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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:
Why do you post articles about women behaving badly?
Stated briefly: the empress has no clothes.
Domestic violence, sexual assault, and sexual harassment laws, in their existence and in their application, reiterate the prejudice that women are more fragile, gentle, loving, caring, honest, and are morally superior to men. … I put forth articles about womens’ crimes primarily as a refutation to that prejudice.
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.
A Russian man who killed and ate his mother — and had his sentence reduced by a judge because “he was starving, he needed to eat.”
Two more Russians who lured a 16-year-old girl to their apartment, drowned her in their tub, then cooked up her remains. They were also “hungry.”
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.
A German man who advertised on the Internet for “young, well-built men aged 18 to 30 to slaughter,” found a not-so-young but willing victim, killed him, and ate him with “potatoes and a pepper or wine sauce … served on ‘good crockery.'” (He did not, however, make the victim into a segment of a human centipede.)
A little closer to home (at least if you live in the US), a Texas man who killed his girlfriend, cooked up her body parts, and may have eaten bits of her.
A man from Oklahoma who confessed to the murder and rape (in that order) of a ten-year-old girl he also had planned to eat. (You can actuallly watch his videotaped confession online, if you’re the sort of sick fuck that enjoys that sort of thing.)
And finally, though there was no cannibalism involved, as far as I can tell, an actor who played one of Steve Carell’s co-workers in The 40-year-old Virgin was just convicted of attempted murder after stabbing his ex-girlfriend more than 20 times with a butcher knife. He said it was a mistake. (And no, it wasn’t Seth Rogan.)
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.
It’s hard to disagree with that. I worry, though, that many of the guys in Thorn’s intended audience will only notice the bit about male sexuality being “hot, awesome, delicious and valuable,” and miss her careful caveats about consent — which she repeats three times in two sentences in an attempt to drive home the point. Unfortunately, as Amanda Marcotte puts it in a response to Thorn’s piece: 
