THEY DON'T MAKE LITTLE OLD LADIES LIKE THEY USED TO

Check out this story about two elderly women who are believed to have taken in two homeless men and murdered them after obtaining insurance policies on their lives.  It reminded me of another story Tango Man brought to my attention a couple weeks ago about a shoot out in Italy among rival Mafiosi -- all female:

Two carloads of female gangsters careered around narrow roads between small towns, exchanging machine gun and pistol fire and terrifying passing motorists . . . Two of the dead women involved in the incident between the rival Cava and Graziano clans were grandmothers . . .

Or this other Mafia story, also from Tango Man about the arrest of high-level Italian Mafia boss Maria Licciardi, one of Italy's 30-most wanted criminals, described as a "50-year old matriarch."  As my mother likes to say, "They don't make little old ladies like they used to." 

I am neither a criminologist nor a sociologist, but my impression certainly is that criminality is becoming more prevalent in women of all ages, particularly in terms of violence and organized crime.  That is the argument made in the story about Licciardi.  Stories like this one track the rise in reported cases of vicious assaults by the younger segment of the female population, adolescent girls. 

What are feminists to make of this?   First, let me be clear.  I am a law-and-order type who disapproves strongly of both violence and organized crime.  I believe (and I don't think this is especially controversial) that girls and women who engage in such activity should be vigorously prosecuted on the same basis as men, without regard to gender. 

At the same time, however, that I find myself profoundly disturbed by the descriptions of girls beating each other to a pulp (just as I am disturbed by similar accounts of violence among men), I also recognize that equality in criminal behavior signifies growing equality among the sexes in society.  Girls and women are not the morally superior "angel in the house" sugar-n-spice creatures we were believed in the past to be.  Increasing confidence, freedom of movement, and physicality among the female half of the human race has led to greater representation of women in all sorts of traditionally male spheres-- from politics to science to business to sports and virtually every other human endeavor.  It stands to reason that women would also participate more in crime. 

While death and destruction are never something to cheer about, society's increasing recognition of women's full humanity is.  Full humanity, of course, means just that -- women having the freedom to achieve the heights and plumb the depths of human behavior on an equal basis with men.

Comments

[David Thompson]

Feminism set out with the goal of letting women be what they wanted to be. Instead, it let women be what men wanted men to be. Oops.

[The Happy Feminist]

I dunno. I think these mafia women probably WANT to be the leaders.

The thing with freedom and equality is that some people are going to abuse it, and women are no different in that respect -- but it's still always better to have freedom and equality.

[Richard]

See the most recent post on my site for another take on this. I think women, in the name of thinking it's enhancing their equality with men, are trying to out-male the men, instead of cutting their own path.

[bmmg39]

Only if you believe that violence is an inherently male phenomenon, which I am not willing to do.

[The Happy Feminist]

Aaargh. I turn back for one minute Richard and look at what you put on your site!

I am not cheering for violence, but I just don't see that we women are that different in kind than men. With greater freedom and equality comes greater opportunity to engage in bad behavior. Them's the breaks. But it's not somehow worse for women to do it than for men. And both should be prosecuted and punished vigorously for breaking the law!

[Kali]

Is somebody really arguing that women are becoming Mafia leaders with the intention of enhancing women's equality with men? Organized crime as feminist activism? Cos obviously women don't REALLY want power, money, sex or indeed anything at all. The only thing they want is to prove they're like men! It's like a really really bad simplistic reading of Freud.

[Kali]

thinking out loud here... if you start off with the premise that men and women are fundamentally different, and use that to inform your thinking about human nature, then you're basically always going to
a) fuck up your ability to empathise with women
b) misinterpret female motivations
c) ultimately give up on trying to understand these hysterical creatures at all and default to the assumption that women have no subjectivity whatsoever and everything they do has been done with a male audience in mind. Just like women wear short skirts to deliberately turn on the guy watching them, women become Mafia leaders because they are trying to "out-male the men"

It all starts off with the "different from me" premise. It leads to a massive missing of the obvious.

[TangoMan]

It all starts off with the "different from me" premise. It leads to a massive missing of the obvious

That premise is certainly operational, but the premise isn't plucked out of the air. The brains of men and women are wired differently and they have different hormones coursing through their bodies. We all know that hormones have a powerful effect on how we think and how we feel.

The starting point is nature. From nature we see that there are differences, and that is when we formulate the premise of "different from me" and then the consequences you lay out begin to play out.

[The Happy Feminist]

The problem is that members of the public jump to all sorts of unfounded conclusions based on biological gender differences, and make far more of them than the evidence supports.

[The Happy Feminist]

Like possibly Richard, who seems to believe that the only reason women and girls might be indulging in violence and mayhem is to be more like the guys. Couldn't be that that's just what human beings do.