Performed on stage by Lynn Crosbie at Ryeberg Live Toronto 2012.

I read that Snooki was having a baby, and this made me think about mothers, about mothers in pop and their changing faces.

I want to start with a clip of a 1981 film I watch each Mother’s Day, as a tribute to this creature’s lioness power and fearsome style.

Frank Perry, “Mommie Dearest” (1981)

A high camp classic, which has caused more than one delirious viewer to yell, “Hit her again!,” this movie critically undermines Christina’s highly suspect sob story and in fact, shockingly vulgar use of wire hangers on her beautiful little gowns.

In 1976’s “Of Woman Born,” Adrienne Rich discusses the maternal “heart of darkness,” and tells horrible tales of actual (not demented and cinematic) violence against children, torture and infanticide, committed by mothers for reasons I believe the great feminist writer calls “complex.”

And these women, these angry, even homicidal, women were losing their shit before what I call the “Panoptimom” came into existence.

What is this? Jeremy Bentham’s 18th century prison/Panopticon, designed for maximum visibility of the prisoners, prisoners who could never tell when they were being observed.

The Panoptimom is, simply, western culture’s constant scrutiny of the pregnant body, and then maternal conduct — a far more easier feat now, thanks to camera phones: was that crazy screaming bigot mom on the British subway simply a monster or a pretty bad mother who thought, Sunset Boulevard style, that given all the cameras, she was on TV sharing vital information about the working classes?

We watch: we watch the smoking mother, the beer and liquor drinker, the screamer, the smacker, the ignorer, the slob, the Diabetes-maker, the TV-allower, the unambitious-by-proxy, the tacky mom, the huge mom, the vain mom, the slutty mom, the mom with the bejeweled, lazy, chrissie ass.

How do mothers stand all this scrutiny, let alone the stealth photography/recordings?

They have started to become gorilla-like: the gorillas who stand, captured, behind glass, eating their vomit defiantly. That is, embracing the maternal aesthetics of the 1960s and 70s, and being as bad as they want to be.

Let me clarify: these are women in POP I am talking about. Here’s one.

Paul Feig, “Bridesmaids” (2011)

If the wretched Pop mother is a thrilling reference to women’s discontent, actual bad mothers are dull, and deeply disturbing. Look at this short clip.

HEADY1313, “Worst Mom Ever” (2009)

It’s not that what she does is so bad, in the context of all bad things, but in its utter triteness, it is almost unbearably cruel.

Pee Mother is the antithesis of my talk: actual, all evil substance, no style.

NMATV, “Frances Bean Cobain: Courtney Love Was A Bad Mom” (2012)

I am just letting videos run in the background of Courtney Love as an anime character (video abridged @ Ryeberg Live) and “Teen Mom,” Amber Portland, having a fight with her hideous baby daddy (played up to 0:16 @ Ryeberg Live).

xxpreppygalx, “Gary & Amber’s Fight” (Teen Mom, 2011)

These Mom villains, the first based on a true story, unfortunately, are clearly reveling in their rejection of such bourgeois values as nurturing and caring for their young; of not debasing them and murdering their pets with Oxycodone Snausages.

When Pop veers into reality, or reality TV, a site between truth and fiction, it is, obviously, harder to enjoy. Reality TV and YouTube have given us, long after the truly disturbing “America’s Funniest Videos,” virtually unprecedented insight into the fraught relationship between mother and child; into what constitutes their relationship and selves. Childhood is still, erroneously, viewed as an age of complete innocence (powerlessness is not innocence) and idolized: it is watched over hawkishly for reasons good and bad.

So when Snooki, Jersey Shore’s hard partying, heavy drinking, whipped-cream guzzling dwarf-goddess was revealed to be pregnant, one felt a collective, concerned gasp.

Here is Saturday Night Live’s take [sorry Canadians and The Rest Of The World Outside The United States, you're out of luck, though there is a very low quality version of this clip here].

Saturday Night Live, “Update: Snooki’s Preganancy” (2012)

YouTube posters are far more unkind: responding to her maybe-pregnancy, “enforced sterilization” has been suggested, contempt that “she thinks showers are a bunch of sprays of perfume” and the following: “I’m not in favor of abortion, but in this case I’ll make an exception. Please do not have the child. This woman should not breed, she should be fixed. This is the most retarded imbecile in the planet, the last thing a child needs is to be is born into her wierd, perverted, twisted version of the world. Let’s not forget that this is the same BEING that when in Rome, stood in front of the statue of David and commented on his peunus size. This moron should not be allowed to breed.”

This poster spells penis “peanus,” by the way. Allowed to breed? She should be “fixed”? The modern woman, filtered through pop culture, is here to tell you she is not a house cat but a tiger, a strong, vital creature ready to do battle for her right to be herself and a mother.

Which leads me to my favourite child, and by extension, the mother who raised her: I want to show Alana and her mother June, the Diva Beauty Queen and the Coupon Queen, respectively. Featured on “Toddlers and Tiaras” recently, they became a viral hit: Alana, for being the greatest child on earth; June for being “the world’s worst mother.”

TLC, “Coupon Queen & Honey Boo Boo” (Toddlers & Tiaras, 2012)

See when I watch June, her eyes rolled back into her skull, her body rocking perversely, and screaming with ecstasy: WORK IT SMOOCHIE! THAT”S IT BABY! , I feel warmed by her passionate love for this remarkable child.

Simone de Beauvoir notes, in “The Second Sex,” that we do not “make” our children, that they form themselves inside of us. Yet June raised Alana, and Alana’s charisma and wit speak to a very good life.

Make a list of all the children you would kidnap, if given the opportunity then admit she is pages above the Beckham or Jolie-Pitt dullards.

Among so many trying to break free, there is the great June. She is a brave, intrepid new mother: she is woman, roaring, too big too ignore.

- Lynn Crosbie

The Jackson Five, “Ben,” (1974)

I am writing this in the days following the death of Michael Jackson, thinking about those dreadful shrines people put on dead stars’ doorsteps, or any number of loci significant enough to bear the weight of crazed portraiture, sentimental plush, guttered votive candles and personal notes that invariably make assertions about immortality.

The shrines, which were once randomly, and idiosyncratically, assembled, are now curated according to modern tradition: One may, for example, write I LOVE YOU MICHAEL with a glitter-pen; but one may not leave a suicide note written in blood on the back of a Gund toy. One may leave cheap cellophane-wrapped daisies, but not a spangled blood orange; one may not set fire to the shrine while howling about its tawdry sentimentality that likely disgusts the ravening, entirely-too-tasteful monster, Death.

The aesthetics of these shrines ensures that order and goodness prevail, while guaranteeing an absence of authentic regard for the deceased.

Michael Jackson, that sublime arbiter of taste, and peerless artist, has nothing to do with piles of garbage on street-corners: This is a man who was seldom seen without a surgical (or, occasionally, comical) mask in public; without bandage-wrapped fingers or pitch-black glasses, as though the world offended his senses and sensibilities.

Yet, he had a great deal to do with the maudlin effusions of fans. For all of his reserve, his seemingly phobic behaviors, he was unfailingly kind to, and open with, fans. While healthy celebrities routinely treat their public in the manner of Marie Antoinette, as contagions and threats to be swiftly dispatched of by their handlers, Jackson, who was genuinely fragile (in every sense of the word) would allow fans to kiss, hug, touch and even maul him.

When he said, “I love you all so much” at his last press conference to his delirious, screaming fans, he actually meant it.

And why not? Having spent his life despising and deforming The Man in the Mirror; having so few friends, he looked out, and, astonishingly, saw us looking back.

Look at this video of a Munich concert where a young woman rushes him, and he holds her, while singing “You Are Not Alone.” He holds her like a friend, like a brother, and like a lover, and he does not let go until she is dragged away screaming.

Michael Jackson, “You Are Not Alone,” (Live in Munich)

In this Bucharest concert, yet another young woman seizes him during “She’s Out of My Life,” and he not only holds her back, he plants a brief, smoking hot kiss on her. When she is dragged away, she is in a state of sexual frenzy. That lucky girl, reads much of the commentary. I feel the same way, except paralyzed with violent jealousy.

Michael Jackson, “She’s Out of My Life,” (Live in Bucharest, 1996)

Jackson was so sexy, something so few ever speak of, and the objects of his sexual attention were so arcane, so unknowable, a mere touch from him must have been explosive (this precise paradigm drives the fans of “Twilight,” who yearn so terribly for the leading man because he is also inscrutable and highly selective he is a hundred-year-old Vampire virgin.)

When Jackson came out hard, around the time of “Black or White,” with his new, crotch-grabbing move (which was promptly stolen by Madonna, the woman Jackson called “That heifer”), he became an even greater threat — brilliant, and dangerously, so strangely sexual.

Strangely, in part, because we knew we would never grab that; or for that matter, know of anyone who did.

Michael Jackson, “Black or White,” (1991)

By making his genitals so central to his mid-career performances, he implied, through gesture, that his sexuality was the key to the music, the dancing, the heat he put out (compare one swipe of Jackson’s graceful, dirty hand to the Mick Jagger’s laborious insistence, in “She’s So Cold” — ‘Put your hand on the heat, your hand on the heat and come on baby let’s go!”: black and white)

I used to want to buy posters of Jackson and rape them, I loved him so much.

And still do.

A few months ago, I went on a blind date with a surprisingly suave little man, who lives in a basement, has no job and likes to smoke pot all day.

He had been writing me ardent letters for weeks, and on the phone one night, he choked up: “This is it. You’re the one. I… I love you.”

And even as he clung to me as if I were a colossus made of sugar, his tiny legs and arms moving like insect feelers, I thought, “He is a nice man, I should give him a chance.”

He called me the next day to say I was “too angry” for him to deal with.

I called a friend and after laughing a lot about me caring what the cruel midget thought, he said, “When someone loves you, they love all of you.”

I feel that way about Michael Jackson. I love his music, his performing; I love his beauty and brilliance.

I also love the nylon wigs worn slightly askew, the painfully chic pairing of cotton pyjamas and garish haute couture, the messed up, make-out lipstick, the huge, black irises, the sexy taint of scandal, his curatorial practices, the name “Blanket“, the way he jumped on cars, or smashed up cars then turned into a proud black panther.

His startling innocence, his dope; how he felt his way through self-analysis saying “Childhood” a song and video that Stanley Kubrick seems to have made is his purest autobiography—his constant assertion that he was deprived of a childhood (true, and tortured during it also), which is why he is always with children.

Michael Jackson, “Childhood,” (1995)

I love that he sang the most beautiful love song, “Ben,” to a rat.

I love him for playing through the pain, the pain he said was “thunder.”

I love meeting a young gay friend and watching huge projections of his videos, watching him play with his then-wife Lisa Marie Presley in “You Are Not Alone,” because you can see a flash of his obviously enormous penis, something very clearly missing from the art of Jordy Chandler.

Michael Jackson, “You Are Not Alone,” (1995)

My friend once told me he used to fantasize that the rumours were true and wished he could meet and be ravished by Michael Jackson when he was 13.

But it was hard to fantasize about Jackson, whose sexuality was, ultimately, part of his mystery, part of the burlesque nature of some of his work. The man who was so complex that to have erotic thoughts about him is like making a pin-up of Picasso’s Dora Maar.

I love also, the crazy fans who attacked him on stage, for their ardent and innocent belief that if they held on to him, he would not let go.

He never did.

Death would have his way with my narcotic beauty, and, like so those driven to near-madness by this profound intimacy, would not release him.

- Lynn Crosbie