"The Chivalry Hypothesis": Why Women Get Sympathy And Men Get Jail Time
Christie Blatchford writes at in the Canadian National Post:
It's called "the chivalry hypothesis," and as Dr. Rob Whitley says, what it suggests is that judges and journalists tend to portray men as villains and women as victims.He's one of the authors of a new McGill University study which looked at how Canadian newspapers describe mental illness and particularly if the chivalry hypothesis holds even when the women are "involved in violence or criminality."
In other words, are articles about mentally ill women different from those about mentally ill men and are the women treated more generously?
After examining 1,168 newspaper articles published over six months, the answer was pretty much a resounding yes, albeit with the usual academic qualifications.
Stories that depicted men with a definitive or alleged mental illness were more "stigmatizing" -- they focused upon crime, danger and violence -- while those about women were "significantly more likely to have recovery as a theme" and to focus upon background information such as mental health interventions.
Blatchford quotes Laura Rowe, "a former member of the Toronto police board and a tough, resilient, ferociously independent feminist" about the notion of women as victims:
Nonsense, said Ms. Rowe: Women are full human beings, and thus fully capable of all the good, and all the bad. Period.
via @judgybitch1
Waal, teaching your children to understand personal agency to the marrow of their bones is a task a parent has. They often do not bother or fail with their daughters, and have for several generations. Add to that the kultursmog that circles of women manufacture in and among themselves and you have a toxic situation. Here is Badger Hut on how this can manifest itself in (comparatively benign) public discourse:
http://badgerhut.wordpress.com/2011/02/23/obligation-masculinity-kay-hymowitz-and-her-clueless-brethren/
So, you have the following ambient notions: that women have options and men have obligations, that only the interests of women are of any importance, and that uttering a want justifies a want (see Sandra Fluke).
The addled on the distaff side are aided by the casual contempt that haut bourgeois men harbor for working-class men (manifest in the behavior of family court judges) and by sentimentality and stupidity. Some years ago, a lapsed attorney employed as a law librarian informed us all that no man who 'really loved' his wife would ever be subject to a divorce suit. I cannot figure how a man gets through 47 years of living and some time in law practice (including divorce cases) and utters such an inane remark, but derivatives, corrollaries, and variations on that are rampant in evangelical circles. (The blogger Dalrock has been a vigorous and incisive of how feminist notions are expressed in evangelical settings).
Art Deco at July 12, 2014 8:18 AM
This isn't caused by feminism, or parents not teaching their children sufficient personal agency.
It's a simple biological drive that we don't address. An attractive woman will garner two extreme reactions, usually sympathy or rarely an extreme persecution. A mother will be viewed as a struggling provider. A grandmother as a matriarch compelled under the circumstances of tragedy.
Women have always been treated like that by the courts, even before we had courts. The only accusation that was usually impossible to escape was being a slut. That isn't applicable anymore.
One of my favorite jokes is by Patrice O'Neal where he talks about how white women's lives are valuable, everyone else is on a sliding scale.
It is in our nature to want to protect women and view them as nurturing and it is in our nature to view men as expendable, and aggressive. That's just how our monkey brains work.
That is not however how the courts should operate.
You can see that attitude outside of courts and among people who don't have notions of middle class feminism. I certainly got babied all the time, even when I did crazy things, and by men who don't view women as equals.
Ppen at July 12, 2014 9:53 AM
It's a simple biological drive that we don't address.
It's not simple, nor is it unvarying.
This isn't caused by feminism, or parents not teaching their children sufficient personal agency.
Yes it is. Anyone who has been around a few decades has seen considerable variation in both expressed attitudes and observable behavior, generally for the worse over time.
Art Deco at July 12, 2014 10:25 AM
Even so, a woman only has the "option" of staying home if she can find a man who will agree to that. My brother certainly didn't agree to that with a certain girlfriend - which is why he married another woman, who agreed to keep her job after they had children.
In the same vein, leaving aside the issue of paternity fraud, a man only has parental obligations to those children he either sired or adopted. I.e., those he was careless enough to have. If men and women are tired of men not having many contraceptives on the market, they should get out and campaign for Vasalgel. Among other things, it would be interesting to see how this changes the insurance debate.
BTW, I found five pretty interesting pieces on the First International Conference of Men's Issues in Detroit (held in late June). One was from the Washington Post, one from TIME, and one was from the Southern Poverty Law Center. One author, Bucky Turco, quoted Dr. Helen Smith as saying: "We’ve seen women with increased reproductive freedom; married men often require a note from their wives before a doctor will even perform a vasectomy."
Kinda ridiculous for her to say that, no?
I mean, why bother to mention that particular restriction on men when last I heard, married women have to jump through the same hoop to get sterilized - and even UNMARRIED women will often have trouble getting sterilized? (The old rule among doctors - not completely abolished everywhere - was: "Woman's age times number of children must equal 120." You do the math.
lenona at July 12, 2014 11:20 AM
Ppen said - This isn't caused by feminism, or parents not teaching their children sufficient personal agency.
No, no, certainly not. We all know feminism is, has always been and always will be the only movement in the history of the world that has caused momentous social change without one single negative consequence.
Feminism exists at the intersection of chivalry and female opportunism - so while feminists are happy to appeal to chivalry and play the damsels in distress over the "fact" that 1 in 5, or 1 in 4, or 3 out of 4, or 4 out of 3 women on college campuses are raped every 2.3 seconds, and men need to protect these vulnerable women from men. They will in the next breath argue just as forcefully that the patriarchal social construct of gender is the only thing that stops the Army and Marines from putting womern into Infantry units. After all, gender IS a social construct - women can be just as effective infantry soldiers as men, right? They don't need men to protect them from men.
And nobody calls them on this, or the astonishingly numerous other examples of doublethink.
So - caused by feminism? I agree. It is much more likely, for reasons covered exhaustively in this and many other outlets, that chivalry springs from the noblest impulses of civilization, and a survival mandate to protect the future a civilization will not have without its women.
Caused by feminism? No. Exploited by feminism and feminists? Ruthlessly and to the fullest.
The WolfMan at July 12, 2014 1:28 PM
I had never heard of vasalgel, but "with one significant advantage: it is likely to be more reversible." Boy does that chill my hide.
Do they have the same sales pitch for female contraceptives? 'Causes less sterility than most!!! Buy now!!!'
And Lenona, that may have been the rule about tieing tubes a few decades ago but it is not now. The law has move more and more misandrist since the 70s.
Ben at July 12, 2014 2:49 PM
It's really difficult to get sterilized as a woman.
No doctor wants to perform it if you are under 30, and if you are under 40 they make it very difficult if you don't have kids.
Part of the reason is they don't want to reverse it, and don't want to get into lawsuits. But that's just part of if.
Ppen at July 12, 2014 3:33 PM
I've known a lot of women to get a tubal ligation and the only one I knew to have difficulty was my single friend. She was 23 at the time and said she went through four doctors before any wanted to perform it. She said everyone she talked to said she needed to be over 25 or already had a child. I'm sure geographic location makes a big difference in what criteria is expected to be met before getting the procedure though.
I'm currently pregnant with baby #4 and this may be our last. My husband and I got literature and consults on both tubal ligation and vasectomy. Oddly enough, no consent or permissions were required for a tubal ligation whether married or not, but a vasectomy required the wife to sign a consent form before it could be done. That's not the least bit fair to require spousal consent for one but not the other, although I'm sure there would be angry mobs in the streets if it were the woman requiring the permission from a man. We decided against getting anything permanent done, but my husband was more than a little miffed that he would have to get my permission before he could get a procedure done on his own body but not vice versa. Again, I'm sure the consent requirements vary from state to state.
BunnyGirl at July 13, 2014 1:20 AM
Around here we have had trouble with medicade doctors tying tubes without consent. In this area medicade doesn't really cover natural births. Instead you have to get a c-section. So some cases are doctors doing 10-15 c-sections a day and getting mixed up on the paperwork. Other cases are doctors with an axe to grind sterilizing all the poor women.
To get tubal ligation without a c-section you have to go to a specialty clinic. As you saw most doctors are not interested in that business. But if you shop around it is not hard to find. The same is true for vasectomy. So no sexism there.
Personally I find medicade essentially forcing poor women to have c-sections disgusting. The sole reason is to save on doctors time. They allocate 15-30 minutes for the procedure. So they put all the women in adjoining hospital rooms on the same day and the doctor goes down the row cutting babies out one right after another. Almost frighteningly efficient.
Ben at July 13, 2014 9:01 AM
To Ben: If, for whatever reason, the creators of Vasalgel decide to put it on the American market before it can be made 100% reversible, I'm guessing they will only recommend it to those men who are willing to store their sperm in advance, plus men who will never want kids but who don't mind being guinea pigs and going in for regular sperm counts. Also, IIRC, Vasalgel is only supposed to last for about ten years in a patient - I've never heard of a case where it didn't "reverse" on its own.
Last I heard, it's supposed to be on the U.S. market by 2016 - unlike the usual prediction of "5 to 10 years from now."
(I'm also guessing that doctors will mostly refuse to use ANY internal barrier contraceptive on males whose bodies are still developing, which will no doubt be a relief to fathers of teen girls; they can then say truthfully to their daughters: "If he's a teen and says he's using something invisible, he's lying. Here's how I know.")
To BunnyGirl: Very evenhanded.
I trust you also know that requiring a spouse's consent is not a law - it's just a rule doctors make among themselves. (After all, what doctor wants to get sued by the spouse who was kept in the dark?) I have no idea which states have a higher rate of that rule - or which ones are more likely to have a double standard in one direction or the other.
It reminds me of this amusing but thoughtful piece on being childfree (for both men and women, of course):
http://asylums.insanejournal.com/childfree/424.html?mode=reply
Excerpt:
Belief: "So Childfree people don't want kids - we get that, but it's not necessary to be so 'activist' about it."
Truth: "It is, actually. We network, we share information on doctors who don't make us jump through hoops and undergo psychological testing and still stay 'sorry, won't do it', no matter what. We share information on birth control, we share frustration with others who understand and have been there - at being told we'll 'change our minds', or nagging in-laws, or getting told by a spouse after five years of marriage that they want children and that's that. We vent about not being allowed time off of work to care for infirm parents or roommates, when coworkers can frequently take off as much as they want to run their kids to soccer practice, and dump the rest of the workload on us. We vent about taxes, about lack of social services and help available for those without children, and at how baby-centric society has become - and it has. Haven't you ever personally experienced the relief and pleasure of being able to congregate and converse with people of like minds? If your whole family and most of your friends followed one political party that did not match your views, how would you feel if you met a group of people who do share your outlook on things, and you can talk to without getting yelled at or told you're crazy? It's no different here."
lenona at July 13, 2014 11:24 AM
"No doctor wants to perform it if you are under 30, and if you are under 40 they make it very difficult if you don't have kids. "
I'll take your word for it, but my wife had her tubes tied and her doctor didn't say boo to me about it. She was over 40 but not by much.
Cousin Dave at July 13, 2014 7:01 PM
Lenona,
If you have more information about Vasalgel than was on their website, more power to you. But as advertised it did not look very appealing. And a product that is only for men willing to store their sperm in case of sterility is not the same as the pill.
On the legal requirement for male serialization, you are wrong. It is current California law that married men must have their spouses consent in writing to get a vasectomy. There have already been a couple of cases where men got vasectomies without their spouses consent and a judge forced them to get it reversed. This is not the law in every state, but it is the law in California. And it is disgusting.
Ben at July 14, 2014 9:36 PM
OK, mea culpa regarding vasectomy laws, assuming you did your homework. I jumped to conclusions in part because at Bratfree, there's been quite a lot of complaints over the years about sterilization and stubborn doctors - but the consensus seemed to be that the spouse notification rule between doctors was not a law, and since that site is so full of hot-headed people, I thought: "If it WERE a law in one state or more, wouldn't someone at Bratfree point that out and complain loudly about it?"
I'd love to see a state-by-state chart regarding such laws - and arbitrary doctors' rules.
lenona at July 15, 2014 11:03 AM
Actually, Ben, would you please reveal your source? I searched quite a bit and couldn't find ANY state law that clearly demands spousal consent for either operation.
Here's one thing I found, re tubals:
http everydaylife globalpost
"In the past, both state governments and hospitals often required spousal consent for voluntary sterilization. However, in the 1970s a number of women challenged these requirements in court and generally prevailed....Federal courts have ruled state spousal consent laws unconstitutional, but the United States Supreme Court has never ruled on this issue, so it cannot be considered completely resolved."
And:
http://goodmenproject.com/newsroom/are-men-legally-required-to-ask-their-spouses-permission-for-a-vasectomy/
(it's from 2011)
"There’s no legal requirement for spousal consent and no minimum age for vasectomy other than the minimum age of consent. But while it’s not necessary to have spousal consent, it’s a really good idea, and involving the spouse in the decision is encouraged."
lenona at July 15, 2014 5:52 PM
Lenona,
I'm afraid I can't find the source anymore and I don't have the time for an extensive search. From what I remember it was a California court case about a decade ago. City of LA if memory serves. So it may have been overturned by now.
Here were the facts as I recall. A woman was married and had a child. The man immediately filed for divorce. He had a vasectomy without her knowledge or approval after they were married. So he knew the child was not his. The judge ruled that since they were married even though the child was not his (also proved with genetic testing) he was still liable for child support. Additionally he ordered the man to get his vasectomy reversed since it was performed without the wife's consent. There was no specific law, but the judge determined that withholding the possibility of impregnation was an illegal taking from the spouse.
I feel bad now that I can't find the source, but it wasn't from a blog or other sketchy source. If memory serves it was the WSJ somewhere between 2000 and 2005.
Although given how badly even major news papers do screwing up the facts I could still be off.
Ben at July 15, 2014 8:48 PM
So since it was likely ten years ago, any such law MAY have been abolished by now. That would fit in with the quotation by the doctor in the 2011 article.
The author of the same article said:
"But then where are all of these accounts coming from?
"Well, according to Janet Crepps, a lawyer at the Center for Reproductive Rights, while there’s absolutely no law requiring men to obtain their partner’s consent, it CAN be imposed on a case-by-case basis at a clinical level."
(And elsewhere, someone said that MAYBE, a husband is less likely to sue over a secret tubal than a wife is to sue over a secret vasectomy, so doctors MAY be more likely to balk at doing the latter operation without spousal notification - but who knows. As another doctor said in the Good Men article: "In terms of good medical practice, most doctors would be a little concerned—if not alarmed—if their patient didn’t talk to their spouse.")
lenona at July 16, 2014 6:19 AM
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