The Body Panic Phenomena

 

Body panics come from a heightened level of paranoia that is rooted from the fear of the unknown. For extra-terrestrial forces in particular, people are scared of this idea that aliens come to earth, abduct them and violate them for their own experimental purposes. It started as a metaphor for the AIDS crisis that overcame the 1950’s and reignited in the 1980’s and 1990’s. The aliens being homosexuals and their “probing” being the reason the AIDS virus was spreading at such a rapid rate.

The fear of communism wasn’t the only issue on the minds of American’s. “Hysterical fears about bugs, germs, microbes, monsters, aliens, and all manner of scapegoated others dominated the political and popular culture of the McCarthy years.” (Knight, 169)

After all, the term for alien is not always referring to a little green man from outer space. In many definitions of it, the connection is made about the fact that the alien is a person who does not belong in the area in which they are inhabiting. Whether it be someone of a different nationality or sexuality or even political view.

If people were more interested and fearful of hypothetic monsters around the times of heightened hysteria, could the stories told in entertainment media be a form of propaganda that was taken too literally? 

Everyone fears the possibility that some disease or unknown species will come along and manipulate their body into a deformed state they can’t come back from. It is really their own society that the fear is mostly rooted from.

Think about today’s culture. When the Ebola virus was spreading this was another form of alienation that was felt throughout society. People feared a life altering disease that was believed to come from foreign countries. Shutting out foreign influencers seemed to be an option most hoped for. Travel was restricted and anyone who was believed to come from contaminated areas was quarantined. No coincidence that area 51 officials in the movies wear hazard masks and suits and place aliens in restrictive cells. The parallels are uncanny and shows the true colors of a frightened society.

Source:

Knight, Peter. Conspiracy Culture: American Paranoia from the Kennedy Assassination to The X-Files. Routledge, 2001.

-Paige Siewert