Posted on 11/27/2001 2:01:41 AM PST by sussex
Women are just catching up with violent, drunken men By Theodore Dalrymple
News: Too many women are sent to jail, judges told
IN the entertainment district of one of our great municipalities recently, I witnessed a street scene that has become perfectly normal in modern Britain: two young women, both drunk and probably high on drugs, screaming at one another and viciously pulling at each other's hair by the handful. Like cobras, they also went for the eyes, spitting and clawing at them with their fingernails. Had they not been dragged apart by the boys over whom they were quarrelling, they might have done serious damage.
The startling increase in the number of women prisoners - now up to a record 4,045, 20 per cent more than last year, and disproportionately more for acts of robbery - and the need to convert a third men's prison into a jail for women, are in my belief symptoms of women's increasing violence, and not just of a change in the sentencing habits of our magistrates and judges. We are seeing a true change in women's behaviour. They are becoming ever more like men.
There are other straws in the wind that I have noticed, quite apart from outright criminality. For example, a few years ago it was very rare to encounter women who were tattooed. Now there are many such, including those with "Love" and "Hate" on their knuckles: and there has long been a statistical association between being tattooed and criminality. While it is not the case, of course, that every tattooed person is a criminal, it has long been true that the great majority of criminals (at least in this country) are tattooed.
There are other indicators of change. There have always been women drunks, especially in private, but the mass public drunkenness of women, something easily seen in all our towns and cities on a Saturday night, is something new. Young women in particular (and crime, it must always be remembered, is a young person's game) feel no shame about being seen drunk in public. Quite the reverse: they take a pride in it. And I need hardly add that drink, taken as young Britons now take it, is a powerful disinhibitor and provoker of quarrels. It is difficult, though perhaps not altogether impossible, to be drunk and ladylike at the same time.
Moreover, young women are increasingly taking to drugs. Contrary to received opinion, cannabis (to say nothing of cocaine or crack) does not always make people mellow: a proportion of people who take cannabis become aggressive and even violent, and if enough people take cannabis there will thus be an increase in violence. I have been assaulted more than once in the casualty department of my hospital by women who have been smoking cannabis.
Certain cultural trends and popular ideas have encouraged the violence of women (as of men). One is that sub-Freudian idea that the repression of emotion is always and everywhere a bad, unhealthy thing. One has only to look at advertisements to see that the completely uninihibited, indeed grossly exaggerated, expression of emotion has become a kind of norm. Women scream at us from posters, their mouths wide open, their bodies in aggressive postures. Like pus in an abscess, one should always let emotion out, the thinking goes even if it means expressing hurtful, insulting or aggressive sentiments.
It is hardly surprising that, if people say and do exactly what they feel like, general querulousness and criminality should result. Perhaps the ne plus ultra of this particular trend was when a man who had killed his lover said to me: "I had to kill her, doctor, or I don't know what I would have done." The supposed healthiness of always expressing one's emotions is one of the reasons that female drunkenness no longer carries any stigma, but rather is seen as a sign of a healthy candour.
In addition, people who believe themselves to be endowed with rights, as almost everyone does nowadays, are more likely than others to turn violent. They are in a state of permanent mental inflammation and paranoid watchfulness. A right is by definition unconditional, untramelled by any other consideration (otherwise it would not be truly a right). When two rights clash - for example, yours to play music at any volume you like and mine to a good night's sleep - the issue can only be decided by violence. Thus the doctrine of rights renders all human relations into questions of power and the capacity to enforce one's own whims. Women are no less affected by this way of thinking than men. They believe that through acts of violence similar to those that men commit, they are defending their rights.
The extreme fluidity of sexual relations conduces to violence. Where the structure of relations between the sexes is so loose that loyalty or circumspection cannot be guaranteed or regarded even as very likely, there is a heightened awareness of the possibility of infidelity. Morbid, unreasonable jealousy was once rare, and almost entirely confined to men. Now it is very common, and spreading fast among women. Every year, I see about 150 women who have been violent, sometimes extremely so, in the home.
Finally, many young women find themselves in an extremely precarious economic situation. Often wishing to spend their money on drugs, abandoned at once by the fathers of their children who believe themselves to have no obligations to their offspring, their life is a constant and often losing battle against insolvency. Coming themselves from families destroyed by the prevailing liberalism, they have no one else upon whom they can rely for support: and the state is at best a grudging provider. The temptation to rob and steal must in these circumstances be very great, especially given the traditional reluctance of the courts to imprison women.
The rise in female criminality therefore throws a lurid and unflattering light upon contemporary British society. Until we change some of our shallow ideas - for example, that uninhibited expression of emotion is always best - we may confidently expect the disturbing trend towards female criminality and violence to continue.
.. or vice-versa.
Thanks Jerry Springer, you charlatan.
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