Indiana Jones may be remembered for the line “I hate snakes,” but I’m pretty sure that saying originated with a woman.
Women hate snakes, and that’s not just a stereotype. Surveys indicate that women are statistically two to four times as likely as men to be afraid of snakes. Recent studies that involved showing pictures of snakes to baby girls seem to suggest that this reaction may be present in infancy, as part of a female’s natural tendency to protect her offspring.
At least that’s how it started for my sister, a mild-mannered mother of four who, as it turns out, is quite a skilled snake slayer. I learned this the other day when my mom was telling me about a recent visit. Mom was leaving my sister’s lakeside home when she saw a large snake curled up in the sun beside the bushes.
“She said, ‘Would you please watch him for just a minute?’” Mom recalled, as if she were being asked to keep an eye on one of my nephews. Seconds later, my sister sprang from the garage swinging a hoe and proceeded to chase a 5-foot-long snake to the end of her driveway, where she whacked off its head. Afterward, wearing slightly blood-spattered shoes, she managed to say a polite goodbye to my stunned mother.
I could hardly believe that my sweet, home-schooling sister was capable of such a violent act and wondered if she might be having some kind of hormonal problem. I called to check on her, made some small talk and finally said, “Mom said you killed a snake.”
“Snakes,” she corrected.
Apparently her wooded yard has given her lots of practice, beginning with the day she looked out the back window and saw a snake threatening some baby birds. My sister, who had two young daughters and a 2-month-old son at the time, called her husband, who was a 20-minute drive away.
“He told me, ‘You’ve got to save those birds,’” my sister said. With that, she swung into action, and the rest, you might say, is hiss-tory.
I’ve recently been amazed to find out how many women I know who have killed a snake at one time or another. None of these women are hunters or even sport fishers. They are simply kind, gentle women who apparently go into Xena Warrior Princess mode when they see a snake.
My friend, Kathy — who takes care of goats and stray dogs and routinely picks up spiders in her house to carry them out to safety — once doused a snake with gasoline and tried to set it on fire. (She ended up killing her grass and a nearby tree, while the snake slithered to safety.)
My mother-in-law, a good-natured nurse, has been known to chase down snakes with a riding lawn mower. The woman was preparing to hack a slug to death with the heel of her shoe “because it looked like a snake” — until I intervened to stop her.
Now I don’t like spiders and snakes, but I’m not sure I have what it takes to kill them. When I saw a snake outside our house several years ago, I didn’t grab a hoe. I went to the hardware store and bought some Snake-A-Way, which worked amazingly well considering I stuck it on a shelf in our storage barn and never opened it.
But I’ve never even taken so much as a swipe at a snake and, to tell you the truth, it was beginning to make me feel downright unfeminine. I know some women who can’t stand to see so much as a picture of a snake, but I didn’t seem to mind them so much, as long as they were at a reasonable distance. I could certainly see a snake at the zoo without feeling threatened.
At least, that is, until our last visit. We had just seen the polar bears and puffins when my husband starting rushing us along to the next exhibit. As he hurried on 20 or 30 yards ahead of me, I saw a black snake crawl out of a small planting area and onto the sidewalk in front of my husband and our youngest son.
I screamed, but it was too late. The next step my husband took landed him directly onto the snake. He didn’t get bitten, and the snake slipped away as quickly as he had come, but I was shaken.
“Why didn’t you stop? Didn’t you hear me?” I said.
“I thought I heard some woman yelling, ‘Snake’!” my husband said as our youngest son nodded in agreement.
“Some woman?” I said. “How could you not know that was me?”
“Because,” my son said, “all women hate snakes.”
http://www.reflector.com/features/kim-grizzard-indiana-jones-hates-snakes-and-so-do-i-31903
Dom Apr 18, 2010 11:19 am