It IS an actual WTF.
It also explains why so many women defend their sons from the vilest crimes but their daughters not even when they’re victims (especially of sexual crimes)
Oh crap.
My wife thinks that in the case of lady defenders shooting an attacker, female jurors will do anything they can to victim blame.
Like...some gal goes out to a restaurant with friends dressed nice, doesn't get drunk, some nut fixates on her, follows her home, breaks in with a knife in hand, she goes full Harriet Tubman on his ass and mag-dumps him into a human colander. She's at fault for enticing him? Really?
That kind of thinking.
Sigh.
(Sidenote: Harriet was likely the toughest gun-packing lady America ever produced.)
Yes, like that. Many women feel in control when shit like this can be prevented by your own actions. It can’t but we’re taught it can.
„I doesn’t happen to ME because I act correctly unlike THAT woman!“
There are a lot of people who are very invested in the just world fallacy. The idea behind this is that we live in a just world where bad people are punished and good people are rewarded. Therefore if bad things happen to a good person, then that person is not really a good person. They must have done something because they are suffering. If the person is unquestionably innocent, like child with cancer, then they are being punished because of their parents who are then clearly guilty of something.
The idea that stuff happens randomly or without a pattern that allows for moral interpretation is something that a lot of people can’t tolerate. They want to believe that they deserve every single good thing that has come their way. It is one of the reasons that hitting tough times is so isolating. People can’t stand to see that sometimes bad stuff just happens and they look for excuses as to why you deserved it. It’s a friendship killer to have an old friend call you up because they heard you have cancer and now they want to tell you that it’s pesticides in your food, never mind that you eat mostly organic.
Men think a man acted a certain way is therefore assaulted by women? What behaviour would that be? I never heard of that, so I'm genuinely interested what behaviour makes a woman assault you according to these men.
Hmmm, my original comment was the TL;DR so apologies for the length.
I am more focusing on the “control” aspect more than the specific safety aspect - in the sense that men need control over everything to *feel* safe - like how medieval kings felt threatened by even the slightest criticism.
I feel men (not all men etc.) view other men that are assaulted by women negatively, because they project their insecurity about having control over women onto them.
MRA types like to bring up things about under reported rates of women on men SA and domestic violence when arguing on the internet, but I’m very willing to bet they are the guys who tell men they are close to, to “man up” (in the nicest way possible) when they are in a physically abusive relationship. Or that are “lucky” when something non-consensual happens to them.
Whatever happened to them is a result of not being what they are “meant to be” - because they believe women are “meant to be” weak, submissive, incapable, irrational etc.
In that reality how can a “real” man lose a physical confrontation with a women? And if sex with a women is something to be “won” what man could say they didn’t want it? What sort of man freezes up and panics when they are born to take control and dominate?
You can also see this bias in the classic "lecherous teacher" trope. When it is a man he is always a creep and predator. When it is a woman, she is a seductress or a Mrs Robinson type; she is somewhat fetishized as she will make boys men as it were.
This isn't even a media thing too it happens irl with the most infamous case being that of Mary K Laturno. Look it up it was all over the new 20 years ago
I always bring up this story because of how bad other men make fun of male sa. A few years back, there was a Cracked article about a man who was sa by a woman. The comments were so bad that they had to lock them. But, a lot of commentators went real life , and Cracked pulled the article.
Men's rights activists always bring up the teacher trope but blame women for not supporting the victim. Even though it is men who say the worst things.
I'd have to dig it up and it's too late to now - ill try to remember in the morning.
I've read a few articles that claim men more often than women minimize their own role, lie, and consider things like "being nagged" as abusive. Whereas their female counterparts are raped, coerced, and beaten. (I'm pretty sure these were not all the same articles but things I remember from a few different ones)
Just food for thought.
Update #1
"New research shows that compared to women, men engage in more deception, especially when telling lies that promote self-interest. Gender differences in dishonesty may be related to emotion and self-regulation (e.g., level of competitiveness, guilt-proneness)."
https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/finding-a-new-home/202301/men-are-more-selfishly-dishonest-than-women
This is it. A lot of it is linked with fear. The world is a much scarier place if we admit that bad things can happen even if you do everything right. People search for “reasons” something bad happens so they can tell themselves it will never happen to them because they wouldn’t do xyz.
My mom had a conversation with her mom, when I was about 20 or so, about who was ‘asking for’ what in a rape case. My grandmother had an idea that if you were assaulted, you must be asking for it in some way. So my mother asked her, do you think Danamo would be asking for it if someone hurt her that way? And apparently she hadn’t thought about it that way. And she didn’t think about it that way because she never had been in any kind of real danger like that, lived at home with her parents until she married a gentle warm man who treated her well. And she hadn’t really thought about what a rape actually entails. A lot of times people just think of things in the simple terms it’s referred to. Nobody refers to rape as everything it is, they just use the word. And if they haven’t experienced it, they allow other peoples assumptions cloud their comprehension of what it is. It’s why men think that being robbed is the same as being raped. They don’t have to think about what rape really means, so they equate it with the only violation of their person they have ready access to. So then your rape was the same as having your money taken away. And now your body is property that’s been violated, not your personhood. It’s awful.
The reason for that is women are scared shitless of being the victim of a crime. Really, really scared.
And they rationalize to make a reason why they won't be a victim, and the rationalizing they make is that women who are victims of crimes are somehow different from themselves and therefore at fault for being victims. So if a creepy dude follows a woman around it MUST be because she did something to entice him, not because creepy dudes will just pick a pretty much random woman to terrorize. If a woman is beaten by her boyfriend then she made a stupid choice of boyfriend or she 'made him angry' and deserve it. Can't be possible there are guys out there who appear to be perfectly normal but turn into monsters when provoked by perfectly normal behavior.
If a woman is murdered, well, she must have it coming. Can't admit it can happen to themselves.
So if a woman had to kill an intruder, well, she must have done something to attract that intruder, and since she practically invited him in, she had no right to shoot him in self defense.
Sucky logic, but women do this to make themselves feel safer.
>She's at fault for enticing him? Really?
It's a defense mechanism, by making the victim partially or wholly responsible they can deny that the risk is equally high for them.
Like when someone finds out that a friend's spouse is cheating they blame the victim then too. Because the thought that the victim didn't deserve it makes them insecure in their own relationship.
I wonder if the constant responsibility/pressure put on women to be responsible for our own safety can give women this lens that any situation we didn’t prevent was our fault.
Like, we’re told as young as 7 or 8 that we have to be conscious of our surroundings, body language, words, etc., and that we have to use preventative measures every single day with zero mistakes our whole lives, or else it’s somehow our fault for not preparing enough or being aware enough or carrying the right kind of self defense weapon.
So maybe women judge women more harshly because women expect women to be responsible for our circumstances regardless if we’re the victim or the aggressor/etc.
Oh, if you frequent any women’s sub, there are regularly stories about mothers telling their daughters to shut up about it, even accusing them to have been involved in this. Especially with the most frequent case of a girl becoming a victim: a family member, SO or close friend.
Are you referring to defending their daughter when they're a victim of sexual assault, or defending their daughter when they're a perpetrator of any random crime like murder?
Sexual assault. I have zero impression about them being criminals. But I have not the impression they fight for them like they do for their sons.
I mean, I never heard about stories of mothers going into hunger strike in a church (as in the case of Rubiales) or something similar. I believe I heard several such examples, I just don’t remember their names now.
But that’s a guess with basic memory
This is quite common. Women are at war with each other. I'm in the middle of a difficult divorce with my soon to be ex-wife. The judge, attorneys, and guardian ad litem are all female. People are telling me I'm at a disadvantage.. but I disagree. I can already tell they are all bickering at each other and treating me with more respect.
Women defend their sons even of the sons committed a horrible crime because the mother has a greater ethical obligation to the son than she does to the victim. In theory, a mother has a greater ethical obligation to the son than she does to society.
Of course she does. The comment I was replying to said "son". So...
I'm also willing to accept that mothers might have a special emotional tie to her son over her daughter in the same way a father dotes on his daughter over the son.
I hope that to be the case at least, since my mother was the most abusive person i know.
>Same basic reason some members of minority groups are ready to pillory their own in order to fit in to the majority.
Or in other situations seem to be just as prejudice against other minority groups?
Yes, especially if you want to talk about “model minorities” or favored ethnic groups, particularly in colonialism. The kyriarchy needs self-policing to function.
I feel like there's a lot of contradictory stereotypes about women that the patriarchy holds simultaneously. And everyone, men and women, are raised in this system, so we absorb the ideas of the system.
Like, women are weak and fragile and they couldn't possibly defend themselves and they need a man to take care of them. And also women are evil temptresses who will use their looks to manipulate men for their own selfish needs.
So if you are raised being told that those things are true about your sex, but you know that that isn't true about you, you have to figure out how you fit into that system. Maybe you're a good girl who is weak and fragile and would never hurt anyone and needs protection, and bad girls are manipulative temptresses who eat hot chip and lie. Or maybe women are clearly awful like that and you're "Not like other girls". And then you're faced with this story where this woman is claiming she did nothing wrong and this guy followed her home and she was afraid he was going to kill her so she shot him, and the defense is saying that she enticed him into coming home with her for sex and then she instigated a fight and he was defending himself and she shot him. So some women on that jury have that belief that some women are good and pure and kind, and other women are slutty with bad morals and tempt men with their clothes and try to manipulate them. Or they're "not like other girls" but they know so many other girls are slutty temptresses who string men along. So they have no issues believing that this woman might be one of the bad ones. So a man who has internalized both of these stereotypes, but hasn't spent a life time trying to make sure he dresses in such a way that no one will assume he's one of the bad ones, is more willing to believe that this situation is a bit more complex. But a woman will come down harshly on any other woman who is presented as not doing her due diligence.
Like, a true non-murder-related example. When I was growing up, I was told that girls didn't really like Dungeons and Dragons, they were just there to impress their boyfriends, and make silly super-hot Mary Sue characters and not bother researching the hobby at all because they weren't actually interested in it. And I knew I wasn't like that. So I had to prove to everybody else that I wasn't like that. And John would make a character named John the Wizard, who looked exactly like John but had super powers, and Alex was the dark and tortured Alastor the thief who wore leather and had a full backstory with many cool-looking beefy muscle illustrations, and Jenny played Elandra the Elf Druid who could talk to animals, and I played GROGNAK the middle-aged pot-bellied half orc barbarian. And I spent a lot of time sniping at Jenny for her obvious Mary Sue. And, like, sure everybody kind of rolled their eyes when she described how her hair looked when she fired her bow, but no one loudly complained about the "Mary Sue"ness of her character as much as I did. And absolutely NOBODY had anything to say about John the Wizard.
>Like, women are weak and fragile and they couldn't possibly defend themselves and they need a man to take care of them. And also women are evil temptresses who will use their looks to manipulate
This is not contradictory.
It is *because* women are weak and fragile, the thinking goes, they are evil evil temptresses who manipulate strong men into deviating from the path of righteousness.
Think about old time comics, and mythology in general. While not a universal trope, it is common enough that you can see the threads. Good guys are powerful, physically strong heroes. Bad guys are often smart, manipulative but physically weak and must rely on trickery, subterfuge or deceit.
The strong hero in myths and folklore must bring down an evil sorcerer.
Brawny physically capable superheroes often had evil scientists as their nemesis.
And just about every two-fisted, hard-boiled detective had to deal with the femme fatale.
Strength is good. Intelligence is not to be trusted.
When did Mary Sue start becoming a term? This is why Boomers hate Millennials because they can't understand what the hell they're talking about. I'm 30 so I'm a millennial but I have to Google a ton of these terms because people invent new words just to annoy everyone else.
You googled it yet still didn’t know Millennials didn’t invent the term? You really think Boomers didn’t have their own lingo that their elders didn’t understand or like?
One explanation I've heard is related to the "women are wonderful" concept. Essentially an assumption that women are supposed to be better behaved than men. So women will often get more benefit of the doubt than men for the same crimes...right up until there's "proof" that she's done something really bad for selfish reasons. At that point it's a betrayal of their shared gender, she's supposed to be better than men, and she needs to be made an example of.
Edit: Realizing my comment was focused on women who commited a crime. Which doesn't address victims on defense being judged harshly. That could be related to the similar phenomenon of judging homeless people harshly...people want to believe that it can't happen to them if they maintain control, so the victim must have done something wrong.
Something else to factor in.
Let's say you're accused of murder and you supposedly shot them to death.
You have two different classes of defense. In one you claim you didn't do it - you weren't there, you don't own a gun like that, you weren't even in that zip code, somebody else did it, etc.
But in a self defense claim, you're admitting you WERE the short but you're claiming justification. Right?
Well to some people, there's no justification. There's no proof your life was in danger until you're actually killed. That's not how the law works but...some people really think that way. My question is, are there people who feel this way for women but not for men? I mean, to me that's twisted. Maybe...it's her fault for not having a male defender around?
I still can't wrap my head around that.
There's a lady named Tamara who hung out on the early gun forums, a decade pre-reddit. She had a great line: "It is the mark of a true gentleman to always provide covering fire while a lady reloads!"
It's REALLY shitty, but I do think there are people out there who don't believe that women have a right to self-defense against men. At all, even if our lives are on the line. There are authoritarians who believe in a strict hierarchy of men = superior, women = inferior, and they're okay with anything that upholds that hierarchy and opposed to anything that undermines it. If he kills her, even if he was just in a snit about normal, non-violent things she did that she had every right to do, that bitch had it coming for pissing him off because he's her superior, he's allowed to control and dominate her by whatever means necessary. If she kills him, even in self-defense from him when he was actively trying to murder her, she's overturned the social order and attacked "our way of life", so she has to be punished. It's a sick mindset, and people who think that way are almost always racist, homophobic, and xenophobic in addition to being misogynist. And they tend to worship the rich and powerful and shit on the poor. They believe in hierarchy and domination rather than equality / egalitarianism in general.
Women are maybe slightly less likely to have authoritarian views than men, but there are still a ton of female authoritarians out there. White straight women are particularly susceptible to this mindset because they're only one rung down the ladder - they may be inferior to white men, but they're still superior to men of color, women of color, anyone queer, anyone from a foreign country, etc. So sure, they might have to put up with varying degrees of abuse from their white husband or boyfriend, but in return they get to call the cops on Black people who are minding their own business. They get to hold anti-trans rallies and hurl abuse at trans people. They get to have their own forms of power tripping and bullying to make themselves feel superior at someone else's expense. They may also get unearned financial and social benefits - the first example that comes to mind for me is Ivanka Trump, who's stuck with her father through it all and as a result has had riches and fame and her own fashion line, etc.
Tl;dr, I think what you're seeing is a symptom of a broader societal sickness. If you read up on right-wing authoritarianism, this stuff starts to make sense.
I don't even know how to phrase this quite right but I've got this feeling a lot like what happened to me back in 1997 when as a white guy I got my nose rubbed in exactly how racist cops are in America towards African Americans in particular. Long story but just to give you one small piece of it, in 2002 I published proof that a California sheriff entered into a written racial redlining compact with all the police chiefs in his county which blocked all of the people in high minority population towns from access to concealed weapons permits. Publishing that got me thrown out of the California chapter of the National Rifle Association because they were firmly up the butts of the Republicans in Sacramento who expected this same sheriff to advance into the legislature.
So now I get to say I was thrown out of the NRA for being too radical lol.
Except this gender bias issue is worse, because this bias isn't coming down from the top (basically, from the government), it's coming up from the people. If you study racism in the absolute peak era for it, roughly 1876 to about 1938, you see this level of institutionalized racism across all levels of society. Thousands and thousands of unpunished murders. Hell, nobody took the blame for the burning of Black Wall Street in 1921. And so on, I've studied that era hard.
I read the article that James Reeves was describing about 2 days ago and it has seriously messed with my head.
For one thing, if there's a cultural judgmental mindset going on in straight white women, is that the origin of the "Karen" meme? I mean, that meme itself is judgmental and nasty and I hate using it but you do see videos pop up of women being extremely judgmental in public. It's not that common thank the deity of your choice but is that an extreme form of the mindset that's causing this disparity in court cases?
And again, I have to start believing that study because I've got access to a highly experienced lady trial lawyer who is as strong a feminist as you could ask for who is claiming to have seen it first hand for whole career. My wife.
Sigh.
Just dealing with the courtroom side of this problem, do we need jury instructions advising against this trend, or maybe set of trends? But that still doesn't fix everything because if this is happening in court, we can be absolutely certain it's filtering across all of society. Corporate offices, handling of welfare and social services, doctors offices?! How deep a rabbit hole are we looking at here?
Racism comes up from the people too. Like yes, the racism that you saw perpetrated by that sheriff and his police chief buddies was coming from government officials - but I bet those folks were racist before they became police. They may even have chosen to become police because they were racist and wanted a legalized way to oppress Black people. Or the unpunished murders you talked about - the authorities looked the other way, but most of the people who carried out lynchings were not authorities themselves. They were just white townspeople who were so racist they thought it was fine and proper for them to murder Black people. They even brought their kids along with them to lynchings.
I believe the "Karen" meme started with [this SNL sketch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzMzFGgmQOc) \- I'm a white woman myself and I think the sketch is hilarious. It's poking mild fun at us, it's not meanspirited at all (and some of us do need to learn what spices are...). The meme morphed over time to mean the kind of white woman who'll demand to "speak to the manager" over petty ridiculous things or who'll flip out at the mere presence of a Black person in a public space. It has been misused in misogynist ways to shut down and disregard women who aren't behaving like petty despots, but the original meaning was basically, a white female bully of a certain age. And yes, I do think Karen-type judgmentalism is connected to sentencing disparities.
Jury instructions might be a little bit helpful, but they won't come close to fixing the whole problem. The problem is that we need better jurors. And voters. And people in general. Society is just a collection of individuals doing their own individual things. If there are too many people choosing to do shitty things, then society is going to suck.
Sexism is cultural, political, *and individual*. Before women had any rights, the law gave the husband the tight and duty to keep *her* in line. That defended on the benevolence and character of individual men. That remains not so much a memory as it does a feeling that men ought to be able to keep women in line. Even babies are given the message that boys are strong, tough, and better than girls. Girls are given pink clothes, bows in their hair, and then people praise them in sexist terms. It's really weird how obsessed some people are with making sure they know what gender babies are.
Boys are still steeped in a culture that waves away predation and the overwhelming ratio of crimes males commit against females. Boys will be boys, you know. Then there's the opposite standards. Males are good, strong, smart, logical, calm; females are bad, weak, shallow, crazy, untrustworthy, dishonest; all flaws that are embraced because they just can't compete with superior males. Any kind of ism is like that; not separate but equal, but polar opposites where one side gets all the positive, and the other side.....well, you know.
There's two places where the patriarchy is cooked into the English language.
One is the term for what your last name used to be before you got married: "maiden name". Hilariously, I'm a guy with a maiden name. We need a different term I think because the gay bros have to be dealing with the same issue? :) Point is, it's assumed that the gal is going to take the guy's last name.
The other is actually more serious, because it's the word "husband" which has a connotation of guide and protect; see also the phrase "animal husbandry". There's no such thing as "animal wifery".
No, I think you may be onto something here.
Let's focus for a second on cases where a lady defends herself with a gun.
*Some people genuinely think that's wrong.* I mean, that's a subtext in the entire gun debate. The fact that there's a tie-in to the type of gun (see that video for details) kind of confirms that that's part of what's going on here. Based on the rate of conviction vote and the length of sentence judgment, the lady defending herself with what looks like a scary black battle rifle is judged the harshest of all.
So at least some of the gals and for that matter a small number of the guys are saying that defending yourself with a rifle which is legal to own but looks scary is morally wrong?
If that's the mindset, then your theory applies.
Your theory would also apply in something like a drug possession case. If the evidence is sketchy against her, the lady defendant is maybe more likely to get off. But the moment it's proven her sentence judgment might go up?
Zero wtf here.
Your wife seems like a bright lady, but for my money this is more readily explained by the fact that under patriarchy women are expected to be not violent and are not socialized into violence. So to these jurors, the women are violating gender roles and norms. Assault rifles in particular touch on the 'protector' role (i.e. military, law enforcement) by which men are socialized into violence.
I say that having not read the study. The article you linked is not the study itself, but a summary of the study. I'm able to access the study, and the first thing I see (in experiment 1) is that the female jurors judged male shooters more harshly for every scenario - except the Ruger Mini. But each juror only saw one scenario (=one type of firearm), so the 35 female female jurors had a median 6 jurors responding for each scenario. That's a really low n.
In experiment 3, they focused on just the AR-15 and the Ruger Mini and the gender question. Here again women judged male shooters more harshly across the board. The female shooter with the R-14 was the only scenario in which men judged more harshly than women. Here there are 62 women participants, so the low n problem is less an issue, but still only 15 or 16 women saw each scenario.
In Experiment 4, they look at police officer's judgment about use of an AR-15 versus a handgun, and find similar results. However, the low-n problem is pretty severe with respect to female officers; they only had 8 women total.
The authors have a pretty good explanation of the results: it's gender norms vs. the assault rifle.
"These results are in accord with previous findings of harsher judgments of women who violate gender-biased weapon use stereotypes (Branscombe et al., 1993). Using an AR-15 was likely to be such a violation."
They point out that the AR-15 is associated with aggression in our culture:
"In general, using an AR-15 may make our shooter violate the norms of someone in a defensive mode. Participants may not see an AR-15 as a 'normal' defensive weapon for the typical homeowner. This viewpoint may be even more damaging for women. Physically aggressive or heavily armed women are not our cultural norm. "
One of their takeaways from the study is that "Suggestions by the popular 'gun press' that weapons type is not important should be taken with a grain of salt." The distinction you draw between "the scary black plastic rifle instead of the pretty wood furniture one" is real, and it is real at least in part because the manufacturers of assault rifles have marketed them as more intimidating weapons than regular hunting rifles. There is no point complaining the difference is illusory.
Assault rifles have a very different valence in American society than other guns, and that brings them into conflict with gender norms around violence and aggression.
We agree 98%.
The one tiny quibble (and it's off-topic from gender disparity) is that the "evil rifle" thing doesn't primarily come from the way they're marketed. I think it has a lot more to do with them being demonized in the media in an effort pushed to ban them dating back to the federal ban in 1994 that ended in 2004 but also continues in other states.
I'm a pure handgunner because I'm right handed, left eyed. I'll never be a decent rifleman. I do wonder if there's a difference between these two guns:
https://www.saddlerockarmory.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/20191220_164813-scaled.jpg
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fe4k6je0252i51.jpg
Same gun, latter has upgrades (mainly electronic sight and underbarrel flashlight).
But anyways. Back on topic.
My wife says this judgemental-to-other-women-in-court trend goes way past cases related to violence of any sort. Drug cases in particular, she saw the same trend. Even when there's no gun involved.
Back to the study. It still seems to show women being harsher towards female defendants than the male jurors, right?
The first episode on all this (focusing on gun types in court), James Reeves started advising everybody watching to carefully consider what their home defense gun is...whether you're a guy or gal. Part two focuses on gender bias.
In the study, women judged women less harshly than men \[judged women\] when the shooter used the R-14. Only for the AR-15 scenario did the women judge women more harshly. For example, in the scenario where a woman shoots an intruder with an R-14, about 50% of men voted to convict while around 40% of women voted to convict. For the AR-15, it was 70% of women and only 45% or so of men.
My father-in-law used to be a member of the NRA and I'd occasionally read *First Freedom* just to see what was what, and my recollection is the ads for assault rifle styles of weapon were very different than those for more traditional rifles. That was after the assault weapons ban expired
The *Washington Post* did a [ series on the AR-15](https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/interactive/2023/ar-15-america-gun-culture-politics/) earlier this year, and that included a look at how they were marketed. Originally, Colt tried to sell them to hunters, but the AR-15 was not a great weapon for that. So they shifted to focus on personal protection and so on. The WaPo is paywalled but [here's a paywall-free version of the article](https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/varmints-soldiers-and-looming-threats-see-the-ads-used-to-sell-the-ar-15/ar-AA197LuE) focused on marketing.
This is also a problem with girls in juvenile detentions. Girls are expected to behave and not be confrontational, so they are punished for stepping out of line more than boys, especially if their crime is deemed as "promiscuous". To a female juror with internalized misogyny, the offence is even worse and they feel like they need to come down harder to "correct" the behaviour. Speaking from personal experience amd research but for me it was psychward as a punishment.
Because patriarchy holds women to different standards which women as well as men have assimilated . Women that have exercised their standard your ground laws with abused partners are routinely convicted although I can't testify to the gender distribution of their juries. Brittany Smith and Marissa Alexander come to mind immediately.
Read Right Wing Women by Andrea Dworkin. It is EYE OPENING in terms of how women feed back into the system of patriarchy. There's free PDFs on Google but if you can't find it dm me and I'll send it to you.
Glancing at the literature, I found [this.](https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w25013/w25013.pdf)
>Results provide strong evidence that own-gender juries result in lower conviction rates for drug
offenses. We estimate that a ten percentage point change in the expected own-gender composition of
the jury results in a 18 percentage point decline in conviction rates on drug charges. A similar change
in jury gender results in a 13 percentage point reduction in the likelihood of being sentenced to at least
some jail time.
But that's just for drug charges -- they failed to find any correlation on other charges, so that may simply be due to a general disapproval of drug prosecution. However, it does *not* support the above mock trial study. Considering this is actual trial data, as opposed to mock trials consisting of only college students, I'm a little more inclined to think it would be accurate.
I'm having a hard time finding anything else with a cursory search -- I'm not really familiar with legal studies, so I'm probably just looking in the wrong places. I'll try to dig into it more later.
There could be a lot of regional variation, especially within the US. My wife's entire time as a trial lawyer was in the deep rural South, absolute peak patriarchy. So she might have seen more of this firsthand than most.
What’s your source on that? That has not been my experience at all. There are only a few crimes or situations where women get a worse deal when it comes to deals, convictions and sentencing.
I was born and raised in Texas. The women I knew growing up *hated* women. Like virulent, hard core, “women need to learn to better submit” kind of hatred. I’ve yet to see it anywhere else I’ve lived.
Neither born nor raised there but lived there during two different periods of my life, in two very different places.
What I observed was the same. Women hated me, and they generally hated other women. My impression was that because women have such low status there they have to compete for men's favors, and in that competition the opponent is other women.
I also encountered a lot of men who really hated women, but they were more sly about it. I also knew an old rancher who told me he had noticed the same thing, and that it didn't use to be that way when he was young. He had two daughters and both chose to live in other states because of the bias against women in TX. He missed them, and said he liked talking to me because I reminded him of them!
I think you’re 100% correct about the status issue. In Texas, women get their social power from men, and they claw each other to the death for it. The approval seeking is crazy.
The majority of white women voted for the overturn of Roe v Wade, and continued to vote Republican in the following midterms just so we'd know it was not an accident.
I try to generously view this as a consequence of women living under patriarchy, where what's good for themselves is suborned to what the men in power want, because fighting back can lead to serious violent repercussions. Nevertheless, you're at least a bit responsible for your own actions, especially voting.
This is a bit misleading. I am assuming you don’t think women voted to overturn roe v wade literally. If you’re meaning that voting republican after the overturn is equal to voting for the overturn… only ever so slightly more white women voted republic. Between 51-55% of white women voted for Trump. You also have 30% of Asian and Latino women and up to 10% Black women did as well. Those numbers did not change much by the time the midterms rolled around.
Not misleading at all. They *voted* to overturn Roe v Wade. Whether they "wanted" it to happen isn't the point. It was a stated goal for 50 years, and then they did it. And the fact that they *kept voting Republican* afterwards is a powerful indication of how much they opposed it.
You might need to examine your biases, because it's impossible to look at the evidence objectively and conclude that it's important to these women that female bodily autonomy be protected.
The same reason non incel men tend to be more disgusted by incels than women. When a part of your in group fucks up you want to make sure you are not grouped in with them. When someone goes against the grain like a woman being violent it can be interpreted as them making the entire group look bad
This answer needs to be highlighted more. When one of our own steps out of line, we have no qualms of wanting to see the worst punishment we can on said individual.
The real answer is that societally speaking, men generally view women as less threatening and more "perfect" or "pure", kind, sweet caring whatever else you wanna point at. Those stereotypes obviously apply less to humans who are inside the group being perceived and who grow up within it and as such get a much more realistic and honest view. It's like having a slightly dirty window, the observers from the other side are getting a pretty clear view, but not totally accurate, vs those on the inside with no filter in between perceiver and perceived.
there's less class solidarity among women than probably any other class. men and women are both taught from childhood to hate women, except they don't think they are. because they believe their negative opinions of women are simply objective fact.
when some women say that they haven't been negatively affected by misogyny, it's out of ignorance. they don't know they deserve to be treated better than they are.
If I were to put myself in the shoes of a woman who made a human colander out of an intruder, my conclusion would have to be that yes, I would do that. I would absolutely do that!
I might first just point the gun at him and tell him to get out, but if he doesn't follow orders really, really quick, human colander he is.
I think one part of it might be the type of women who are allowed to get into those positions. Maybe the system favours the women who don't believe in the patriarchy, don't think much about feminism, are judgier towards certain subsections of the population, the ones who play the "boys game" well. Just a thought
There's some evidence, especially in sexual assault or risk of bodily harm cases, that it's internal self-defence against victim blaming.
It's actually *comforting* for a female juror to think "this woman was wearing the wrong clothes, this woman was attacked at home because she left the door unlocked, this woman got into a gunfight because she was careless"...
...because the alternative is the ugly truth: having to think "it doesn't matter what I do, this terrible thing could happen to me".
That's not an idea we like to confront very often.
some women are invested in the patriarchy because they get something in return. if they choose that being a wife and mother is acceptable to them, they get an honored seat at the table. the virgin/mother/whore complex. if people are only going to see you as one of those things and you have to choose one, mother's probably best.
think about women who perform femininity. who wear makeup because they believe they enjoy it. they enjoy it because they are rewarded for doing so within a patriarchy. outside a patriarchy, most probably wouldn't wear makeup or shave their legs.
women buy into the lies the patriarchy gives them because they are not shown other examples of how women can be. they've adopted patriarchal values and convinced themselves it's in their best interest and not just a compromise. this leads them to be as misogynistic as the predominant culture.
So, there was this Aaron Sorkin show called The Newsroom about a cable news show. There's a scene where a lead producer (or something) is teaching the team how to edit for sensationalism, and at one point he says the line "No one ever went broke in America selling a woman who makes other women feel superior."
I don't know the science here, I'm just opining, but my theory is that with the way women are pitted against each other by society, they tend to compare themselves to other women a lot more than men (which is not to say men don't compare themselves to each other, but it's less intense and probably more inclined towards favorability). So they see a woman who's on trial and immediately categorize her as below themselves, and therefore unworthy of grace or understanding. This factors heavily into "pick-mes" as well.
Every time a woman who thinks this way sees another woman, there's an immediate calculus of whether she's Like Me, Worse Than Me, Better Than Me (an inspiration), or Better Than Me (because she's a bitch, and therefore Worse Than Me because at least I'm not a bitch). Like Mes are targets for friendship and collaboration. Better Than Me (inspo)s are targets for hero worship and manipulative or one-sided friendship, and also fuel for those habits that you know are unhealthy but are supposed to make you Better, like dieting or MLMs or whatever. Worse Than Mes are targets for derision and "at least I'm not like that," potentially also manipulative friendship so you have a steady source of that ego fodder. Better Than Me (bitch)s are targets for derision and envy, and the same sort of ego fodder in a shade of "I may have less than her, but I got it honestly and not by sleeping around/being a bitch/whatever."
I'm 100% sure this is not an original thought and there's feminist scholarship out there that puts it more elegantly, but you can see the threads of this in a lot of society. "The beauty industry's goal is to make you feel ugly." It does this by showing women Better Than Me (inspo)s and capitalizing on that fuel for unhealthy habits. "No one ever went broke selling a woman who other women can feel superior to." Because showing women a Worse Than Me lets them say "well at least I didn't do \[whatever she did\]" (the line was in the context of Casey Anthony, so in this case "at least I would never kill my child") and that makes them feel good.
Obviously none of this is a healthy way of thinking and I think feminists and women in the present day are starting to move past it. But it makes sense to me as an effect of pitting women against each other the way the patriarchy tends to do.
I am a woman. I have served on two juries. First one, I was an extra juror in a murder trial, and I did not get to vote. Second, I was the sole hold out on a hung jury. In the jury room, I saw a male juror slam his fist on the table, and three female jurors who were on the fence came to his side regarding the verdict. The thing I think you are missing here is the dynamic within the jury room. Rarely is the jury all female. Men are on the jury and women. And you must state your opinion of the case in front of a group of jurors. Imagine for a moment, a bunch of men who want to get out of that jury room and finished with the case as fast as possible. The jurors themselves try to control the other jurors, and the pressure to conform to the prevailing powertrip is intense.
Women, generally, are not willing to stand up to a group of men who want control. It is ingrained societal conditioning. A woman has to have a lot of courage to stand up. Thus, women who look at other women who use force against someone view them negatively, because they are having a psychological fight within themselves to have courage.
There was an article I read a while back about people harshly judging parents whose child died in a hot car. Paraphrasing here: “We want to believe that if we follow the rules, we’ll be OK. So, when this kind of thing happens to other people, we don’t want to resemble them, and the fact that we might is too terrifying to deal with. So, they have to be monsters.”
The idea that we might have to take a life—one of the worst acts you can commit—is terrifying, so we pretend like if we just act a certain way, if we stay inside increasingly narrow parameters, that’ll never happen to us. And it happened to her? Well then she did something wrong! It’s her own fault!
Texas? Are a lot of these people Christian? Do young Christian women think there’s no way they would ever take a life even if they were terrified and experiencing a home break in I guess? Is it a moral holier than thou issue? Need to go to Heaven so could never take a life?
Girls and women are often expected to be perfect or strive to be and always be kind and turn the other cheek. Boys do what they want and sometimes have to learn the hard way how to be kind or not escalate to violence immediately?
What about other countries? Do they have the same bias?
Texas *college kids* - therefore more liberal and more atheist/agnostic leaning than most Texans and a lot won't even be from Texas. (Kids "migrate" to different areas for college in the US, quite often.)
I think it just doesn't fit peoples biases. Women are socialised harder away from violence by other women and also participate in this. In a similar way men don't like other men crying and probably were socialised out of crying in front of other men.
So when women see another woman kill perhaps it just seems less forgivable and less reasonable. Where as if a man does it, it perhaps just 'fits' a little more? Of course if you break in a man's house he will shoot you - Could be an equivalent to ' of course if you yell at you girlfriend she will cry'.
Even being aware of this if I see a grown man cry I find it super uncomfortable unless there is a really good reason. But I can be more sympathetic/empathetic with women crying because I was raised to think that them crying is more normal.
Or maybe I am wrong, this is just my first thoughts. 30 year old man from Australia who is new to this sub and some of the ideas on it. Genuinely just lurking to learn a little more.
Similar with mothers who get longer sentences when the father abuses the children. “She was with an abuser!” He WAS an abuser.
https://www.npr.org/2022/08/17/1118009546/are-failure-to-protect-laws-failing-mothers
Edit: added link
I remember talking to a lawyer about this, when he was defending rape victims in the '60s he would deliberately avoid having women on the jury because it's a social bias that if a woman is attacked she brought it on herself, so to admit to themselves that you could be attacked and it can have nothing to do with anything you do or don't do, that means they are vulnerable so they'd rather judge the woman harshly and think they are safe because they do everything right.
I don't know, I wish I knew. Personally I'm 52 and I've seen improvement. Anita Hill hearings were a step in the right direction. the Me too movement was, believe it or not, a step in the right direction. I'm hopeful but it's really slow.
Yeah.
Fun story on cultural change.
The worst time and place for white-on-white violence in the US was in the "older West" - Mississippi River valley, basically Georgia through East Texas, 1810ish to 1840ish. Lots of drunk brawls, gambling violence, dueling, general crazy shit. My theory is that part of it was a byproduct of the slave industry - you have lower class whites who didn't own slaves employed as overseers, slave catchers and slave traders. Think "prison guard tough" but with far less morals and zero legal controls. I suspect the violence started against minorities and wasn't tracked, but then spilled over into the white community and raised serious concerns.
Anyways. Various gun and knife control laws were tried, didn't work. What finally did work was the rise of what we now call the "Bible belt culture". It got to a point where the only way out of a duel was to claim you were too "God fearing" to kick their ass. And this shift (driven in past by women who were beyond tired of this shit) happened *before* the Civil War and the end of slavery.
Point is, cultural change on that fundamental a level is *hard*. Takes a big, culture-wide shift. Gotta start with the kids - women in the South were able to do that part as the primary kid caretakers. That's also why school integration was so crucial to the civil rights movement - mix the white kids with the rest and they'll get to see they're not so different. Long term, that's who both Brown v Board of Education 1954 and everything Dr. King succeeded in doing worked as well as it did.
The trans community is trying to help by *erasing* gender differences, maybe? Not quite sure that's going to work. Don't know if that's exactly what they're up to. It has worked in part...I get very little blowback on the whole "took my wife's last name" thing. (Couple of hilarious freakouts though.)
We can point out problems all day long. Doesn't mean we have solutions. I certainly don't :( and that's depressing. But pointing out the problems is still vital.
*We got married in late 2013. I took her last name, no regrets even though I'm a dude with a "maiden name".*
I took my bride's name, too. My bachelor name was long and difficult to say. We're divorced now, but as I told her, I earned this name and I'm keeping it.
I'm about to really mess with your head.
Have you looked into Canadian gun laws and attitudes?
Particularly the OIC banning a bunch of "assault style" long guns? And what we have, in terms of gun laws, restrictions, etc? We bemoan "gun culture" and a lot of especially urbanites hate guns on principle alone.
Now ... wanna watch a middle age woman's mind blown? I'm 60ish, 5'5", normal BMI. Not particularly attractive, not a girly girl. Husband and son are (for good reasons) into guns, the club. I fully trained and certified for "restricted" alongside long guns.
Hand guns aren't all that socially acceptable, in Canada and only very few open carry. The fact that I own my own handgun, alone, makes men say "Cool." once they get over the whole "She looks like someone's Gramma" thing. I get the "Weird, but that's COOL." admiration.
But women ... ? It is a very interesting combination of "well that's just not DONE" and "Why?". They honestly don't get why a Gramma would want to TOUCH anything "gun", let alone a handgun. They'd really poop themselves if they saw it's a Chiapa replica of military issue, so it's big and nasty looking. In a little lady's hands? Oh no no no. Not DONE. Too much wrong.
Imagine I was using an "assault style" long gun? I can. They're just like pretty much most long guns of their type. I can handle one easily. The ladies would lose their minds with how wrong it is.
Most women, in Canada, that I've come across, can't figure out why I'm licensed in the first place. Imagine if I shot someone in self defense? They'd hang me in a heartbeat.
Anecdotal, but true. Think it's a thing in the USA? Try Canada.
Right, so, Canada would be kinda like the US but "cranked up to 11" in this area. Makes sense, especially since self defense as a core concept is *massively* repressed in Canada.
I apologize if that's how I sounded. Absolutely my bad.
I was trying to accentuate the women's attitudes about another woman respecting guns, in my experience. Also highlighting that in Canada, "guns" are very much viewed as a "man" thing and that they are appalled at a woman would be involved.
I am very sorry if I was unclear.
Hard for me to read "this is gonna blow your mind" and then someone talking about how they're a lady who owns guns as anything else, but she said that's not what she meant so fine.
Ok, I didn't the full post, but the short answer is that we expect more from women than from men. It's way more horrifying to most people when woman kills and it a small child is killed, we're horrified no matter who did it.
Because men are programmed to be partial toward women. That's why you have things like white knights and sugar daddies and the catering. It's a trait that was selected for once and exists in some men now.
Women do not receive that same benefit from other women. There is more likely to be actual accountability.
Not usually the case though. Since it's a patriarchy, the courts are RULED by that male mentality - which means gynocentrism, which isn't good because ...
it allows serious dirtbag ladies to get away light or Scott free for horrible shit.
I’d say it probably warrants some follow up studies. They actually have a ton of other studies they incorporate, but I’d like to see them dig into what OP is suggesting specifically. There’s just a lot going on here…
Some striking findings:
“…found incompetent male shooters and competent female shooters were dealt with more harshly than the reverse pairing.”
“Shooters who violated gender roles were perceived more negatively…”
“Women delivered the homeowner defendants higher sentences than men (Male average = 3.9 years and female average = 5.7 years). Importantly the average recommended sentence when the homeowner used the AR-15 weapon was 7.2 years for male subjects and 8.5 for females. This was significantly higher than any of the other gun types. The handguns had the lowest recommended sentences (in the two to four year range).”
“Our analyses of guilty and non-guilty verdict decisions found that females were more likely to find the defendant guilty (regardless of defendant gender). The other effects didn't reach statistical significance (though some were close) but there was some indication that the AR-15 usage was detrimental to a defendant's chances of acquittal. The female shooter with the AR-15 did receive the highest percent of guilty verdicts (about 75%).”
“McCaughey (1997) in a feminist analysis of women who train in self-defense tactics suggest they are at risk at trial for not seemingly womanly and victim-like.”
“Sentences for male officer defendants who used the AR-15 were twice as long as those of male officers who used the Glock 19.”
I realize this is ***not*** the point of OP's question but can we stop calling them "lady/ladies"? So archaic. How about women on juries or female jurors?
Social reproduction possibly. Women police other women in their gender role along the lines of their own internalisations of patriarchy.
Patriarchy is inherently misogynistic and victimises the woman. A woman that defends herself is going against her gender role and therefore is acting inappropriately in that jurors eyes. But a man is acting in his nature and can’t help it/ made a mistake/ doesn’t deserve to lose hims life etc etc.
Secondly, if we have been victimised due to our gender, and have along the way just accepted that “that is just how women get treated and we have to accept it” to deal with that trauma, then a woman fighting back may challenge whether we really DO have to accept it, which reignites the trauma. It may also be like a punitive idea of fairness “if I had to just accept it, then she should have to aswell”.
That’s all I got.
My SIL is a lawyer and she said it’s also because they don’t want to think that this could happen to them so it has to be because the defendant did something wrong not because the perpetrator was completely wrong otherwise it could happen to them and there is nothing or very little they could do about it
It’s also the nature of that particular workforce. Law is extremely male dominated and “masculine” in its workings. I worked at a law firm for about a year, and the women were chronically stressed, sick and would throw other women under the bus as it’s highly competitive, and quite frankly, not built for women. So, what kind of “successful” women does it breed? (Pro Bono notwithstanding).
Women always judge women the hardest tbh. It's sad and it should not be like that but its not surprising in this particular scenario when we're judged by fellow women just as or more harshly for the mundane everyday things.
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Study is fundamentally flawed.
The jury selection pool is a randomly selected cross section of the community based on an overall jury pool. College students are overwhelmingly not representative of a society as there will be a clear age based bias. Most colleges also tend to be predominantly made up of middle class+ individuals from the local community. So you already have a jury pool in the study that’s going to be biased.
Beyond that, in jury selection the prosecutor and defendant’s attorney have the opportunity to strike potential jurors during the selection practice, with the idea being that prosecutors will eliminate jurors most friendly to the defense, while defendant’s attorney will eliminate jurors most friendly to the prosecution. So, in theory extremists on either end of the spectrum should be weeded out well before trial starts.
If the study didn’t replicate these aspects, and is making a broad, sweeping statement based on the behaviors of a group of female college students from a college in Texas, it’s inherently flawed and unreliable.
Only conclusion from the study is that if you want accurate data you need to actually look at real cases and jury related data, not over rely on college students as representative of society.
I’m not sure about this study specifically, perhaps because it is not a ‘typical’ woman’s crime it was judged differently, but typically women actually face positive sexism when it comes to deals, convictions and sentencing. There are a few situations where that is not the case (iirc young attractive women murdering older rich husbands are judged more harshly) but overall men have a tougher time in the criminal justice system when all else is equal.
1. Your anti-feminist post history.
2. The fact that you responded "What makes you assume that I'm not a feminist?" and not "I'm a feminist."
Besides which, the burden of proof is on you and your profile to provide evidence of feminism. People are not "feminist by default."
Further disagreement will result in a ban.
I don’t doubt the validity of the results but is it possible that they were skewed because this took place in Texas, a very misogynistic state?
From my own personal experience from being on a jury, it was 2 men who were clearly misogynists who were the harshest to the female defendant. I was very vocal about supporting her and the other woman was very neutral but eventually voted in her favor
Think about it this way: if I know most dogs bark am I going to get that upset at a dog for barking? If the common assumption is that dogs bark on instinct, am I going to be that upset for a dog following its instinct? Now, if I specifically got a rabbit because the common assumption is they're "supposed" to be quiet, am I gonna get annoyed if it starts barking? Yes!
Women are punished more bc in the juror's eyes, they 've broken society's harsh rules of how a woman should behave. Men aren't expected to adhere to the same standards.
It's the Just World fallacy. Everything happens for a reason, so that means the *victim* did something wrong, and if the female jurors just avoid doing that thing, they'll be safe. Notice how men are erased from this equation, like they're some kind of non-human weather phenomenon that no one control. Wear your rain boots and rain coat, silly Billy. /Angry sarcasm
I...literally can't wrap my head around this.
Anybody who studies history (and I do) knows we don't live in a just world. I'm not just talking about obvious stuff like Hitler and the Holocaust either. US history has bad stuff in it. Like the time an entire civil rights movement collapsed in 1876 when the US Supreme Court stole the 14th Amendment...weird shit. Let's not even start on what happened to the First Nations.
If you don't understand stuff like that, I can see how the "just world fallacy" is a trap.
For those not aware:
https://old.reddit.com/r/supremecourt/comments/16jb5ya/the_supreme_court_can_fix_its_oldest_mistake_this/k0qc6t5/
It IS an actual WTF. It also explains why so many women defend their sons from the vilest crimes but their daughters not even when they’re victims (especially of sexual crimes)
Oh crap. My wife thinks that in the case of lady defenders shooting an attacker, female jurors will do anything they can to victim blame. Like...some gal goes out to a restaurant with friends dressed nice, doesn't get drunk, some nut fixates on her, follows her home, breaks in with a knife in hand, she goes full Harriet Tubman on his ass and mag-dumps him into a human colander. She's at fault for enticing him? Really? That kind of thinking. Sigh. (Sidenote: Harriet was likely the toughest gun-packing lady America ever produced.)
Yes, like that. Many women feel in control when shit like this can be prevented by your own actions. It can’t but we’re taught it can. „I doesn’t happen to ME because I act correctly unlike THAT woman!“
There are a lot of people who are very invested in the just world fallacy. The idea behind this is that we live in a just world where bad people are punished and good people are rewarded. Therefore if bad things happen to a good person, then that person is not really a good person. They must have done something because they are suffering. If the person is unquestionably innocent, like child with cancer, then they are being punished because of their parents who are then clearly guilty of something. The idea that stuff happens randomly or without a pattern that allows for moral interpretation is something that a lot of people can’t tolerate. They want to believe that they deserve every single good thing that has come their way. It is one of the reasons that hitting tough times is so isolating. People can’t stand to see that sometimes bad stuff just happens and they look for excuses as to why you deserved it. It’s a friendship killer to have an old friend call you up because they heard you have cancer and now they want to tell you that it’s pesticides in your food, never mind that you eat mostly organic.
Weirdly, this is the same backward logic men use against other men when they are assaulted by women.
Men think a man acted a certain way is therefore assaulted by women? What behaviour would that be? I never heard of that, so I'm genuinely interested what behaviour makes a woman assault you according to these men.
Hmmm, my original comment was the TL;DR so apologies for the length. I am more focusing on the “control” aspect more than the specific safety aspect - in the sense that men need control over everything to *feel* safe - like how medieval kings felt threatened by even the slightest criticism. I feel men (not all men etc.) view other men that are assaulted by women negatively, because they project their insecurity about having control over women onto them. MRA types like to bring up things about under reported rates of women on men SA and domestic violence when arguing on the internet, but I’m very willing to bet they are the guys who tell men they are close to, to “man up” (in the nicest way possible) when they are in a physically abusive relationship. Or that are “lucky” when something non-consensual happens to them. Whatever happened to them is a result of not being what they are “meant to be” - because they believe women are “meant to be” weak, submissive, incapable, irrational etc. In that reality how can a “real” man lose a physical confrontation with a women? And if sex with a women is something to be “won” what man could say they didn’t want it? What sort of man freezes up and panics when they are born to take control and dominate?
Ah, I see. Yeah, that makes sense.
You can also see this bias in the classic "lecherous teacher" trope. When it is a man he is always a creep and predator. When it is a woman, she is a seductress or a Mrs Robinson type; she is somewhat fetishized as she will make boys men as it were. This isn't even a media thing too it happens irl with the most infamous case being that of Mary K Laturno. Look it up it was all over the new 20 years ago
I always bring up this story because of how bad other men make fun of male sa. A few years back, there was a Cracked article about a man who was sa by a woman. The comments were so bad that they had to lock them. But, a lot of commentators went real life , and Cracked pulled the article. Men's rights activists always bring up the teacher trope but blame women for not supporting the victim. Even though it is men who say the worst things.
I'd have to dig it up and it's too late to now - ill try to remember in the morning. I've read a few articles that claim men more often than women minimize their own role, lie, and consider things like "being nagged" as abusive. Whereas their female counterparts are raped, coerced, and beaten. (I'm pretty sure these were not all the same articles but things I remember from a few different ones) Just food for thought. Update #1 "New research shows that compared to women, men engage in more deception, especially when telling lies that promote self-interest. Gender differences in dishonesty may be related to emotion and self-regulation (e.g., level of competitiveness, guilt-proneness)." https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/finding-a-new-home/202301/men-are-more-selfishly-dishonest-than-women
I want clarification too. Not challenging you, trying to understand because it might be possible.
I was sorta replying to that specific comment than your OP, but I just replied to someone else.
This is it. A lot of it is linked with fear. The world is a much scarier place if we admit that bad things can happen even if you do everything right. People search for “reasons” something bad happens so they can tell themselves it will never happen to them because they wouldn’t do xyz.
My mom had a conversation with her mom, when I was about 20 or so, about who was ‘asking for’ what in a rape case. My grandmother had an idea that if you were assaulted, you must be asking for it in some way. So my mother asked her, do you think Danamo would be asking for it if someone hurt her that way? And apparently she hadn’t thought about it that way. And she didn’t think about it that way because she never had been in any kind of real danger like that, lived at home with her parents until she married a gentle warm man who treated her well. And she hadn’t really thought about what a rape actually entails. A lot of times people just think of things in the simple terms it’s referred to. Nobody refers to rape as everything it is, they just use the word. And if they haven’t experienced it, they allow other peoples assumptions cloud their comprehension of what it is. It’s why men think that being robbed is the same as being raped. They don’t have to think about what rape really means, so they equate it with the only violation of their person they have ready access to. So then your rape was the same as having your money taken away. And now your body is property that’s been violated, not your personhood. It’s awful.
The reason for that is women are scared shitless of being the victim of a crime. Really, really scared. And they rationalize to make a reason why they won't be a victim, and the rationalizing they make is that women who are victims of crimes are somehow different from themselves and therefore at fault for being victims. So if a creepy dude follows a woman around it MUST be because she did something to entice him, not because creepy dudes will just pick a pretty much random woman to terrorize. If a woman is beaten by her boyfriend then she made a stupid choice of boyfriend or she 'made him angry' and deserve it. Can't be possible there are guys out there who appear to be perfectly normal but turn into monsters when provoked by perfectly normal behavior. If a woman is murdered, well, she must have it coming. Can't admit it can happen to themselves. So if a woman had to kill an intruder, well, she must have done something to attract that intruder, and since she practically invited him in, she had no right to shoot him in self defense. Sucky logic, but women do this to make themselves feel safer.
>She's at fault for enticing him? Really? It's a defense mechanism, by making the victim partially or wholly responsible they can deny that the risk is equally high for them. Like when someone finds out that a friend's spouse is cheating they blame the victim then too. Because the thought that the victim didn't deserve it makes them insecure in their own relationship.
I wonder if the constant responsibility/pressure put on women to be responsible for our own safety can give women this lens that any situation we didn’t prevent was our fault. Like, we’re told as young as 7 or 8 that we have to be conscious of our surroundings, body language, words, etc., and that we have to use preventative measures every single day with zero mistakes our whole lives, or else it’s somehow our fault for not preparing enough or being aware enough or carrying the right kind of self defense weapon. So maybe women judge women more harshly because women expect women to be responsible for our circumstances regardless if we’re the victim or the aggressor/etc.
Sounds reasonable.
This genuinely doesn't make sense. Can you name any examples of women not defending their daughters?
Oh, if you frequent any women’s sub, there are regularly stories about mothers telling their daughters to shut up about it, even accusing them to have been involved in this. Especially with the most frequent case of a girl becoming a victim: a family member, SO or close friend.
Are you referring to defending their daughter when they're a victim of sexual assault, or defending their daughter when they're a perpetrator of any random crime like murder?
Sexual assault. I have zero impression about them being criminals. But I have not the impression they fight for them like they do for their sons. I mean, I never heard about stories of mothers going into hunger strike in a church (as in the case of Rubiales) or something similar. I believe I heard several such examples, I just don’t remember their names now. But that’s a guess with basic memory
This is quite common. Women are at war with each other. I'm in the middle of a difficult divorce with my soon to be ex-wife. The judge, attorneys, and guardian ad litem are all female. People are telling me I'm at a disadvantage.. but I disagree. I can already tell they are all bickering at each other and treating me with more respect.
I've heard stories about that sort of thing from the corporate office world. I need to go track down studies on that.
Women defend their sons even of the sons committed a horrible crime because the mother has a greater ethical obligation to the son than she does to the victim. In theory, a mother has a greater ethical obligation to the son than she does to society.
And she has no obligation to her daughter?
Of course she does. The comment I was replying to said "son". So... I'm also willing to accept that mothers might have a special emotional tie to her son over her daughter in the same way a father dotes on his daughter over the son. I hope that to be the case at least, since my mother was the most abusive person i know.
Not really
Interesting. What do you mean? To not have a unique relationship with offspring of the opposite gender seems to be at variance with observed reality.
This doesn't even make any sense
Why? We have a greater ethical obligation to people we know over strangers.
Internalized misogyny.
This, and patriarchal bargaining
Internalized misogyny. Same basic reason some members of minority groups are ready to pillory their own in order to fit in to the majority.
>Same basic reason some members of minority groups are ready to pillory their own in order to fit in to the majority. Or in other situations seem to be just as prejudice against other minority groups?
Yes, especially if you want to talk about “model minorities” or favored ethnic groups, particularly in colonialism. The kyriarchy needs self-policing to function.
I feel like there's a lot of contradictory stereotypes about women that the patriarchy holds simultaneously. And everyone, men and women, are raised in this system, so we absorb the ideas of the system. Like, women are weak and fragile and they couldn't possibly defend themselves and they need a man to take care of them. And also women are evil temptresses who will use their looks to manipulate men for their own selfish needs. So if you are raised being told that those things are true about your sex, but you know that that isn't true about you, you have to figure out how you fit into that system. Maybe you're a good girl who is weak and fragile and would never hurt anyone and needs protection, and bad girls are manipulative temptresses who eat hot chip and lie. Or maybe women are clearly awful like that and you're "Not like other girls". And then you're faced with this story where this woman is claiming she did nothing wrong and this guy followed her home and she was afraid he was going to kill her so she shot him, and the defense is saying that she enticed him into coming home with her for sex and then she instigated a fight and he was defending himself and she shot him. So some women on that jury have that belief that some women are good and pure and kind, and other women are slutty with bad morals and tempt men with their clothes and try to manipulate them. Or they're "not like other girls" but they know so many other girls are slutty temptresses who string men along. So they have no issues believing that this woman might be one of the bad ones. So a man who has internalized both of these stereotypes, but hasn't spent a life time trying to make sure he dresses in such a way that no one will assume he's one of the bad ones, is more willing to believe that this situation is a bit more complex. But a woman will come down harshly on any other woman who is presented as not doing her due diligence. Like, a true non-murder-related example. When I was growing up, I was told that girls didn't really like Dungeons and Dragons, they were just there to impress their boyfriends, and make silly super-hot Mary Sue characters and not bother researching the hobby at all because they weren't actually interested in it. And I knew I wasn't like that. So I had to prove to everybody else that I wasn't like that. And John would make a character named John the Wizard, who looked exactly like John but had super powers, and Alex was the dark and tortured Alastor the thief who wore leather and had a full backstory with many cool-looking beefy muscle illustrations, and Jenny played Elandra the Elf Druid who could talk to animals, and I played GROGNAK the middle-aged pot-bellied half orc barbarian. And I spent a lot of time sniping at Jenny for her obvious Mary Sue. And, like, sure everybody kind of rolled their eyes when she described how her hair looked when she fired her bow, but no one loudly complained about the "Mary Sue"ness of her character as much as I did. And absolutely NOBODY had anything to say about John the Wizard.
>Like, women are weak and fragile and they couldn't possibly defend themselves and they need a man to take care of them. And also women are evil temptresses who will use their looks to manipulate This is not contradictory. It is *because* women are weak and fragile, the thinking goes, they are evil evil temptresses who manipulate strong men into deviating from the path of righteousness. Think about old time comics, and mythology in general. While not a universal trope, it is common enough that you can see the threads. Good guys are powerful, physically strong heroes. Bad guys are often smart, manipulative but physically weak and must rely on trickery, subterfuge or deceit. The strong hero in myths and folklore must bring down an evil sorcerer. Brawny physically capable superheroes often had evil scientists as their nemesis. And just about every two-fisted, hard-boiled detective had to deal with the femme fatale. Strength is good. Intelligence is not to be trusted.
When did Mary Sue start becoming a term? This is why Boomers hate Millennials because they can't understand what the hell they're talking about. I'm 30 so I'm a millennial but I have to Google a ton of these terms because people invent new words just to annoy everyone else.
Mary Sue has been a literary term for idealized female characters for about 50 years now. I'm surprised you've never heard it.
I've heard of it before but it was so annoying having to Google it the first time I heard it
You googled it yet still didn’t know Millennials didn’t invent the term? You really think Boomers didn’t have their own lingo that their elders didn’t understand or like?
lol It was invented by Gen Xers to talk about fanfiction. Sometimes words you don't know are from hobbies you're not into!
It has been a term longer than you've been alive....
One explanation I've heard is related to the "women are wonderful" concept. Essentially an assumption that women are supposed to be better behaved than men. So women will often get more benefit of the doubt than men for the same crimes...right up until there's "proof" that she's done something really bad for selfish reasons. At that point it's a betrayal of their shared gender, she's supposed to be better than men, and she needs to be made an example of. Edit: Realizing my comment was focused on women who commited a crime. Which doesn't address victims on defense being judged harshly. That could be related to the similar phenomenon of judging homeless people harshly...people want to believe that it can't happen to them if they maintain control, so the victim must have done something wrong.
Something else to factor in. Let's say you're accused of murder and you supposedly shot them to death. You have two different classes of defense. In one you claim you didn't do it - you weren't there, you don't own a gun like that, you weren't even in that zip code, somebody else did it, etc. But in a self defense claim, you're admitting you WERE the short but you're claiming justification. Right? Well to some people, there's no justification. There's no proof your life was in danger until you're actually killed. That's not how the law works but...some people really think that way. My question is, are there people who feel this way for women but not for men? I mean, to me that's twisted. Maybe...it's her fault for not having a male defender around? I still can't wrap my head around that. There's a lady named Tamara who hung out on the early gun forums, a decade pre-reddit. She had a great line: "It is the mark of a true gentleman to always provide covering fire while a lady reloads!"
It's REALLY shitty, but I do think there are people out there who don't believe that women have a right to self-defense against men. At all, even if our lives are on the line. There are authoritarians who believe in a strict hierarchy of men = superior, women = inferior, and they're okay with anything that upholds that hierarchy and opposed to anything that undermines it. If he kills her, even if he was just in a snit about normal, non-violent things she did that she had every right to do, that bitch had it coming for pissing him off because he's her superior, he's allowed to control and dominate her by whatever means necessary. If she kills him, even in self-defense from him when he was actively trying to murder her, she's overturned the social order and attacked "our way of life", so she has to be punished. It's a sick mindset, and people who think that way are almost always racist, homophobic, and xenophobic in addition to being misogynist. And they tend to worship the rich and powerful and shit on the poor. They believe in hierarchy and domination rather than equality / egalitarianism in general. Women are maybe slightly less likely to have authoritarian views than men, but there are still a ton of female authoritarians out there. White straight women are particularly susceptible to this mindset because they're only one rung down the ladder - they may be inferior to white men, but they're still superior to men of color, women of color, anyone queer, anyone from a foreign country, etc. So sure, they might have to put up with varying degrees of abuse from their white husband or boyfriend, but in return they get to call the cops on Black people who are minding their own business. They get to hold anti-trans rallies and hurl abuse at trans people. They get to have their own forms of power tripping and bullying to make themselves feel superior at someone else's expense. They may also get unearned financial and social benefits - the first example that comes to mind for me is Ivanka Trump, who's stuck with her father through it all and as a result has had riches and fame and her own fashion line, etc. Tl;dr, I think what you're seeing is a symptom of a broader societal sickness. If you read up on right-wing authoritarianism, this stuff starts to make sense.
I don't even know how to phrase this quite right but I've got this feeling a lot like what happened to me back in 1997 when as a white guy I got my nose rubbed in exactly how racist cops are in America towards African Americans in particular. Long story but just to give you one small piece of it, in 2002 I published proof that a California sheriff entered into a written racial redlining compact with all the police chiefs in his county which blocked all of the people in high minority population towns from access to concealed weapons permits. Publishing that got me thrown out of the California chapter of the National Rifle Association because they were firmly up the butts of the Republicans in Sacramento who expected this same sheriff to advance into the legislature. So now I get to say I was thrown out of the NRA for being too radical lol. Except this gender bias issue is worse, because this bias isn't coming down from the top (basically, from the government), it's coming up from the people. If you study racism in the absolute peak era for it, roughly 1876 to about 1938, you see this level of institutionalized racism across all levels of society. Thousands and thousands of unpunished murders. Hell, nobody took the blame for the burning of Black Wall Street in 1921. And so on, I've studied that era hard. I read the article that James Reeves was describing about 2 days ago and it has seriously messed with my head. For one thing, if there's a cultural judgmental mindset going on in straight white women, is that the origin of the "Karen" meme? I mean, that meme itself is judgmental and nasty and I hate using it but you do see videos pop up of women being extremely judgmental in public. It's not that common thank the deity of your choice but is that an extreme form of the mindset that's causing this disparity in court cases? And again, I have to start believing that study because I've got access to a highly experienced lady trial lawyer who is as strong a feminist as you could ask for who is claiming to have seen it first hand for whole career. My wife. Sigh. Just dealing with the courtroom side of this problem, do we need jury instructions advising against this trend, or maybe set of trends? But that still doesn't fix everything because if this is happening in court, we can be absolutely certain it's filtering across all of society. Corporate offices, handling of welfare and social services, doctors offices?! How deep a rabbit hole are we looking at here?
Racism comes up from the people too. Like yes, the racism that you saw perpetrated by that sheriff and his police chief buddies was coming from government officials - but I bet those folks were racist before they became police. They may even have chosen to become police because they were racist and wanted a legalized way to oppress Black people. Or the unpunished murders you talked about - the authorities looked the other way, but most of the people who carried out lynchings were not authorities themselves. They were just white townspeople who were so racist they thought it was fine and proper for them to murder Black people. They even brought their kids along with them to lynchings. I believe the "Karen" meme started with [this SNL sketch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzMzFGgmQOc) \- I'm a white woman myself and I think the sketch is hilarious. It's poking mild fun at us, it's not meanspirited at all (and some of us do need to learn what spices are...). The meme morphed over time to mean the kind of white woman who'll demand to "speak to the manager" over petty ridiculous things or who'll flip out at the mere presence of a Black person in a public space. It has been misused in misogynist ways to shut down and disregard women who aren't behaving like petty despots, but the original meaning was basically, a white female bully of a certain age. And yes, I do think Karen-type judgmentalism is connected to sentencing disparities. Jury instructions might be a little bit helpful, but they won't come close to fixing the whole problem. The problem is that we need better jurors. And voters. And people in general. Society is just a collection of individuals doing their own individual things. If there are too many people choosing to do shitty things, then society is going to suck.
Sexism is cultural, political, *and individual*. Before women had any rights, the law gave the husband the tight and duty to keep *her* in line. That defended on the benevolence and character of individual men. That remains not so much a memory as it does a feeling that men ought to be able to keep women in line. Even babies are given the message that boys are strong, tough, and better than girls. Girls are given pink clothes, bows in their hair, and then people praise them in sexist terms. It's really weird how obsessed some people are with making sure they know what gender babies are. Boys are still steeped in a culture that waves away predation and the overwhelming ratio of crimes males commit against females. Boys will be boys, you know. Then there's the opposite standards. Males are good, strong, smart, logical, calm; females are bad, weak, shallow, crazy, untrustworthy, dishonest; all flaws that are embraced because they just can't compete with superior males. Any kind of ism is like that; not separate but equal, but polar opposites where one side gets all the positive, and the other side.....well, you know.
There's two places where the patriarchy is cooked into the English language. One is the term for what your last name used to be before you got married: "maiden name". Hilariously, I'm a guy with a maiden name. We need a different term I think because the gay bros have to be dealing with the same issue? :) Point is, it's assumed that the gal is going to take the guy's last name. The other is actually more serious, because it's the word "husband" which has a connotation of guide and protect; see also the phrase "animal husbandry". There's no such thing as "animal wifery".
No, I think you may be onto something here. Let's focus for a second on cases where a lady defends herself with a gun. *Some people genuinely think that's wrong.* I mean, that's a subtext in the entire gun debate. The fact that there's a tie-in to the type of gun (see that video for details) kind of confirms that that's part of what's going on here. Based on the rate of conviction vote and the length of sentence judgment, the lady defending herself with what looks like a scary black battle rifle is judged the harshest of all. So at least some of the gals and for that matter a small number of the guys are saying that defending yourself with a rifle which is legal to own but looks scary is morally wrong? If that's the mindset, then your theory applies.
Your theory would also apply in something like a drug possession case. If the evidence is sketchy against her, the lady defendant is maybe more likely to get off. But the moment it's proven her sentence judgment might go up?
No it relates it woman are naturally more “trusted” when jurors are presented with evidence they feel More betrayed.
Zero wtf here. Your wife seems like a bright lady, but for my money this is more readily explained by the fact that under patriarchy women are expected to be not violent and are not socialized into violence. So to these jurors, the women are violating gender roles and norms. Assault rifles in particular touch on the 'protector' role (i.e. military, law enforcement) by which men are socialized into violence. I say that having not read the study. The article you linked is not the study itself, but a summary of the study. I'm able to access the study, and the first thing I see (in experiment 1) is that the female jurors judged male shooters more harshly for every scenario - except the Ruger Mini. But each juror only saw one scenario (=one type of firearm), so the 35 female female jurors had a median 6 jurors responding for each scenario. That's a really low n. In experiment 3, they focused on just the AR-15 and the Ruger Mini and the gender question. Here again women judged male shooters more harshly across the board. The female shooter with the R-14 was the only scenario in which men judged more harshly than women. Here there are 62 women participants, so the low n problem is less an issue, but still only 15 or 16 women saw each scenario. In Experiment 4, they look at police officer's judgment about use of an AR-15 versus a handgun, and find similar results. However, the low-n problem is pretty severe with respect to female officers; they only had 8 women total. The authors have a pretty good explanation of the results: it's gender norms vs. the assault rifle. "These results are in accord with previous findings of harsher judgments of women who violate gender-biased weapon use stereotypes (Branscombe et al., 1993). Using an AR-15 was likely to be such a violation." They point out that the AR-15 is associated with aggression in our culture: "In general, using an AR-15 may make our shooter violate the norms of someone in a defensive mode. Participants may not see an AR-15 as a 'normal' defensive weapon for the typical homeowner. This viewpoint may be even more damaging for women. Physically aggressive or heavily armed women are not our cultural norm. " One of their takeaways from the study is that "Suggestions by the popular 'gun press' that weapons type is not important should be taken with a grain of salt." The distinction you draw between "the scary black plastic rifle instead of the pretty wood furniture one" is real, and it is real at least in part because the manufacturers of assault rifles have marketed them as more intimidating weapons than regular hunting rifles. There is no point complaining the difference is illusory. Assault rifles have a very different valence in American society than other guns, and that brings them into conflict with gender norms around violence and aggression.
We agree 98%. The one tiny quibble (and it's off-topic from gender disparity) is that the "evil rifle" thing doesn't primarily come from the way they're marketed. I think it has a lot more to do with them being demonized in the media in an effort pushed to ban them dating back to the federal ban in 1994 that ended in 2004 but also continues in other states. I'm a pure handgunner because I'm right handed, left eyed. I'll never be a decent rifleman. I do wonder if there's a difference between these two guns: https://www.saddlerockarmory.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/20191220_164813-scaled.jpg https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fe4k6je0252i51.jpg Same gun, latter has upgrades (mainly electronic sight and underbarrel flashlight). But anyways. Back on topic. My wife says this judgemental-to-other-women-in-court trend goes way past cases related to violence of any sort. Drug cases in particular, she saw the same trend. Even when there's no gun involved. Back to the study. It still seems to show women being harsher towards female defendants than the male jurors, right? The first episode on all this (focusing on gun types in court), James Reeves started advising everybody watching to carefully consider what their home defense gun is...whether you're a guy or gal. Part two focuses on gender bias.
In the study, women judged women less harshly than men \[judged women\] when the shooter used the R-14. Only for the AR-15 scenario did the women judge women more harshly. For example, in the scenario where a woman shoots an intruder with an R-14, about 50% of men voted to convict while around 40% of women voted to convict. For the AR-15, it was 70% of women and only 45% or so of men. My father-in-law used to be a member of the NRA and I'd occasionally read *First Freedom* just to see what was what, and my recollection is the ads for assault rifle styles of weapon were very different than those for more traditional rifles. That was after the assault weapons ban expired The *Washington Post* did a [ series on the AR-15](https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/interactive/2023/ar-15-america-gun-culture-politics/) earlier this year, and that included a look at how they were marketed. Originally, Colt tried to sell them to hunters, but the AR-15 was not a great weapon for that. So they shifted to focus on personal protection and so on. The WaPo is paywalled but [here's a paywall-free version of the article](https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/varmints-soldiers-and-looming-threats-see-the-ads-used-to-sell-the-ar-15/ar-AA197LuE) focused on marketing.
This is also a problem with girls in juvenile detentions. Girls are expected to behave and not be confrontational, so they are punished for stepping out of line more than boys, especially if their crime is deemed as "promiscuous". To a female juror with internalized misogyny, the offence is even worse and they feel like they need to come down harder to "correct" the behaviour. Speaking from personal experience amd research but for me it was psychward as a punishment.
Because patriarchy holds women to different standards which women as well as men have assimilated . Women that have exercised their standard your ground laws with abused partners are routinely convicted although I can't testify to the gender distribution of their juries. Brittany Smith and Marissa Alexander come to mind immediately.
I'll dig into those two cases.
I'd be interested in what you find out.
Read Right Wing Women by Andrea Dworkin. It is EYE OPENING in terms of how women feed back into the system of patriarchy. There's free PDFs on Google but if you can't find it dm me and I'll send it to you.
Glancing at the literature, I found [this.](https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w25013/w25013.pdf) >Results provide strong evidence that own-gender juries result in lower conviction rates for drug offenses. We estimate that a ten percentage point change in the expected own-gender composition of the jury results in a 18 percentage point decline in conviction rates on drug charges. A similar change in jury gender results in a 13 percentage point reduction in the likelihood of being sentenced to at least some jail time. But that's just for drug charges -- they failed to find any correlation on other charges, so that may simply be due to a general disapproval of drug prosecution. However, it does *not* support the above mock trial study. Considering this is actual trial data, as opposed to mock trials consisting of only college students, I'm a little more inclined to think it would be accurate. I'm having a hard time finding anything else with a cursory search -- I'm not really familiar with legal studies, so I'm probably just looking in the wrong places. I'll try to dig into it more later.
Most real studies on sentencing do not support the position that there is an overall bias against female defendants (at least in the US and UK).
There could be a lot of regional variation, especially within the US. My wife's entire time as a trial lawyer was in the deep rural South, absolute peak patriarchy. So she might have seen more of this firsthand than most.
What’s your source on that? That has not been my experience at all. There are only a few crimes or situations where women get a worse deal when it comes to deals, convictions and sentencing.
I was born and raised in Texas. The women I knew growing up *hated* women. Like virulent, hard core, “women need to learn to better submit” kind of hatred. I’ve yet to see it anywhere else I’ve lived.
Neither born nor raised there but lived there during two different periods of my life, in two very different places. What I observed was the same. Women hated me, and they generally hated other women. My impression was that because women have such low status there they have to compete for men's favors, and in that competition the opponent is other women. I also encountered a lot of men who really hated women, but they were more sly about it. I also knew an old rancher who told me he had noticed the same thing, and that it didn't use to be that way when he was young. He had two daughters and both chose to live in other states because of the bias against women in TX. He missed them, and said he liked talking to me because I reminded him of them!
I think you’re 100% correct about the status issue. In Texas, women get their social power from men, and they claw each other to the death for it. The approval seeking is crazy.
The majority of white women voted for the overturn of Roe v Wade, and continued to vote Republican in the following midterms just so we'd know it was not an accident. I try to generously view this as a consequence of women living under patriarchy, where what's good for themselves is suborned to what the men in power want, because fighting back can lead to serious violent repercussions. Nevertheless, you're at least a bit responsible for your own actions, especially voting.
This is a bit misleading. I am assuming you don’t think women voted to overturn roe v wade literally. If you’re meaning that voting republican after the overturn is equal to voting for the overturn… only ever so slightly more white women voted republic. Between 51-55% of white women voted for Trump. You also have 30% of Asian and Latino women and up to 10% Black women did as well. Those numbers did not change much by the time the midterms rolled around.
Not misleading at all. They *voted* to overturn Roe v Wade. Whether they "wanted" it to happen isn't the point. It was a stated goal for 50 years, and then they did it. And the fact that they *kept voting Republican* afterwards is a powerful indication of how much they opposed it. You might need to examine your biases, because it's impossible to look at the evidence objectively and conclude that it's important to these women that female bodily autonomy be protected.
The same reason non incel men tend to be more disgusted by incels than women. When a part of your in group fucks up you want to make sure you are not grouped in with them. When someone goes against the grain like a woman being violent it can be interpreted as them making the entire group look bad
Best answer so far.
This answer needs to be highlighted more. When one of our own steps out of line, we have no qualms of wanting to see the worst punishment we can on said individual.
The real answer is that societally speaking, men generally view women as less threatening and more "perfect" or "pure", kind, sweet caring whatever else you wanna point at. Those stereotypes obviously apply less to humans who are inside the group being perceived and who grow up within it and as such get a much more realistic and honest view. It's like having a slightly dirty window, the observers from the other side are getting a pretty clear view, but not totally accurate, vs those on the inside with no filter in between perceiver and perceived.
there's less class solidarity among women than probably any other class. men and women are both taught from childhood to hate women, except they don't think they are. because they believe their negative opinions of women are simply objective fact. when some women say that they haven't been negatively affected by misogyny, it's out of ignorance. they don't know they deserve to be treated better than they are.
I wonder if it’s easier for the women jurors to put themselves in the shoes of the women perpetrators and say “well I wouldn’t do that.”
If I were to put myself in the shoes of a woman who made a human colander out of an intruder, my conclusion would have to be that yes, I would do that. I would absolutely do that! I might first just point the gun at him and tell him to get out, but if he doesn't follow orders really, really quick, human colander he is.
I think one part of it might be the type of women who are allowed to get into those positions. Maybe the system favours the women who don't believe in the patriarchy, don't think much about feminism, are judgier towards certain subsections of the population, the ones who play the "boys game" well. Just a thought
There's some evidence, especially in sexual assault or risk of bodily harm cases, that it's internal self-defence against victim blaming. It's actually *comforting* for a female juror to think "this woman was wearing the wrong clothes, this woman was attacked at home because she left the door unlocked, this woman got into a gunfight because she was careless"... ...because the alternative is the ugly truth: having to think "it doesn't matter what I do, this terrible thing could happen to me". That's not an idea we like to confront very often.
some women are invested in the patriarchy because they get something in return. if they choose that being a wife and mother is acceptable to them, they get an honored seat at the table. the virgin/mother/whore complex. if people are only going to see you as one of those things and you have to choose one, mother's probably best. think about women who perform femininity. who wear makeup because they believe they enjoy it. they enjoy it because they are rewarded for doing so within a patriarchy. outside a patriarchy, most probably wouldn't wear makeup or shave their legs. women buy into the lies the patriarchy gives them because they are not shown other examples of how women can be. they've adopted patriarchal values and convinced themselves it's in their best interest and not just a compromise. this leads them to be as misogynistic as the predominant culture.
So, there was this Aaron Sorkin show called The Newsroom about a cable news show. There's a scene where a lead producer (or something) is teaching the team how to edit for sensationalism, and at one point he says the line "No one ever went broke in America selling a woman who makes other women feel superior." I don't know the science here, I'm just opining, but my theory is that with the way women are pitted against each other by society, they tend to compare themselves to other women a lot more than men (which is not to say men don't compare themselves to each other, but it's less intense and probably more inclined towards favorability). So they see a woman who's on trial and immediately categorize her as below themselves, and therefore unworthy of grace or understanding. This factors heavily into "pick-mes" as well. Every time a woman who thinks this way sees another woman, there's an immediate calculus of whether she's Like Me, Worse Than Me, Better Than Me (an inspiration), or Better Than Me (because she's a bitch, and therefore Worse Than Me because at least I'm not a bitch). Like Mes are targets for friendship and collaboration. Better Than Me (inspo)s are targets for hero worship and manipulative or one-sided friendship, and also fuel for those habits that you know are unhealthy but are supposed to make you Better, like dieting or MLMs or whatever. Worse Than Mes are targets for derision and "at least I'm not like that," potentially also manipulative friendship so you have a steady source of that ego fodder. Better Than Me (bitch)s are targets for derision and envy, and the same sort of ego fodder in a shade of "I may have less than her, but I got it honestly and not by sleeping around/being a bitch/whatever." I'm 100% sure this is not an original thought and there's feminist scholarship out there that puts it more elegantly, but you can see the threads of this in a lot of society. "The beauty industry's goal is to make you feel ugly." It does this by showing women Better Than Me (inspo)s and capitalizing on that fuel for unhealthy habits. "No one ever went broke selling a woman who other women can feel superior to." Because showing women a Worse Than Me lets them say "well at least I didn't do \[whatever she did\]" (the line was in the context of Casey Anthony, so in this case "at least I would never kill my child") and that makes them feel good. Obviously none of this is a healthy way of thinking and I think feminists and women in the present day are starting to move past it. But it makes sense to me as an effect of pitting women against each other the way the patriarchy tends to do.
I am a woman. I have served on two juries. First one, I was an extra juror in a murder trial, and I did not get to vote. Second, I was the sole hold out on a hung jury. In the jury room, I saw a male juror slam his fist on the table, and three female jurors who were on the fence came to his side regarding the verdict. The thing I think you are missing here is the dynamic within the jury room. Rarely is the jury all female. Men are on the jury and women. And you must state your opinion of the case in front of a group of jurors. Imagine for a moment, a bunch of men who want to get out of that jury room and finished with the case as fast as possible. The jurors themselves try to control the other jurors, and the pressure to conform to the prevailing powertrip is intense. Women, generally, are not willing to stand up to a group of men who want control. It is ingrained societal conditioning. A woman has to have a lot of courage to stand up. Thus, women who look at other women who use force against someone view them negatively, because they are having a psychological fight within themselves to have courage.
Internalized misogyny is a hell of ac drug
There was an article I read a while back about people harshly judging parents whose child died in a hot car. Paraphrasing here: “We want to believe that if we follow the rules, we’ll be OK. So, when this kind of thing happens to other people, we don’t want to resemble them, and the fact that we might is too terrifying to deal with. So, they have to be monsters.” The idea that we might have to take a life—one of the worst acts you can commit—is terrifying, so we pretend like if we just act a certain way, if we stay inside increasingly narrow parameters, that’ll never happen to us. And it happened to her? Well then she did something wrong! It’s her own fault!
Texas? Are a lot of these people Christian? Do young Christian women think there’s no way they would ever take a life even if they were terrified and experiencing a home break in I guess? Is it a moral holier than thou issue? Need to go to Heaven so could never take a life? Girls and women are often expected to be perfect or strive to be and always be kind and turn the other cheek. Boys do what they want and sometimes have to learn the hard way how to be kind or not escalate to violence immediately? What about other countries? Do they have the same bias?
Texas *college kids* - therefore more liberal and more atheist/agnostic leaning than most Texans and a lot won't even be from Texas. (Kids "migrate" to different areas for college in the US, quite often.)
I think it just doesn't fit peoples biases. Women are socialised harder away from violence by other women and also participate in this. In a similar way men don't like other men crying and probably were socialised out of crying in front of other men. So when women see another woman kill perhaps it just seems less forgivable and less reasonable. Where as if a man does it, it perhaps just 'fits' a little more? Of course if you break in a man's house he will shoot you - Could be an equivalent to ' of course if you yell at you girlfriend she will cry'. Even being aware of this if I see a grown man cry I find it super uncomfortable unless there is a really good reason. But I can be more sympathetic/empathetic with women crying because I was raised to think that them crying is more normal. Or maybe I am wrong, this is just my first thoughts. 30 year old man from Australia who is new to this sub and some of the ideas on it. Genuinely just lurking to learn a little more.
Similar with mothers who get longer sentences when the father abuses the children. “She was with an abuser!” He WAS an abuser. https://www.npr.org/2022/08/17/1118009546/are-failure-to-protect-laws-failing-mothers Edit: added link
I remember talking to a lawyer about this, when he was defending rape victims in the '60s he would deliberately avoid having women on the jury because it's a social bias that if a woman is attacked she brought it on herself, so to admit to themselves that you could be attacked and it can have nothing to do with anything you do or don't do, that means they are vulnerable so they'd rather judge the woman harshly and think they are safe because they do everything right.
Gawd. How do we fix this? How deep into the culture does this go? Fixing deep cultural issues is a horrendous job. I've studied several attempts.
I don't know, I wish I knew. Personally I'm 52 and I've seen improvement. Anita Hill hearings were a step in the right direction. the Me too movement was, believe it or not, a step in the right direction. I'm hopeful but it's really slow.
Yeah. Fun story on cultural change. The worst time and place for white-on-white violence in the US was in the "older West" - Mississippi River valley, basically Georgia through East Texas, 1810ish to 1840ish. Lots of drunk brawls, gambling violence, dueling, general crazy shit. My theory is that part of it was a byproduct of the slave industry - you have lower class whites who didn't own slaves employed as overseers, slave catchers and slave traders. Think "prison guard tough" but with far less morals and zero legal controls. I suspect the violence started against minorities and wasn't tracked, but then spilled over into the white community and raised serious concerns. Anyways. Various gun and knife control laws were tried, didn't work. What finally did work was the rise of what we now call the "Bible belt culture". It got to a point where the only way out of a duel was to claim you were too "God fearing" to kick their ass. And this shift (driven in past by women who were beyond tired of this shit) happened *before* the Civil War and the end of slavery. Point is, cultural change on that fundamental a level is *hard*. Takes a big, culture-wide shift. Gotta start with the kids - women in the South were able to do that part as the primary kid caretakers. That's also why school integration was so crucial to the civil rights movement - mix the white kids with the rest and they'll get to see they're not so different. Long term, that's who both Brown v Board of Education 1954 and everything Dr. King succeeded in doing worked as well as it did. The trans community is trying to help by *erasing* gender differences, maybe? Not quite sure that's going to work. Don't know if that's exactly what they're up to. It has worked in part...I get very little blowback on the whole "took my wife's last name" thing. (Couple of hilarious freakouts though.) We can point out problems all day long. Doesn't mean we have solutions. I certainly don't :( and that's depressing. But pointing out the problems is still vital.
We have been conditioned to expect violence from men but women are not just committing violence but breaking out of their gender role.
*We got married in late 2013. I took her last name, no regrets even though I'm a dude with a "maiden name".* I took my bride's name, too. My bachelor name was long and difficult to say. We're divorced now, but as I told her, I earned this name and I'm keeping it.
I'm about to really mess with your head. Have you looked into Canadian gun laws and attitudes? Particularly the OIC banning a bunch of "assault style" long guns? And what we have, in terms of gun laws, restrictions, etc? We bemoan "gun culture" and a lot of especially urbanites hate guns on principle alone. Now ... wanna watch a middle age woman's mind blown? I'm 60ish, 5'5", normal BMI. Not particularly attractive, not a girly girl. Husband and son are (for good reasons) into guns, the club. I fully trained and certified for "restricted" alongside long guns. Hand guns aren't all that socially acceptable, in Canada and only very few open carry. The fact that I own my own handgun, alone, makes men say "Cool." once they get over the whole "She looks like someone's Gramma" thing. I get the "Weird, but that's COOL." admiration. But women ... ? It is a very interesting combination of "well that's just not DONE" and "Why?". They honestly don't get why a Gramma would want to TOUCH anything "gun", let alone a handgun. They'd really poop themselves if they saw it's a Chiapa replica of military issue, so it's big and nasty looking. In a little lady's hands? Oh no no no. Not DONE. Too much wrong. Imagine I was using an "assault style" long gun? I can. They're just like pretty much most long guns of their type. I can handle one easily. The ladies would lose their minds with how wrong it is. Most women, in Canada, that I've come across, can't figure out why I'm licensed in the first place. Imagine if I shot someone in self defense? They'd hang me in a heartbeat. Anecdotal, but true. Think it's a thing in the USA? Try Canada.
Right, so, Canada would be kinda like the US but "cranked up to 11" in this area. Makes sense, especially since self defense as a core concept is *massively* repressed in Canada.
If you even JOKE about it, in Canada, to the wrong person, they would take your license.
do you want us to tell you how cool and awesome and not like other girls you are or what
I apologize if that's how I sounded. Absolutely my bad. I was trying to accentuate the women's attitudes about another woman respecting guns, in my experience. Also highlighting that in Canada, "guns" are very much viewed as a "man" thing and that they are appalled at a woman would be involved. I am very sorry if I was unclear.
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Hard for me to read "this is gonna blow your mind" and then someone talking about how they're a lady who owns guns as anything else, but she said that's not what she meant so fine.
Internalized misogyny.
Ok, I didn't the full post, but the short answer is that we expect more from women than from men. It's way more horrifying to most people when woman kills and it a small child is killed, we're horrified no matter who did it.
"Boys will be boys" - the adult version.
Because men are programmed to be partial toward women. That's why you have things like white knights and sugar daddies and the catering. It's a trait that was selected for once and exists in some men now. Women do not receive that same benefit from other women. There is more likely to be actual accountability. Not usually the case though. Since it's a patriarchy, the courts are RULED by that male mentality - which means gynocentrism, which isn't good because ... it allows serious dirtbag ladies to get away light or Scott free for horrible shit.
I’d say it probably warrants some follow up studies. They actually have a ton of other studies they incorporate, but I’d like to see them dig into what OP is suggesting specifically. There’s just a lot going on here… Some striking findings: “…found incompetent male shooters and competent female shooters were dealt with more harshly than the reverse pairing.” “Shooters who violated gender roles were perceived more negatively…” “Women delivered the homeowner defendants higher sentences than men (Male average = 3.9 years and female average = 5.7 years). Importantly the average recommended sentence when the homeowner used the AR-15 weapon was 7.2 years for male subjects and 8.5 for females. This was significantly higher than any of the other gun types. The handguns had the lowest recommended sentences (in the two to four year range).” “Our analyses of guilty and non-guilty verdict decisions found that females were more likely to find the defendant guilty (regardless of defendant gender). The other effects didn't reach statistical significance (though some were close) but there was some indication that the AR-15 usage was detrimental to a defendant's chances of acquittal. The female shooter with the AR-15 did receive the highest percent of guilty verdicts (about 75%).” “McCaughey (1997) in a feminist analysis of women who train in self-defense tactics suggest they are at risk at trial for not seemingly womanly and victim-like.” “Sentences for male officer defendants who used the AR-15 were twice as long as those of male officers who used the Glock 19.”
I realize this is ***not*** the point of OP's question but can we stop calling them "lady/ladies"? So archaic. How about women on juries or female jurors?
Internalized misogyny. I get this from the medical system, and am not surprised it’s built into everything. I hate it. I want to stop dealing with it.
Social reproduction possibly. Women police other women in their gender role along the lines of their own internalisations of patriarchy. Patriarchy is inherently misogynistic and victimises the woman. A woman that defends herself is going against her gender role and therefore is acting inappropriately in that jurors eyes. But a man is acting in his nature and can’t help it/ made a mistake/ doesn’t deserve to lose hims life etc etc. Secondly, if we have been victimised due to our gender, and have along the way just accepted that “that is just how women get treated and we have to accept it” to deal with that trauma, then a woman fighting back may challenge whether we really DO have to accept it, which reignites the trauma. It may also be like a punitive idea of fairness “if I had to just accept it, then she should have to aswell”. That’s all I got.
My SIL is a lawyer and she said it’s also because they don’t want to think that this could happen to them so it has to be because the defendant did something wrong not because the perpetrator was completely wrong otherwise it could happen to them and there is nothing or very little they could do about it
It’s also the nature of that particular workforce. Law is extremely male dominated and “masculine” in its workings. I worked at a law firm for about a year, and the women were chronically stressed, sick and would throw other women under the bus as it’s highly competitive, and quite frankly, not built for women. So, what kind of “successful” women does it breed? (Pro Bono notwithstanding).
Women always judge women the hardest tbh. It's sad and it should not be like that but its not surprising in this particular scenario when we're judged by fellow women just as or more harshly for the mundane everyday things.
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Study is fundamentally flawed. The jury selection pool is a randomly selected cross section of the community based on an overall jury pool. College students are overwhelmingly not representative of a society as there will be a clear age based bias. Most colleges also tend to be predominantly made up of middle class+ individuals from the local community. So you already have a jury pool in the study that’s going to be biased. Beyond that, in jury selection the prosecutor and defendant’s attorney have the opportunity to strike potential jurors during the selection practice, with the idea being that prosecutors will eliminate jurors most friendly to the defense, while defendant’s attorney will eliminate jurors most friendly to the prosecution. So, in theory extremists on either end of the spectrum should be weeded out well before trial starts. If the study didn’t replicate these aspects, and is making a broad, sweeping statement based on the behaviors of a group of female college students from a college in Texas, it’s inherently flawed and unreliable. Only conclusion from the study is that if you want accurate data you need to actually look at real cases and jury related data, not over rely on college students as representative of society.
I’m not sure about this study specifically, perhaps because it is not a ‘typical’ woman’s crime it was judged differently, but typically women actually face positive sexism when it comes to deals, convictions and sentencing. There are a few situations where that is not the case (iirc young attractive women murdering older rich husbands are judged more harshly) but overall men have a tougher time in the criminal justice system when all else is equal.
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What makes you assume that I'm not a feminist?
1. Your anti-feminist post history. 2. The fact that you responded "What makes you assume that I'm not a feminist?" and not "I'm a feminist." Besides which, the burden of proof is on you and your profile to provide evidence of feminism. People are not "feminist by default." Further disagreement will result in a ban.
I don’t doubt the validity of the results but is it possible that they were skewed because this took place in Texas, a very misogynistic state? From my own personal experience from being on a jury, it was 2 men who were clearly misogynists who were the harshest to the female defendant. I was very vocal about supporting her and the other woman was very neutral but eventually voted in her favor
"i got mine" gatekeeping attitude, internalized patriarchy, fear of judgement by male peers, lots of reasons
Think about it this way: if I know most dogs bark am I going to get that upset at a dog for barking? If the common assumption is that dogs bark on instinct, am I going to be that upset for a dog following its instinct? Now, if I specifically got a rabbit because the common assumption is they're "supposed" to be quiet, am I gonna get annoyed if it starts barking? Yes! Women are punished more bc in the juror's eyes, they 've broken society's harsh rules of how a woman should behave. Men aren't expected to adhere to the same standards.
It's the Just World fallacy. Everything happens for a reason, so that means the *victim* did something wrong, and if the female jurors just avoid doing that thing, they'll be safe. Notice how men are erased from this equation, like they're some kind of non-human weather phenomenon that no one control. Wear your rain boots and rain coat, silly Billy. /Angry sarcasm
I...literally can't wrap my head around this. Anybody who studies history (and I do) knows we don't live in a just world. I'm not just talking about obvious stuff like Hitler and the Holocaust either. US history has bad stuff in it. Like the time an entire civil rights movement collapsed in 1876 when the US Supreme Court stole the 14th Amendment...weird shit. Let's not even start on what happened to the First Nations. If you don't understand stuff like that, I can see how the "just world fallacy" is a trap. For those not aware: https://old.reddit.com/r/supremecourt/comments/16jb5ya/the_supreme_court_can_fix_its_oldest_mistake_this/k0qc6t5/