Atomic Nerds

There’s a link to a sad and disturbing story about a woman who starved her one-year-old son to death on the behest of a cult leader, over at Dr. Helen’s. The deliberate overlooking and suspension of consequences of violence and predatory behavior in women, which serves both traditional sexist stereotypes and the more twisted expressions of modern feminism, is an issue of concern I share with Helen, which is why she’s on my blogroll.

The article itself is pretty sad. The mother comes off as convincingly crazy, whether the cult itself made her so or merely provided a bonsai-like shaping of her existing pathologies. I’m not sure that anybody should ever be deemed somehow not really responsible for standing by and watching their child die in order to extinguish a “spirit of rebellion” in a one-year-old, and I’d sure as hell have liked to see some form of addressing the question of whether this woman, just crazy or murderously crazy, will ever be in a position of having another human life dependent on them ever again. I don’t really disagree that had the genders been reversed, a father who did the same would have been convicted- though I’d also add the observation that when it comes to crazy religious cults, complete passivity is a great deal more expected of one sex than the other. (Complete obedience combined with willingness to kill is what’s usually demanded of the men.) At the very least the judge’s “you had no idea what was happening, you poor thing” comes off as condescending.

The theme of the blog post is a straight “female killer held not guilty”. The comments are full of discussion of the gender politics of the issue and the judge’s masculine “chivalry” toward the feminine killer.

However, I find it… interesting… that nowhere in either the blog post or the comments themselves is any mention whatsoever of the fact that two other women, the cult leader and her daughter, were convicted as being responsible instead. There was one man involved, who recieved an identical conviction and sentence to the two women- second-degree murder, sixty years in prison.

Kind of knocks a bit of skew into the whole “murderer gets off only because she’s a chick and the judge feels sorry for chicks” frame.

Posted lookey here, my furious genitals |