From: beaver@castor.cs.psu.edu (Don Beaver)
Subject: Guilty?
Date: Fri, 9 Oct 1992 16:49:59 GMT


Janis Cortese wrote the following on soc.women (moderated):

===   If I had a kid and someone threatened it, I'd slit their
===   throat wide open and drink their blood with a smile in my face.  


The context was women as soldiers:

[M. Bickis]
> Why do I cling to this belief?  Because I believe that gender is an
> essential aspect of society, and gender is associated with more than
> just sex and pregnancy.  If I strip the concept of gender down to its
> essentials, I find a nurture vs. protection dichotomy.  To be feminine
> is to be nurturing, nourishing and *non-threatening*.

[Janis Cortese]
> Ridiculous.  If I had a kid and someone threatened it, I'd slit their
> throat wide open and drink their blood with a smile in my face.  In the
> wild, as you say, women are the protectors and providers for their
> children.  This requires that they have a greater capacity for general
> nastiness than any male.


In light of the controversy over Will Steeves' statements,
let me recall some responses.

Adrienne Regard wrote:
> MAYBE you shouldn't make such statements, Will.
> MAYBE you shouldn't even think things like that, Will.

Steve Novak wrote:
> General rule of thumb for interpeting things on Internet:
> What they type is what they mean.

Dan King wrote:
> I will not give Will the benifit of the doubt.  Will Steeves has threatened
> to kill women that do not show him the proper respect.

Keith Cochran wrote:
> While some men will only THINK those thoughts, some men will ACT on those
> thoughts.
> And that seems to be a pretty good reason for throwing out every "spousal
> notiication" law in the book.

Drieux wrote:
> Given that the Gentleman would KILL a woman for NOT
> showing enough/the_right respect for/toward himself,
> {and Please, let us not equivocate that he did in
> point of fact say that... its been reposted enough }
> it is a logical consequence of the argumentative form
> to conclude that As He Might Potentially Become a
> Murderer of Women as They Might Potentially Show Disrespect,
> THEREFORE it is that He is a Murderer of them...


I wrote:
> I grant you that the *literal* interpretation of Will Steeves' posting
> is frightening.  But, as he has already indicated, it was certainly
> not a literal posting -- and he made the unwise decision of thinking
> that readers would realize, by the very nature of the posting, that it
> could not be literal.


Now, let me pose some questions to the above posters (and interested others):

. Is Janis Cortese's statement that she would +smile+ while drinking 
  someone's blood to be taken literally?  

. Is Janis Cortese violent?

. Is Janis Cortese an unbalanced woman who should be kept away from children?

. Would Janis Cortese slit someone's throat for bumping into her child
  on a subway car?

. Would Janis Cortese slit the throat of a child who threatened her child?

. Would Janis Cortese smilingly slit the throat of a mother who stopped
  a fight between their children by yelling at them to stop or grabbing
  one of them?

. Should the moderators of soc.feminism be held responsible for having
  posted a threat to anyone whom the unbalanced Janis Cortese imagines 
  is antagonistic to her child?

. Should we outlaw knives?

. Mothers have done such things.  Should we restrain all mothers?


I think not.  In particular, I saw no reason to interpret "with a smile
on my face" as a sign of violent insanity; rather, it seems a figurative
description intended to emphasize her point.

I'm curious about other opinions, though.

Don
-- 
beaver@cs.psu.edu                       Opinions from the PC-challenged
Newsgroups: alt.abortion.inequity,talk.abortion,soc.men,soc.women