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17 April 2008

Question for the Gentlemen: When you were a little boy, did you pull the wings off flies?→[More:]One of my coworkers just had a baby boy, and she apparently is not looking forward to when he's old enough to pull the wings off flies, which she declares is something ALL little boys do, and girls don't. So, I'm takin' a poll.

And, yes, I know it sounds weird, but we've all been working a lot of overtime lately and we're very tired. :)

post by: JanetLand at: 08:11 | 51 comments

Nope.

posted by BoringPostcards 17 April | 08:18

I did.

posted by Daniel Charms 17 April | 08:19

No. . but I did something equally cruel. We (a friend and I) would find a nest of red ants, and (while getting stung a few times) collect as many of them as we could.

Then we would find a nest of the smaller black ants, and release the red ants on it. Ant war. The black ants always won, but the casualties on both sides were vast.

Once the last red ant had been dismembered and carried off by the black ants, we would solemnly acknowledge how bravely they fought.

I am not proud of this.

posted by danf 17 April | 08:24

I knew a girl who did that with the ants.

posted by brujita 17 April | 08:27

I did not mutilate insects or animals as a tot. OK, maybe once or twice I burned up ants with the sunlight beam through a magnifying glass.

posted by birdherder 17 April | 08:29

I'm a girl and when I was three or so, I was cruel to ladybugs. They offended me somehow is my memory of it, so I pulled off their under wings (underneath their red wings.) I also tried to catch ants in my mouth as they crawled around on my mother's peonies. It was strange and cruel, but speaking personally, I grew up to be quite an empathetic person. A friend of mine, pointed out recently that my work whether I am performing, writing or running youth programs speaks to my activism. All I am saying is that even though I was cruel as a child, in fact as an adult, I am a quite the opposite.

posted by typewriter 17 April | 08:31

Guilt aside, yes. Didn't everyone do this or something similar at some point in their lives? Sometimes after you'd pull 1 wing off and put the fly down, they'd beat the other wing and causing them to spin wildly. Great fun for a 5 year old. Fortunately, I've outgrown it. But in the big scheme of things, I don''t think its a great crime. What we do to domestic food animals everyday to get our eggs and meat and milk are greater crimes against life, imho.

posted by DarkForest 17 April | 08:40

My friends and I tried to catch dragonflies by their wings, not to pull them off, but just to say we accomplished it. It definitely wasn't easy.

posted by deadcowdan 17 April | 08:40

Well, I'm kind of on your side there, DarkForest, but I decided that wasn't the kind of discussion I wanted to get into with a coworker on very little sleep. :) I told her that when the kid gets big enough to watch tv, she should rent that episode of The Andy Griffith Show where Opie gets a slingshot and kills a bird and then is completely covered with remorse.

posted by JanetLand 17 April | 08:48

I am a girl, and I pulled the wings off flies. I think I was about 5 years old, because I distinctly remember doing it at my daycare center, while everyone else was napping.

OMG GENDER STEREOTYPES ARE SOMETIMES UNTRUE!

posted by muddgirl 17 April | 08:54

I didn't pull wings off flies, I went out of my way not to kill anything in fact, I set my brothers toad free on a nightly basis. The cruelest thing i did was catch fireflies in jars with airholes and keep caterpillars in my lego-houses (they died because I brought them the wrong food to eat or something). Everywhere we went I picked up stray cats and dogs and fed them. Once I found a near dead baby bird on the street and promptly fetched the baddest guy I knew and convinced him to kill it with a rock because it had a broken wing. He had the hardest time doing it but being egged on by two girls he was "manly" enough to close his eyes and throw the rock as hard as he could at the head for a clean kill. We were about seven. I've adopted spiders and made little barriers around their webs so that silly kids wouldn't walk into them. I've carried home porcupines that needed some food. Does this make me a girly girl?

posted by dabitch 17 April | 08:58

No, I never had much of a desire to be cruel to insects or animals. What did they ever do to me?

posted by cmonkey 17 April | 09:03

Flies? No.

Ants? Crayfish? Mole crabs? Yeah, tortured the hell out of those.

posted by danostuporstar 17 April | 09:05

My wife and I have successfully managed to teach our boys not harm insects though (as far as I know).

posted by danostuporstar 17 April | 09:07

I'm a girl, and I never did anything of the sort. In fact, it flipped me right out to see it happening. I would yell and cry.

posted by rainbaby 17 April | 09:11

No, never.

How do you even manage to catch a fly in order to pull its wings off?

posted by chrismear 17 April | 09:11

No, but, like birdherder, I did the magnifying glass / ant thing on a few occasions.

posted by misteraitch 17 April | 09:23

nope. never did anything like that.

posted by dismas 17 April | 09:24

I'm like dabitch. So are both my kids for the most part, girl and boy. Although there were some ant wars and magnifying glass incidents from the boy at about age 8 or thereabouts but since the ants were in my flower garden, it didn't bother me much. I've never known anyone to pull the wings off flies, although I remember at one point in college that a couple of guys got into gluing string to flies and walking them on "leashes." Then they cut the strings short and let them go - no word from the flies on how they felt about it. Art students are weird.

posted by mygothlaundry 17 April | 09:31

No, though I did occasionally make little gliders out of tracing paper and toothpicks and glue flies to them. Saw it in some magazine somewhere.

posted by eamondaly 17 April | 09:31

No, though I did occasionally make little gliders out of tracing paper and toothpicks and glue flies to them.

≡ Click to see image ≡
Fly Bomber

posted by quonsar 17 April | 09:46

I'm with chrismear--I don't know that I could have caught and pulled the wings off of flies if I wanted to.

I did catch and imprison plenty of fence lizards. Although this sometimes resulted in the death of the lizards, I didn't harm them on purpose. However, I did go through a bb-gun phase where I somehow managed to kill a couple lizards from across the yard and hit a couple beastly pigeons (though I don't know if the pigeons died--they always just flew away).

posted by mullacc 17 April | 09:55

I don't know that I could have caught and pulled the wings off of flies if I wanted to

Most of my victims were the sort of flies that had been repeatedly buffetting the window in my room, trying to escape, and were thus on the verge of death anyway - they were easy to catch, but still had a bit of flight left in them.

posted by muddgirl 17 April | 09:58

Negative here.

posted by netbros 17 April | 10:12

Nope. I never quite got the whole torture thing with animals. I actually quit the Boy Scouts after witnessing a particularly nasty event with a toad that the Scoutmasters either condoned or turned a blind eye to.

posted by ufez 17 April | 10:24

Not flies (yeah, I never figured out how people caught them for these operations either), but I used to squish the abdomens on ants and watch them flail around stuck to the table or wherever by their own gut juices.

I don't do that anymore, but I still take unholy joy in smothering cockroaches with Scrubbing Bubbles and other nasty corrosive cleaning stuff.

posted by casarkos 17 April | 11:17

Pulling wings off flies? No, that's mean. Salt on snails? Yup. In my defense though, I was serving the fatherland.

posted by spork 17 April | 11:20

Hell no. I was practically a kiddy Jainist.

At the age of three or four one of my first exposures to Human Nature was seeing some older kids use a wooden stake to whack off the leg of a frog in a stream. "Should we kill him?" one said. "No, let him suffer," said the kid who'd done the whacking.

Hell no.

posted by shane 17 April | 11:40

Heh. I'm wondering why this was a "Question for the gentlemen."
;-)

Although I suppose the male adolescent sex is the cruellest to flies and is, traditionally, more concerned with insects in general.

posted by shane 17 April | 11:44

I specifically asked the guys because my coworker was insisting that "boys ALWAYS do this and girls NEVER do." So she's unhappy anticipating the evil things her baby boy will do one day. Mind, I don't agree with her views at all, but I figured if a few of you fellers said you didn't pull wings off flies in your boyhood she might feel better. As I said, we're a little overtired at work this week.

posted by JanetLand 17 April | 11:53

Oh, and my brother and sister and I did the red ants/black ants war thing.

posted by JanetLand 17 April | 11:54

I suppose the male adolescent sex is the cruellest to flies

In my case, the torture was definitely pre-pubescent. By adolescence I had moved on to hating myself.

posted by danostuporstar 17 April | 12:01

Burned ants with a magnifying glass a couple of times. Used to catch wasps and tear them in half when I was really little, until my brother informed me that they can sting you and it REALLY HURTS. I spent the rest of my childhood being terrified of them. Karma's a bitch, I guess.

posted by middleclasstool 17 April | 12:27

Nope. Never.

I may have burned a few ants with a magnifying glass, and I distinctly remember tying a string to a june bug's leg and keeping it like a pet for a while, but no fly mutilation.

posted by BitterOldPunk 17 April | 12:30

I never touched a bug if I could help it. I dunno if my brothers were wee bastards, but I wouldn't put it past them.

posted by deborah 17 April | 13:03

Ants + magnifying glass, yep. We also used to turn on the porch light in order to attract june bugs, then we'd go after them mid-air with a whiffle bat.

I also had a BB gun phase. Used to shoot the locusts out of the trees.

By the time I turned 6 or 7, all the horned toads were gone from our part of Texas. But before that, there were loads of them. We'd catch them and annoy them, just to try to make them shoot blood from their eyes. (Which they supposedly do when agitated, although I don't remember ever seeing it happen.)

I'm not proud of any of this, but hey -- a lot of childhood (boy or girl) is about avoiding boredom and proving that you're not the lowest on the pecking order.

posted by mudpuppie 17 April | 13:16

I did, but I was a little girl with four older brothers. We also put firecrackers into the eyes of Irish Lords (freaky-looking and spikey fish that we would pull up in our fishing boat net every summer).

posted by rhapsodie 17 April | 13:21

Girl here. I did glue string to a few flies and keep them as pets, and burned some with a magnifying glass once or twice, and spraypaint them so I could track them but I never pulled their wings off.

I loved torching wasp nests though, with a lighter and a can of deodorant - I only stopped doing it when I was 14 or so. Cane toad golf was also played until about the same age. The ant war kinda sounds like fun.

posted by goo 17 April | 13:25

One summer we went through a phase of pulling the legs off of daddy long leg spiders one at a time and catching lightning bugs so we could smear the glowing tail on our clothes and glow too! I don't know what we were thinking! YUCK!

posted by zookeeper 17 April | 13:26

and catching lightning bugs so we could smear the glowing tail on our clothes and glow too!

Most of my brain is saying "Oh, how awful! Glurk!", but a little sliver of me is turning the idea over in my head. "So the material of the tail glows independently of the organism? Hmmmm. Interesting."

I. Am. Gross.

posted by Elsa 17 April | 13:40

wings off flies? no.

salt on slugs? yes; mom was (is) protective of the garden.

posted by heeeraldo 17 April | 13:55

Elsa, if I remember correctly we broke off the tails while lit (glowing) and then smeared them on our clothes. I think we glowed for only a few minutes. We would write stuff on our clothes too. Ewwwwwwww!
I am a girl by the way and I am sure I only did this under the influence of my older brother.

posted by zookeeper 17 April | 14:21

Flies no. We used to remove the glowing parts of fireflies and stick them all over ourselves like war paint.

Salt on slugs or pools of beer to have them drown, but that was actually being encouraged by my parents because the slugs were harming the garden.

posted by terrapin 17 April | 14:54

We also used to turn on the porch light in order to attract june bugs, then we'd go after them mid-air with a whiffle bat.

We used to do that with lightning bugs. When you made contact, they looked like little shooting stars as they plummeted down to the grass.

I also remember cutting an earthworm in half once, but that was only because I'd been told both halves of the worm would go on living (instead of neither, which is what actually happened).

(Related)

posted by Atom Eyes 17 April | 16:26

i tied a string to a fly as a leash. That's all i got.
i kill when i have to, but i avoid it if i can. Torture is only reserved for unrepentant humans for which death is too kind.
i have some significant bug trauma and slugs just squick me out no end.

posted by ethylene 17 April | 16:39

NO!

it's not a boy thing, I hope!

(I asked the boy and it squuueeeks him out!
Maybe he's a metrosexual?
How lucky am I??)

posted by Wilder 17 April | 16:45

No.

That ant thing sounds interesting, though. I guess some of us never grow up.

posted by dg 17 April | 17:08

I pull the wings off of angels.

posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson 17 April | 19:16

By the time I turned 6 or 7, all the horned toads were gone from our part of Texas. But before that, there were loads of them.

Coincidence? I think not!

posted by deadcowdan 17 April | 21:05

which she declares is something ALL little boys do

Funny, I thought all little boys burned ants with magnifying glasses. Never got that one either.

posted by hadjiboy 18 April | 00:35

Thank you terrapin! I'm glad we weren't the only ones removing glowing parts and sticking them on ourselves.

posted by zookeeper 18 April | 00:59

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