Mon Dieu! Le Pew!

On a cold Sun­day morn­ing in 1963, Dad was preach­ing from the pul­pit at Mount Mori­ah Methodist Church in White Hall, Vir­ginia, when screech­es and howls came up through the floor and a smoth­er­ing cloud of nox­ious fumes filled the sanctuary.

Sit­ting in one of the front pews, Cecil Gib­son jumped up and yelled, “Skunk!”

Dad hus­tled down from the pul­pit, wav­ing his arms toward the back doors. “Every­one outside!”

Hack­ing and cough­ing, the con­gre­ga­tion stam­ped­ed down the aisles, through the vestibule, and out the door. As the crowd of wor­ship­pers sucked in fresh air under a grove of tall pines, Cecil found a breach in the wire mesh over an open­ing to the church’s crawl space. Shin­ing a flash­light into the dark void, he spied a male and female skunk in fla­grante delic­to.

Up to that time, Dad had stead­fast­ly refused to call off church ser­vices even in the face of nat­ur­al dis­as­ters. He preached through floods, boom­ing thun­der­storms, and hur­ri­cane winds. Even when a big black snake slith­ered down the aisle and scur­ried under the piano in the mid­dle of Dad’s ser­mon, we dis­en­tan­gled the snake from the piano strings and Dad picked up right where he left off.

But skunk mat­ing sea­son posed a prob­lem like no oth­er. When the amorous cou­ple chose the warm space under the House of the Lord to seal their bond, they turned the sanc­tu­ary into a lethal gas cham­ber. Dad had no choice but to shut the place down.

It took three days for sev­er­al brave church mem­bers to chase the skunks from their hon­ey­moon bun­ga­low. By then the fur­nace had pumped their per­fume through heat­ing ducts into every nook and cran­ny. Cur­tains, cush­ions, and altar cloths were so mar­i­nat­ed in skunk juice they couldn’t be cleansed and had to be burned.

Fifty years lat­er when a pair of pole­cats bur­rowed under our house in San Mari­no, I remem­bered the lessons of the Mount Mori­ah skunk inva­sion. To pro­tect our fur­ni­ture and cloth­ing, I turned off the fur­nace and sealed off the duct vents, then made an urgent call to the ani­mal con­trol peo­ple. They referred me to a skunk specialist.

Some voca­tion­al choic­es make no sense to me. I can’t under­stand why any­one would strug­gle through med­ical school and then choose to become a proc­tol­o­gist. In Rat­tlesnake Avoid­ance Train­ing, I made clear you couldn’t pay me enough to be a rat­tlesnake han­dler. I’d sign up for those jobs in a heart­beat, though, if my only alter­na­tive was a career in skunk removal.

I smelled the skunk tech­ni­cian before his truck round­ed the turn at the end of my street. Short and over­weight with greasy shoul­der-length black hair and an expres­sion on his face befit­ting some­one on death row, he explained that he would bait a cage with peanut but­ter, trap the skunks overnight, and return the next morn­ing to col­lect them for release in the Ange­les Nation­al For­est. Cov­er­ing my nose with a ker­chief, I wrote him a check and care­ful­ly hand­ed it to him with­out mak­ing phys­i­cal contact.

At dawn, I awoke to enraged screams when the trap door fell, lock­ing the skunks in the cage. Lat­er that morn­ing when the skunk guy threw a tarp over the steel box and car­ried it out to his truck, they screamed again. The cloud of spray envelop­ing him was as thick as coal dust and the stench was … well … there are no words. As he drove away, I won­dered what it must be like to be him, to have no hope of ever going out on a date, mak­ing a friend, enjoy­ing the com­pan­ion­ship of a faith­ful pet, or even com­ing with­in shout­ing dis­tance of any crea­ture with olfac­to­ry glands.

I tell you my his­to­ry with skunks as a long-wind­ed intro­duc­tion to this month’s top­ic of con­tro­ver­sy: Pepé Le Pew. Pepé is a car­toon skunk who starred in 17 Looney Tunes pro­duc­tions, mak­ing his debut in 1945 in Odor-able Kit­ty and win­ning an Oscar in 1949 for Scent-imen­tal Rea­sons. Pepe’s char­ac­ter is mod­eled on Charles Boy­er, a French cin­e­mat­ic heart­throb of the 1940’s. Most of Pepe’s films involve the same plot line. By acci­dent a female cat ends up with a white stripe paint­ed down her back. Pepe mis­takes her for a skunk and falls in love. Bliss­ful­ly obliv­i­ous to his repul­sive odor, Pepé pur­sues the trau­ma­tized cat relent­less­ly while she des­per­ate­ly tries to fend him off.

When I was grow­ing up, Pepé’s one-sided, cross-species love affair made me laugh out loud, but appar­ent­ly not every child found Pepé’s antics humor­ous. In a March 3 NY Times op-ed about the can­cel­la­tion of sev­er­al Dr. Seuss Books, Charles Blow took a swipe at Pepé. “Some of the first car­toons I can remem­ber,” he wrote, “includ­ed Pepé Le Pew, who nor­mal­ized rape culture.”

At first, I thought Charles’s remark about Pepé was as looney as the toons he skew­ered, but in research­ing this post, I dis­cov­ered he is far from alone in regard­ing Pepé a per­vert. In 2000, Dave Chapelle, the come­di­an, in a stand-up rou­tine declared Pepé a “f****** rapist.” He was fish­ing for a laugh and got one, but since then many schol­ar­ly arti­cles have made sim­i­lar dead-seri­ous accu­sa­tions against Pepé.

This from Kirsten Thomp­son, Pro­fes­sor of Film Stud­ies at Seat­tle Uni­ver­si­ty: “Pepé’s nar­cis­sism relies on a strat­e­gy of dis­avow­al so hyper­bol­ic and resilient that his per­for­ma­tive and con­struct­ed mas­culin­i­ty lays bare its ide­o­log­i­cal repres­sion. Here the role of the joke nego­ti­ates the unset­tling ter­ri­to­ry of any cas­tra­tion anxieties.”

I have no clue what that means, but it doesn’t sound good, espe­cial­ly that last part.

Dr. Amber George, Assis­tant Pro­fes­sor of Cul­tur­al Diver­si­ty at Galen Col­lege of Nurs­ing, deliv­ered a more blunt cri­tique, assert­ing that Pepé’s behav­ior con­sti­tutes “sex­u­al harass­ment, stalk­ing, and abuse.” Pro­fes­sor Amy Bar­tow of the Uni­ver­si­ty of New Hamp­shire School of Law shared Charles Blow’s reac­tion to Pepé. “Those car­toons made me uneasy as a child, and now I find them tru­ly sick­en­ing. Rape isn’t fun­ny, and it cer­tain­ly isn’t ‘love.’”

After read­ing these arti­cles, I thought maybe I’m the one who’s looney, so I down­loaded Scen­ti-men­tal Rea­sons and watched it again. Okay, appar­ent­ly I’ve grown up a lit­tle. I’ll admit Pepé isn’t as fun­ny to me now as he was when I was a kid, and I can see what offends his detrac­tors. As Charles tweet­ed in defense of his NY Times remark, “Pepé grabs/kisses a girl/stranger, repeat­ed­ly, w/o con­sent and against her will.”

I get that, but I don’t agree with the con­clu­sions Charles and oth­ers draw from it – that Pepé teach­es lit­tle boys no doesn’t real­ly mean no and over­com­ing a woman’s stren­u­ous objec­tions is nor­mal, adorable, and funny.

I real­ize I’m not attuned to the chang­ing social norms. No one would char­ac­ter­ize me as “woke.” In fact, as an old guy who has a hard time remain­ing con­scious for eight hours at a stretch, my polit­i­cal state of aware­ness is, at best, “som­nam­bu­lant.”

But come on, man! Here’s the deal! Pepé’s a skunk. He’s chas­ing a cat. Skunks don’t rape cats. I’m not even sure skunks rape skunks. The cat isn’t afraid of Pepe’s “per­for­ma­tive and con­struct­ed mas­culin­i­ty.” She’s afraid of chok­ing to death on tox­ic skunk mist. That’s the joke – Pepé’s mis­ap­pre­hen­sion that the cat is a skunk who is immune from his stench. Which could nev­er hap­pen in real life because, and here’s the kick­er, CARTOONS ARE NOT REAL! They are named “Looney Tunes” for a reason.

I con­fess, how­ev­er, that I’m prob­a­bly not an objec­tive judge of Pepé’s char­ac­ter. I feel a cer­tain kin­ship with him. When your last name is Oder, you endure a lot of taunt­ing in ele­men­tary school. For a hor­ri­ble few weeks in the third grade, I got sad­dled with the nick­name Stinky. My lit­tle broth­er had it worse. In the sec­ond grade, the teacher assigned lock­er mates using the alpha­bet­i­cal order of their last names. In a cru­el twist of fate, my brother’s lock­er bud­dy became Ron­nie Pugh (pro­nounced “pew”). The Oder-Pugh lock­er took a lot of gas, so to speak. For those of us in the Oder clan, and prob­a­bly for most of the Pughs, Pepé’s per­sis­tent con­fi­dence in the face of an over­pow­er­ing social stig­ma gave us the strength to endure the wit­less slings and arrows of count­less imma­ture stu­pid jerks (not that we took it per­son­al­ly or hold a grudge or anything).

So while I’ve assid­u­ous­ly avoid­ed writ­ing posts about my polit­i­cal views because Pol­i­tics Makes Me Sick, on this par­tic­u­lar con­tro­ver­sy I feel com­pelled to speak my mind.

Let me be clear. On the ques­tion of Pepé Le Pew, I stand with the skunk!