Can Women be Predators?

I was talking to a friend the other day about all the female teachers in the news who have been having sex with teenage boys. Her response was that these women must have low self-esteem, feel bad about their marriage or have some other reason for engaging in this behavior. When I asked her if she would give the same leeway to men who fondle teen girls (note, I did not even go as far as saying having sex with them), she shuddered at the mere thought of that and said, "No, they're men, that's what they do."

I was surprised because this female friend prides herself on not stereotyping others. I asked her if she thought that only men were predators, to which she replied, "well, I guess a woman could be a predator but I never thought about it." She stopped herself and said, "you know, I just assumed that was the way things were, but that can't be right." I think the idea of all men as potential predators is so ingrained in our society that we do not stop to think that the idea might be not only preposterous, but that it supposes that women are not predators.

In an incredibly insightful book entitled, When She Was Bad: How and Why Women Get Away With Murder, Patricia Pearson explains that we often mistake women for angels. We always want to see women as victims, rather than perpretrators of crime--that thought is too scary, I think, because we want to believe that the last person who would hurt us is a mother.

So we do anything we can to document that women are victims, rather than predators. When we look at crime rates, we see tables that cite the percentage of incarcerated women who were abused as children. There is typically not such a table for men---even though more boys are physically abused in childhood than girls. We try to justify why a girl would grow up to be a woman who harms others but we have no such excuse for men. Pearson says that this is because we clearly seek a preemptive cause for female transgressions that preserves an emphasis on victimization. "It is not the effect of abuse on future criminality that truly concerns us. It is the desire to avoid seeing women as willful aggressors."

Just take a look at any TV show on Lifetime or We--women are always victims and rarely aggressors. They fight only in self-defense and never out of the normal human emotions of greed, lust, or anger. Oxygen Network started to get progressive for a while with Snapped, a show about women who kill for the reasons just listed, but they quickly surcombed to the feminist dogma that women only harm others because they are forced to by men. (Notice the language of the cultural facists involved in the link to this freebattered women's site where they describe Snapped as a "misogynist, homophobic" show).

As long as we believe that women do not possess the full range of human emotions, we will continue to see them as victims of circumstance. The real tragedy in this is that the real victims of these predator women (who are often children) will never see justice served and the rest of us who are female will live with stereotypes that have not moved us beyond the 19th century.