I. The Setup
Remember when you first looked down and discovered wayward hairs growing in strange and embarrassing places? Now imagine that, but all over your body. Or, if you’re Robin Williams, just imagine that. Thus is the true curse of the lycanthrope — the legendary werewolf. Unless you’re willing to wax your entire body every full moon (ouch) or take a dip in a vat of Nair (ouch, with burning), you’re in for an unsightly night on the town.
That’s right. Don’t fool yourself into believing being a werewolf is all sexy brooding and surfing on top of vans. Teen Wolf is a lie, my friends. There’s a lot more to this story.
II. The Findings
Like any good myth, the werewolf at its best works as a metaphor for unwelcome change—primarily hormonal. Teen Wolf plays up the puberty angle (for a little while anyway, before the whole van-surfing basketball star bit), but the werewolf story also has some roots in man’s fear of woman’s menstruation cycle. And you thought the whole moon phases bit was just a coincidence. In the days before science, it was much easier for a husband to blame his wife’s irritability on an inhuman and unholy transformation than it was to understand chemical surges.
In the days of yore, professional witch hunters (woman-haters, we call them today) decided to officially list the wolf as one of the furry creatures practitioners of the dark arts (single white females, we call them today) could change into. This accusation of shape-shifting served a purpose. Anyone who might be a little squeamish about throwing a woman onto the fire simply for choosing to live alone could take comfort in knowing that under her sweet, sexy visage, there lay a vicious, hairy wolf.
This concept worked so well, it soon branched out to encompass men. Soon, anyone could spread rumors about their annoying neighbors. “Did you hear that howling coming from the Stevensons’ hut the other night?” In fact, it was eventually decided that werewolves don’t even have to take the shape of a wolf. In 1541, a man was accused of having a fine pelt of wolf hair under his skin and died under the steady hand of a surgeon’s scalpel.
In 1216, the talk of the town was that England’s recently deceased King John had to have been a werewolf. How else to explain his complete incompetence as a ruler of any sort?
[nms:werewolf,4,0]
Before you get all excited, George W. Bush probably isn’t a werewolf either.
But, of course, any kind of outlandish claim needs some kind of explanation. You can’t just go around saying people you don’t like are werewolves (well, not all the time). Just like homeopaths have to explain their flasks of water by saying they contain curative “energy”, the men who cried werewolf also had to come up with some inane, pseudo-scientific reasoning. How does one become a werewolf? Medieval churchman Gervase of Tilbury claimed that stripping naked and rolling in sand under a full moon would do it. Out of Italy came the idea that being conceived under a full moon or sleeping outdoors under a full moon on Friday would turn a person all hairy. Or make you into a vampire. They weren’t really clear. St. Patrick is said to have cut out the middle man and just cursed an entire clan he disliked with a bad case of lycanthropy. Of course, you could also just drink from the same stream as a wolf, suffer a rabid wolf’s bite, or munch on a wolfbane plant. The methods are about as varied as the rules of feng shui.
III. The Conclusion
It’s interesting to ponder the fact that the only way to kill a werewolf is to shoot it with a silver bullet. Wouldn’t a silver bullet to the brain kill just about anything? Yes, and here lies the fundamental truth behind the werewolf myth. The only way to stop our bodies from changing—from growing, from shrinking, from sprouting hairs, from driving us mad from month to month and year to year—is to stop them from doing anything else. Our only escape from the unknowns of our physical existence is death.
A scary thought, yes. But not all of us can be like a furry Michael J. Fox. Damn Teen Wolf was cool.
About The Amateur Scientist: Brian Thompson is a professor of amateur science at a major imaginary university. He has been able to read and write for over seventeen years.
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Brian Thompson is a professor of amateur science at a major imaginary university and a regular blogger at CHUD. He has been able to read and write for over seventeen years. 
Good summary! Can you touch on cannibalism next? Only I felt that that motivation to blame werewolvism or other shape-shifting impulses to devour human flesh would tie in nicely with the real practices of anthropagy.
Anywho, I’m really enjoying these series of articles.
“Like any good myth, the werewolf at its best works as a metaphor for unwelcome change—primarily hormonal.”
Right you are. It was used rather effectively to that end both with Oz (and sort of Veruca) on ‘Buffy’, and with the pack of teen-wolves who call themselves the Alphas in Jim Butcher’s ‘Dresden Files’ books. Both sets of characters come into their lycanthropy during their confusing adolescence, and learn to control their own transformations as they mature.
Cannibalism is a great topic. Thanks for the suggestion. Now I can spend less time trolling through my dusty tomes. And no, that’s not a masturbation euphemism.