> From: DMadrone <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Who, wait, not so. Check the numbers.
>As far back as the 1800's there are records of people pondering the
>question..."why is it that women do not, as a group, commit the kinds of
>violent and atrocious crimes that men do?"
I disagree with you in the following way:
Women have always practiced domination and exploitation
against others if they were living in societies were men were
equally disfunctional. This is not to say that women have not
been oppressed based on their category as women, but
that women are part of a variety of categories simultaneously,
and as such they have acted as both oppressed and oppressors,
both as victims of violence and as perpetrators.
There are zillions of examples. One that comes to mind:
Roman civilization, there was gender oppression, but
if you look at who went to the Colosseum or regarding
noble women exploiting Others as slaves you see
that this "men only do violence" is absolute nonsense.
Noble women may not have killed a slave with their barehands,
they could if they wanted to,
but they had their goons do it. They enjoyed violence and their
benefits from it as much as men. If you look throughout European
history,
women who benefitted from exploiting others were
very supportive of the men doing the dirty work.
Women perpetrate violence against the groups
that they have power over: basically this means
Other women/people, children, elderly, the environment, etc.
Look at the apartheid/slavery culture in the South in this
country in the 1800's to the middle of this century and
see if white women as a group were
all nice and good and only the white men were the bad ones.
That's not how it was, now was it?
If you look at people who are environmentally responsible
v. irresponsible, I have seen no evidence of a gender
superiority from women to men. A very large proportion of
women are quite comfortable in doing violence against
the environment if they benefit from it. Same regarding men.
>If you look at past and current
>statistics, you will see clearly that 85-95% of crimes of violence are
>committed by men. Women's crimes include prostitution, petty theft, etc.
I disagree entirely because of your construction of violent crime.
If you support a government/system that starves people even though
you may not be killing them with your bare hands, you are committing
violence. And women practice this type of violence in a variety of
ways throughout the world/history. Furthermore women in a large scale
support men who commit violence against other women in children,
which is a key factor in perpetuating such a system.
>Somebody correct me if I am wrong on the following, but the last I can
>remember about 1/3 of boys and 1/2 of girls are molested in childhood...and
>this is overwhelmingly done by males. Not to mention that at least 1/2 of
>women can expect physical abuse in their marriages. Whatever it is in male
>culture that leads to these inappropriate behaviors (and milder versions of
>such, including 'simple' physical and psychological abuse) must have a part in
>the male culture of leadership which in itself leads to abuse of persons and
>the environment.
Your above statement focuses on only
one type of violence, the type that is much more carried out directly by
men.
But this is not the only type of violence in the world.
I would also like to point out that if these millions of violent men
were not by and
large supported by a variety of women in their lives, this violent
system
would have suffered substantial alteration a long time ago.
>It was neither women nor women's culture that Imagined, administrated and
>implemented the European and Spanish inquisitions, the Viking and Vandal
>raids, or the atrocities of the ivory, sugar and slave trades.
I disagree with you here as well because men and women
shared larger cultures. There were not two distinctly separate
cultures, one used only
by men and another by women that completely divided people
throughout history. I agree that there are a variety of gender
differences, so that
you can speak of a female culture or a male culture within a larger
French culture for example. An example, if we look at Marie Antoinette,
is her "Let them eat cake" mentality an example of
women's culture? Or is it part of the culture of
the French aristocracy in the 18th century?
Women are never part of a "women's" only category, there
are multiple categories interwoven in everyone's lives
and this makes the issue of violence much more complex
than a simple women v. men. If you read about the slave trade
you will find that many European women completely and
totally supported it, endorsed it, and loved the men who
carried out the dirty work of actually capturing, torturing, and selling
the enslaved peoples. Not only that, they were very happy
with the riches they acquired by exploiting Others.
>At least one of the First Nations in our country (drat, at the moment I can't
>remember the tribe) had to ask their women for permission to go to war...which
>permission was given only if there were enough food supplies for the year.
>Think of it: how would that effect us?
I think it's a great example, but it's because the women and men in this
particular
culture were not favorable to war. European civilization for the most
part has
not enjoyed having women (or men) with this type of enlightenment.
And this example demonstrates that enlightenment about violence
is not based on biological sex or solely gender, but on what you think
and how you
behave, regardless of being male or female.
>Note here that I do not think differences in culture indicate differences in
>humanity. Just differences in how that humanity is (often predictably)
>expressed.
>Madrone
Vera
>From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tue May 5 09:32:32 1998
From: "loba kola" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "STUDIES IN WOMEN AND ENVIRONMENT" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Sex and Male Violence / concealed estrus
Date: Tue, 5 May 1998 11:31:30 -0400
charset="iso-8859-1"
the male violence is not just an encapsulated thing: it is almost always
directed at women, children, nohuman animals, nature. im sick of young
males (notice i said *male* rather than *men* there is a HUGE difference
and i would like for the press to stop referring to murderers, rapists,
childmolesters, animal beaters, woman beaters as *men*. they are clearly
demonstrating that they are not *men*, that they are simply *male adults* or
*male juveniles*.) (and you thought you were suffering an unusual loss of
patience with the world, madrone..... :) what has to be done before these
young males who are murdering little girls with rifles at school is stopped?
what has to be done before male adults are no longer murdering their wives
or girlfriends? i swear to god where i live a male adult is murdering his
wife/girlfriend and or kids! a couple of times a month! just last week a
block from where i live, a 13 year old male raped a 7 year old little boy in
broad daylight under a heavily traveled bridge surrounding a public park!
ive had it. im sorry but something drastic has to happen. i am a young
woman who has decided never to have kids because god forbid i have a child
who is the victim of this. im sick of seeing these subhumans released from
prison to commit these atrocities to someones elses child or sister.
something drastic has to happen for these people to snap the hell out of it
and start raising their children to know that if they commit these crimes,
they will pay dearly for it.
loba kola
