Word: clingingly
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...fantastic nature of all of these characters can't in the end, do much to muffle the fact that everything families normally cling to for common happiness is steadily and completely destroyed for everyone in Bette and Boo's extended family: Thanksgiving is ruined in a mess of spilled gravy and arguments, nobody can remember why anyone celebrates Christmas, birthdays always end in somebody dying, horny priests make religion unreliable and children don't, in the end, ever respect their parents (and for good cause...
Both grapple with a universal truth: boys have complicated relationships with their mothers. Pollack, who is alarmed by what he calls the "silent crisis" of "normal" boys, says we live in a confused society in which mothers are afraid to cling to their sons. On the one hand, we ask 1990s boys to be sensitive and expressive, and on the other, we saddle them with the culture's outdated notions of masculinity. The result is what Pollack calls the ever present "boy code"--a stoic, uncommunicative, invulnerable stance that does not allow boys to be the warm, empathic human beings...
...exactly, insists the anthropologically oriented Gurian, who focuses on adolescent boys. Boys--who are just being who they are--are making a natural, and critical, separation. And by the way, moms cling too much. Boys are more independent than girls at ages 5 and 6. To suggest something is wrong with this is to "pathologize" boys. Indignant about society's ignorance of male biology, Gurian says we're basing our expectations on female models...
ORANGUTANS: Months of drought and fire have brought starvation to Borneo's apes. Many babies, too weak to cling to their mothers, fall out of the trees...
...because of the potential for abuse and, more to the point, the traditionally seedy associations that cling to impotence remedies (witness the ads in the back of low-rent men's magazines for spurious Spanish fly, hard-on creams and the like) that drug companies have only recently turned their attention to sexual dysfunction. This would account for the tone adopted by Pfizer chairman and CEO William Steere even as he figuratively licks his chops over the potential market in "aging baby boomers." He is careful to point out that "quality-of-life drugs are gene-based just like those...