“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned” and why women aren’t believed
OK so I wasn’t sure whether to flair this post as Discussion or Blake vs Baldoni so please reassign if wrong but my god I’ve been reading up on the Blake Lively vs Baldoni case and I am APPALLED at the number of people who believe that she made a pass at him, got rejected, then decided to cover for herself and/or take vengeance by levying false accusations of sexual harassment against him.
It’s absolutely bonkers that these are the same people who claim that a person is innocent until proven guilty, yet turn around and accuse Blake of infidelity with zero proof whatsoever and don’t see the hypocrisy in that. Worse are these “hell hath no fury like a woman scorned” comments always being the most upvoted but you know what Reddit is a male dominated space so maybe there is a bias there
Regardless I’ve always found the misogyny of this adage especially infuriating and kind of want to rant about it considering the fact that historically and presently it’s always been MEN not women who in greater numbers or at least comparatively respond to emotional injury with punitiveness or vindictiveness.
Like what about model Marla Hanson, whose landlord hired two guys to slash her face after she’d refused his advances?
What about a woman in New Jersey whose partner paid two people to disfigure her face with acid after she’d broken things off with him?
What about the student whose med school residency was terminated after her spurned organic chemistry professor fabricated her exam results, reported her for “cheating,” then had her expelled even when other students complained about his inappropriateness?
What about Jerry Ramrattan, the POS who framed his ex girlfriend Seemona Sumasar for armed robbery for which she spent 7 months in jail until his plot was unearthed?
Misogynists love acting as though women have a monopoly on a certain brand of wickedness - namely any behavior marked by deception, vengefulness, or malice. Women are scheming puppeteers behind a curtain and men are simple, goofy and well meaning characters whose only real fault is being too horny.
It’s a subtle but prevailing stereotype that not only perpetuates the myth that the differences between women and men are inherent rather than socially or culturally mediated but that a man’s evil doing is shaped by the values unwittingly imposed upon him, while a woman’s is embedded in her nature.
Misogyny want us to believe that not only are men “superior” physically and intellectually but morally as well because it benefits them for us to internalize this narrative about ourselves - it is PRECISELY because misogyny has convinced women that hell has no fury like ours when we’ve been scorned that there is more credibility in the idea that a woman would falsely accuse a man of a crime than there is in the idea that a man would rape or beat a woman.
It does not matter that only 1-5% of all sexual assault allegations are false.
It does not matter that most sexual predators will never spend a day behind bars.
It does not matter if Gisele Pelicot’s husband orchestrated a plan over several years to drug his wife with the hopes that she would get HIV from one of the many handpicked HIV positive rapists he recruited to rape her for his own twisted vengeance. It does not matter that this same man accompanied her to doctor visits, comforted her, and cried bitterly when she asked him if he was drugging her, asking how she could accuse him of such a thing.
Because then it’s “most men aren't like that,” but when an equally deplorable woman accuses an innocent man of SA then suddenly the sentiment becomes, “how like a woman to do that” while being completely unaware that in perhaps one of the most egregious miscarriages of justice in recent history 4 queer women in San Antonio Texas were falsely accused of child sexual abuse by a man who had them imprisoned for almost 15 years before all 4 women were finally exonerated in 2016. But yeah men NEVER do that, right? It’s not as if the patriarchy itself enables these loopholes for psychopathic individuals to exploit, harming both women AND men in the process.
Aside from the obvious knowledge that men rape and murder at disproportionally higher rates than women, there’s definitely no shortage of cases where men have resorted to shadier tactics to channel their rage and indignation.
Misogynists will blame “misandry” for why women receive more lenient sentences for crimes men commit, in total ignorance of the fact that women not men are more likely to mete out the same punishment regardless of the perpetrator’s sex.
They actually think the historical systemic dehumanization and subjugation of women is comparable to some “misandrist” ranting about men online. They actually think women always stick up for each other and gang up on men with no regard for how the flames of witch hunts are fanned by the rhetoric that a woman’s personal history of victimization is invalidated by the likelihood that women like Blake Lively or Amber Heard are filthy, reprehensible liars.
And it seemingly does not matter that Johnny Depp is a proven liar who falsely accused Amber Heard of cutting off his finger, giving him a black eye, or shitting on the bed. Because then he was only trying to defend himself from her “false” accusations of abuse for which ONLY he wanted to go public about so she could have her “global humiliation.”
Crazy how it’s never mental gymnastics when it’s a man you’re defending because so many people have these warped beliefs about women that make it so easy to overestimate just how many villainous women there are among us while men are simple and accidental in their harmfulness, and the ones who inflict abuse are one in a million.