The Cartman Effect

Imagine you’re an independent woman trying to make it while you’re still young enough to matter. One day, you come home from work and find your post-divorce sex partner diddling your young child. Do you:

a) grab your child, call the cops on the son-of-a-bitch, press charges, cut off all contact, and get your kid to a therapist?

Or

b) only cut ties with the guy because your parents threatened to cut you out of their inheritance, then spend the rest of your life spoiling the child out of guilt even though you subconsciously hold him/her responsible for ruining your last remaining chance at having a perfect life?

If you answered B, congratulations, you’re the reason why there’s an overabundance of twenty-something men who shoot up colleges because they can’t get chicks to sleep with them (even one is too many, in my opinion). Fortunately for the above case, I was able to defuse the situation by doing the favor for the guy in question (you’re welcome, Cypress College), but he’s still so socially retarded that I’ve have to convince people he’s got some sort of neurological disorder to explain why he can’t function in situations that call for common courtesy. The problem of (often single) mothers forming co-dependent relationships with their sons to make up for their own shittiness is far too prevalent for my tastes. I don’t know what it’s called, but I like to call it the Cartman effect – after the relationship between the infamous South Park character and his mom.

I went into excessive detail about another victim of this travesty in my last post – basically, some overly-opinionated abuse victim took her life’s frustration out of her soul offspring to the point where he (later she) didn’t know how to act appropriately with people. Now that kid (only a year younger than me) is her personal caretaker, and probably will be until the devil can’t hold her off any longer.

Let’s also examine the case of Elliot Rodger, the frustrated virgin responsible for the 2014 Isla Vista killings. His parents were long divorced, and after the tragedy his dad and stepmother were available for comment, but where the hell was his egg donor? I did a quick Google search for “Elliot Rodger mother” and came across an array of articles blaming everything but the kitchen sink, but what really stood out to me was the claim that Rodger’s mother somehow needed more child support money to deal with his “high-functioning autism.” I’m no social worker, but I’m not entirely sure how getting more government cheese is supposed to help a child with a condition that requires special care and attention. Combined with the fact that Rodger’s father hooked up with yet another exotic piece of ass shortly after the divorce and his mother was dabbling around in the film industry when her unexpected pregancy broke her stride, I think it’s safe to assume that maybe the former missus needed to feel pretty again and put her son’s perceived mental condition on the back-burner. If this guy spent at least half his home life with this woman, why wasn’t she stepping up to bat while he was being bullied and obviously out-of-touch with reality?

Now let’s be clear – Elliot Rodger and only Elliot Rodger was responsible for those murders. But who was responsible for making sure he didn’t grow up to be a fucked-up train wreck? Yeah, his dad probably could have shown him a thing or two about what it means to be a good man, but in the majority of divorce cases, custody goes to the mother. Society usually does not bat an eye at men who aren’t involved in their children’s lives, but the stigma of non-custodial women is strong – perhaps that’s why otherwise unfit mothers are caring for children they neither want nor deserve. I say this as an non-custodial mother myself – granted, my situation involved me getting screwed over by my ex-husband, but even though he’s a selfish, unmotivated jackass, he has managed to do his part well enough that the kids are thriving even when I’m not there to run the show. But for every single parent of either sex who is doing the best they can with the tools at their disposal, there’s a Liane Cartman prototype who would rather infantilize her son and be a self-centered whore at the expense of the rest of the world.