Back in 1963 — the year before I was born — a rather controversial book arrived in bookstores and select libraries. Not only controversial, but also popular. Popular among housewives, especially.
The Feminine Mystique, by Betty Friedan, who was a politically active housewife, known as Bettye Naomi Goldstein prior to her marriage to Carl Friedan in 1947. When the book came out, Ms. Friedan was challenging the American notion that “men are men, and women are housewives.”
I mention marriage, because it plays into today’s curious, and perhaps timely, story.
A story which, we might add, could have been shared in the Disney/Pixar movie, Finding Nemo, but wasn’t.
Readers who can still remember this animated feature (released in 2003, 40 years after Betty Friedan’s book) might recall that, at the beginning of the movie, two clownfish named Marlin and Coral had just moved into a new home — their new sea anemone — where they were hoping to raise their numerous babies, who, as the movie starts, are still only eggs waiting to hatch, hidden in a crevice near their anemone home.
Clownfish are also known as ‘anemone fish’ because each male-female couple lives in a mutually-beneficial symbiotic relationship with a selected sea anemone, where they live protected from predators. The clownfish male and female are immune to the poisonous string of the anemone, and they help defend their home (the anemone) against unwelcome intruders and parasites.
It’s a complicated set-up, but it works. Sort of like life in Pagosa Springs.
In the movie Finding Nemo, a Barracuda shows up outside the door, and Coral makes a valiant attempt to protect her eggs. (Against Marlin’s better judgement.) During the ensuing melee, Marlin gets knocked unconscious, and when he awakes, Coral is nowhere to be found, and all of the eggs have disappeared.
All the eggs, except for one solitary egg… the egg that will ultimately hatch, to become Marlin’s only child, Nemo… the son who will be raised by an overprotective father, and without a mother.
We won’t go into the rest of the adventure, because it has very little to do with the ‘Clownfish Mystique’.
The important detail that the scriptwriters at Pixar completely avoided in this animated fairytale, was perhaps too much for the viewing audience to tolerate in 2003. But I think we’ve come a considerable distance since then, in our ability to accept the previously unthinkable.
The habit of clownfish to hook up with a sea anemone is weird enough. But it turns out that clownfish have another unique characteristic.
All clownfish are born ‘male’. They live in small ‘family’ groups, and when the time arrives to have babies, the largest male in the group transitions.
‘He’ becomes a ‘she’.
She — being the largest family member, and also the only female — becomes the boss of the anemone, and pretty much keeps everyone else in line. (As human wives are occasionally known to do.) The second largest clownfish becomes the husband, and the biological father of any babies that happen to come along.
So we have one ‘mother’, ruling the roost, and one ‘father’ doing as he’s told, and a few miscellaneous ‘uncles’ hanging around without much to do.
But if the wife disappears for any reason (eaten by a barracuda, for example?) the ‘father’ transitions into a female… becoming the new ‘mother’… and the next largest ‘uncle’ becomes the new ‘father’.
And life goes on.
This is a well-known scientific fact that the Pixar/Disney scriptwriters knew about, but totally left out of the Nemo story. In reality, Marlin should have become Marlene.
I suspect that, were the movie made in 2022, we would have been told the truth.