I"Women commit the majority of child homicides in the United States, a greater share of physical child abuse, an equal rate of sibling violence and assaults on the elderly, about a quarter of child sexual abuse, an overwhelming share of the killings of newborns, and a fair preponderance of spousal assaults. [...] The sole explanation offered by criminologists for violence committed by a woman is that it is involuntary, the rare result of provocation or mental illness, as if half the population of the globe consisted of saintly stoics who never succumbed to fury, frustration, or greed. Though the evidence may contradict the statement, the consensus runs deep. Women from all walks of life, at all levels of power — corporate, political, of familial, women in combat and on police forces — have no part in violence.
"It is one of the most abiding myths of our time."
Patricia Pearson,
When She Was Bad: Violent Women and the Myth of Innocence, 1997, Penguin Putnam.
Medea, written by Euripides in 431 BC, is widely recognized as one of the most important plays from Ancient Greece.The titular character is married to Jason, who led the argonauts to find the golden fleece. However, Jason abandons her to marry Glauce, daughter of King Creon of Corinth. He apologizes to Medea for the turmoil he'll cause her and their two kids. But he promises to pay the ancient Greek equivalents of alimony and child support, and invites her to be a mistress so she can maintain some social standing. Medea kindly invites Jason to cram it sideways and break off the handle. She then goes about proving how hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.
Medea brewing poison, as painted by Anthony Frederick Augustus Sandys, 1868.First, Medea counsels with a group of Corinthian woman, who vet her plan. Jason has wronged her, they insist, so her urge for revenge is righteous. As translated by
E. P. Coleridge Medea says to the children's nurse, "Now will I explain to thee my plans in full; do not expect to hear a pleasant tale." Under the guise of a peace offering, Medea poisons King Creon and Glauce. But she's still not satisfied. Medea decides to kill her two children, to hurt Jason in the most devastating way possible. The children's nurse objects: "Why, pray, do thy children share their father's crime?" Medea replies, "No word divulge of all my purpose, as thou art to thy mistress loyal and likewise of my sex." In other words, "If you're loyal to me and to all women, don't snitch. It's us against the men." After killing her children Medea flees to Athens with two little bodies, denying Jason a funeral and burial.
A leading literary interpreation of Medea has become prominent in academic scholarship over the past 20 years. Is Medea seen as a vivid depiction of the destructive power of vengeance? Nope. Is the play cited as an example of how the breakdown of a marriage leads to suffering for families? Try again. How Medea is driven to madness by a series of betrayals and misfortunes? Wrong. Is Medea an early feminist, refusing domination in a male-dominated society? Winnar!
Undoubedtly, Medea gets the shaft. She saves Jason from an effing dragon, relocate to his city, then she's unceremonesously dumped when Jason can marry up. These facets of the play arguably represent Medea's inferior status. But morally or logically, how can a woman's callous decision to murder her own children to spite her ex be construed as anything other than the worst kind of evil?
II"
The Walnut Creek [California] woman who killed her teenage son on Mount Diablo before shooting herself was angry that the boy was spending more time with her ex-husband."
Despite the horrorshows of several recent "fetal kidnappings" via Stanley-knife C-section, the crime of Judith Williams, 51, is the crime that's refused to leave my mind. I had a nightmare about her.
On 17 July 2009, Williams drove her 17 year old son Adam to a popular lookout spot in a state park near Oakland. She took a photo of Adam, before shooting him and killing herself. In her suicide note Williams said she was in financial trouble, and was angry because Adam had reestablished a relationship with his father Bill.
In 1996, when Adam was about five years old, Williams filed for divorce from Bill. Why'd she file for divorce? The news doesn't say. I can only speculate. But statistically, the most likely option is that she simply tired of Bill. Women file for 75% of divorces, and the overwhelming majority of those are no-fault divorces without allegations of infidelity, abuse or addiction. After the divorce, Bill moved to his home state of Missouri. A few years ago, he returned to California to be closer to his son. But mamma didn't care for that...
During her invocation of Medea in Walnut Creek, Williams was primarily motivated by a desire to hurt her ex-husband. The worst kind of evil.
IIIWomen commit the majority of child homicides not only in the United Satates, but worldwide. And worldwide, women are more likely to kill their sons than their daughters. These figures are consistent even after adjustment for single and two-parent families. Everywhere we look, the most lethal person in a young child's life is his or her mother.
In Finland. See Vanamo, et al., "Intra-familial child homicide in Finland 1970–1994: incidence, causes of death and demographic characteristics" in Forensic Science International vol. 117, no. 3, 2001.
In South Africa. See Byard, et al., "Murder-Suicides Involving Children: A 29-Year Study" in The American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology, vol. 20 no. 4, 1999.
In Brazil, Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Austria, New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Hong Kong, and Turkey. See Friedman et al, "Child Murder by Mothers: A Critical Analysis of the Current State of Knowledge and a Research Agenda" in the American Journal of Psychiatry vol. 162, 2005.
I'll never again take it as an idle threat when a woman says she brought her child into this world and also can take 'em out of this world.
Incidentally, my personal experiences align with these broader scientific findings. My dad spanked me once when I was a child. He calmly explained the spanking was a punishment for a misdeed: he'd warned me to cut it out, I didn't cut it out, and a spanking was the consequence. With the palm of his hand, dad delivered four or five swats to my butt. My mom, on the other hand, didn't use her hand. She preferred wooden spoons. Mom delivered a frenzied fusillade at least six or eight occasions as a kid; twice while her fuse blew while talking on the phone I outran her as she tried to spnk me and maintain the conversation. Once she broke the spoon. I never knew exactly why she was whacking my ass. Her behavior was arbitrary, unpredictable. And using a wooden spoon meant that she was more likely to inflict severe damage, and less likely to feel any discomfort compared to a slap with a hand. In hindsight, "abusive" seems an apt word to describe my mom's behavior.
IVMessages permeating the culture say that women have a special claim to spiritual, moral, ethical, communicative and emotional superiority. The message is pervasive, yet can be subtle and so firmly established that it's unquestioned. For example, husbands on television are typically portrayed as bumbling, inept, egomaniacal fools; mischievous little boys in oversexed men's bodies. For half a century, from Jackie Gleason to Ray Romano, husbands are routinely depicted as useless without the chiding and guidance of their longsuffering wives.
And it ain't just on teevee that one finds evidence of sexist double-standards and anti-male bias. In his 1994 Master's thesis for Canada's Wilfrid Laurier University,
Jim Boyce did a systematic review of Canada's daily newspaper headlines. When reporting violent crimes, the papers demonstrated a profound bias. If females suffered a violent crime, their sex was mentioned in the headline over 90% of the time. But when males are victims of violent crime, their sex was mentioned less than 5% of the time. This bias even extended to crimes against children. A headline on rampant sexual abuse of girls: "8 in 10 native girls sexually abused, study finds." Compare with a headline on rampant sexual abuse of boys: "Beatings, sexual abuse alleged at Catholic-run reform school in Ontario."
The message from Canadian newspapers – and I suspect that America aint different; read your local newspaper critically -- is this:
Pity female victims. Ignore male victims.
In his 2007 speech to the American Psychological Association,
Roy F. Baumeister said, "On the
Titanic, the richest men had a lower survival rate (34%) than the poorest women (46%) (though that’s not how it looked in the movie). That in itself is remarkable. The rich, powerful, and successful men, the movers and shakers, supposedly the ones that the culture is all set up to favor — in a pinch, their lives were valued less than those of women with hardly any money or power or status. The too-few seats in the lifeboats went to the women who weren’t even ladies, instead of to those patriarchs."
John Jacob Astor IV and his wife were two of the wealthy who nobly sacrificed themselves on the
Titanic so that the poor could survive.
John and Madeline Astor, ca. 1911; public domain photo.His cousin, Lady Nancy Astor, famously quipped, "I married beneath me. All women do."
I beg to differ.
V"Women invent rules, manipulate men to obey them, and so dominate the male sex. Of course, these rules in no way apply to women themselves." Esther Vilar,
The Manipulated Man, 1972.
Common cultural messages say that women are victims, and also that women are morally superior. Yet when such platitudes are tested against hard facts, the ideas falter. Women are at least as likely as men to use physical violence in dating and marriage, and commit substantially more emotional abuse. Women commit more physical child abuse, and 25% or more of child sex abuse. Women are more likely to kill their children, especially their boys.
Men die an average of seven years earlier than women, yet there's no Federal office of men's health alongside the office of women's health. Men tend to work longer hours at more dangerous jobs. But Allianz, the world's second largest financial serves firm,
estimates that women will control 60% of America's wealth by 2010.
Women can't be collective victims of collective male oppression and also control 60% of the nation's wealth. Women can't be victims of a patriarchy when innumerable laws are slanted in their favor. Women cannot expect gentlemanly chivalry from men and also expect to compete with men in the marketplace. Women cannot claim a monopoly on suffering male violence when men are most likely to kill other men. Women can't claim to be the more nurturing sex who automatically deserve physical custody of children following divorce while when women are also substantially more likely to abuse and kill their own children.
I'm no longer confused by the mixed messages. Now, I see such inconsistency for what it is, at least partly: abuse resulting in cognitive dissonance. I have a new working theory to explain the double standards I see so often: DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender). Psychologist Jennifer Freyd coined DARVO to describe the predictable response many abusers exhibit when confronted about their mistreatment. Freyd writes, "I have observed that actual abusers threaten, bully and make a nightmare for anyone who holds them accountable or asks them to change their abusive behavior. This attack, intended to chill and terrify, typically includes intimidation, overt and covert attacks on the whistle-blower's credibility, and so on. […] The offender is on the offense and the person attempting to hold the offender accountable is put on the defense." See Freyd, J.J. "Violations of power, adaptive blindness, and betrayal trauma theory." Feminism & Psychology, vol. 7, 1997.
Freyd originally intended DARVO to describe sexual predators. But the concept applies to other contexts. For one, imagine a husband who beats his wife then blames her for his outbursts. For another example, take this statement by therapist and author Audrey Chapman: "During a seminar I did with black men and women, the men decided to express to the women some things that they had never had a chance to say. So the men started expressing their pain and disappointment. They started expressing how they feel about not being accepted for who they are, for not having their struggle recognized, for having the women respond to them in very self-centered ways where the women were only talking about what they needed, what they wanted. 'You want, want, want, want all the time. Can't you see that I'm working with very limited resources? I'm doing the best I can...' And as they were in the midst of talking about that, the women lit into them. I mean they fired at them! the women started screaming and yelling at them, 'How dare they be so insensitive and uncaring!' And all the kinds of foul statements that can be made. And the men shut down. They shut down. They couldn't say another word." (Chapman quoted in Jack Kammer's book
Good Will Towards Men: Women Talk Candidly About the Balance of Power Between the Sexes, 1994, St. Martin's Press). Consistent with DARVO, Chapman describes women who denied the validity of the men's opinions, framed themselves as the victims, and attacked the men to shame them into silence.
Other examples of female DARVO are obvious. Women – as a class – commit more physical child abuse, and the larger portion of child murders. Women – as a class – are substantially more likely to harm the most innocent and defenseless humans. Yet women also have the temerity to claim they're inherently gentler, kinder and more loving, and accuse men – as a class – of being more inherently violent. Women initiate the majority of divorces, yet accuse men of fearing commitment.
Deny. Attack. Reverse victim and offender.
If men are afraid of committing to women, perhaps it's not an irrational phobia, but the canny fear of a jailhouse prisoner who's learned the most painful way possible not to completely trust anyone, and when to keep his back to the wall.
VISince about April 2009, I've undergone a drastic reappraisal of women. Initially, I was verging on misogyny: a hatred of all women. Following a fixed number of kicks to his heart by the so-called fair sex, a man begins noticing patterns of behavior. I still insist, quite reasonably given my experience and the data I've discovered, that many women simply don't give a damn about how their behavior affects men. I felt the outrage of a casino customer who'd entered the game in good faith, then suddenly realized he'd been losing because the croupier was dealing from the bottom of the deck.
But once my emotions cooled, I began the first of several of my patented data-digs. When a subject strikes my interest, I am
unrelentingly curious. I want to understand it inside out and upside down. I'll read as many books, essays and articles as required to quench my burning curiosity. One of my goals in life is to earn a living (or at least some cash) by researching and writing about whatever topic drifts through my mental transom and affixes to my brain like velcro. But I digress.
The last few months I've become more enlightened: I see reality more accurately. Despite the everpresent messages in the culture, it's obvious that women – as a class – have no special claim to victimhood or moral superiority. Like many other men my age, I was raised to defer to women as a class, to show them immense respect and consideration. But many or most women my age don't reciprocate that respect and consideration. They've become entitled and fail to recognize that to get respect they must also give respect. And with entitlement can come worse excesses: such as the common double-standard that says when a man does wrong it's his fault, and when a woman does wrong it's also his fault because it certainly can't be her fault.
Deny. Attack. Reverse victim and offender.
"We [women] have to start looking at our feminine shadow and own that as a part of ourselves and stop projecting it onto males and onto the masculine. It creates the idea that only men abuse. It's only men who are patriarchal. It's only men who are controlling, or greedy, or competitive, all of those negative adjectives that get attached to men and masculinity. Women are capable of just as much viciousness, cruelty and abuse as men." Carolyn Baker,
Reclaiming the Dark Feminine, New Falcon Press, 1996.
