Post by Joan in GB-WPost by Fire TigerMaybe I just cannot get it through this thick male head of mine, but I
cannot understand why a woman would scream at the sight of a dead
body. I could see possibly them throwing up at a gruesome murder
scene but not screaming. Why are they screaming? Why would they
scream? I'm not talking about screaming to raise an alarm or a cry
for help but out of supposed terror. In mysteries (written, TV, and
movies), women are always screaming when they find a dead body. Even
screaming and then fainting. Is this just a tradition of mysteries or
do women actually do this?
Scott
I don't know, Scott. I have never found a murdered body. I did, however,
find my mother dead in bed many years ago, but it was a normal death due to
old age.
To find a murdered body, especially a bloody body, could produce screams . .
. maybe. I have never screamed in my life. And so I don't know what I
would do.
Me neither, but I know what happens when I'm shocked hard:
I tend to yell, not scream, and what I yell is exactly what airline
pilots yell as their planes go down (yes, they have it recorded
on the black boxes), which is "SHIT!"
IMO, the "screaming woman" thing is a cultural hangover from
times when ladies were supposed to be delicate flowers in
desperate need (in conditions of stress of any kind) of male
protection. The scream was often coupled with a faint or some
other demonstration of complete incompetence, at least among
the upper crust where such shenannigans were encouraged (this
being one of the ways that "ladies" could demonstrate that they
weren't "common"). The corollary was that men, real men, must
keep that stiff upper lip thing and *never* scream unless it was
a scream of manly rage, closely followed by violence.
The stage and then the movies picked up the nonsense of the
shrieking female for the purposes of charging up an audience's
response to melodrama; there's a movie with John Travolta, I
believe, about a sound tech who's assignment is to record the
"best" possible screams -- all female, of course -- for a suspense
movie about a killer, which uses this need of Hollywood for
the loudest, shrillest female screams available as part of its plot.
There has also been input from immigrant communities which
have much more public ideas of mourning as a required
demonstration of feeling than mainstream America seems to.
I think sometimes people of both sexes do scream out in
anguish at discovering the death of someone they care for, but
for that to happen you have to know the identity of the dead
person, and the cry is one of grief, not fear.
Generally speaking, though, I think most people's response to
finding a dead person is to recoil with a grunt or exclamation
of disgust and alarm. But maybe I'm just led too sheltered a
life . . .
Suzy