Girl Fight!

One time, I was watching a tv news story about the Taiwanese parliament several years ago. A female speaker was at a podium, giving a withering verbal assault on some divisive issue... When she'd finished her speech, another female member of parliament ran-up behind her, grabbed two fistfuls of hair and yanked hard. (Ow.) On the floor, howling in pain, the first woman immediately swiped her finger-nails to scratch-out the eyes of the second. In an instant, security rushed-in to break-up what was turning-into a vicious cat-fight. (Taiwan's parliament is notorious for fist-fights.)

I could feel the pain and venom through the television as I watched this. There was pure hate in that room.

I think women are just as brutal than men when it comes to violence. If they're not just as brutal, then they're far more brutal. Think this isn't true? Turn-off the computer and hide under your bed. You're hopeless. Refusing to confront the reality of female aggression puts potential victims (like you) at unnecessary risk. Men are not taught to protect themselves against women when they're growing-up because women are supposed to be all 'sugar and freaking spice' et cetera.

An awful number of women are brutalized and killed by their male partners. Everything should be made to punish the perpetrators, help the victims, and, most of all, prevent such crimes in the future. That being said...

Blaming the Victim. *Blink* Wha?

I read a very eye-opening book. According to When She Was Bad: Violent Women and the Myth of Innocence, by Patricia Pearson, women are responsible for the majority of infant and child homicides. (A 1994 U.S. Department of Justice report says that when a parent kills a child, 61 percent of the time, it's the mother.) They are responsible for the majority of physical abuse against children, and one quarter of child sexual abuse. They inflict 50 percent of the violence directed at siblings and the elderly, and commit about half of all assaults against intimate partners. Pearson notes that when Chicago homicide data was analyzed, the people found to be most in danger of being murdered by a spouse between 1966 and 1996 weren't women at all. They were black men. These men lost their lives to domestic violence five times more frequently than white women, and almost twice as often as black women.

And maybe if women weren't so violent, Phil Hartman would still be alive today? Phil Hartman had to be one of the funniest, most versatile comedians on television in the 90s. Turns-out, he had to be the victim of a murder-suicide in order for people to realize that his wife had actually been abusing the hell out of him for years.

As for women in prison, American and British data indicate that women break more rules and behave more violently behind bars than do men. One in six known U.S. serial killers is female; in fact, a white woman is 100 times more likely to become a serial killer than an Asian, black or Hispanic man. Women aren't 'everything nice'; they can be quite the opposite as these facts demonstrate.

Kipling Once Said: "The Female of the Species is Deadlier Than The Male"; Innit Odd That Punishment is Lax?

Even when we come face to face with the female form of evil, we rush to forgive her or make-up excuses for her. We automatically assume that she'd be somehow driven to it or led astray. If evidence clearly shows her to be evil and violent, people shake their heads about how she's somehow not a woman.

People are often loathe to believe a woman can be a criminal, which is why she is more likely to get-away with it. There was a news story in the Australian edition of The Daily Telegraph from June 16, 1998. A woman killed her husband with a shotgun while he was sleeping. She left the house to bury the gun in the middle of the night and reported his mysterious murder the next day to police. Nothing was done and yet for the next several years she boasted killing him to a variety of people. "I shot him, pow pow pow. He had it coming." No one took it seriously, until a new lover finally reported his suspicions to the police. And when they came for her, of course she used the "battered woman" defense.

The most-oft used legal defense for women murderers can be summed-up with three words: "poor little me". Female aggressive strategies are by necessity, underhanded. When we see a woman being violent, we automatically assume that it's been provoked or in self-defense or there's a good reason for it. This provides ample cover for bad deeds.

Battered Women Syndrome, for instance. A woman is driven by abuse (either real or imagined) into killing her husband, and she can use this defense at her trial. Gee, if a guy kills his wife, we don't care what his reason was! The woman gets sympathy and a light sentence, but the man gets sent to prison regardless. Women's prisons look a hell of a lot more comfy than men's prisons, too.

It's obvious that women often receive preferential treatment in the justice system. Of all perpetrators who avoided prosecution for infant murder, 83 percent were women. And I don't want to look like I'm making accusations... but death by smothering is virtually indistinguishable from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome in an autopsy. Hmm...

Women commit about 10 percent of all murders in the U.S., yet receive only about 2 percent of the death sentences and account for about 1 percent of death-row inmates, since their sentences are more often commuted or reversed.

It is worth noting that while women commit nearly 30 percent of spousal murders (excluding homicides ruled to be in self-defense), they account for only 15 percent of prisoners sentenced to death for killing a spouse. Husbands who killed their wives received an average of 16.5 years in prison; wives who killed husbands got six years.

In 1998, Karla Faye Tucker was awaiting execution in Texas for a brutal double murder. She'd killed 2 people in their sleep with a pickaxe and later described an 'orgasm' of pleasure from doing it. In prison, Tucker had become a born-again Christian and her clemency petition was backed by such unusual suspects as Christian Coalition leader Pat Robertson, Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell and right-wing hero Oliver North -- all generally pro-capital punishment. In fact, Pat Robertson referred to her as "this sweet woman of God". They all rushed to defend her. 28 men were also on death row that year, and didn't get the same kind of support and publicity that this woman got.

This isn't just in the U.S. that society lets women escape severe punishment, I think this is universal: I remember that a captured female Basque terrorist was interviewed in the 1970s. She readily admitted to escaping severe punishment when caught by claiming that a boyfriend had forced her into robbing a bank, firing a gun, or planting a bomb.

Naturally, all this is very complicated. Every murder is different and different juries and different defense attorneys can of course affect sentencing... but the statistics would indicate there's a pretty strong bias in favor of the gals.

In Fact...

I think it's notable to show here that there are dozens of studies indicating that women are just as violent (or even more violent) towards men and children. Here's an interesting page: 93 studies that show women commit at least half of all domestic abuse. Funny that local governments won't fund too many men's shelters.

A 1994 British study led by Michelle Carrado, for example, interviewed 1,800 men and women with heterosexual partners. Some 11% of the men but only 5% of the women said their current partner had committed acts of violence towards them, ranging from pushing, through hitting, to stabbing. Five percent of married or cohabiting men reported two or more acts of violence against them in a current relationship, compared with only 1% of women. A further 10% of men but 11% of women said they had committed one of these violent acts.

The American social scientists Murray Straus and Richard Gelles reported from two large national surveys that husbands and wives had assaulted each other at approximately equal rates, with women engaging in minor acts of violence more frequently. Elsewhere, they found more wives than husbands were severely violent towards their spouses.

A survey of 1,037 young adults born between 1972 and 1973 in Dunedin, New Zealand, found that 18.6% of young women said they had perpetrated severe physical violence against their partners, compared with 5.7% of young men. Three times more women than men said they had kicked or bitten their partners, or hit them with fists or an object.

According to Claire Renzetti, violence in lesbian relationships occurs with about the same frequency as in heterosexual relationships. Lesbian batterers "display a terrifying ingenuity in their selection of abusive tactics, frequently tailoring the abuse to the specific vulnerabilities of their partners". Such abuse can be extremely violent, with women bitten, kicked, punched, thrown down stairs, and assaulted with weapons.

Moreover, given the deterrence implied by the greater strength of men, it is particularly unusual that so many women initiate violence against them. The fact is that men are usually very likely to restrain themselves. The psychologist John Archer has noted that, among female college students in her study, 29% admitted initiating an assault on a male partner. Of those women, half said they had no fear of retaliation or, since men could easily defend themselves, they did not see their own physical aggression as a problem. In other words, far from assuming that men are violent, violent women seem to take men's non-aggression for granted. Now that is fighting dirty; it's plain cowardly to hit someone when you know they probably won't hit you back.

Archer went on to remark on the apparent restraint shown by many men in western cultures. "We might speculate that to some extent a strong norm of men not hitting women enables women to engage in physical aggression which might otherwise not have occurred," he wrote. Male aggression, he suggested, was a kind of default value associated with patriarchal structures. He went-on to say that "We can speculate that these represent specific instances of a more general set of circumstances entailing a relative change in the balance of power between men and women."

In other words, as women have become independent of men, they have also become more violent towards them - because men have become disposable. This unpalatable conclusion, however, has been completely overlooked in a culture that believes violence is the sole domain of the male.

Chatting At the Coffee Shop

Recently, I was at my favorite coffee shop, discussing the prospects of possible retaliation against the Taliban and Osama bin Laden for the tragic attacks that took place this past September 11th.

One of the female clerks behind the counter said: "If we invaded Afghanistan and they started drafting people, I'd move to Canada. If the draft ever started again, women could get sucked-in, and I don't want to be in the military."

"I fully support women in combat roles." I replied quickly. "I think women should be right-up there on the front lines, guns a-blazing in any future war."

"No..." She turned her back and started working on another order of coffee. "Women would be more prone to talk things out. They'd just sit-down and..." I interrupted her.

"Blah blah blah. Ever see two women fight? They fight dirty."

"Yeah, hair-pulling." She nodded.

"No, beyond hair-pulling. Ask any school principal and they will tell you that girl-fights are the nastiest by far. Fingernail eye-gouging. Hair-ripping. Biting. Use of nearby hard objects. Kicking 'em when they're down and stepping on their throats. That's dirty, man. That is why I think women should be on the front lines. They fight dirty. However, in the U.S. military, women are typically stuck in secondary positions far behind the lines. I find it odd that women in the military are spared the one thing that the military exists for: fighting!"

She laughed at what I said. Probably not for the reasons I intended, though.

Final thought:

Oh, by the way: 12 million American women own handguns. Hope you feel safe now.

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"...the feminine archetype is now dominant in the western world, and... most dangerously, we are virtually blind to the shadow side of this archetype. As a result, while we are vigilant against masculine forms of evil, feminine evil is taking over our culture..." -- David Shackleton

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