First published in the Huffington Post 01-30-08
The Doppler Effect and sex in the city
In Wallace Stegner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Angle of Repose, a wheelchair-bound historian looks back into his family’s frontier past. It includes a meditation on “The Doppler Effect,” which led me to consider how this scientific principle could apply to something seemingly unrelated—animal attraction. With dozens of single friends looking for the perfect partner for horizontal repose, a nagging thought consumed me. Could “Doppler” be synonymous with “duped?”.
Doppler Effect-the frequency shift of the signal in relation to the relative motion of a source or an observer.
The Doppler Effect is, as Stegner explains it, what happens when something moving toward us seems louder and ever-more full of energy than the same object moving away from us. If you recognize the word “Doppler” it may be that you paid attention in high school physics, or because it’s now ubiquitous in local news weather forecasts for tracking storms and showing speed of movement on “Doppler Radar.” Stegner, writing in 1972, used a train in his example of “Doppler.” This put some coal in my boiler and the wheels in my brain began turning.
Consider the roar of a train coming in your direction. According to “The Doppler Theory,” when the source (the train) is moving toward the observer (a man or woman ) the sound frequency increases. This is called the "Doppler Shift." Now, consider the relative quiet sound as the train’s whistle passes -- leaving for new destinations. While pulling away, a train is often described as emitting a lonely, forlorn sound. According to “The Doppler Theory,” the sounds of the whistle change as it passes because of changes in wavelengths.
Doesn’t this sound a lot like what happens with an object of desire?
Fresh meat, the “object,” approaches and, like the theory, emits a high frequency “sound” that creates rapidly colliding energy molecules; in this case, sexual energy. The person left behind with little more than a churning gut and the sound of a forlorn whistle, no longer pulls at the heart strings of the one now chasing new frequencies. Wavelengths have changed as the old object fixates on the new higher energy frequency. All this happens in the subconscious, hardly noticeable to anyone but the used goods now a distant-lonely-whistle-blowing-country-western-song.
Hank Williams:
I was ridin’ number nine
Headin' south from caroline
I heard that lonesome whistle blow
Got in trouble had to roam
Left my gal and left my home
I heard that lonesome whistle blow
Ole’ Hank had a hankering and didn’t know why. He never considered the frequency of the signal emitted by the moving object—someone new and different on a collision course with a beloved. Doppler Effect=apple-bite.
So, how exactly is a nice girl supposed to survive this Doppler Theory world? A woman taught to take time getting to know an object of desire doesn’t stand a chance. Consider the woman who was taught to meet the family and know the guys middle name before becoming intimate. She's just a sad lonely caboose without a chance against a new high frequency train moving across a crowded room.
In this often predatory, prestige-driven, money-mongering world—a wedding ring or a commitment can be cancelled out by The Doppler Theory, a push up bra, mini shirt and stilettos heels or worse-- a bespectacled, clever, intelligent woman of substance. Ouch those hurt!
Stegner compared “The Doppler Effect” to the body’s inevitable weaknesses leading to deterioration, but perhaps when the whistle blows in a crowded room a train wreck of another sort might be in the making.
I’ll never see that gal of mine
Lord, I’m in Georgia doin’ time
I heard that lonesome whistle blow.
Here is another op-ed:
