The female Fritzl

I do not usually feature examples of horrible crimes, but that one was on a whole different level (found via F&F):

Just a few weeks ago, police entered Weston’s house, located a low door that led to a sub-basement and opened it. No light came from the small, windowless room with a dirt floor, but when they shined a flashlight, human beings started moving in the darkness. These were the mentally impaired adults Weston had kidnapped and locked away from the eyes of the world. They were injured, malnourished. They had only a bottle of water and one of orange juice for nutrition. One man was chained to a radiator. Sanitary facilities consisted of buckets on the floor. News media have uniformly dubbed the scene a “dungeon.” Weston’s apparent motive was to collect their checks from the Social Security Administration that her captives received due to their disabilities. But that was only part of the reason that, over possibly as long as 30 years, Linda Ann Weston gained control over children and the mentally disabled. The other was torture. What else can explain the fact that she starved her subjects, beat them, burned them with hot implements? After all, if your interest is strictly monetary, you don’t kill the people whose checks you’re receiving. On the contrary, you want them to survive for as long as possible. [...] Weston’s interest in forced sex to produce children and therefore income from SSI wasn’t confined to her own siblings. Apparently she also forced the mentally impaired adults in her dungeon to do the same. [...] The girl was found locked in a closet on the third floor of the building that contained the basement dungeon, away from the other victims and children. She was pulled from the closet with her head wrapped in clothing, covering open wounds and scars. On the rest of her body, scars covered her face, a burn mark from a heated spoon was imprinted onto her skin, fractured bones had healed over incorrectly, and her ankles showed signs of repeated shooting from pellet guns, police said.

I am speechless. Final word from F&F:

I want people to understand that men have no monopoly on depravity. I want them to learn that, despite our persistent mythmaking of the “sugar and spice and everything nice” variety, men and women should be judged by the same standards because they’re equally capable of behavior that horrifies. Last, dozens of articles have already been written about Linda Ann Weston. Even though many of her victims were her blood relatives, so far, not one article has called her crimes “domestic violence.” So I did.

Thanks feminism!

I am a bit stressed by life, but will try to post regularly again. So why not comeback with something atypical? If you have clicked through that blog, you might have noticed that I tend to be critical of feminism. To say it that way, I would like to call myself egalitarian but I am biased toward a masculist opinion. And there are certain aspects of feminism that makes lives for men harder, which is where I am coming from. Anyhow recently read this on feministe:

In the years leading up to the birth of “Ms. Magazine”, women had trouble getting a credit card without a man’s signature, had few legal rights when it came to divorce or reproduction, and were expected to aspire solely to marriage and motherhood. Job listings were segregated (“Help wanted, male”). There was no Title IX (banning sex discrimination in federally funded athletic programs); no battered-women’s shelters, rape-crisis centers, and no terms such as sexual harassment and domestic violence.

Well done, no really! To add to the above, I read feministing regularly and can mostly agree with what they are saying (I don't read the community posts, that is probably a very different beast), especially their opposition to "pro-life laws" (I am pro-choice), most stuff on politics, the stuff on body acceptance, sex-positivity, pro-transgender, anti-racism etc. In that vein, I am sure I have been unfair to feminists / feminism in the past, so apologies for that. I wonder if I will get backlash for that post.....we will see.