Women Are More Violent Than Men!

By Janet Bloomfield (aka JudgyBitch): The New York Times is running an op-ed about violent women who embrace terrorism, and shining a light on how our sexist assumptions about women and violence often blind us to these Black Widows in our midst.

Women have long been involved in terror of all stripes, from female neo-Nazis in Europe to Chechen “black widow” suicide bombers.
Indeed, despite stereotypes about their domesticity and passivity — the idea that they must always be under men’s influence or tricked into joining — women are drawn to groups like the Islamic State by many of the same forces as men: adventure, inequality, alienation and the pull of the cause.

Despite the author’s willingness to acknowledge that women can be and are horrifically violent, often against other women, the issue is still framed in terms of ‘helping’ women, rather than stopping them.

Terrorists are strategic about using women, in increasingly chilling ways. To fight them, we have to move past simplistic assumptions about gender and terror and get serious about helping women and girls who are on this deadly path, as well as their would-be victims.

The involvement of women in terrorism is an interesting conversation, because the tripping point around the discussion of women and violence is essentially removed: evidence suggests that women are indeed more violent than men, but their violence tends to be less effective than men’s and it therefore seems less serious. Women overwhelming prefer children as victims – if a woman commits multiple murders or mass murder, her victims are almost certainly children. Gun control didn’t stop a 37 year old woman in Australia. She stabbed eight children to death.
And think about Safe Haven laws. Every state in the US allows women to opt-out of parenthood, because the alternative is that she kills the baby. When men have children they don’t want to assume financial, legal and social responsibility for, they move town and get a cash only job. Women tend to kill the babies they don’t want. The purpose of Safe Haven laws is to prevent these deaths. Some US states allow women up to a year to decide if the whole parenthood thing is working out for them. No man has the right to opt out of parenthood, even if he is not the biological father of the child. No one assumes that the guy will kill the baby, yet when women have babies they don’t want …. the risk that she will kill the baby doesn’t even seem that unusual, does it?

But masculinity is toxic?
Women can and do go on killing sprees, and they can and do commit some pretty nasty, horrific murders, but in general, murder and mayhem is the province of men. Women are perfectly happy to engage in domestic violence, for example, but if the man doesn’t share her sexist assumptions that men should not hit women, she is likely to end up seriously injured or dead. It’s somewhat akin, I think, to picking a fight with an armed police officer. That just isn’t likely to end well for the attacker. Women are violent, but they not typically very effective, particularly when their victim is an adult male.
Biology, meet reality.
Terrorism takes the effectiveness quotient out of the equation.

A suicide bomb doesn’t care what chromosomes the detonator is sporting. Bullets are not interested in the contents of your underpants. Women terrorists are every bit as effective as their male counterparts, and terrorism allows us an opportunity to talk about just how violent and radical women can be. It’s hard to swallow the ‘sugar and spice and everything nice’ narrative when the bodies are piling up. That narrative is so pervasive, and so powerful, we are able, as a culture, to collectively ignore the fact that when women lead nations and armies, they are actually more likely than men to go to war.

“People have this preconceived idea that states that are led by women engage in less conflict,” says Oeindrila Dube, an assistant professor of politics and economics at New York University. But historically, that’s just not true. Not only did queens fight more wars than kings, they were also more likely to start them.”

Why would Queens be more likely than Kings to start wars? Well, for one thing, women don’t have to fight the wars, so that makes going to war just that much easier. For another, proxy by violence is a time-honored strategy of women everywhere: get someone else to carry out the dirty work. Since women stand little chance of being injured or even held accountable, violence by proxy is a tempting weapon.
Reliable stats on violence by proxy are hard to come by, because it’s not something we like to discuss or acknowledge. What percentage of male murderers carried out murder at the behest of a woman? I make no argument that men who murder on the suggestion of a woman are somehow exempt from the consequences of their decisions: utter nonsense. But I am curious as to why women are not held accountable for ‘radicalizing’ men into murder? In Canada, a woman was caught on film trying to hire an RCMP officer to kill her husband, and she was acquitted after feminist organizations insisted she was reacting to ‘abuse’ from her husband. Well, holy hell, Batman, what is more abusive than planning murder? It doesn’t get much worse than that!
It will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog that feminists are completely committed to the idea that women are never accountable for their own violence, and that whatever happens to men, they ‘asked for it’, but for the rest of us sane people, the idea that women are not full, adult human beings, responsible for their own choices is repellent.
Terrorism, and women who commit terrorism, opens up this dialogue. It’s not just women who literally pick up guns and pull the trigger who are dangerous; it’s the women who radicalize men into murder who are perhaps even more dangerous. We lack a good word in English (or perhaps I lack knowledge of it) for what I want to discuss next: the courage (blah) it takes to pick up a gun and start shooting. I hope we can all agree there is an enormous difference between landing on a craft at Normandy and fighting on to the beachhead, and shooting up a Christmas party, even though the actions involve the same things. It doesn’t take courage, in the way we normally use that word, to engage in terrorism. But there’s an important, relevant factor that needs to be discussed: it’s takes a certain lack of value for the self to engage in an action that will almost certainly end in your own death.
And women are a lot less likely to take that risk than men. It’s much easier to encourage and support men into disposability than it is to decide you yourself will be sacrificed. I’ve discussed the fact that we generally lack stories in our culture about women willing to risk their lives to save the men they love, although the reverse is bog-standard. Men don’t even have to know the women they are dying for: protect women and children has long been a rallying cry to encourage men to sacrifice themselves. A big part of the reason I love The Hunger Games trilogy is that it’s a rare story of a young woman willing to sacrifice herself to protect the man she loves.
In general, women are not willing to make that sacrifice. They are willing to encourage men to sacrifice themselves, and when it comes to terrorism, the goal is to take as many people with you as you can. A key part of addressing, identifying and preventing terrorism will involve looking closely at the women in radical communities. They are not sugar and spice and everything nice.
They are deadly.
It’s time to address that.
Lots of love,
JB

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