You remember Janice, right? She of the “why are middle class men so useless” tirade?
Well, she’s back at it, this time claiming that men are a malign influence we need to stamp out pronto.
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/columnists/janiceturner/article3768313.ece
As always, Janice in italics.
While he was on remand for the murder of Tia Sharp, Stuart Hazell wrote a letter to his father: “You know I’m not a bad person,” he said. “It’s the Hazell curse.” Not his fault: the internet searches for “violent forced rape” and “little girls with glasses”. Attacking a child who trusted him, penetrating her with a sex aid, strangling, then posing and photographing her 12-year-old corpse: not his fault at all.
Wow! There’s a leap of logic. Saying you are not a bad person is not the same as saying you are innocent. Hazell is simply identifying a pattern of behavior within his particular family as a contributing factor to his horrific crime, and most evidence bears that assertion out: adults who commit shocking crimes against children were almost always abused themselves as children.
http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/179/6/482.full
Forces beyond his control made him commit this horrible crime. Hazell claims that he was abused as a child and thus powerless against an almost occultish desire to visit his own suffering on the next generation. He was a mere puppet of his innate drives and sexual impulses, a victim of destiny.
He wasn’t a victim of destiny, he was a victim of childhood abuse that left him so profoundly damaged, he became a perpetrator of the very crimes that blighted his own childhood. Again, that’s not terribly unusual.
It might surprise you to know that a significant percentage of men who were abused as children were abused by women, and that abuse by a female relative correlates very highly to becoming a perpetrator.
There is an alarmingly high rate of sexual abuse by females in the backgrounds of rapists, sex offenders and sexually aggressive men – 59% (Petrovich and Templer, 1984), 66% (Groth, 1979) and 80% (Briere and Smiljanich, 1993).
http://www.canadiancrc.com/PDFs/The_Invisible_Boy_Report.pdf (p.28)
A curse is a magnificent excuse. It not only obviates all blame but dismisses the need for any further analysis. And it struck me that in this bizarre and grisly year, in which stories of sexual violence — from Jimmy Savile and Stuart Hall to Rochdale and Oxford — have saturated the news, that our examination of such events has been just as worthless and hollow.
Well, your examination certainly constitutes worthless and hollow. Why is it that you seem to have noticed all the nasty, evil men, but you make no mention of the nasty evil women who were up to murder and mayhem during the same period?
Fiona Andersen killed her three small children, and is hailed as a “beautiful girl”.
Sheri Torkington killed a woman she didn’t even know after a screaming argument with her boyfriend.
Michelle Mills stabbed her boyfriend to death in a brutal attack that was so frenzied she broke the blade right off. She then sat and watched him die for 20 minutes.
Melanie Smith set fire to a house and killed five members of a young family because she wrongly believed the mother was having an affair with her partner.
The endless assaults, rapes and dressing-room gropings exposed by Operation Yewtree were put down to 1970s sexual mores and celebrity indulgence. The “grooming” cases in which vulnerable girls were trafficked at rape parties were blamed on our dismal care system and the imported culture of Pakistani Muslims. The most arcane acts, committed by Hazell or Ariel Castro, the Ohio basement kidnapper, were filed with the likes of Fred West or Ted Bundy under “evil”.
I like how you left Rosemary West out of your analysis, there, Janice. I guess she was just an innocent dupe under the spell of darling Fred? Under a curse of some sort?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_West
Meanwhile, wherever I go, whichever women I speak to — my hairdresser, my old ma, friends at my exercise class, a gazillion strangers on Twitter — all are asking the same uneasy question: what is it with men? I can foresee the outraged, defensive online comments gathering now under this piece: “man-hating feminist”, “how dare you blame the whole male gender”. But seriously, guys, have you never stopped to wonder hard why members of your gender do so many vile things to members of ours?
Why, yes, Janice, I’ll bet they have. Have you ever stopped to wonder why so many members of your gender do equally vile things to their husbands and boyfriends and especially to children? I always wonder how it is possible to be evil and such a fucking coward at the same time. How hard is it to strangle a baby? Why not pick a more equally matched opponent? What is it with women that they go after the smallest, most vulnerable of victims?
http://motherswhokillchildren.blogspot.ca/
Because, let me tell you, womankind is a permanent state of Maoist self-criticism. If, say, some new study suggests that kids in nurseries are the tiniest bit disadvantaged compared with those cared for by mummies at home, we must pull on our hair shirts, wring our hands at our whole sex’s selfish ambition. Daily we are berated for female shortcomings: we drink too much, break up the nuclear family with our pesky financial autonomy, are too promiscuous, cause our own cancers with frivolous lifestyle choices. And that’s on top of our workaday self-flagellation: we’re too fat, too old, are wearing unfashionable pointy shoes during a round-shoed summer . . .
Selfish
Neglectful
Drunk
Slutty
Broken families
Frivolous
Fat
Old
Concerned about shoes
Yeah, that about sums it up, Janice.
Perhaps the reason women spend so much time thinking about these things is because it takes a lot of energy to defend such shallowness and superficiality.
People hardly ever feel guilty about doing the RIGHT thing, now do they? And based on your photo, Janice, you are definitely too fat.
So it seems only fair that, just this once, men do a little uncomfortable soul-searching. Apply your larger, more rational male brains to a very big conundrum: why do men commit almost all of society’s crime? It is a question so seldom considered that when the sociologists Cynthia Cockburn and Ann Oakley tried to analyse it, they found the Ministry of Justice does not even routinely break down offences by gender.
Men don’t commit all of society’s crimes. They get charged and prosecuted for all of society’s crimes. Women have long received preferential treatment from the justice system, and continue to do so, masking the true extent of women’s criminal proclivities.
Domestic violence, for example, tends to be mutual, but men are far more likely to be charged and convicted of an offence both genders take part in equally.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/sep/05/men-victims-domestic-violence
Men who kills infants will not be seeing the light of day for a long, long time. Women who kill infants get a pat on the head, the address of a therapist and a prescription for Prozac. Indeed, there is a call for even MORE leniency for mothers who murder their infants.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/scrap-outdated-infanticide-law-say-judges-495016.html
Fathers were more likely than mothers to have killed their infants using violence which wounded. Nonetheless sentences were unrelated to the brutality of the offence: mothers who had killed with wounding violence received less severe penalties than fathers who had killed in a non-wounding way.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8264367
With persistent digging they found that in the year to June 2012, 85 per cent of all indictable crimes in England and Wales were committed by men. Moreover, the more serious the offence the more male offenders: 88 per cent of crimes against the person, 98 per cent of sexual offences and 90 per cent of murders were by men. And although theft is seen as the domain of female shoplifters, women were responsible for only 21 per cent. Taking into account that 19 out of 20 prisoners (each costing around £40,000 a year) are male, Cockburn and Oakley calculated that if men committed the same amount of crime as women, we’d save £30 billion a year.
You mean of course if men were CONVICTED of the same amounts of crime as women and sentenced to the same amount of time. Even when women are convicted, they get less time in jail. Why, Vicky Pryce announced the day she was released from jail that she would be writing a book discussing the economics of jailing people women, and who wants to bet she thinks it’s a bad, bad thing?
That’s a fat chunk of the deficit paid off right there. You mean we’re clawing back a pittance from disabled folk with spare bedrooms when dealing with the root cause of male violence could save the defence budget? So why is this is not a key government strategy, except that men’s brutality is seen as a given — an unavoidable downside of superior physical strength and sexual urgency, a by-product of that dark Y chromosome and the sloshing rocket fuel that is testosterone.
Indeed, why is not a priority? Let’s get to the root cause of male violence, shall we? How about we start by looking at these men’s earliest years. The first few years of life have a dramatic impact on how people come to perceive and react to the world around them.
http://www.bjdd.org/new/105/81to95.pdf
Oh-oh. Can we see the problem here? Who cares for small children during their earliest years? Who is primarily responsible for shaping their minds and experiences? Who governs whether their lives are filled with love and affection and stability, or abuse and neglect and violence?
Oh, that would be women. Hello, Mummy!
Let’s take all these violent, terrible men and NOT blame their hormones, but look at their earliest experiences. Where are their mothers?
Oh, right. Janice already answered that. They’re off at the pub getting sloshed and worrying about their footwear.
But is it really a given? As I’m sure male Times readers are bursting to tell me, not all men are rapists or wife-beaters. Then why not focus on what turns innocent boys into dangerous men? This week Diane Abbott, the Shadow Public Health Minister, made a much-heralded speech about the crisis of masculinity. She described modern man as lost in a post-industrial landscape, functionless, suicidal, porn-addicted, racked with performance anxiety in a “Viagra and Jack Daniels” culture, having “moob reductions” while unable to articulate his feelings.
Nice! What a sweet characterization of men. Well, I suppose if Janice is going to portray modern women as fat, drunk sluts more concerned about fashion than their own children, it’s only fair that she portray men as fat, drunk, emotionally crippled porn-addicts who can’t get it up.
Gosh her love of humanity just shines like a beacon in the night, doesn’t it?
But she still hits it. What turns innocent boys into dangerous men? What is it, Janice? Or more accurately, WHO is it?
It was a somewhat broad brush picture. Blue-collar manual jobs were lost decades ago and today’s young men who greet each other with “bro” hugs are certainly less restricted by masculine norms than boys at my school who believed it was effeminate to study English A level. But putting the spotlight on masculinity felt timely in 2013, the year of the sex crime.
Let’s just go back for a minute and consider:
There is an alarmingly high rate of sexual abuse by females in the backgrounds of rapists, sex offenders and sexually aggressive men – 59% (Petrovich and Templer, 1984), 66% (Groth, 1979) and 80% (Briere and Smiljanich, 1993).
Oh, dear. Looks like our fat, drunk slutty mothers have been up to a little bit of alarming behavior when the lights are off and no one is looking.
At the heart of her speech was a welcome affirmation of fatherhood, hitherto absent from Labour thinking for fear of sounding judgmental about what constitutes a family, and all the more powerful from Ms Abbott, a single mother. “We need to say loudly and clearly, that there is a powerful role for fathers,” she said. “Loving fathers are a benefit to children, loving families are a benefit to men.”
How rich, coming from a single mother. Yes, indeed. Loving families are a benefit to our entire society. Why then do we have so many social programs to benefit single mothers, who, by definition, have made sure their children have no fathers in any meaningful sense? Why does the UK offer tax incentives to mothers who farm their children out to day orphanages and punish women who care for their own children?
Maybe what is required is a Ministry for Men to focus on building healthier, happier men and in doing so guarding against the tragic consequences of malign male libido. (It would be self-funded by the resultant fall in crime.) A minister to oversee the provision of mentors for fatherless boys, to ensure those who witness domestic violence do not abuse themselves, to promote sex education based upon consent and respect. A male leader saying categorically that men are masters of their own lives, not slaves to their sexual appetites or victims of a curse.
You’ve got that ass-backwards, bitch. There is nothing malign about the male libido. What is malign is the abuse boys are subjected to, often by women, that results in the kind of anti-social behaviors you rail against.
Monsters are not born, honey. They are made. Made by whom?
That’s the real question. Maybe we need a Minister for Women to teach women not to sexually abuse boys, to teach them not to have children if they don’t intend to care for them, to teach them how to behave like mothers and wives and sisters and daughters and friends. Stop thinking about your fucking shoes and start thinking about someone other than yourself.
No one is saying that sex offenders should get a pass for how they have decided to act as an adult. The word adult is synonymous with autonomy and responsibility. Being the victim of an abusive, loveless childhood peppered with sexual assault is not an EXCUSE for how adults behave. It is an EXPLANATION.
In order to understand why innocent boys become dangerous men, we are going to need to bring women into the conversation. How have these boys been mothered? Where are their fathers? What, exactly, have their experiences been?
That means we need to listen. Listen to what damaged men have to say. Discover how and by whom they were damaged. It’s easy to just blame men for being men. It’s the testosterone. Nasty stuff, that is. It’s also a complete cop-out.
No baby is born determined to grow-up to be a child rapist. Those that do deserve our condemnation, absolutely, but that does not automatically exclude compassion. No, Hazell should never see the light of day again. Perhaps his mother shouldn’t either. He wasn’t born that way. He was made.
The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world. And the hand that decides to beat the ever-loving shit out of that baby is the hand that slays the world.
That hand often belongs to a woman. If we really want to know what is up with men, we’ll need to start by asking what the fuck is up with women?
Lots of love,
JB