thebewilderness wrote:In fact you and I and all of us have been conditioned to believe that women are far worse than men in every possible way at the same time women are expected to be better than men in every possible way.
When men blame us for what men do to us it is no more than we expect.
When women blame us for what men do to us it is an outrage.
Because we expect better of women.
Why?
I think it is because we never see women as people. Good, bad, and indifferent, the way we are conditioned to see men.
Yes, women are held to impossible levels of goodness and saintliness, and that expectation is doomed to failure at the outset. The expectations for men are a lot, lot lower. Possibly down around the 'don't fart in public' but even that seems to be waivered.
The media plays its part in the distortion too. If a woman is involved in crimes, usually with one or more men, the focus is on her, her and her. Yet, with most of these crimes, we rarely see a woman alone committing them - there is almost always a male involved. (Killing one's abusive spouse aside, and that is downright justified). The media bias in reporting women's "horrific" crimes has to be realised when they can only trot out the same half-dozen names over and over again, to "prove" how "evil" women are. Myra Hindley - did not work alone, yet we never hear of her partner Ian Brady, who was probably the more active of the pair. Fred and Rosemary West - it was him that was the primary, certainly she went along, but she also has sub-standard IQ. The recent case of the nursery worker taking photos of children in the nursery - sure, she took the photos, but ALWAYS forwarded those photos to her boyfriend (it was obviously to please him, and for his gratification). Yet all these women are Evil Incarnate. The media jump on these stories because there are so few women doing these crimes, and they milk these stories for years and years, which proves how very few there actually are. Men do the same and worse every day, and it does not always get reported. So no. Until the media can trot out dozens and equal numbers of women doing the same abuses, women are NOT as bad as men.
Another reason why women are not as supportive of female victims of rape and incest is that they are trained to only see "stranger danger" by society. And that it would be "obvious" what a rapist or paedophile would look like. The fact that almost all of them look like "normal men" instead of some Jack the Ripper characterture, becomes unbelievable. The fact that most perps are known to them (like family members, family friends, ministers etc) instead of "strangers" is also unbelievable, from what they have been taught. These reasons are probably the main ones why women have trouble believing victims. The deeper issue is that men they trust, are untrustworthy.
Sorry to hear of your abuse and problems with your mother believing you, andromache. Research some local stats on rape and incest for your mother, showing that the perps are most likely someone the victim knows, rather than a stranger, and perhaps your mother may come around.