Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we pity the poor Babysitter. Monday we found out why these darlings are hunted. Wednesday we look at how the legend survived the digital age.

Babysitter. Killer. Telephone. We’ve taken a neatly assembled story and plucked off the buttons, ripped the stitching and unloaded fistfuls of stuffing. Might as well see it the rest of the way through. Parents. Children. Let’s add them to this strewn mess of analog technology, gender stereotyping, Aquarian culture wars and artificial maternity.

I had briefly mentioned that, in many versions of the Babysitter and the Stranger Upstairs, at least one of the sitter’s employers is a doctor. In almost every version, the parents, doctorate holding or not, are wealthy. On the surface, this seems a mere plot device – the teenaged kid-herding neophyte is lured into the job by the promise of healthy dividends while, at the same time, the couple’s sizeable home fulfills certain narrative logistics. In other words, it would be difficult for the killer to call the babysitter from inside a single-phone apartment, or sneak unnoticed through a ranch-style house. And that makes enough sense. But let’s say we take a moment to get cynical:
Even if we accept many folklorists’ assertions that, when deconstructed, this urban legend takes on gender oppression and warns girls away from fast-tracking themselves toward some sort of patriarchically enforced homemakership and oppressive motherhood – that it’s a GRRL power ballad played in the key of independent womanhood – we need to consider the story’s intended demographic. After all, “gala-bound rich couple seeking responsible teen for one-night babysitting job $$$” rarely bypass the nearby middle-class McMansions and make a beeline for the barrio. Likewise, many blue collar families comprise two working parents who are beholden to shift work, and older children who are busy enough looking after each other, or working themselves. (Obviously, these are gross generalizations, but remember, we’re applying them to a story in which the main characters are Rich Couple, Attractive Teenage Girl, Sleeping Children, and Anonymous, Motivationless Killer.)

Get the rest AFTER THE JUMP…

That the story is geared toward young women seems sensible. What’s offensive (or if we’re keeping with the whole cold, removed cynicism thing, wholly predictable, given the ongoing undermining of the American working class), is that the story, in engaging with the tropes and situations that it does, seems to disqualify an entire social strata of adolescent girls. Perhaps these ladies are assumed to be beholden to a hard-scrabble life of early pregnancy, working motherhood or looking after their existing immediate family members. Or, even worse, maybe, on a subconscious level, independent poor women, who are perhaps deprived the educational opportunities of their moneyed sisters (many of whom were only able to burn their bras because, once the message was sent, they could afford to buy new ones), don’t represent the type of spokespeople that the political side of the feminist movement are looking for.

Maybe I’m reading too much into it. Obviously, I’m not suggesting that whatever cadre of feminists ideologues may or may not have perpetuated this story in the name of a positive social movement purposefully approached it with an agenda of class discrimination, but rather that even the most idealistic among us are not immune to underlying culture biases that lay hidden, like live black widows inside the smallest nesting dolls, within otherwise socially conscious and progressive narratives.

Just something to think about.

On a lighter note… The Children. I only mention the kids because there’s a sanitized, Cub Scout-ready version of the tale in which there is no killer and, in fact, the frightening phone calls coming from inside the house are made by the children themselves, who have amalgamated all of their bratiness and initiated a prank call campaign against the babysitter. I only mention it because in all the other versions, the kids are little more than bug-snug snoozing cutlets awaiting the fall of the knife. Here, though, the children have the power and use it to terrify and ultimately embarrass the ad hoc adult, thereby, revealing the man-behind-the-curtain quality of the so-called power and responsibility wielded by authority figures. And what kid doesn’t want to hear about that? If I were 8 years old, listening to this story would probably be almost as fun as harassing an actual, live babysitter.

So, if any of you folks are spending tonight at a high-paying babysitting gig at a secluded mansion near the back-up perimeter fence of the asylum for the criminally wigged out, remember: you had some calls traced, they were coming from inside the house, you fled on foot. Clearly, the murderer upstairs killed the single-malt scotch.

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