My wife and I were recently on a road trip. We went to a concert, rode some rides at the fair, and went to a zoo. Over all a great date weekend. We’d been out late one night and finally got settled back in the hotel. She was laying in bed while I showered and from the bathroom I heard her turn on the TV. When I came out sometime later I was surprised to find that she was watching an episode of “Forensic Files”, a television program from the 1990s that was sort of like a real-life CSI. Every episode involved some real life crime, almost always a homicide, which was only finally solved after months of stalled progress through the use of some clever forensic analysis. A housewife finding blood splatter on the sleeve of a sweater maybe, or a dog picking up the faint scent of narcotics on a discarded shoe.
You know, stuff like that.
Why this show should be airing in 2022 I can never know, other than the objective fact that television peaked somewhere around 1996 and has been in free-fall ever since. The X-files, Seinfeld, Frasier, Unexplained Mysteries, Stargate SG-1, that thing where Jonathan Frakes would look smugly at the camera and go, “Not a chance…” Great stuff. Very Cozy. It might simply be nostalgia goggles, but to me TV today is either trying to be “epic” ala Game of Thrones, or aggressively trashy like The Bachelor or 90 Day Fiancé. That comfortable middle ground occupied by the likes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Family Matters has been lost.
Of course, I suspect that whatever network was airing “Forensic Files” nearly thirty years after it was filmed was simply trying to cash in on the recent explosion of True Crime as a genre. And I imagine that after a few months of playing to that audience you’d have to start recycling old material. Wouldn’t you? I mean, you know, there’s only so many murders that are interesting. I’m sure the network is busy round the clock making new murder mystery content but homicides are rare and most of the ones that do happen are fairly cut and dry. You can’t make thirty minutes of TV about a case where it’s instantly obvious who the killer is now can you? For better or worse (probably better) this country only produces a handful of “Woman Murdered and Everybody Thinks it’s The Husband Only for The Crack Detective to Find a Hair Follicle Under the Carpet Which Proves It Was Actually The Adopted Son They Hadn’t Seen in Fifteen Years Because He Went Missing in Iraq” style cases. At some point you gotta do re-runs. “It’s two in the morning. Put that True Crime show from the 90s on and call it good.”
As I walked over to see what she was watching with my toothbrush still hanging out of my mouth I caught bits of the story from the dialogue.
“Wait…” I said, my words encumbered by the brush between my teeth. “She stayed with him after he hit her in the back of the head with a hammer?”
“Yes. She told the hospital a horse kicked her.”
“Why would she do that!?”
My wife shrugged. “Well, after that they slept in separate rooms.”
It’s long been a running joke that women’s favorite form of entertainment is to listen to stories of other women getting murdered. There’s truth in that. Women will listen to a low budget podcast of Mr. Ballen describing how a woman was dismembered by her boyfriend a hundred times over before they’ll sit through an episode of the billion dollar Rings of Power. But, as I watched my wife’s rather nonchalant reaction to my “Why would she do that?” question, something dawned on me. I realized that True Crime, as a genre, is really about the Honor of Women.
See, my wife understood intuitively why that woman from the 90s show covered for her husband when he tried to kill her with a hammer. A lot of other women would understand it too. People are always asking why women do this. Publicly they ponder why a woman would stay with an abusive spouse or a dangerous addict or why they will overlook a seemingly innumerable number of red flags in their romantic partner.
“Why would she stay with her husband after he tried to murder her with a hammer?”
“Well, after that they slept in separate rooms.”
Honor is not a virtue typically ascribed to women. If it is, it’s generally twisted in its meaning to refer to something akin to chastity or honesty or something similar. That’s because Honor, as a concept, is really a military thing. It’s a virtue about bravery in battle, not cowering before the enemy, running into a hail of bullets to retrieve a downed comrade, that sort of stuff. For example, a sea captain might feel compelled by Honor to go down with his ship. Or a doctor might likewise feel compelled to risk his own life treating contagious patients. Honor is something like that. A virtue that hovers closely around notions of chivalry, duty, and valor.
We don’t expect that of women. They might have it, sure. But we don’t expect it. Culturally speaking, it’s okay if women run away from a fight. It’s okay for them not to do their duty.
That’s good.
Women have only recently joined the militaries of the world and, thank goodness, most nations are still civilized enough to keep them off the front lines and generally out of harms way. Call such thinking “patriarchal” or “misogynistic” if you want to, but I don’t think there’s that many men in the world that really relish the thought of shooting a woman. Okay, maybe one they know (and hate) personally, sure. But a stranger? A woman they’ve never met? No. Not really.
See, women are more valuable than men.
It’s wrong to kill anybody but it’s worse to kill a woman than it is a man. In the same way, and for much the same reasons, it’s worse still to kill a child. Of all humans, adult males are the most expendable and this is good and this is right. On a biological level women are simply more valuable entities. Think about it. In ye olden days a tribe that had half its men wiped out in a war could still reproduce at the same rate they always did. Every man now simply needs to take two wives. The tribe survives just fine. One man and one hundred women can make one hundred children in around nine months time. One woman and one hundred men can make one child in the same time span. Eggs are expensive. Sperm is cheap. For the continuation of the species it is encoded in both men and women to view men as more discardable. “Women and children first!” Yes. That’s correct.
Of course, on the ground level of day-to-day life there’s not much difference between being considered “more valuable” and therefore “worthy of more protection” and being infantilized. It’s understandable why some women resent it. This infantilization is nearly the entirety of the driving force behind much of feminism. For traditionally society has gone to great lengths to keep women out of harms way and this breeds with it the idea that they are weaker, more fragile, and in general just less capable. A nasty side effect, sure. But what’s the alternative? Let women get mowed down by machine guns en masse? Let them break their bodies doing manual labor instead of raising children? As stated, the simple fact is that from a survival perspective (an evolutionary perspective, if you believe in such) the species has a vested interest in not letting women do things that might get them hurt. Society doesn’t demand Honor from women for the same reason that no one is clamoring for women to be equally represented amongst ditch diggers or electrical linemen. They’re to be protected. As a rule, we believe they shouldn’t go down with the ship.
A lot of men have come to resent this.
There’s been so much talk of equality over the past decades that many men, not unreasonably, have come to see it as hypocritical for women to demand the same rights as men without taking on the same responsibilities. Child Support payments, alimony, the military draft, working as house framers and plumbers… Such men will say, “We get an unfair shake in family court, in fighting wars, and in actually having to build all the stuff that makes life possible. When’s the last time you saw a woman installing sewage pipe on the side of the road or having to squeeze themselves into the crawlspace of a house to put in some wire? Why are almost all homeless people men? Why is the suicide rate for men so much higher?”
And they’re right.
Society doesn’t ask these things of women. It does consider men more expendable as cannon fodder. It does think children being with their mothers is usually more important than them being with their fathers. It doesn’t ask women to do back breaking labor. People are more likely to help a homeless woman than they are a homeless man. “Men’s Rights Activists” have a point. Equality won’t ever actually be reached unless women share equally in all the unpleasant stuff men have to do as much as they share in the patriarchal perks.
But that won’t ever happen.
It can’t happen because women actually are more valuable than men and no social movements can undo that basic reality. Women are simply more necessary for the future. Nourishment for the next generation, babies, literally comes from women’s bodies. New humans literally grow in their bellies. This is okay. It’s unequal but it’s okay. It’s just Nature. My parents have chickens. The roosters will throw themselves at an approaching coyote, a fight they have no chance of winning, just to give the hens a chance to escape. Why? Because females are more valuable than males in a lot of species. Males, and therefore the societies that males participate in, are necessarily coded to protect them. It is what it is, and it’s okay.
At the same time, another piece in the disgruntled state of the Gender Wars that we find ourselves in is that women are exceedingly picky about the men they date. Again, you can see why some men might come to resent this. “Not only am I expected to die first, to do all the hard labor, to provide for myself without any safety net, and everything else, but then on top of all that they aren’t even going to pick me!?”
Some men get bitter about it.
They perceive women as having it easy.
They might even come to see women as lesser because in their heads women are never asked to do hard things and have all the options and choices in the world.
For instance, more than once I’ve seen jaded men online say things like, “Women don’t understand honor or courage or virtue. When they use those words they never mean what you think they do.” Such sentiments are, vaguely, the source of the “incel movement”, so called. MGTOW. Men Going Their Own Way. Women aren’t worth the trouble they say. There’s nothing good in women and they’ll always disappoint you and you’ll never be good enough for them anyway. Let’s just focus on stacking cash, hobbies, and working out in the gym.
Of course, such ideas are not true.
Women do have Honor. And Virtue. And Valor.
It’s just expressed in a different way.
It’s expressed, actually, by standing by your man even after he tried to kill you with a hammer. That’s actually why women watch that stuff. True Crime resonates with women because it’s their version of a war story. The murdered woman who tried to make it work despite every red flag in the book, she’s a war hero. She did it. She fought the good fight.
See, women aren’t coded for war. They don’t watch war movies, they don’t obsess over the names and dates of World War 2, they don’t know what a Sherman Firefly is or roughly how many men make up a platoon. No. But women are coded for family. Coded, in many ways, for family to the death.
When a woman commits to a man, when she comes to love him, that bond is exceedingly strong. Terrifyingly strong even. So strong that many women are rightly scared of such commitment. A woman in love, who has given her life to her partner, will overlook almost anything. Cheating, abuse, addictions, screaming… you see it everyday. The exact same emotions that tell a man “Do your duty, stay with your platoon even if you die. Get everybody else onto the lifeboat first.” are present in a woman in love. “Hold your family together. Don’t let it disintegrate. Fight for it. Don’t run, even if it kills you.”
And they do.
Not all of them, obviously. Just as there are loads of men who don’t live up to masculine version of honor there are loads of women who don’t live up to the feminine version either. But in neither case does that mean their version of honor isn’t real or that it isn’t powerful. Women are picky because they understand how powerful their attachment can be and subconsciously they know it is not wise to attach like that to just anybody. He needs to be good. He needs to be someone she can feel safe with and depend on. I believe women do, genuinely, feel a duty to fight for their family and relationships, although perhaps because “duty” is such a male coded word they might not express it like that. But I don’t know another word which can explain the women who stay with their husbands after they’ve hit them in the skull with a hammer, nor how easily other women empathize with such a woman’s decision to do so.
Sure, women also watch shows for a cheap thrill and a chance to gawk at the depths of human depravity, like we all do. But there’s an element, not the whole mind you but an element, of women’s love for True Crime that revolves around admiration for other women who did their duty to the full. They listen to a story about a woman who died trying everything, everything, to hold her family together and a part of them thinks, “Good job. She stayed at her post. She went down with her ship.”
It’s a little like the female version of a salute when you think about it.
After all, the female version of the Hero’s Journey is Beauty and the Beast. It has to be because every man is potentially dangerous. Men have to be. They’re coded for war. A woman in a relationship lives in the same house as a animal often twice her size, tremendously stronger, much more aggressive, and filled with veins coursing with testosterone. She has to have children with this animal and those children will depend on this animal for part of their livelihood. She has to tame him. Her family depends on it. Belle is the archetypal female hero. The one whose courage and duty to her family (saving her father) tames the savage beast and heals everyone inside the house.
Right.
This is great work. Thank you for the writing you do.
Oh boy. I love ya, man, but please stop trying to explain women. We're not all alike. But mostly we stay with horrible, abusive men because we think it's our fault they are being horrible and abusive. I did it. It had nothing to do with honor, and everything to do with a lack of self-worth Finally one night while staying at my grandparents' house I heard a voice telling me no one was going to save me. This had the curious effect of motivating me, and shortly after I managed to get my act together and I left. Fortunately things worked out and I've had an excellent husband for 14 years. But now I understand that it is an absolute betrayal of one's honor to stay with an abusive individual. So there you have it, a woman explained.