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Florida this week executed serial killer Aileen Wuornos. Wuornos was a prostitute living in Florida who murdered 7 of her clients. Originally Wuronos claimed that in all seven cases she was acting in self-defense. As Cathy Young notes in an article on on Wuornos in Reason, Wuornos later changed her story, saying she killed the seven men because she hated them and wanted to rob them.

Of course it almost goes without saying that Wuornos because a feminist celebrity and cause. A typical defense of Wuornos is offered by Phyllis Chesler who, in a 1993 article about Wuornos complained that women were held to a different standard when it comes to violent crime than men,

Women are held to higher and different standards than men. People expect men to be violent; they are also carefully taught to deny or minimize male violence (“I don’t believe any father would rape his own child”) and to forgive violent men (“He’s been under a lot of pressure”; “He’s willing to go into therapy”). On the other hand, people continue to blame women for male violence (“She must have liked rough sex if she stayed married to him”; “She provoked him into beating her”).

Also, people do not expect women to be violent, not even in self-defense. In fact, most people consistently confuse female self-defense with female aggression. In addition, people demand that women, but not men, walk a very narrow tightrope of acceptable behaviors. Most people are psychologically primed to distrust/dislike any woman who, in addition to failing to embody ideal behavior, dares to commit other morally questionable acts, such as having sex or children, for money, outside of marriage. Few women are deemed perfect enough to be seen as credible, or to merit serious compassion.

These psychological double standards of perceived violence result in a double standard of punishment. Studies document that women are often punished more severely for lesser, primarily “female” crimes, such as prostitution, than men are for the more violent “male” crimes of femicide and homicide. When women commit “male” crimes such as spouse or stranger murder after being raped, and in self-defense, or when they protectively kidnap a child, they are usually punished more harshly than their male so-called counterparts.

Of course Chesler had it all wrong. As Young points out, women committ about 10 percent of all murders in the United States, but they only receive 2 percent of capital sentences and only account for 1 percent of people on death row. Moreover, as Young points out, “while women commit nearly 30 percent of spousal murders (excluding homicides ruled to be in self-defense), they account for 15 percent of prisoners sentenced to death for killing a spouse. ”

Women are held to a different standard when it comes to violent crimes, but those standards are lower than those applied to men.

Sources:

Sexual Violence Against Women and a Woman’s Right to Self-Defense: The Case of Aileen Carol Wuornos. Phyllis Chesler, Criminal Practice Law Report Vol. 1, No. 9, October 1993.

Lethal Injection Gender Gap
Why aren’t women clamoring for the right to be killed by the state? Cathy Young, Reason, October 8, 2002.

The
table below gives the number of patents granted per million people for all countries
of Europe and the Confederation of Independent States.

Patents Granted Per Million Population, 1998 (1)

Footnotes:

1. United Nations. Human Development Report 2001.
pp.48-50.

The current issue of Australian Feminist Studies includes an interesting review of Joan Dunayer’s book, Animal Equality: Language and Liberation. It is interesting largely because reviewer Anona Taylor offers a very positive review of a book whose main thesis is that the killing of a woman as a result of domestic violence and the killing of a chicken for food are morally equivalent and should be discussed using identical language. In fact, Dunayer argues, the killing of the chicken may be even more tragic than the murder of the woman.

The idea that we should use the same language to discuss the killing of both humans and non-humans was too much to bear even for animal rights philosopher Peter Singer, who in a review of Dunayer’s book noted that it was absurd to use language that put something like the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the same moral plane as the slaughter of broiler chickens. The former was clearly a tragedy of much greater magnitude than the latter, Singer argued, even from an animal rights point of view.

In a reply to Singer, Dunayer vehemently disagreed with this contention,

“It is not speciesist” to consider the murder of several thousand humans “a greater tragedy than the killing of several million chickens,” Singer contends. It certainly is. . . . Also, Singer’s disrespect for chickens is inconsistent with his espoused philosophy, which values benign individuals more than those who, on balance, cause harm. By that measure, chickens are worthier than most humans, who needlessly cause much suffering and death (for example, by eating or wearing animal-derived products).

Not surprisingly, reviewer Taylor’s is concerned that Dunayer’s view clearly undermines feminist theories of the self that permit abortion. But she is apparently unconcerned about Dunayer’s larger argument that we should have no more compassion for Ted Bundy’s victims than we do for the animals killed to make a chicken salad sandwich. Taylor writes,

Dunayer argues that, like sexism or racism, speciesism survives through lies. Conventional English pronoun use terms nonhuman animals “it”, erasing their gender and grouping them with inanimate objects. Euphemism and doublespeak disguise humans’ massive exploitation and maltreatment of nonhuman beings. Dunayer shows that these (and other) linguistic ploys serve to keep nonhuman victims absent from discussion, helping us disregard and deny our mistreatment of them.

And here I thought it was just pornography and violent movies that dehumanized women.

Source:

Animal Equality Book Review. Anona Taylor, Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 17, no. 38.