I am not one for watching the insipid daytime talk shows but once I was channel surfing and happened upon the Maury Povich show which featured a teenage single mother (of age fifteen) who was there to accuse a young man of being the father. This “girl” was described by all as being pure as the driven snow and this miserable no account wretch sullied her. She said that it had to be him because he was the only male she had ever held intimate relations with. So he sat there taking the contemporary version of the pillory for public viewing complete with rotten tomatoes in the face. So after being vilified and abused for several minutes out they came with the DNA results. He was not the father. The audience sighed and fell to a hush and then the girl came under scrutiny of her family because she obviously had lied when she said he was the only boy she had ever slept with. So she began to weep and apologized and said that there was one other boy. By then the show was ending and Maury promised to bring them all back again and test this other boy. Some weeks later this was done and again the second boy was pronounced not the father. So again she comes under scrutiny and become admonished by her family so she again accuses yet another boy, who in turn was also pronounced as not being the father. This scene became a regular theme for a series for Maury Povich that lasted months. I happened to find out much later in one of his retrospective shows of earlier programs such as this, that it took several episodes and some fifteen boys being tested and they still had not found out who the father was. I believe the series was ended because there was no sign of finding the real father short of testing every male in the country.
I now point out that this spectacle was littered with malicious and totally untrue accusations by a young woman who was obvious a flagrant liar as well as a whore, but she was given a free pass for a long time just because she was a “victimized woman” while all of these totally innocent men were dragged through the mud “just to get to the bottom of it” and they never did find bottom.
I move on to another story with the same sort of theme. Several years ago, just after 9/11 a story hit the press that on a flight from Detroit to New Orleans a businessman was sitting next to a young woman who was talking on her cell phone. As the plane was taking off, despite the broadcasted warning to stop using cell phones because it could cause interference with the airplanes electronics, she continued to gab away without any sign of stopping. So the man leaned over to her and whispered that she ought to put down the phone “because it could cause a problem that could bring the plane down”. This must have insulted her (the nerve of someone interrupting her phone call) so she goes to the rear and reports to a flight attendant that “the man next to me just threatened to bring the plane down”. So they divert to Chicago O’Hare and the federal agents come aboard and drag the poor man out of his seat in handcuffs and haul him downtown for eight hours of interrogation. Meanwhile, the real perpetrator - who actually should have been charged with all kinds of charges beginning with filing a false police report up to countless others relating to air piracy – went on her merry way to her destination totally unmolested.
Why and how could such a miscarriage of justice have occurred? For no better reason than she was a cute young woman and he was a man. But these anecdotes exemplify why and how women – especially attractive ones – get away with all sorts of latitude when it comes to criminal and aberrant behavior while men get the book thrown at them even when they did nothing wrong. All I need to do further is to point out how the pretty (and usually boned it seems) young women (often teachers) are proven to have held elicit affairs with some of the male charges and they are let go with a slap on the wrists if anything at all. There is a double standard at work and there is no need to even try to deny it.