When I was in high school, the girl I was dating slapped me. My memory of the events that led up to the slap is vague, but I believe that we were arguing about something. Our relationship was unravelling, and we were uncomfortable with each other. She was at my house — or rather, the house my mother rented — when she slapped me. She shocked me when she did that, for she had never shown violent tendencies. I turned away from her, went to the kitchen and cut an orange in half. I took one half of the orange and squeezed the juice over my girlfriend’s head.
In movies and on television shows, women are often shown slapping men. A dictionary definition of the term “a slap in the face” is that the act is something that is “surprising (and either) offends or insults someone.” The ancient art of dueling was believed to start when one party — a man — slapped another in the face with his glove. This belief may be incorrect, but at the very least, medieval combat was invited by throwing a gauntlet onto the floor. Knights were created when tapped three times on the shoulder with a sword, and then gently slapped on the face. This ritual was supposed to signify the last time the knight would suffer an insult. When I see movies where a person is slapped, I often wonder what the slapper is thinking. The person being slapped, as I noted, is most often a man: Does the woman believe that there will be no return of fire?
I still regret my brief descent into corporal punishment of my two youngest children. When they were 8 and 9 years old, I sat them down and apologized to them for my behavior, and promised that I would never again hit them. I avoid making promises because they can be broken by circumstances out of our control. If you promise to be home at 5:00 p.m. and get into an automobile accident at 4:30, your promise has been broken. I did not break my promise to my two children: I never again hit them. But people slapping other people is an old theme, played out many times in the movies. In the film Moonstruck Cher slaps Nicolas Cage; Meg Ryan slaps Billy Crystal in When Harry Met Sally; Scarlett O’Hara delivers a good slap in Gone With the Wind and Joan Crawford slapped plenty of men in the 1940s. But there are examples of men slapping men.
The movie In The Heat Of The Night, set in 1960s Mississippi, has a prominent White citizen slap Sidney Poitier; Poitier slaps back, and Rod Steiger, the sheriff, looks on in wonder. Marlon Brando delivers a slap in The Godfather; in Tombstone, Kurt Russell slaps the snot out of Billy Bob Thornton. In The Maltese Falcon, Humphrey Bogart slaps Peter Lorre and tells him to “take it and like it.” In the movie Whiplash the symphony conductor, played by J.K. Simmons, slaps Miles Teller, whose drumming was off tempo.
My high school girlfriend assaulted me, but my response was moronic and unnecessary. I recently watched a politician make a case for herself by touting her understanding of conflict resolution. That’s what we need to happen between us. People should not be slapping each other, nor beating each other. We have better ways to resolve our differences but even when we cannot, we can always just walk away. We just do not need to slap each other.
cjon3acd@att.net