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To judge from numerous MRA sites, women are responsible for the vast majority of wickedness in the world. On mensactivism.org we read about a German woman’s killing spree that left four dead; further down the page, there is a story about a female stalker, an update on the case of two girls allegedly killed by their mother and another story about a woman found guilty of negligent homicide. No stories, of course, about badly behaving men.
Porky’s Place, meanwhile, has a special page devoted to “Women Behaving Badly,” (WBB) a category capacious enough not only to include stories about female perps — most recently, a woman who allegedly managed to taser both her brother and herself — but snide attacks on Oprah Winfrey, Jennifer Aniston and Kim Kardashian for offending in various ways Porky’s apparently quite delicate sensibilities.
The Men’s Rights subreddit, on Reddit.com, meanwhile, so routinely features WBB posts that the moderator has written up a little FAQ in order to try to rebut those who regularly point out, quite rightly, that random stories about random women committing random crimes don’t really have anything to do with men’s rights. Not so, says the moderator:
What follows is a rambling collection of individual news items and dubious statistics that really prove nothing more than that the FAQ’s author has his own set of prejudices he’s trying to justify.
But the entire premise of his FAQ is a bit loopy. I haven’t met many people, male or female, who actually think that women are “more fragile, gentle, loving, caring, honest, and … morally superior to men.” I have met lots of people who think men, on average, are more violent than women, on average. They believe that because it’s true. The vast majority of violent crimes are committed by men.
Homicide? Men are responsible for almost ten times as many murders as women, according to figures from the Department of Justice. They are also killed more often than women, but almost always by other men. What about those evil wives and girlfriends who are killing men in their sleep? An MRA boogey-woman. As the DOJ notes, only “about 3% of male murder victims were killed by an intimate.”
How about the particularly awful crime of child murder? Looking at all children under the age of five who were murdered from 1976-2005, we discover that 54% were killed by fathers or male acquaintances, and 29% by mothers. (Most of the rest were also killed by men.)
Rape? Again according to DOJ figures, nearly 98% of rapists and attempted rapists are men. MRAs suggest that rape by women is vastly underreported, which is no doubt true, but rapes of women by men are also vastly underreported as well; we don’t really know by how much, in either case. Men make up 10% of all rape victims, true, but their rapists are almost always other men. No matter how you crunch the numbers, no matter how you spin the results, the overwhelming majority of rapists are male.
Domestic violence? It’s a little more complicated — and I will deal with it in more detail in a future post — but, again, the vast majority of serious abusers are men. “Women are 7 to 10 times more likely to be injured in acts of intimate violence than are men,” notes one researcher. “Husbands have higher rates of the most dangerous and injurious forms of violence, their violent acts are repeated more often, they are less likely to fear for their own safety, and women are financially and socially locked into marriage to a much greater extent than men.”
All this is not to say that women aren’t capable of horrific crimes. Of course they are. But the notion that men commit far more violent crimes than women isn’t a prejudice, it’s a fact. That, and not some sentimental notion that women are as pure as the driven snow, is the reason that most crime stories in the papers have men in the starring role as villains.
The effect of all this selective reporting on the part of MRA sites, which trumpet every grisly story of women-gone-bad and completely ignore the much larger number of stories about evil men, is to further an atmosphere of hysterical lady-phobia amongst their readers. It’s no wonder that so many MRAs have started talking about “marriage strikes” and “Men Going Their Own Way.”
And so, as a kind of corrective to all of these Women Behaving Badly posts, I am launching a new feature, called Men Behaving Worse.
This week, CANNIBALS, a whole rogues gallery of them. Let’s meet them all, shall we:
A Ukrainian man who chopped off parts of his grandmother and ate them while she was still alive.
An Australian killer who told fellow inmates he’d eaten a leg and the penis of his victim.
A former Mr Gay UK who killed his boyfriend then fried up chunks of the body with fresh herbs.
A Chinese man awaiting trial for murdering his two children and eating their brains.
What does all this prove? People do fucked up shit. Both men and women. But mostly men. Film at 11.
EDIT: Added a sentence to the first paragraph; made a few minor edits. Added link about violent women.
EDIT 2: Removed potentially confusing statistic from the paragraph on child murder. See comments for discussion of this.
>"Marriage strikes" have nothing to do with lady-phobia, and everything to do with an unfair family court system.If you are going to criticize the MRAs, at least get your facts straight.
>It's all part of the same anti-woman hysteria; those promoting a marriage strike are afraid of evil women screwing them over.
>child murder by biological fathers is lumped together with other men living with the biological mother in order to make that statistic.""Women are 7 to 10 times more likely to be injured in acts of intimate violence than are men,""that doesn't matter if women were the ones who started it in majority of the cases."But the notion that men commit far more violent crimes than women isn't a prejudice, it's a fact. "then what's the problem with accepting that men are also far ahead when it comes to being at the top of the social hierarchies?"That, and not some sentimental notion that women are as pure as the driven snow, is the reason that most crime stories in the papers have men in the starring role as villains."but women aren't even shown as villains, it's rather she must have been suffering emotionally and generally due to a man. If you want to say that women commit crimes due to suffering meted out from the men in their lives then let men have the same recourse too.and does DOJ includes the women teachers who sleep with their under-ages students as raped? and do women undergo the daily shaming that men undergo for crimes of a few? perhaps the women who are injured/killed in DV would benefit much more if they were told not to hit their partners rather than the other way round.
>I agree with the above comment that you've quoted the child murder statistics in a very misleading way. Males are responsible for 63% of child murders. The 81% of non-parental murders by males is offset by fathers being responsible for only 52% of parental murders. By improperly adding "other male acquaintances" to the figure for fathers, you've concealed the fact that the figures for fathers and mothers are almost the same.
>The issue was male vs female violence, not mother vs. father violence. So obviously I combined fathers and other men. I haven't concealed anything.
>"The issue was male vs female violence, not mother vs. father violence. So obviously I combined fathers and other men. I haven't concealed anything."The overall ratio of male to female perpetrated child murder is in reality a little over three to two. The figures you chose to quote: 54% compared to 29% on the one hand and 81% on the other misleadingly suggest a higher ratioStrictly speaking you didn't conceal anything because you linked to your source, but, as I'm sure you're aware, not everyone will click through, and even fewer will drill down into the figures to find out what they really show.
>How on earth was that misleading? I used the numbers available from the govt. and linked to the source. The source didn't break down the numbers cleanly male vs. female, so I combined father and male acquaintances into one male category. Obviously 54% and 29% don't add up to to 100% I added the 81% figure, given by the source, simply to indicate that the remaining deaths were mostly caused by males. There was no attempt on my part to cover up female child murderers. Anyone reading what I wrote would see very clearly that mothers do indeed commit a very significant minority of child murders.
>"How on earth was that misleading? I used the numbers available from the govt. and linked to the source. The source didn't break down the numbers cleanly male vs. female,"Yes it did, in the table immediately below the statistics you quoted from."so I combined father and male acquaintances into one male category. Obviously 54% and 29% don't add up to to 100% I added the 81% figure, given by the source, simply to indicate that the remaining deaths were mostly caused by males."The remaining deaths – i.e., excluding those by mothers, fathers, and male acquaintances – are 55% male-perpetrated, not 81%. The 81% figure includes male acquaintances. You've included them twice.You ask how this is misleading? Well, you seem to have mislead yourself. Inattentive readers are likely to come away the same impression – that the remaining deaths are overwhelmingly male-perpetrated, when they're not.
>"the entire premise of his FAQ is a bit loopy. I haven't met many people, male or female, who actually think that women are "more fragile, gentle, loving, caring, honest, and … morally superior to men.""In respect of "moral superiority" Barbara Ehrenreich disagrees:Th[e] strategy and vision [of naive feminism] rested on the assumption, implicit or stated outright, that women were morally superior to men…She goes on to quote a Journalist, Mary Jo Melone:Feminism taught me 30 years ago that not only had women gotten a raw deal from men, we were morally superior to them."She may have learned it 30 years previously, but she didn't unlearn it until 2004. I didn't see a great sea-change in feminist attitudes at that time either, Ehrenreich's and Melone's disillusionment notwithstanding.As for "fragility", that's a synonym for vulnerability. While I disagree more or less completely with Drew's analysis, I agree with the basic observation that the women are percieved as vulnerable in "legal, media and societal systems".
>As I said, I haven't met many people who believe that. That doesn't mean there aren't a few who do. But the vast majority of feminists I've met in the last 20 years or so do not think that women are angels or anything close to angels.Also, I think you're misread Ehrenreich's own history here. As she put it, "I never believed that women were innately gentler and less aggressive than men." The "naive feminism" she talks about was widespread in the 1970s, and it sounds as though tiny traces of it lingered on in Ehrenreich until Abu Ghraib, but it's been under steady criticism from less-naive feminists for decades, and at this point in time there aren't many of those kinds of feminists left.
>Oh, and on the 81%, I think it's my comment that was confusing, not the original article. My comment said: "I added the 81% figure, given by the source, simply to indicate that the remaining deaths were *mostly* caused by males." I wasn't saying that 81% of the remainder were caused by men, just most. And that, as you note, is true. I'll reword that part of the original post to remove the 81% figure; like I said, I'm not trying to confuse anyone or overstate the % of murders committed by men.
>"Rape? Again according to DOJ figures, nearly 98% of rapists and attempted rapists are men. MRAs suggest that rape by women is vastly underreported, which is no doubt true, but rapes of women by men are also vastly underreported as well; we don't really know by how much, in either case."Which renders your 98% statistic – a ratio between two "vastly underreported" figures, rather suspect, doesn't it?"Men make up 10% of all rape victims, true, but their rapists are almost always other men. "They're 10% of victins according to a study which is severely underestimating rape prevalence. According to probably the best measure that’s ever been taken of national rape prevalence in the USA, men were 23.5% of victims in the survey year.Unfortunately "the best" survey didn't ask men if they had been coerced into vaginal sex. Only women got asked that question.That's a serious omission. According to one survey of college students, (which I can't cite off the top of my head, sorry), more men than women reported being coerced into vaginal sex by their partners.
>Oh, and another thing: I suggest you take any statistics from NCVC with a pinch of salt. At the very least, verify them with their source. Their figures for prison rape, for example, are completely bogus. The 22% figure is not an annual rate, did not originate with HRW, does not refer to rape and is an outlier in the scholarly literature. I don't know where 420,000 figure came from.
>"I'll reword that part of the original post to remove the 81% figure; like I said, I'm not trying to confuse anyone or overstate the % of murders committed by men."You should also add the number of female-aquaintance-perpetrated to those by the mother.Better still, why not just quote the percentages for men and women overall. They're not difficult to calculate.
>Rape statistics (and abuse statistics) are inherently problematic; the kinds of issues you're bringing up would be better dealt with in a future post, and they will be. The point as far as this post went was simply to say that, yes, the overwhelming majority of rapists are male.
>Me:"According to one survey of college students, (which I can't cite off the top of my head, sorry), more men than women reported being coerced into vaginal sex by their partners."Ah the dangers of relying upon memory when reporting research finding. In fact, the study found that more men than women reported being physically forced into vaginal sex by their hetrosexual partners. Specifically 2.1% of men against 1.6% of women. But more women than men reported being verbally coerced.Similarly, more men (2.4%) than women (1.6%) reported being physically forced into oral or anal intercourse by their opposite-sex partners.My point is not to argue that this is the definitive study into the question – there are others, using different methodology, which make different findings. My point is that we really don't know how much female-perpetrated rape there is, because by and large, researchers haven't looked for it. All of the major studies into rape prevalence suffer from one or more of the the following flaws:1. They do not consider female perpetrators at all.2. They do not consider male victims at all.3. They do not use behaviourally specific screening questions.4. They contextualise the subject matter in ways that are likely to lead to underreporting by men in particular (as well as by women.)5. They exclude people residing in institutions6. They operationally define rape in ways that exclude acts against male victims and by female perpetrators, while including comparable acts against female victims or by male perpetrators.The National Violence against Women Survey for example operationally defines the act of forcing ones genitals into another persons mouth to be rape, only if the perpetrator is male. An act of forced PIV or PIA is rape, only if person with the penis in question is the forcer. It is not rape if that person is the forcee.
>>My point is that we really don't know how much female-perpetrated rape there is, because by and large, researchers haven't looked for it.Well, you know what? We "really don't know" all sorts of things about the world. We don't understand what makes people happy. We don't know what percentage of people are gay. We do the best we can with the data we have, and we hope that the people researching these subjects begin to fill in the holes. Nevertheless, I am comfortable with the conclusion that men commit the vast majority of rapes in the world. (Just as I am comfortable saying that the vast majority of people are not gay.) I cannot say with certainty what the percentages are, and I indicated that in the piece, though I probably could have put more caveats in there than I did. If a new wave of scholarship proves me wrong on this point, I will change my tune.
>"We "really don't know" all sorts of things about the world."There's a big difference between the things we don't know because we haven't examined them, and the gaps in our knowledge left after a subject has been examined."I am comfortable with the conclusion that men commit the vast majority of rapes in the world."That's a statement of personal psychology, not an argument supporting the claim. Most people are comfortable with their own gender stereotypes.
>Black widows usually avoid suspicion from the police until they've murdered their 6th or 7th victim. I recall hearing this on either The FBI Files or Cold Case Files. What this means is the figures for the incident rate of woman-on-man homicide are dubious and unreliable. This fact proves that the methods used by the police are ill-equipped to spot woman-on-man homicide. I'd argue that this is the main reason the figures are so skewed. Why? Because not all black widows go on to kill 6 or so men — only a few of them rally up such a high number. This means only the select few who go on to kill 6 or so men are likely to be caught. The ones who kill less than 6 stand a good chance of avoiding detection. So Mr Futrelle, can you now see why the figures are so one-sided? And don't get me started on the amount of woman-on-child murder that are listed as SIDS!
>Look at what the Administration for Children and Families has to say about child homicide:"Perpetrator RelationshipMore than 70 percent (71.0%) of child fatalities were caused by one or more parents.5 More than one-quarter (26.6%) of fatalities were perpetrated by the mother acting alone.6 Child fatalities with unknown or missing perpetrator relationship data accounted for 17.3 percent."Child Maltreatment 2008. Chapter 4: Fatalities; p57http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cb/pubs/cm08/cm08.pdfIn case you didn't know Mr Futrelle, the ACF is a Governmental department. If you're going to cite the BOJ, then have the balls to cite the ACF too. Doing anything less makes you look like an ideologically-driven bigot who uses selective statistics to support his view.
>"Most fatalities from physical abuse are caused by fathers and other male caregivers. Mothers are most often held responsible for deaths resulting from child neglect (U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect, 1995)."http://www.childwelfare.gov/pubs/factsheets/fatality.cfm#perps
>Fatal child abuseChild deaths resulting from parental abuse are unique among homicides in terms of the high proportion of women offenders. Female offenders are usually biological mothers, whereas male perpetrators are usually de facto or step parents to the child victim (Alder & Polk, 2001). It has been found that de facto or stepparents kill children in their care at a much greater rate than biological parents, with many more stepchildren killed by stepfathers than by stepmothers (Daly & Wilson, 1994; Strang, 1995). The greater rate of harming by stepfathers is in part due to small children rarely residing with biological fathers and stepmothers (Daly & Wilson, 1994).Most researchers who have used police homicide records suggest that the majority of perpetrators are males (Lyman et al., 2003). However, many deaths due to maltreatment may not meet the criminal definition of homicide, particularly deaths due to neglect (Finkelhor, 1997; Lawrence & Irvine, in press). The US National Incidence Study (Sedlak & Broadhurst, 1996), which is based on child maltreatment cases that include neglect, showed that almost 80 per cent of fatal maltreatment cases were attributed to female perpetrators. Studies have shown that mothers are predominantly responsible for neonaticides (death of child aged under 24 hours) (Creighton, 1995, Finkelhor & Dziuba-Leatherman, 1994). These women tend to be young or immature women who are ill-equipped to deal with pregnancy and the care of a child (Finkelhor, 1997).There is evidence that men are most often responsible for child deaths that result from physical assault (Ewing, 1997). A characteristic of these cases is the apparent attempt to punish or discipline in response to the child's behaviour (e.g., crying), rather than an intent to kill the child (Adler & Polk, 2001).http://www.aifs.gov.au/nch/pubs/sheets/rs7/rs7.html
>Black widows usually avoid suspicion from the police until they've murdered their 6th or 7th victim."Uh, CITATION NEEDED. All this stuff about black widows is fantasy on your part.As for the rest, yes, mothers commit a significant percentage of child murders. THIS IS WHAT MY POST ALREADY SAYS. Comparatively, they commit more child murders than they commit other murders. Again, THIS IS WHAT MY POST ALREADY SAYS. But they do not commit more child murders than men, and none of what you posted suggests they do.Mothers also spend, on average, a fuckload more time with kids; there are many many more single mothers raising kids than single fathers, so it makes sense that most deaths by neglect are due to mothers, because they're the ones caring for the kids (and sometimes failing badly at that). When you control for the amount of time spent with kids, it's more dangerous for young kids to be around male caregivers than it is to be around female ones. I'll dig up that stat when I have more time.Also, the stuff you posted about stepfathers? I don't know if you realize this, but stepfathers are, you know, men. The point I was making was that a higher proportion of child murders were committed by men than women. Mothers and fathers commit child murder at about the same rate; but other men (including stepfathers) commit the vast majority of the rest of the child murders.
>"Uh, CITATION NEEDED. All this stuff about black widows is fantasy on your part." — FutrelleLOLDid I didn't I tell you that the statement was made on The FBI Files or Cold Case Files? Yes I did.Here it is again:"I recall hearing this on either The FBI Files or Cold Case Files."If I recall correctly, the person who made the comment was a law enforcement officer. The fact that you've written it off as "fantasy" proves that you're an ideologically driven bigot. You refuse to accept this information because it clashes with your agenda. But if you're still delsuional enough to believe I live in a fantasy world, then take a look at this:"The typical pattern of a black widow killer is to murder six to eight victims in a period of 10 to 15 years. Numbers of victims have been known to be higher in areas where law enforcement is minimal and investigators are either less vigilant or less suspicious."The aforementioned excerpt is from Domestic Homicide of Male Spouses by Females: A Review for Death Investigators. You can see the full article here:http://www.forensicnursemag.com/articles/391lifedeath.html
>"As for the rest, yes, mothers commit a significant percentage of child murders. THIS IS WHAT MY POST ALREADY SAYS. Comparatively, they commit more child murders than they commit other murders. Again, THIS IS WHAT MY POST ALREADY SAYS. But they do not commit more child murders than men, and none of what you posted suggests they do."A child is more likely to be murdered by its biological mother than by their biological father. Saying "more men commit murders" is a cunning attempt to hide the fact that children are safest when they live with their father. It's a known fact that children of single mother households are more likely to be maltreated, physically abused, murdered, and; have a higher incidence of alcoholism, dropping out of school, mental illness, psychopathy and suicide. Single mothers are responsible for their children's welfare. This means they need to reject all dangerous men who approach them for sex and a relationship. Any single mother who allows a dangerous man to come within 1 foot of her child is just as culpable as him for any violence that he inflicts upon it. These sort of women are just selfish, useless, uncaring monsters who place more emphasis on having their clitoris tickled by a thuggish man — mostly because only these sort of guys turn them on — than they do about doing what's right for their children. All of these women ought to be castrated or hanged.You ought to be ashamed of yourself for not holding single mothers accountable for their deplorable behaviour. People like you are the reason single-motherism has caused more problems for children than anything else.