit-Kat.
Mike: For example, but what is really interesting about this, and I learned this in the in the article that I read about Oprah’s propagating of this myth is that this was not the first episode that Oprah did about an oral sex epidemic. That's what she calls it.
Sarah: This is why people shouldn't have TV shows that are on every day. Like it's too much pressure for material.
Mike: This like really bummed me out. So, a year before the infamous rainbow party episode, she doesn't oral sex epidemic episode, which is the title of the episode, that's what she says. This is in 2002. This is a year before the rainbow party’s episode, where she has Dr. Phil on, and a mother brings her 15-year-old daughter onto Oprah to talk to Dr. Phil about how she's giving blowjobs to somebody at school.
Sarah: So the teenagers are being teenagers and the adults are all behaving. The adults are the degenerates in the story.
Mike: As usual. She talks about how, you know, she's giving blow jobs to this boy at school. And Dr. Phil is like, well, why are you giving this guy blow jobs? And she says, we're friends. And so, Dr. Phil says, you're saying, it's just friends, let me tell you a friend doesn't ask you to go in the bathroom, get on your knees in a urine splattered tile floor, and stick their penis in your mouth. That's not what I call a friend.
Sarah: Oh, that's really awful.
Mike: And so then the audience of course is like roaring it's approval. There's all this laughter and kind of clapping. And the girl says quietly to her mother that's not what happened to me.
Sarah: Oh God.
Mike: And Dr. Phil just like moves on.
Sarah: Oh my God.
Mike: This is so typical. I think of the way that we talk about this issue in particular and especially teen sexuality in general. Is it's never, no one ever asks like, oh well, what did happen to you?
Sarah: How did you feel?
Mike: What do you mean we're friends? What kind of relationship do you have? How long have you known each other? What does he do to you after you do this to him? Do you enjoy giving him oral sex? Does he enjoy giving it to you? No one ever asks.
Sarah: What do you like about it?
Mike: And he immediately assumes that it's in a bathroom on her knees.
Sarah: You know what, Dr. Phil is really showing his hand here because he's the one who's like, well, obviously this is an act of violent domination and it's like, not necessarily. It doesn't have to be about humiliating someone.
Mike: Unfortunately, this execrable Oprah episode gives rise to a novel. So, a novel called, Rainbow Party comes out in 2005 and the author says explicitly, he saw the episode of Oprah and decided to write a book about it.
Sarah: Ahh.
Mike: It sounds like from all the reviews and excerpts online, I could find, it sounds extremely bad. So, the plot of the novel is these two girls, giant skanks are trying to organize a rainbow party and inviting the boys and they're inviting the girls and my dad isn't going to be home after school, let's have a rainbow party. And then the tragedy of the ending of the book is nobody shows up and it's like, oh, we learned something today, nobody wants to go to rainbow parties.
But then the next day, one of the protagonists finds out that she actually has gonorrhea that she got from one of the boys earlier from giving him a blow job earlier. Again, like all of these things, it's pretending to be prurient and interesting and about teenage sexuality, but it's really just telling you kids, you're going to get gonorrhea if you get people blow jobs. That's really the overall message of it. Here's an excerpt of one of the sex scenes.
“Her breathing intensified. She grabbed a clump of the comforter in her hand, squeezing tightly, she was feeling all the things she had read about in trashy romance novels her mom had kept hidden under the bed they were on. Skies bosom heaved her loins burned with desire; waves of pleasure washed over her body ready to crash on the shore.” That is her getting gonorrhea.
Sarah: It's interesting that like in a man's attempt to depict a teenage girl's sexuality, he's like, of course she had a perfect vaginal orgasm because that's what happens when you're a teenage girl.
Mike: One thing that also completely infuriated me is that in 2005, the New York Times writes like a trend piece article on rainbow parties.
Sarah: The gatekeepers are the people who really are the villains here. The journalists, the cops, the Dear Abby’s the Oprah’s. If they weren't opening the door and spreading all these things, it wouldn't look like this.
Mike: Yes. So the lead of the article is if drinking, driving in college admissions, aren't enough for the parents of teenagers to worry about. There's a new specter on the horizon, rainbow parties. The writer of this New York Times piece, she is turning it into a question of like, are rainbow parties a thing, it's hard to say. She also says this isn't like paragraph 75 in the article, “NBC surveyed 13- to 16-year-olds and found that 12% had engaged in oral sex, 4% of those, so less than half a percent overall had ever been to an oral sex party.”
Sarah: And then how are we defining an oral sex party?
Mike: Exactly. And it's like, what's the margin of error for this study. So it's a half a percent of kids have been to an oral sex party. That's not really very many and not worth two Oprah episodes. And also, I mean, I remember when I was a teenager because I was a terrible person. We used to do these surveys in homeroom all the time with like, have you used drugs? Have you done sex? Whatever and I would always like, fuck with them. I'd be like, yeah, I used heroin twice last week. Like I would totally fuck with these surveys.
Sarah: If you are a kid and you tell your parent, like this family is emotionally dysfunctional, they won't believe you nothing will happen. But if you tell them that you found a razorblade in an apple, or that you've been to a rainbow party, stop the presses. Like if it's implicating someone else, like one of your fellow teens or your dangerous sexuality, they will be on it.
Mike: The only voice of reason in this entire New York Times article, it appears about two thirds into the article. It's from Dr. Deborah. Tolman, the director of the center for research on gender and sexuality at San Francisco State University she says, “This phenomenon has all the classic hallmarks of a moral panic. One day we have never heard of rainbow parties and then suddenly they are everywhere.”
Which I feel like is just like, ding, ding, ding, Deborah Tolman, dope as hell. That's exactly it. This is not how societal phenomena work, especially with the numbers that we have. We should be really skeptical of this.
Sarah: I don't know if half a percentage of teens surveyed are saying that they've been to a nebulously defined thing.
Mike: They also quote this fucking miserable slut-shaming quote from the 13-year-old girl. “I think it's completely gross, but there's a girl in my class and everyone says she's been to one. I heard two guys talk about her.” Why would you quote a 13-year-old girl slut-shaming some poor girl in her school? Don't put that in your story.
Sarah: And now we go live to that bitch from your homeroom.
Mike: Like what the fuck.
Sarah: I'm sorry to be dragging you, kicking and screaming back into one of your least favorite topics, but what is so bad about oral sex? Why are we trying to prevent it?
Mike: There is like a weird panic about oral sex specifically, especially with girls giving oral sex, like nobody panics about boys going down on their girlfriends. Like there's never been a panic about that.
Sarah: We should have an active public health campaign to get boys and men to go down on girls and women because everyone would just loosen up a little bit.
Mike: The last infuriating article I want to read you excerpts of is by Caitlin Flanagan and it's called, Are you There God? It's me, Monica, how nice girls got so casual about oral.
Sarah: Oh, for God's sake.
Mike: She starts out with the panic framing and then only later on peppers it was like actual information and statistics by people who do this for a living. Second paragraph of the article is, “Nowadays girls don't consider oral sex to be exotic, nor do they even consider it to be sex, it's just something to do.”
Sarah: What?
Mike: Yes. Somehow these girls have developed the indifferent attitude toward performing oral sex that one would associate with bitter long married women or streetwalkers.
Sarah: She used the word streetwalkers, that's amazing.
Mike: This just gets even worse. “For a while whenever I pass groups of young girls, I looked at them anew were these nice kids. The ones playing soccer and doing their homework and shopping with their moms, behaving like little whores whenever they got the chance.”
Sarah: Oh my God.
Mike: This was in The Atlantic dude in 2006, paragraph 27 as usual, we get to the actual statistics. So, she says, “A huge report was issued by the national center for health statistics. The news was devastating, a quarter of girls aged 15 had engaged in oral sex and more than half age 17 had engaged in oral sex.”
Sarah: Isn't it interesting that you can just say that something is devastating, even if it's objectively has no positive or negative value intrinsically? The news was devastating, 13% of millennials buy more than one case of LaCroix a week and it's like, well, that's just what we're worried about right now. It's not necessarily bad.
Mike: I also love that. The very next sentence of the article is obviously there was no previous data to compare this with. So oral sex is out of control, but we don't have data on whether it's increasing. So, half of teenage girls have given oral sex. Okay, did it used to be 75%? Did it used to be 5%? Is it trending up? Is it trending down? Who knows?
Sarah: What if we are just afraid of the idea that teenage girls are capable of having their own sexualities and their own ideas about consent and what they want to do. That seems like the scariest of eventuality. What if teenage girls are actually just sensible human beings who want to decide what makes sense for them sexually and unionize?
Mike: The last thing to say about those numbers is that is not actually true, that we have no previous data to compare this with.
Sarah: Really.
Mike: It's true that we don't have surveys of women over time. We do have regular surveys of teenage boys over time. It's not perfect data. Like you should always admit the limitations in the information that you have. So, I found a survey of teenage boys that gets taken every, I think, three years, we're in 1995, 49.4% of boys, 15 to 18 have engaged in oral sex. Almost half, 2011, 48.5% of boys had engaged in oral sex. So over the course of 20, more than 20 years rates of oral sex among boys go from 49.4% to 48.5%, essentially they don't budge.
Sarah: And is this receiving or is it both receiving and giving?
Mike: It is receiving and giving. So surveys of women always find lower percentages. So at 50% of boys say they've received oral sex. It's usually like 30% of girls say they've given oral sex. Like that's a typical thing, but there's no reason to believe that the rates of boys receiving oral sex have stayed completely steady for 20 years and they've skyrocketed among girls. It's really irresponsible to not mention that in your article about how girls are so different these days, and they're all giving oral sex.
Sarah: Well, it's adults using teenagers as specters in their own imaginations.
Mike: It's also worthwhile thinking about that we keep doing this. So, I looked into, there's all these great histories of sex panics, because we've had like 10,000 of these. There was a documentary, a PBS documentary that came out in 1999 called, The Lost Children of Rockdale County.
Sarah: Is that the one where all the kids started having sex with each other and they all got syphilis or chlamydia or something?
Mike: Syphilis outbreak, yeah. What's interesting about that is this, I mean, won a Peabody. It was one of the most watched TV shows of that year and it was about kids that, you know, in rural, small town, but like rich, white, suburban, small-town Georgia who were basically bored, and their parents weren't home a lot and they started having group sex.
Sarah: The call is coming from inside the house, inside suburbia.
Mike: It's never been debunked, but there's some shit in it that rubs me the wrong way. So here's a description from it. Group sex was commonplace as we're 13-year-old participants. Kids would watch the Playboy cable TV channel and make a game of imitating everything they saw. They tried almost every permutation of sexual activity imaginable, vaginal, oral, anal, girl on girl, several boys with a single girl or several girls with a boy. During some drunken parties, one girl might be passed around in a game. A number of kids had upwards of 50 partners. Some kids engage in what they called a sandwich while a girl performed oral sex on one boy, she has penetrated vaginally by another boy and anally by yet another. Again, it's a big country, has group sex among teenagers occurred?
Sarah: Yeah, of course it has.
Mike: Of course, it has. But there's something about this.
Sarah: It sounds so strenuous. It doesn't sound fun.
Mike: I have no information that this is bullshit. There's just something that seems amplified about it and something that seems designed to panic parents about it. That was an earlier sort of sex panic. But the one that I love is the sex bracelets one. I don't know if you've ever got this email forward.
Sarah: Yeah. That it was a code and you got different colored bracelets for different stuff you would do. It was all based on like color coding. Adults were convinced that teenagers wanted to organize everything they're doing sexually.
Mike: This is from a 2003 email forward. If your daughter is wearing one of these bracelets, it may be cause for concern.
Sarah: Oh my God.
Mike: Yellow hugging, purple kissing, red lap dance, blue oral sex, black intercourse.
Sarah: How does a teenage girl who's under the age of 18 and presumably hasn't been watching that much HBO even know how to give a lap dance? Like that is a skilled profession.
Mike: Yeah. That's something that like old dudes in the financial sector are worried about their daughters doing. That is not something that actual daughters do very often, like giving lap dances doesn't make a whole lot of sense. The last thing, because Joel Best also wrote a book about rainbow parties. He says, “In previous generations they were worried about going steady. They were worried about lipstick. They were worried about miniskirts. They were worried about rock music. It's not new for parents to worry about kids or that their pop culture interest or their access to the opposite sex is going to lead to trouble. We've been worried about that for a long time, but we always hear that now it is worse than ever.”
Sarah: And again, we do have things in America that are consistently getting worse. The Cairo problem is getting worse. Climate change is getting worse. Teen sexuality is staying level and is arguably not a bad thing intrinsically, but let's freak out about that. Why not? So happy Halloween help your babysitter unionize.
Mike: Finally.