Episode 91 - Mommy Issues

Transcript

David: 0:00

Hey Overthinkers, it's David here with a quick message before we get into today's episode. If you've been keeping up to date with all of our recent amazing Overthink episodes, you'll know that we had a difficult experience after we paid to rent a studio in Paris, and nobody was there to help us with the audio at all, leaving us to our own devices because our wonderful audio editor was not there with us either. I want to let you know that that's kind of an issue in this episode. Our audio editor did his absolute best to get rid of some of our popping sounds, our popping P's and T's, but the audio quality is not quite up to our usual standards. And that's because we had to do the audio levels ourselves when we were recording and obviously that's not our area of expertise. I also want to note that we discussed child abuse and murder in Section 2 from around the 21 minute mark to about the 35 minute mark, so you might want to skip that if that's a sensitive topic for you, or at least handle with care.

Ellie: 1:12

Hello, and welcome to Overthink.

David: 1:24

The mother of all podcasts.

Ellie: 1:26

I'm Dr. Ellie Anderson,

David: 1:28

And I'm Dr. David Peña Guzmán. Ellie, have you heard about this new TV show called MILF Manor?

Ellie: 1:34

I think the name rings a bell.

David: 1:37

It's a reality dating show, and I plan to watch some episodes for us to talk about. And then I just could not handle it after I learned about it a little bit more. So this is the summary for this reality show.

Ellie: 1:51

Your students are gonna say next time they don't do their reading, they're like, I listened to your podcast , and you just said you couldn't handle it, and that's how I felt about the Kierkegaard reading.

David: 1:58

Yeah. I mean, huge difference between Kierkegaard's reading and MILF manor. But here is...

Ellie: 2:03

Dude probably had some mommy issues.

David: 2:05

Yeah, they played out in his romantic life.

Ellie: 2:08

I know, I know. That's why I said it. Anyway, go ahead.

David: 2:11

So here is the summary from IMDB. From cities all across the country. Eight confident and strong minded women leave home for the chance to find love at a paradise destination. They might be older than the average dating show contestants, but these women are not out of practice. Ranging from 40 to 60 years young, this vibrant group brings their unique life experiences to the game. They have decades of dating experience and will use it to find a lasting connection with men half their age. But nothing could prepare them for the jaw dropping surprise that greets them at the front door.

Ellie: 2:53

What is the jaw dropping surprise?

David: 2:55

Okay, so if you watch the trailer of the show, it shows these eight hot women, I mean, they're MILFS. Yeah, yeah, get to the but I have to set the scene. So there are these eight hot women who talk about how, they're hot, and some of them are divorced, some of them have never found love, and they're all ready to find love, but they all are attracted to young men.

Ellie: 3:16

Okay, I'm still waiting for the surprise, David. I know. We heard the description.

David: 3:19

No, you need to, the buildup is essential to the surprise. And so the show shows all the eight women lined up in this villa in Mexico. And then it shows the shadow of eight hot young men with abs and like good legs on the other side and you only see the silhouette and it opens the curtain between them only to reveal that the eight male contestants are in fact the eight MILFs' actual sons.

Ellie: 3:47

Oh my god. No!

David: 3:49

Yeah, so it's a dating reality show in which these eight women are gonna date the sons of their other women.

Ellie: 3:57

Wait, it's not just a gimmick?

David: 3:58

No, no, it's not a gimmick. It's actually, it's their mother's son dating show.

Ellie: 4:02

I could not handle this. Oh my god. I thought you were going to say that like. When you said their sons, I thought it was then going to be that the real guys that they were dating came on the show and then the sons were there and it was awkward and weird.

David: 4:16

Well, the sons are there.

Ellie: 4:18

Oh, wow. Okay, so they're really leaning into it because I was gonna reflect a little bit on the IMDB description that you read for us and say that one thing that surprises me about it is how focused it is on the MILFs as the main characters because I feel like the figure of the MILF is usually not her own main character.

David: 4:38

Yeah, no, this is.

Ellie: 4:40

Yeah, but like in porn and stuff, for instance, where milf is a big theme, category, it's like super, obviously, super male gazey, but it's like the guy who's into MILFs, who is the main character. Whereas here, the MILF is front and center at the, at the heart of her own narrative.

David: 4:59

But yeah, now that I know what the jaw dropping surprise is, I feel like I would maybe need to rethink the entirety of this description. Yeah, no, and it is true that it decenters the, what would we call the young man? There's the MILF...

Ellie: 5:12

the milfophile.

David: 5:13

Like the milfophile. Yeah, I like that term. And the show actually begins with the host talking only to the women, like you're here to find love, so it centers them, their ambition, many of them are very successful. It talks also about their failures in love. and how they're ready to take on this new project. And then the milfophiles are then presented, again, as a surprise, kind of like the secondary characters. Okay. And so you're right that it centers the desire of these older women, 40 to 60 years young, as the IMDB description makes clear.

Ellie: 5:49

Okay, so tell us about how you like started watching the show and then you stopped watching the show and also real talk, let us know if it's really just because like you didn't have time.

David: 5:56

No, no, no. So I wanted to watch it and then the description just made it seem so rough. Okay. And then the trailer also made me think it's just like, Oh God, I don't really want to deal with it.

Ellie: 6:08

Wait, so you didn't even watch any episodes?

David: 6:09

I did not watch a single episode. I watched the trailer.

Ellie: 6:12

Wait, I thought you said you started watching it.

David: 6:14

Oh, no, no, no. Yeah, I started with the trailer. And it's very clear from some of the clips that they really lean into the drama that emerges between the women and between the milfophile, of course. I mean, that's how these dating shows go. No, no, no, no. But here the drama is not just like, oh, you and I are competing for the same women. It's like, leave my mommy alone. Yeah. Yeah. And also, once the women get to know each other, some of them dislike one another and they're like, I will never let my son end up with a viper like you.

Ellie: 6:45

Right. Oh my God.

David: 6:46

It's the protective, it taps into this like sexualized MILF who is also highly protective of her son, who is one of the contestants.

Ellie: 6:55

Okay. I just am googling it a little bit, now I'm like curious to watch it kind of, even though I said it sounded so bad, it does sound bad, but as you know I watch some dating reality shows. So I just found these Google reviews. There's one from Jasmine Feliz who gave the show one star out of five. This show is one of the most profoundly repulsive and appalling show I have ever watched. The show's premise is to gather the moms and sons of different women to all join the same dating pool. To put in perspective, none of the male cast would even be able to have a sip of beer in the United States because they are all 18 to 20 years old.

David: 7:33

I did not catch that!

Ellie: 7:34

If I could give this show a zero, I would. And if you wish to watch this abomination of reality TV, acknowledge these asks, these acts spread in media, promote acts of incest, sexual abuse, and pedophilia. Okay. 18 to 20. I mean, if we're taking Jasmine Feliz's review seriously, Christie White rated it a five out of five. It's literally like a train wreck. You can't look away. It's extremely entertaining. A hundred percent cringeworthy and weird. But I'll be damned if I miss an episode.

David: 8:00

That might be you. Just to add it to this level of cringiness, just listen to some of the episode titles. Your MILF should know. She's a bad MILF. MILF, I'm a big boy now. And, MILF's broken hearts.

Ellie: 8:17

Oh, wow. Wow.

David: 8:19

Also, my favorite is actually, I ain't your MILF.

Ellie: 8:21

Oh my god. That's awesome. Okay, well now that we've done a textual reading of a show that neither of us have watched because it was your assignment and you did not.

David: 8:31

I could not do it.

Ellie: 8:33

Yeah, don't worry folks, this isn't what happens when we actually talk about philosophy on this show. So, yeah, like, any, anything else to reflect on? Like, okay, figure of the MILF.

David: 8:44

Yeah, the figure of the manor and the figure of the man who is the MILF's child, as I'm a big boy now.

Ellie: 8:53

Who can't even get like tipsy on the show like they all do in these reality shows because they're underage?

David: 8:59

No, but they can because the show is actually filmed in Mexico and honestly when I saw that I was like, oh I'm out.

Ellie: 9:05

Oh my god.

David: 9:06

This mother son weird porn fantasy...

Ellie: 9:09

In your home country!

David: 9:09

Get me the fuck out of here. What happens in Mexico stays in Mexico.

Ellie: 9:18

Today, we are talking about mommy issues.

David: 9:21

How do early childhood experiences of identifying with the mother shape behaviors throughout our lives?

Ellie: 9:26

What's the difference between a bad mother and a good enough mother?

David: 9:31

And why does the mama's boy loom so large in popular culture?

Ellie: 9:41

Ellie, in our last episode on daddy issues, we talked about Freud's theory of the Oedipus Complex. As we mentioned there, it's primarily a theory about children's relationships to their parents, in particular their fathers. And the reason that Freud gives so much weight to fathers during this period of child development is because he believed that the Oedipal stage begins when the child shifts their primary identification from the mother to the father, which means that in the stages leading up to the Oedipal stage, the central object of attachment for the child is actually the mother.

David: 10:17

For example, it is the mother who typically, in our society, bathes and literally touches the baby in the first few years of life so that the child's various erogenous zones are activated by maternal touch. Which for Freud would actually be the entire body. The erogenous zones don't crystallize into zones until later over time.

Ellie: 10:40

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. The infant is polymorphously perverse.

David: 10:43

Yes. And so they take, they take shape through maternal touch. And this is true for boys and for girls at the same time.

Ellie: 10:51

Okay.

David: 10:52

So by the time. Children enter the Oedipal stage around age three, they come in with lots of mommy issues that were generated during those earlier stages. And in fact, at one point, Freud says that many of the things that happened during the Oedipal stage itself, that seem like they are surrounding some kind of conflict with the father are, in fact, mommy issues because the children come to disidentify with the mother along the way and they develop both a certain kind of resentment toward her, but also a fear of her because they recognize that she is obviously more powerful than them and they still depend on her.

Ellie: 11:31

Yeah, and so what you're pointing to David is the fact that even though we think about Freud as like the thinker of daddy issues because of the Oedipus complex, he's also a thinker of mommy issues. Whether or not we agree with the contents of his views here, many feminists nonetheless have pointed out that Freud doesn't pay sufficient attention to mothers and their role in child development. Indeed, this was the position of an American feminist sociologist Nancy Chodorow, who developed one of the most influential theories of mothering in recent decades. When I've spoken to feminist scholars of a previous generation, they talk about how Chodorow's view was ubiquitous in the 1980s, even though it's not something that people talk about as much today. But it's a view that she develops in her book, The Reproduction of Mothering. So I want to talk about that. She argues there that Freud ignored the importance of mothering. But that relations to one's mother are crucial for children's development, especially regarding gender roles. And I think if you look at Freud's work as a whole, even if you're right, David, that, you know, he doesn't ignore the mother or mommy issues, there is definitely a focus on daddy issues and certainly in the way that Freud has been taken up as well. But she's focused on his work specifically. Here's Chodorow's view by contrast, which she thinks provides like a necessary counterpoint to Freud. She thinks that mothers treat their daughters very differently from their sons because they recognize themselves in their daughters. They identify more with them. They treat their daughters almost as an extension of themselves. And for this reason, it becomes very difficult for daughters to separate from the mother and develop a sense of autonomy. Instead, they tend to have an emotional continuity with their moms. And this extends into adulthood, where, as adults, women often have stronger relationships with others than men do. But they also struggle with tendencies to merge with others. So that's the mother-daughter side of things, this identification piece. But by contrast, mothers do not identify so much with sons, and so boys separate and develop a sense of independence more easily than girls do. Masculinity, just in the way that we think about it as a cultural phenomenon, is constituted by disengaging from the mother. Boys learn to deny their primary emotional attachment to their moms and direct their energies to more active and aggressive forms of play and eventually behavior in the world.

David: 13:52

So this is interesting, but it also sounds a little bit weirdly conservative, maybe, or gender essentialist, with this notion that women in their capacity as mothers can only identify more strongly with their daughters than with their sons. Do you get the sense that there is an essentialism brewing underneath the surface here?

Ellie: 14:11

Certainly, there's a very 1980s feminism feel to this, but I don't think that there is necessarily an essentialism because Chodorow is not saying anything about gender roles being fundamental, biological, et cetera. And separately, she's not justifying gender roles at all. In fact, she finds them deeply disturbing. And she thinks that asymmetry between mothering and fathering in our society is hugely exploitative for women and also does a disservice to children. So it's rather meant to be a theory about how the structure of engaging or disengaging with the mother, depending on whether the child is her same gender or not, ends up installing emotional tendencies that stick with children for life, almost more of a diagnosis than a prognosis or a claim about ahistorical fundamental realities.

David: 15:03

Yeah. So here are the stereotypes of men's emotional unavailability and also women's clinginess would be things that are distilled from their childhood relationship to their mother, right? Like they would be literally mommy issues. Yeah. And in turn, she thinks that women's more relational tendencies, which they've learned from their early relationships to their mothers, end up being a main driver of their own desire to mother.

Ellie: 15:27

So it's as though adult women often feel a desire for relational intimacy of the sort that they had with their own mothers, and so they want to have their own children to reestablish that identity, because that's the relationship where that identity is strongest.

David: 15:41

I wonder whether this type of theory, how much basis in reality it has, because as the person who was just telling us about Freud and talking about a show that I didn't watch. But I mean, my main concern is that there's a lot of generalizing going on here. And as a philosopher, I obviously cannot be against generalization to some degree. But there are also some things that...

Ellie: 16:07

You can't be against generalization. Lose that to some degree!

David: 16:11

No, I mean, yeah, like, because it's just like built into our profession.

Ellie: 16:14

Yeah, exactly! Let's own it.

David: 16:17

But there are some things that can be generalized better than others. So for example, why assume that mothers femininity so immediately identify with their own genders, rather than, say, having an ambivalent relationship with their own feminity. Or maybe identifying along the basis of behavioral components like I'm a curious person. My son is more curious than my daughter. Therefore, I identify on the basis of that shared trait. It just seems weird to me to assume that every mother immediately sees herself in her own daughter because their daughter is also a girl. Yeah. First, because not all mothers have the same relationship to their genders as I just implied. But also because there are a lot of other ways of explaining identification and dis identification other than gender. Again, what if I'm a mom and I have a gregarious child and a quiet child and I just identify more with one that is more like me? Nothing to do with gender.

Ellie: 17:12

I'm no psychoanalyst, so I don't have a really great answer to that, and I think you're definitely on to something, but I think we could also say that in a society where gender is deemed more important than other characteristics, for instance, we have it listed on our driver's licenses and passports, but not whether we're gregarious or quiet, it would make sense that parents would relate to their children in ways that foreground gender. And while there are, of course, many different family systems in our society, mothers do tend to be the ones who primarily parent. And that's really Chodorow's issue. She thinks that, to quote from her, "the asymmetrical organization of parenting in which women mother, is the basic cause of significant contrasts between feminine and masculine identification processes," so, that is to say that, that living in a society where women and mothers are the predominant parents is the cause of these really strong contrasts between masculine and feminine identification. I feel like I just ended up restating a quote, but I wanted to just kind of like... elucidate it a little bit perhaps just by restating it. The question of whether she's right about the identification of mother and daughter and the independence from the son is less straightforward.

David: 18:26

Yeah, no. And so yes, maybe I'm coming back a little bit to her position because I do agree that especially when we're thinking about children, their lives are intensely gendered by their parents and by the expectations that we have built around parenting.

Ellie: 18:40

And by their teachers and other people in society, like, is it a boy or a girl when you're at the grocery store, even if parents are really trying to raise their children in a less gender oriented climate.

David: 18:49

Yes, even things like what sorts of clothes you buy them, it's like boys over here, girls over here for the bathroom at school, um, the kinds of toys that they're allowed to have to the point that children come to internalize these distinctions that they're seeing all around them and start asking questions about them. So recently I hung out with a couple friends of mine who have two young children, three and five. And they began asking questions about gender that suggests that this is really the primary category with which they are concerned. Yeah. So questions like, are girls allowed to play soccer? And I remember thinking like, what the hell are your parents teaching you? But, but it, I mean, obviously it's not the parents, you know, saying that it's that the children are picking up something from the social atmosphere and trying to make sense of it with their child minds and so that's why they start becoming fascinated. The problem is when then parents or adults look at that fascination that the children have and think, Oh, you see, children naturally classify social agents along anatomy or gender.

Ellie: 19:57

Yeah. Rather than the fact that they're picking up on that as the most salient social category. Yeah. Even, even surpassing race or other characteristics that are straightforwardly, actually more visually.

David: 20:11

Yeah, but not yet. They wouldn't be obvious to the child because they are not part of the cultural expectations that we have about parenting itself.

Ellie: 20:19

I'm always fascinated by how bad little kids are at figuring out how old people are. Like a child might think I'm 18 years old or might think I'm, 60 years old. It's actually really fun to ask little kids how old they think you are. Um, and, but they're like, they're likely not to be confused about my gender or if they are confused, then they're curious about it and they want to ask about it. I don't think they care that much about how old you are. And even if we're thinking about Age in terms of broad categories, like big kid, adult, old person.

David: 20:52

Yeah. And I think in the end, I'm just trying to resist this notion that mothers identify with their same sex children more than the opposite. Because as a child of a single mother, I'm like, no, my mother would have been better off with a daughter when she could identify. But you know, in my case, people often in our family had the sense that my mother overinvested and over identified with me. This actually became a point of tension with her husband later on. Mm-Hmm., where he's, he was like, you're too close to your son. I don't like it.

Ellie: 21:26

Oh, wow. And I think from my perspective, and granted maybe Chodorow's dimension, the analysis is going deeper than just like my memory as an adult of my childhood would be, would tackle, but I really loved both of my parents so much growing up. I mean, I still do. Hi mom and dad! As a child I really felt super close to both of them. But I do feel that from a young age, I identified more with the personality and interests of my father. And so I don't know, like, maybe Chodorow's is still right. I'm not sure. I'm not going to bring in my one personal anecdote as confirming or denying her hypothesis. But I do think that for me that like that some of the salient matters in terms of identification were more about interests, uh, and about personality traits than about gender. But I think there, like I said, there is something to the fact that we live in a society where people care a lot more about gender than about personality traits.

Segment: 22:30

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David: 22:51

Ellie, I want to tell you a story. And the story took place in 2015, and it hinges on a message that was mysteriously posted by an anonymous source to the Facebook page of a 48 year old woman named Dee Dee. And the message read... The bitch is dead.

Ellie: 23:12

I'm also so excited for you to tell me this because I actually found this article and then I sent it to you. I was like, you read it. I'm not going to read it. And then you tell it to me on the episode.

David: 23:22

Your gasp is actually genuine. I never know if like our reactions sound weird or not to our listeners.

Ellie: 23:27

No, I saw the headline. I sent it to you. I have not read the article.

David: 23:31

Yeah. So this. Facebook message is posted to somebody's account, a 48 year old woman named Dee Dee. Her friends and neighbors read the message and obviously become alarmed, because this is not something that Didi would ever post on her own Facebook page. The police are dispatched and they find Didi in her bedroom, dead. Murdered with a knife.

Ellie: 23:53

Dee Dee is a 48 year old woman.

David: 23:55

Correct. The police then realize that Didi's daughter, Gypsy Rose, is nowhere to be found in the home. And they start suspecting the worst because Gypsy has cancer, muscular dystrophy, and also a cognitive impairment. She's paralyzed, and she often needs to be fed through a tube, so they're wondering whether the person who committed this murder may be... took her away and now we have to worry about her wellbeing. Now, this triggers a search for Gypsy Rose, and it unravels a whiplashing story of what turns out to be fraud, lies, and child abuse. It turns out that Dee Dee, the mother, had what is known as Munchausen by proxy. And Munchausen by proxy is a psychiatric condition where somebody makes a loved one, typically a family member, appear sick or ill in order to gain attention and sympathy from other people.

Ellie: 24:59

Including making that person think they're ill, right?

David: 25:02

In a form of gaslighting. Because in order for the charade to work, the person in question either is in on it or on part of it or is completely ignorant of the situation.

Ellie: 25:10

Yeah. And culturally, Munchausen by proxy is very much associated with mothers and daughters, I would say.

David: 25:16

Yes. Although rarely it also applies to fathers and children, but it's very, very uncommon.

Ellie: 25:22

That's why I say culturally associated. Yeah.

David: 25:25

Yeah. And so in the case of Gypsy Rose, her mother's lies were honestly just staggering. She, through a combination of lies and fraud and manipulation, managed to convince doctors that her daughter was sick in all kinds of ways. doctors that she had muscular dystrophy, that she had cancer, that she had sleep apnea and all other sorts of conditions.

Ellie: 25:47

Was the cognitive disability feigned too?

David: 25:49

Yeah. All of it was feigned. All of it was feigned.

Ellie: 25:52

All of it was feigned.

David: 25:53

She was not even paralyzed. And then...

Ellie: 25:56

can you say more about how that happened? Like how did Dee Dee convince the doctors that her daughter had cancer, muscular dystrophy and a cognitive disability and sleep apnea? Sleep apnea, I care less about that one if I'm being honest. Yeah.

David: 26:08

Yeah. Of course. But this is where the web of lies and manipulation kicks in because one of the things that she would do, for example, is she would show up to a medical provider and say, my daughter has muscular dystrophy. And if the biopsy didn't reveal that, she would then just go to another doctor. So she would change doctors often to create a confusing paper trail. She would change names. occasionally she would get a doctor that would give her the benefit of the doubt and would prescribe the medicine for this Okay. simply on the assumption that this mother obviously knows what the daughter has. She also was apparently very good at medical terminology, so she was very impressive. in these medical patient doctor encounters.

Ellie: 26:53

And when did this start? Like, was this from an early age in Gypsy Rose's life?

David: 26:59

Yes. It all began when Gypsy Rose was born and her mother became fixated on the idea that she had sleep apnea. And then I read about this.

Ellie: 27:08

So the sleep apnea bit is more important.

David: 27:10

It's so weird that you say that because then I read that sleep apnea is one of the most common triggers for Munchausen disease. This worry that mothers might have that their newborn babies that their kids, there's a problem with them when they're breathing, and so they end up staying up at night, just like, is my baby, okay, is my baby okay. And so it's extremely common. It's one of the most common symptoms in cases of Munchausen by proxy. And, you know, so there were the lies to the doctors, there was the isolation of family members, there was defrauding of charities. And there was also constant changing of their names, as I mentioned, just to confuse the paper trail. And what all of this resulted in was a child that was seen as sick by everybody around them who saw herself as sick because she believed that she had all these conditions and whose belief that she was ill was maintained by her mother giving her all these medications that she didn't need and also giving her things like tranquilizers. Regularly as a way of making her believe that she really was paralyzed, that she didn't have strength. Mommy issues to the next level.

Ellie: 28:22

And do we know anything about Gypsy Rose's, or sorry, about Deedee's upbringing or reasons why she would be like this?

David: 28:30

We don't. And in fact. Because she died, uh, she was murdered, as I said. Oh yeah, we'll come back to that. Because she was murdered, we can't even officially say that she had Munchausen's by proxy, because you cannot diagnose somebody without investigating them. But people say this is a very clear case. Just officially we can't diagnose somebody with a psychiatric condition after death.

Ellie: 28:55

Okay. But we can diagnose Gypsy Rose with mommy issues. So.

David: 28:58

Yeah. And so she had, you know, like a failed marriage, but in general, we don't really know much about her background. Yeah. And

Ellie: 29:06

Everybody with failed marriage is listening. I don't have Munchausen's by proxy.

David: 29:10

I know. Um, and one really important detail that I left out earlier is that she also lied to her daughter about her own age. So there were times when the daughter just didn't know how old she really was. So she thought she was like, 18 when she was already 22, or when she was younger in order to get the attention of like the media and local newspapers, she would make her seem younger than she really was. And so Gypsy Rose eventually comes to start harboring doubts about her mother's claim that she is sick.

Ellie: 29:41

And how do those doubts start?

David: 29:44

Her doubts started really when she was in her late teens and she started asking questions about why am I not allowed to talk to anybody about my illness without my mother present? Okay. Why am I not allowed to use the internet without her literally looking at the screen over my shoulder? Why is it that when I am at home, I can sort of move my legs a little bit, but my mother tells me not to do it. How come my mother tells me that my hair will fall out if I let it grow out, but I've never actually seen hair fall out.

Ellie: 30:16

Wait, okay. Going back to the paralysis point. So her mom told her that she was paralyzed, but she just like straight up wasn't.

David: 30:23

But she would give her tranquilizers, and other drugs that probably had muscular effects. So the daughter kind of knew that she could, but if you grow up being told your whole life, That that's what it means to be paralyzed and that you should not walk in public, but should limit yourself to your wheelchair. You know, remember this happened from the beginning. She was homeschooled, um, and had very little contact with people her own age, friends, a social network until she met this man, this young man by the name of Nick. And they begin this romantic relationship largely through a series of mysterious Facebook accounts that Gypsy Rose managed to create on her computer while her mother was not looking when she would go to the bathroom or when she was asleep. Oh my god, so Gypsy Rose just has this boyfriend that she can only communicate with while her mom is in the bathroom. Yeah, or asleep because she had to keep it hidden. Wow. And this romantic relationship then starts taking a slightly bizarre turn where Nick and Gypsy Rose start fantasizing about killing. Gypsy Rose's mother.

Ellie: 31:30

Ah, okay, now we're getting to the bitch is dead moment.

David: 31:33

That's what happens essentially. Nick came over to the house and murdered Dee Dee. He actually stabbed her like 17 times while Gypsy Rose was in the other room just listening, and there's a lot of confusion about who had the idea and who was the ringleader of the whole operation, but then they ran away to Nick's home, where the police eventually found them. And that's what led to the revelation of this long history of Gypsy Rose herself being the victim of this woman with Munchhausen's by proxy.

Ellie: 32:12

Okay, I have so many further questions. I am seeing now that I'm like creeping a little bit on this online that there is an HBO documentary on the case. So maybe I'll check that out because after all, we are not a true crime podcast. We are philosophy podcast. So I will refrain from my desire to go down a deep rabbit hole on this case and turn to some thoughts. So in The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir has a chapter on the mother where she talks about chohow women, especially bourgeois women, aren't given enough opportunities to make their mark on the world, so they often vicariously seek to do so through other people. And the mother is tempted to do this through her children, to live through her children, because she can't live her own life in a way that's fulfilling. So mothers tend to, according to Beauvoir's theory, merge their identities with their children. in a way that seems sacrificial but is ultimately very controlling, manipulative, and selfish. And I will mention briefly that Beauvoir's theory of mothering has been controversial because Beauvoir herself was not a mother, did not want to be a mother, and according to some, her view of mothering is like really quite negative. It just focuses on this sacrificial and ultimately selfish side of mothering rather than seeing motherhood as like a more affirmative and I don't know, valid path for women. So yeah, I don't actually have very strong opinions about that, even though I'm a Beauvoir scholar, but I will say that that's at least like a target of critique. It does seem to me, however, that Beauvoir's view is applicable in this case, right? This extreme manipulation, controlling, abusive behavior on the part of Dee Dee that, you know, like shaped Gypsy Rose's entire life. Yeah.

David: 34:03

And I mean, the one difference that I would note here is that with Beauvoir, the main concern is that because women's lives are frustrated by patriarchy, they have to live through their children. As you said here, the difference is that like, it's not that the mother gets to live her life through her children, but that she gets to be the mother that she wants, imagines to be like a good sacrificial mother by frustrating. the lives of their children, right? So there's a bit of an inversion.

Ellie: 34:28

Yeah, I think that might cohere with Beauvoir's account, though. For her, the center of this is really what she calls devotion, and she does not think that devotion is a good thing. She thinks there's actually an element of masochism in sacrificing everything for another. But equally, and I think more interestingly, she argues that devotion can be profoundly selfish because in devoting yourself completely to another, you're actually not letting them live out their own freedom. So for Beauvoir, devotion is an oscillation between denying your freedom, your own freedom, and denying the freedom of the other person. And thus, devotion is a deeply unethical position. She writes about it actually outside of the context of motherhood in The Ethics of Ambiguity as well.

David: 35:10

Yeah. And by that standard, the Munchhausen by proxy mother would be the archetype of the devoted mother. It's just that they're not really devoted to their children. They're devoted to their own image and status as mothers in the eyes of others. Yeah. And there is certainly a problem when mothers attempt to merge with their children to the point of fusion. But we also know that mothers do extremely challenging work and that judging them is a common pastime so that it can become extremely messed up very quickly. There is that whole phenomenon of mom shaming where people find an excuse to accuse mothers of doing things wrong. And I think that's in the background here.

Ellie: 35:53

Yeah, which is certainly not what we want to suggest here. Dee Dee, horrible mother. Um, lots of moms, not horrible. Don't mom shame Dee Dee. But this is part of why, Beauvoir's has been criticized since it kind of seems like she's talking about mothering in general rather than only speaking of some moms. That is, bad moms. So let's talk about good moms or rather the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott's well known theory of the Good Enough mother. He was also a pediatrician. Um, very cute.

David: 36:18

Yeah, Winnicott distinguishes between two types of mothers. What he says are two extremes. The good enough mother, and the not good enough mother. So the extremes aren't like, amazing, perfect, yes, you did everything well, kind of mother, and horrible, evil, bad. DeeDee style mother, but rather just like good enough mother and not good enough. So there's a threshold here of what suffices.

Ellie: 36:47

Yeah. Well, and, and that threshold demarcates the two extremes. So I really liked that aspect of Winnicott's view. Yeah. It's just like, are you good enough? I mean, that can also lead to a lot of mom shaming. You are not good enough, but let's go with it. The distinction for him is really that the good enough mother meets the child's needs repeatedly. In early development, the infant perceives no distinction between itself and the mother or the primary caretaker. And when the mother meets the infant's needs repeatedly, it gives the infant a sense of control or even omnipotence. It's like the baby is a little tyrant. Though again, they don't really see their mom as separate from them, so they don't think they're controlling her. Rather, having their needs met gives them a sense of controlling their world. Naturally, of course, this does not last. Once the baby turns into a child, they quickly realize they aren't in control. But the temporary sense of omnipotence is important for psychic development. Specifically, it's key to developing what Winnicott calls the true self. And this means that the baby goes from having this sense of merging with the mother to developing its own identity as a separate self.

David: 37:56

And if it has a good enough mother, then a true self will develop. Now, the true self isn't some metaphysical core, but rather it's rooted in The sheer aliveness of the body for Winnicott. It's that felt sense that you're an organism in the world who has a demonstrable impact on your environment, right? Like I can affect change and see it reflected back to me.

Ellie: 38:21

Yeah. But if you have a not good enough mother, on the other hand, you have a mother who hasn't repeatedly met your needs. Perhaps she's neglected you for long periods, not soothed you when you've needed it or not given you space at all. This gives you the sense that you have no control over your environment. You don't see your desires reflected back in what happens to you in the world. And so it blocks your ability to develop a true self.

David: 38:46

And this is where the good enough mother for Winnicott is somebody who takes a lot of shit from the kid, basically, in order to facilitate their development. But at the same time, it's not as if the good enough mother Just lets the baby walk all over her. Mm-Hmm. and just meets all the baby's needs unconditionally as soon as they arise. Yeah. And importantly, even though the baby may be merged with her, she's not merged with the baby.

Ellie: 39:13

Yeah. Well, the baby is by default merged. It hasn't, hasn't individuated yet. But the mother recognizes that they're not merged.

David: 39:18

Yeah. Yeah. The mother is already individuated, yeah.. And so she meets the baby's needs repeatedly, but doesn't like. automatically always fold to the baby's will. And Winnicott thinks about this in terms of resistance. The mother must provide a principle of resistance to the baby's sense of omnipotence and tyranny because that resistance is actually good for the baby because it will help the baby develop a concept of reality. And so this is where it's really important to think about the interpersonal relationship between mother and child. as providing individuation for the child through a kind of obstacle. So the child comes to the realization, look, I can't just walk all over the mother. My mother will say no to certain things. And it means that she is a real separate subject from me who resists my desire. And this sense of reality is what the child needs in order to then become a true self.

Ellie: 40:21

Yeah, and Hence, the good enough mother concept. It's actually better to meet the child's needs repeatedly, but not always meet them unconditionally and immediately, because that would lead the child into a false and permanent sense of their own omnipotence. It's rather about like, yeah, hey, you meet the child's needs repeatedly, but hey, you're also your own person. And that's kind of the optimal situation.

David: 40:50

Yeah, and in this sense, if we were to imagine the cultural stereotype of the perfect mother for Winnicott, that would be quite problematic from the standpoint of child development because the child would not understand that the world is real and separate from him and that it will offer a resistance to him.

Ellie: 41:22

The philosopher Jacques Derrida was famously a mama's boy. He wrote quite a bit about mothers in his work, including reflections on the mother tongue and on all sorts of things, like partly inspired by psychoanalysis, but not limited to them. And he came from Algeria had this, like, complicated relationship with his mother country, which was Algeria, but also French, because he was a French Algerian. And in an interview late in life, he said that he took the side of his mother against his father as a child. So I think this is a good time for us to talk Mama's Boys, David. What is a Mama's Boy?

David: 42:07

So, obviously, there is no agreed upon definition of a mama's boy, and I wonder whether you and I have diverging views about this, about what makes a mama's boy a mama's boy. But when I think about that character, what I really think about is, of course, a grown man who has not been able to fully de individuate from the mother. And who tries to replicate the mother son relationship in their other relationships, probably in a relationship with a wife or a partner or even a teacher.

Ellie: 42:39

Yeah, yeah. No, I think that's right, for sure. I think that's a really nice initial description of the mama's boy. And probing a little bit what that relationship with the mother that he's trying to replicate in these other situations might mean, I associate the mama's boy with a man who relies on women for domestic labor. For emotional labor, for sure, for hermeneutic labor, my preferred term, and probably doesn't recognize the extent to which he's doing that. It's often a man who thinks that he's more independent than he actually is because he doesn't realize how much work women have put into making his life easy, but they do. still recognize and honor the mother as a figure. So it's almost as though they recognize that the mother has done work for them to the point that they actually almost idolize her, but they don't recognize on the ground the content of that work such that they would be able to take it on for themselves. It's like, Oh, my mom always made like wonderful food growing up, but that doesn't translate into being like, okay, well, here's the. Here's what she was buying at the grocery store. Here's how she was cooking. This is just sort of this abstract, like that's her domain approach. And so I think that also translates into this other aspect of being a mama's boy, which is that I think being a mama's boy often goes along with being pretty misogynistic. I think paradigmatically there's a macho vibe, I think, about this movie Don John, which I love, starring Joseph Gordon Levitt and Scarlett Johansson, where, um, it takes place in an Italian American community in New Jersey. And Don John is a typical macho Italian guy who goes to the gym, or Italian American guy who goes to the gym a lot, watches porn a ton, and is obsessed with his mom, who makes delicious pastas. But also has this extremely problematic relationship to women where he suffers from what we would call the Madonna whore complex. Either women are these virginal figures to him, the virgin mother figure, which I want to come back to a little bit later, or they are these like whore sex doll kind of figures.

David: 44:48

Yeah. So again, I think this, I now see maybe potentially diverging views because. You mentioned two things. You mentioned that the mama's boy relies on women's labor, thereby replicating the mother son relationship in the context of potentially romantic relationships. But I think it's not just about replicating the relationship to the mother in the future, but it's actually about maintaining a too close relationship to the mother in the present. So when I think about the mother's boy, about the mother's boy, the mama's boy, I think about somebody who calls their mom too much, you know, like, Oh, I call my mom three times a week. Mama's boy. Yeah. I also think about somebody who goes back home too much. Especially if like they live in the same city,

Ellie: 45:35

is really excited about their mom doing their laundry is,

David: 45:37

yeah, brings their laundry back to the mother. So it's not just a replication of a previous relationship. It's actually the maintenance of that relationship after it's meant to have expired. And so if you come back home because you can only enjoy your mom's cooking and then you compare everybody else's cooking to your mother. Mama's boy. Yeah, yeah. Um, and so that's why I see it as a kind of failure to de individuate. In the full sense of the term and to form new relationships without comparing them to them.

Ellie: 46:07

I think that's right. And often lurking behind that is the specter of the mama, the mama. We're just like messing up, like mother. Who has the mama's boy. And that figure is typically seen as one who has over invested in her son and sees the son's new partner, like a girlfriend or female partner as a threat to her pride of place.

David: 46:30

Yeah. So moms can also have mommy issues, I guess we could say.

Ellie: 46:34

Or like issues, honestly, probably issues in their romantic relationships with their husbands such that they've like put, they've overinvested in the relationship with the son.

David: 46:44

Yes, they, they turn their son into their little husband, something like that. The second point I was going to mention is that you point out that many mama's boys are fundamentally misogynistic and, you know, they have this macho attitude that combines glorification of the feminine with a disdain for women also. But I also think of the mama's boy as the opposite of that male character. I think of the mama's boy, not. So much as the macho guy who's like, my mama is the best. Don't fuck with her. Um, and I think about the feminized male character , men who show maybe signs of vulnerability, who maybe are more in touch with their emotions, who are weak, um, physically, who don't play sports, and who are called a mama's boy for that very reason. And in fact, in the gay community, this is a very common way in which people make sense of their childhood. Okay. From the time I was very young, I was bullied for being a mama's boy. Yeah. That's a code term, not for machismo or misogyny, but actually for a kind of masculine softness. And that, that would be. Maybe not the opposite, but very different from what you mentioned.

Ellie: 48:00

And I think though that that would have to do with whether the mama's boy is primarily relating to his mother in terms of identification or in terms of complementarity. Because the mama's boy that I'm talking about is a mama's boy who is complementary in a sense to his mother because he is different from her and benefits from her giving him what he lacks, which is like the domestic care, the emotional care, et cetera. Whereas what you're talking about, I think is more a child who identifies with the domestic sphere of the mother or is, or is seen as doing so who is seen as feminine. Cause I think that. A key for me with Mother's Boy Mother Why do we keep doing that? With Mother's Boys, we literally keep doing that. Okay, so a key for me with the mama's Boy trope, at least, is that there is an erotic passion for the mother that's lurking beneath. Like, there is a milfy kind of element,

David: 49:01

Milfy manor kind of element?

Ellie: 49:04

Exactly. But it's also strangely desexualized. So the mother, the specter of the mother's sexuality, or at least of her as a desirable sexual object, I think lurks beneath the mama's boy trope a little bit similarly to how in the daddy issues episode we talked about how the father and father of the bride relates to the daughter as if he is distanced from his own previous virile self, who would have sexually desired the mother. Here there's a... Sorry, the daughter. Thank you. Um, here there's a sense in which it seems to me that the mama's boy recognizes that if his mother were younger and not his mother, then he would sexually desire her.

David: 49:46

Or if he were older. You know, conversely.

Ellie: 49:48

Because when I... I think it's younger.

David: 49:51

I don't know, because... In these cases, the section this like, let's say, cryptosexualization of the mother happens when the mother is already significantly older than her son, of course. Yeah. And so the age, the projection backwards doesn't make sense. Like many, and that's why many men have difficulty imagining their mothers, with whom they have cathexed in this way, as young girls.

Ellie: 50:15

Cathected. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cathected. Sorry, like, not to just, like, casually mansplain English to you, but I feel like cathexed sounds, like, weirdly sexual. Ah, cathexed. Because it is cathexes. Send me a cathexed. It is cathexes in the noun form. Anyway, go ahead. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

David: 50:30

I think it's easier for father's to do that mental exercise with their daughters. Okay. They've seen it. Yeah. Not for sons to do that with their mothers. Okay. Okay. But you mentioned that there is this kind of like reliance on the mother to do all this work for the child, whether that's practical work or emotional work. And I googled famous mama's boys? Okay. And guess who was the only famous person that appeared in like 90 percent of all the lists about Mama's Boys?

Ellie: 51:02

Okay, I will be honest, I, you, I already know the answer to this because you already told me. You did not tell me about the Gypsy Rose story beforehand, I just sent you the article without reading it, but I already know the answer to this. Can I say it or shall you? Yes, do it. Leonardo DiCaprio.

David: 51:14

Okay, and so just very quickly to give you a sense of what it means to say that Leonardo DiCaprio is a mama's boy, here is a quick quote from one of these websites. Would lovely Leo have made it to superstardom had he changed his name to Lenny Williams? i Like his first potential agent suggested? We doubt it. Luckily for Leo, he stuck to the moniker his mother, Irmelin, gave him after the unborn Leo kicked while she was admiring a Leonardo da Vinci painting. Today, Irmelin handles all of Leo's finances, and the devoted son, speaking about devotion, even bought her a house with his Hollywood earnings. He even said in an interview after Blood Diamond that the only woman he would ever buy a diamond for was his mother. Oh my god. Like, I gotta get more mommy issuey than this.

Ellie: 52:07

Yeah, I mean, I think it's, I think it's awesome that he bought his mom a house. Like, I think that's a totally respectable thing to do. He's a super wealthy person. Like, I would buy my mom a house. But yeah, the, the idea that he would only buy a diamond for his mother, I find extremely worrisome. And we know that Leo only dates women famously up to 25 years old. Maybe he needs to disavow that desire for the mother. And also, I mean, to just have her. Handle all of his finances. Like there is for sure a lack of individuation going on.

David: 52:39

Yeah. And just the combination of the super successful man who is a cultural symbol of sexual appeal, who can't manage his own finances and who sees his mother as the only possible, like quote unquote marriage partner. Um, and it does speak to this duality that you were alluding to between like putting the mother on a pedestal and at the same time, having pretty misogynistic views about women more generally.

Ellie: 53:04

Yeah, yeah. Definitely. At least if we are to take his dating habits of under 25 year old models. Yeah. And refusal to buy any of them diamonds, seriously.

David: 53:15

And, you know, in the gay community, there is this. ongoing rumor that Leonardo DiCaprio is gay and that the whole thing about him dating all these young women is just a cover to conceal his homosexuality so as to not threaten, basically, his career. Yeah, yeah. And so in that sense, he would also be Not just your type of mama's boy, who like puts a mother on the pedestal, but also like my soft boy, kind of mommy's boy.

Ellie: 53:40

Oh my gosh. She's just like, into the boys instead. Well, I don't know which Leonardo da Vinci painting Ermalyn was looking at when she named Leo, Leo, which is a name that I actually really love. I think it's super cute. Props to her for naming her child Leo, but. He did, of course, paint a lot of mother, Madonna and child paintings. And I want to mention that before we close the episode, is the figure of the Madonna. Because the, I mentioned the Madonna whore complex earlier, which is a concept that comes from Freud, but the figure of the Madonna in particular is a fascinating one. Because Madonna, or the Virgin Mary, the Virgin Mother. is desexualized in the sense that she's a virgin, she's sexually pure, untouched, maiden like, eternally youthful in that sense, but she is also a mother, a symbolic of nurturance, caregiving, etc. And I do think that in Predominantly Christian societies, it's perhaps no coincidence that I chose, like, the sort of Italian American machismo as a paradigm example of, the mama's boy. She is deified, I mean, not deified, but let's say sanctified, idolized, but that is dependent on her being sexually pure. Nobody wants to think about Mary having sex with Joseph.

David: 55:03

Well, yeah, she didn't. I mean, hopefully, no, she's, she never did. Yeah, she never did. That's the whole point of Christianity. No, but the, the Mama's Boy trope is also really interesting because of the infantilization of the boy that comes with it. I mean, or the boy, the man. And it makes me think about the category of baby talk, you know, like sexual baby talk and how that might or might not be implicated in this. Do you have any thoughts about this? Because I have seen a lot of videos, for example, in social media, primarily on Instagram of women, young women who are sort of secretly recording their interactions with their romantic male partners and the male partners express emotion. and love towards their female partners by going into baby voice. I mean, like, it does. Yes, baby. Mommy gonna give me smooches. And then when the young man, usually in their twenties or so, turns around and realizes that the girlfriend had been filming the interaction, they explode their voice this changes and drops like a thousand octaves and they start projecting this masculinity because they've been exposed. And I actually, I just wonder how common that baby voice is.

Ellie: 56:27

Yeah. Well, and one other thing to put on the mix here is the prevalence of insults such as motherfucker in many different languages. This idea. Uh, I, I think that. Insult only gains such track because there is this disavowed desire that signals Maybe I am. Maybe I will be. No, and in Spanish we have a similar thing.

David: 56:49

Because in Spanish the most common insult, or bad word, is la chingada, which Literally translates into the fucked one, but it's feminized. So it's the her who is fucked and historically it makes a reference to Malinche, who was the first indigenous woman to have children with Hernan Cortes. Um, and, and to give birth to the race of mexicans as this mixture of indigenous roots and Spaniard roots. And so there is the sense in which we insult people by reminding them that their mother, like Malinche like the mother of the nation, that they've been fucked.

Ellie: 57:32

Which I think speaks to the fundamental paradox in the way that we see mothers through a Christian lens, which is as illicitly, sexually desirable, and also completely devoid of sex.

Segment: 57:47

We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you to your podcasts. Consider supporting us on Patreon for exclusive access to bonus content, live q and as and And thanks to those of you who already do. To reach out to us and find episode info, go to overthinkpodcast. com and connect with us on Twitter and Instagram at overthink_pod. We'd like to thank our audio editor, Aaron Morgan, our production assistant, Emilio and Samuel K. Smith for the original music. And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.