Sadly, at almost exactly the same time, we had a similar case here in the Seattle area. Kenneth Westmark took his two young sons into the garage, strapped them into his Chevrolet Blazer, started the engine and waited to die. His then-wife, who had just told him she was planning on filing for divorce, found them. The boys were dead and Westmark was in a coma.
His lawyer pleaded not-guilty by virtue of severe depression. Unlike Smith, Westmark had already attempted suicide twice before. Unlike Smith, he did not stand by and watch his children die, but tried to take his own life as well. Was he guilty? As sin. Would his fate be comparable to Smith’s?
He will be sentenced later this month, and could receive 40 years.
And on June 24th, while her husband Michael was at work, Holly Wood sat her two boys down in a walk-in closet in their Sultan home, just north of Seattle, set their mobile home on fire, then closed the closet door behind her. All three died from asphyxiation.
What is it with people these days? Have feminists made marriage such a battlefield that everyone feels compelled to kill themselves and their boys?
I think there is a sexist bias here, against a category of fiction that is written, edited and read almost exclusively by women.According to Krentz, her novels do not conform to the old stereotypes; they’re about intelligent, liberated women:
Krentz has settled into a pattern best described by the title of a University of Pennsylvania Press book of essays Krentz edited: "Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women."No, nothing like the old formula at all. Right. Her rationale is that her "heroes are not usually dangerous in the legal sense; they aren’t desperadoes or criminals, and they most certainly aren’t rapists or abusers." So, what are they like? Like the "dashing and handsome Earl of Colchester, whose respect for the heroine’s scholarly prowess is matched only by his passion for her nubile body."
A "wealthy scion of European nobility"? That’s really original. Thank goodness Krentz is breaking the old stereotypes.
WELLINGTON - Ground-breaking New Zealand research indicating that many children fabricate stories of sexual abuse when questioned by adults is before an international forum in Paris.In the study of 30 children, run by Dr. Jane Rawls and financed by the Law Foundation, the children reported they had been sexually abused, all by the same man.
The revelations were an unpleasant surprise because the assessment team knew there had been no abuse. The children had invented the incidents. Their every moment with the man had been videoed.Dr. Rawls was shocked to discover that "the children’s accuracy of recall about a range of situations at their first set of interviews ranged from 13 per cent to nil."
The anger and frustration many women feel as they try to juggle family and work is understandable, if misdirected. Their anger properly should be toward those who have pushed policies that ignore the special needs of women with children. The proper object of their anger should not be men or society, but those who, purporting to fight for women's freedom, effectively have denied them the simple freedom to raise their own children.Right on.
They (women) are allowed to take new jobs and new responsibilities, but find that those new responsibilities are "feminized" and thus aren’t deemed valuable to society. So we have the great advantage of doing what we always wanted to do, with the disadvantage that it’s dismissed as "women’s work."Like engineer, firefighter and garbage collector?
By law, these professions are open to women. Where are the female candidates? Flocking to the "glamorous" jobs. But there are a limited number of available positions, and as the law of supply and demand relegates such in-demand jobs to lower pay, they become "women’s work" as men seek the higher wages necessary to make them attractive to women, elsewhere.
And male sexism is to blame? I don’t think so.
Typically, I’d start with the "common wisdom" about men and domestic violence, and end with references to sitcoms that portray men as clumsy bumblers. But beyond the obvious (once you know what to look for) is the media’s insidious blindness to balance.
To promoting his new movie, The Nutty Professor, Eddie Murphy has granted several interviews, recently, and a number of the articles include retrospectives of his career. Not always complimentary.
"People were letting me down right and left, and women were using me and hurting me. It took its toll." Murphy released the vicious concert movie, "Raw" in 1987 Wearing a red leather suit and gloves, he ranted about women after his money, saying he was going to Africa to find an unspoiled "crazy naked Zebra bitch" named Oomfoofoo.I saw "Raw." Twice. It made me think. Not because he "ranted" about women, but because the entire performance was about how shallow women and men can be when it comes to relationships.
First, he "ranted" about women. Then, about half way through, he reversed everything to demonstrate with biting wit that both women and men have an equal capacity for superficiality.
What’s this got to do with male bashing?
Newsweek reporters Allison Samuels and Jeff Giles heard, and reported, Murphy’s derisive exposition about women, but were blind to his mockery of men. A blindness common to the media.
It's true!
In Sweden, feminists have made significant progress in getting women elected into political office. Being in office turned out to be tough. So, instead of taking responsibility for the progress they’ve made, they make it sound like men pushed them into it:
Women have been assigned the job of managing the public weal just when the real influence is shifting to the Disneys and the Microsofts. [Editor: Emphasis added]Microsoft, huh? What is it about Microsoft you pop feminists don't like? How many of you have been to the Microsoft campus and visited the many women in positions of power there? The Systems and Applications departments may still be dominated by the guys, but CorpCom, Marketing, Public Relations, HR, Finance, most of the areas that have the most significant impact on individuals’ lives and society alike, are increasingly dominated by women.
Let's talk about sex. Specifically, the sexual demands of a female supervisor in Microsoft's manufacturing facility in Canyon Park. (Details on October 17th.) Let's talk about how Tina Podlodowski looked the other way while one of her male subordinates sexually harassed and humiliated one of her female subordinates at Microsoft University. (Details on October 17th.) Let's talk about the stripper a woman in HR hired to surprise and embarrass Jeff Lum in his office in building 6 on his birthday in 1988. (Details on October 17th.)
Microsoft may have started out as a boys' club, but hundreds of women have Microsoft under a sexually charged siege. Sex, under the best of circumstances, can be crazy-making. But many Microsoft women are making love a battlefield, and it shows.
Now, what was it you were saying about influence shifting to the Microsofts?
Critics of this view assert that the number of women in prison will increase dramatically when arrest, prosecution and sentencing become gender-blind, when the ways women commit violence are acknowledged, and when our courts stop automatically arresting men every time someone (either the man or woman involved) makes a complaint of domestic violence (even when the man is the one who calls the police complaining of a violent woman, he’s still more likely to be arrested than she is).
We have also noted the disparity between the number of white and black males in prison. In speeches, essays and radio and television appearances, I have emphasized that while we always need to hold individuals responsible for their behaviors, we should not ignore the cultural and social conditions that create this disparity. When the disparity gets too high, I and others have predicted, the mainstream media will condemn these conditions and decry the oppression of black men.
We were right. The U.S. Bureau of Prisons reports that 43 percent of men in prison are black, compared with 42 percent who are white, and now the media recognizes there’s more to men in prison than some innate criminal talent:
Given this sad state of affairs, we will not be able to build enough jails to hold all of the criminal offenders being crunched out daily by rising levels of poverty, drug addiction, homelessness and economic dislocation ravaging inner-city communities throughout our nation.When femigogues complain that some uniquely female complaint is receiving too little attention, they commonly whine that "if men had this problem, it would receive national priority and buhzillions of dollars in programs to address it" (like prostate cancer?). An epithet, of sorts, that is rearing its ugly head once more, this time not as a sexist slur, but racist:
America would quickly and effectively institute the most comprehensive set of intervention and prevention strategies known to mankind if there came a time when one-in-three white male youth (20-29 years of age) were in jail, on parole or on probation.Uh-huh. If we could get past pop feminists like June Stephenson and her demand to effectively put all men on probation (along with imposing a special "testosterone tax" to pay for the prisons and programs to remedy the "criminal gender").
The fact is, if race was the essential factor, there would be significantly more black women in prison. But there are hundreds of thousands more white men than black women in prison. Yes, race is a factor (I may look almost white, but I’m Cowlitz Indian, I have experienced racism firsthand, and nobody can tell me it isn’t relevant). But sex has far more to do with it, and African- American pundits who treat it solely as a matter of race rather than sex will make little progress.
And they’re still at it:
In 1949, (Mary) Wood started at Boeing at $1.05 an hour, decent money in those days -- though below the rate men earned.Nonsense. My father started at Boeing in 1953 doing the same kind of manufacturing work as Wood, and at the same rate or $1.05. That’s roughly 4 years after Wood alleges she was discriminated against. Four years worth of (relatively low) inflation. Effectively, my father was earning less in 1953 than Wood -- a woman -- was earning in 1949.
Things that make you go, hmmm.
Why?
Long experience has taught us that pop feminists, who, even today, justify tax funding for feminist programs on the basis that feminism is about equality for everybody, clam up when the subject has to do with problems that adversely affect men. So why haven’t we heard the feminist-foretold "uproar" from men? Because, simply put, most men aren’t whiners, but are embarrassed by such problems:
Most men are too embarrassed to admit having surgery to relieve a self-esteem problem that many doctors say might be better addressed through psychotherapy.Once again, it appears the femigogues are projecting their own attitudes onto men.
Attorney Gloria Allred, a spokeswoman for Nicole Simpson’s family, said the anti- violence group should not "stoop" to associating with Simpson, who was convicted in 1989 of battering his wife.First off, Simpson is barking up the wrong tree. Everyone acknowledges that Nicole Simpson was emotionally and physically abusive, but no one takes her violence seriously because she was "just a woman" and in our society the violence women commit against men is considered trivial. As Dennis Miller derisively remarked on an episode of HBO’s Dennis Miller Live, O.J. said he hit her because "she hit me first.""It’s clear to me he is involved in a public-relations campaign on a grand scale to spit-shine his image and to try to erase from the public’s memory the kind of person that he really is," Allred said.
With that in mind, perhaps O.J. should focus more attention on how society views women’s violence against men, and on false allegations of domestic violence.
However, and perhaps more significantly, he should consider filing suit against Gloria Allred for slander.
A couple of years ago when Allred appeared on the Donahue show to discuss the case of sexual harassment her firm successfully litigated against Cal Spas, at one point she threatened one of the defendants with a libel suit for making a derisive remark against her client. "What’s good for the goose is good for the gander," and all that. If Allred can do it, then perhaps she should get a taste of her own medicine.
Clarence Thomas helped to write the rules Anita Hill used in her attempt to crucify him. Now, he "gets it."
Bob Packwood was a powerful political ally of many feminist organizations. Now, he "gets it."
Who’s next? Enter talkshow host Montel Williams, who has often showcased men as sexual barbarians who abuse, abase, and objectify members of the genteel sex.
Two women who used to work for Montel Williams claim in a lawsuit that they were fired because they objected to his sexual innuendoes and harassment. He denied any wrongdoing.We’re shocked! Are these women working for some radical underground cell of the men’s movement? Probably not. But we can only hope that something good will come of this. Either Montel will be exposed as just another powerful philanderer who found pop feminism a convenient ideological closet for hiding his sexist skeletons, or he will learn just how easy it is to fall victim to the tarnishing power of the pointed finger.Stacy Galonsky and Mahri Fieldman say the TV talk-show host grabbed workers’ buttocks, regularly called women "whores" and conducted meetings in his underwear.
Either way, we win.
Some say women need guns for protection. Others say that would be like women stooping to the same level as men. Columnist Mike Royko borrows from both sides, agreeing women should pack protection, but arguing essentially that women can’t stoop that low:
Let us look at the obvious. Women are physically weaker. They are less violent, less boastful, less inclined toward proving they have a large whatsis by beating up on someone smaller.I keep getting confused about this "women are physically weaker" thing. On the one hand, they live longer because they’re stronger, while on the other they’re victimized by men because they’re weaker. They’re strong enough to fill combat positions, but the qualifying tests to prove fitness for combat roles are much less demanding for women than men. They’re strong enough to be firefighters, but when it comes to lifting and carrying employers are still instructed to use men for the heaviest loads.
That’s different, you dolt! Constitutional strength is not the same thing as muscular strength. Silly me. Obviously, Bud Bundy has much more muscular strength than Kelly Bundy, even though she’s bigger than he is. Silly me.
But are women really less violent than men? Well, men are certainly arrested for violence more often than women. But black men are arrested for violence more often than white men, too. Does that mean black men are more violent than white men?
Some feminists retort that black men do commit more violence, but that’s because they’re victimized by the institutionalized racism of white men. Like the racism that causes them to be accused of violent behavior more often even when white men are just as violent. Okay, so why would white men be more violent than white women? Could it be because white men are driven to it by the institutionalized sexism of white women and a white society that caters to white women more than to any other group?
What could I be thinking of! Everybody knows white American women are, of all people, most oppressed! Silly me. (And let’s just ignore that more and more studies, not to mention arrest statistics, are beginning to show that women are just as violent as men.)
Less boastful? Less sensitive about proving they have "large whatsis"? That would explain all the women who are suing Dow for the silicon leaking into their, um, large whatsis.
But wait, before we dismiss Royko’s glowing account of women, we ought to consider carefully his carefully considered characterization of men:
While we men have our good qualities, we’re responsible for most of the violence and boorish behavior in our society.This confuses me. Okay, so I’m easily confused. But aside from the times when women provoke guys to fight each other (oh, come on, don’t tell me you’ve bought the pop feminist hen and cow about how women never cause bar fights?), what about the equal distribution of domestic violence? Or the fact women are responsible for most child abuse and child murders?