With both his skin color and gender working against him, it took vast amounts of money to defend himself. Money he will not be reimbursed. So -- horrors! -- he does what celebrities do, and agrees to autograph copies of videos, helmets, and other paraphernalia, at a sporting event for a fee.
"It’s just another example of how O.J. Simpson is capitalizing on himself as O.J. Simpson the Murder Defendant," said Nicole Perlman, vice president of the Los Angeles chapter of NOW.They do have a point. It's pretty sleazy. On the other hand, it's not as if NOW never capitalized on O.J. Simpson the Murder Defendant, too. Hypocrisy is not a good foundation upon which to build a soapbox.
Mrs. McMartin died last month at the age of 88. May she rest in peace, and may we be blessed with more women of such strong character as she.
When Sam heard that Judge Bordlemay had been accused by her husband and courtroom staff of being prone to violence, he gave a humorless laugh. "Now watch," he said, "the worst that will happen is, she’ll be forced to retire."
He was right. Judge Bordlemay was forced to sign "an agreement with the (Washington) state Commission on Judicial Conduct to leave the bench for unspecified health problems and violation of the judicial conduct code." She stepped down from her $91,900-a-year position January 1, 1996.
Okay, so one misandristic magistrate is off the bench. Good, but another will soon take her place. Same ol’ same ol’.
Almost.
Seems some folks at the City of Kirkland were intent on keeping the details as secret as possible. They didn’t want anybody to know how the rules Judge Bordlemay applied so vigorously to men would not apply to her. Enter John Sample, columnist for The Backlash!
When John’s request for a copy of the investigation report was denied, he obtained the assistance of Harley Hudgens, a free-lance journalist who knows the law. In a lawsuit alleging that the Kirkland police improperly kept secret the contents of the six-page crime report, Hudgens forced them to provide him with a copy of the report and pay his attorney fees.
Sample will provide a more extensive report in his column.
In the time-honored tradition of victim feminism, they trotted out numerous victims to recount the atrocities only men can commit, and pointed to Bosnia as telling evidence of how all men victimize all women.
But weren’t some men raped, and weren’t many men tortured? Yes, but it’s a man-thing because only men are the villains.
Personally, I’m less concerned with the sex or race of the perpetrator than I am with the fact that someone is being victimized, but for what it’s worth, we might note that Richard C. Paddock of the Los Angeles Times reports that the United Nations has documented 50,000 cases (mostly men) of torture, and 3,000 cases (mostly women) being raped.
Pop-feminists say the sex of the perpetrator does matter. (Sort of like Klan members who insist race matters.) Well, what I’d like to know is, where were the mothers, wives, and daughters of the men who perpetrated these crimes? Protesting, or benefiting.
It’s important to know. Share the bootie, share the blame.
Immediately, he filed for divorce on grounds she had been fooling around and had obviously gotten pregnant by her black lover. A little investigation, however, proved the husband was the culprit. Seems he had been visiting a prostitute on the side, and one evening after such an...interlude...he came home with traces of one of the hooker's other client's -- a black man -- semen on his penis, and immediately coupled with his wife, and that is where the child came from.
Immediately, she filed suit against him and, as the story goes, he got what was coming to him.
I don't know if the story is true, nor is it important. What is important is that everyone who heard the story agreed that he had victimized his wife, and that he should pay.
These days, however, when the shoe is on the other foot, it's still the men who have to pay. And it happens all the time.
Recently, after a Pittsburgh bus driver found out the 8-year-old girl he was paying child support for was another man's daughter, he tried to cut all ties with her, but that's now how the law operates.
In Pennsylvania and most other states, if a man thinks he's a father and acts like a father, that makes him the father (for purposes of child support) even if he later finds out he is not the biological father.
Just another example demonstrating that, when women play, men must pay. (And then they wonder why there's a backlash?)
One thing a bit more clear-cut, (Frank) Truhillo (a probation counselor in the Seattle area Department of Youth Services sexual-offender unit) said. The courts, paradoxically, deal less harshly with girl sex offenders than their boy counterparts -- who are "thrown to the mat" by judges, Truhillo said.Gender-blind justice is long overdue, but is it preferable to treat girls as harshly as boys? What about merging the most effective characteristics of each? In other words, why not treat the boys more like we treat the girls?In Minneapolis, (Ruth) Mathews (a research psychologist) said, 50 percent of girls referred to Transition Place for treatment are charged with crimes, compared with 80 percent of boy sex offenders.
"There’s just an incredible disparity," Truhillo agreed. "If girls are engaging in the same type of behavior as males, they should be held just as accountable and exposed to the same treatment."
Gender-difference enthusiasts of every ilk will hasten to note that no matter how hard we try to pretend otherwise, most boys and girls are different.. And they would be right. Thanks to the ticking of the hormonal clock, time and seasonality inhere in women where men experience them primarily as external events.
What’s more, as Ann Moir outlines in Brain Sex, long before the onset of puberty, early in the womb, testosterone or its lack sexes the brain, imposing gender in ways common sense has always known but science is only beginning to understand.
Granted, these and more are undeniably true; what is equally true, however, are the affects of socialization and education on the development of human personality: we are the product of our biology, environment, and -- what we make of them -- our cognitions. To embrace only one or two factors to the exclusion of any other is to play the role of an ideologue for whom TRUTH transcends what is true.
There are natural gender roles, but civilization and culture are not about emphasizing what is in nature, but building on it. Embracing and encouraging what optimizes our survival and avoiding or mitigating what does not. Purely natural femininity and masculinity are created in the womb; socialization and education that emphasize, encourage and accentuate the differences may have survival utility in more primitive societies that had neither the time nor technology to accommodate anything less than sharply divided roles. That is where our milieu is different: our technologies afford us the time to allow individuals the freedom to nurture in themselves the best personality traits of both sexes.
Would it be so harmful to cultivate empathy in men and integrity in women? (Were you offended, just now, by the implication women are somehow lacking in integrity? But not the implication men are somehow lacking in empathy? Certainly, there are many women of great integrity, but are there not also many men of great empathy? A non-sexist reaction might be to feel offended by both implications. A well-considered non-sexist reaction would be to understand that, generally, empathy is not encouraged in men, and integrity is not encouraged in women, so, as both are virtues, we ought to teach both to our children without regard for their gender.)
If it would be beneficial to cultivate empathy in men and integrity in women, then, in the context of working with child sex offenders, where should we begin?
First, we need to take another look at our society’s (or the psychological/psychiatric professions') still puritanical views about sexual arousal. It is not deviant to be sexually aroused, yet when investigators remark the difference between boys and girls, that is precisely the view they take:
Girls often report that their sex offenses have more to do with wielding power or sating curiosity than satisfying sexual arousal. ...Abuse motivated by a desire to sate curiosity or exert power is neither more nor less deviant than when it is motivated by sexual arousal. Either way, it’s inappropriate and should be addressed on the basis of degree of harm inflicted.A two-year study looking at 51 girl sex offenders found the girls fell into roughly three types, said Ruth Mathews, a Minnesota psychologist who helped conduct the research.
They called the first group experimenter/exploiter girls, who tended to be fairly well-adjusted, had healthy families and no prior sexual activity. ... "These girls are very naive. ... It doesn’t seem like their offending comes from a deviant place. Their victims are stranger’s children whom they baby-sit," she said.
In other areas, however, there are differences which, in the context of socialization, are telling:
The second group of girls had been abused once or twice by a man not related by blood -- typically by their mother’s boyfriend or a step-brother.Paul Shaner , a Seattle-area family therapist, points out that women who have been sexually abused generally display the same kind of body armor most men do -- body tense and distant, rather than relaxed and open. To him, this suggests that masculinity -- at least, that part stemming from socialization -- is a response to a toughening process that is tremendously abusive.The most severe offenders have extensive histories of victimization and had been sexually abused by up to 15 people -- including their mothers, fathers, neighbors, siblings and acquaintances.
This casts an entirely different light on how we may perceive abusive boys and girls:
Girl sex offenders are cut from different cloth than their boy counterparts, said Shawn Brown, who for the past decade has evaluated and treated adolescent sex offenders at the King County Department of Youth Services.That may be true, but is general abuse of boys so common that it has faded into the cultural background noise where, like the male-only military draft, "women and children first," and "male-dominated patriarchy," we accept it without question? If so, then recognizing it may be the first best step we can take in dealing with boy sex-offenders. As Shawn Brown notes, "Young people learn by what has been shown to them." With that in mind, we might begin by treating boys with the same empathy society usually reserves for girls.Up to 80 percent of girls convicted of sex crimes had been victimized themselves, compared with less than half of boy sex offenders.
When sex abuse does happen, equal penalties might be imposed along with the kind of counseling many girls now receive:
The counseling strives to hold the girls responsible for their actions, encourage empathy for victims and build the self-esteem of the offenders.Rather than building self-esteem, however, it might be more effective to build self-respect. Self-esteem -- a sense of having intrinsic value -- is a fine thing, but even a psychopath can have high self-esteem. Self-respect, on the other hand, derives more from a sense of measuring up to external standards. Something our society sorely lacks.
To be effective, disciplinary systems must be neither too lenient nor overly harsh, but encourage behaviors that are appropriate and discourage those that are not. Gender-blind justice is a good thing, but treating girls the way we treat boys is not the answer. Combining the best of how we treat both, however, is a step in the right direction.
Send Editorial Comments to The Backlash!
Please report all problems to The Web Master