If Your Man Knew What to Say, Here’s What He Might Say If He Knew You Feared His Potential For Violence...

Excerpted from Warren Farrell's Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say.

(Permission to reprint granted by Warren Farrell.)

See www.warrenfarrell.com and www.warrenfarrell.info.

When a woman is looking at a picture of a day that is supposed to be her happiest, that’s an emotional experience; it does not motivate her to do a statistical analysis of the 42% figure. She is manipulated into going with the “feel” of the ad – that her happiest day is almost as likely as not to turn into her death. Most women sense it is a statistical manipulation, but still the “feel” remains and the fear registers. And that is the ad’s intent.

The value of stopping to do a statistical look-see is to make the fear appropriate to the reality. When it isn’t, it’s called paranoia. People who refuse to look at a statistic because they want to remain “heart focused” are subject to having their heart manipulated. In reality, nine hundred women are murdered each year by the man they married.78 Out of 54- million married women in the US.79 That creates a bit of a different feeling. But let’s move to the exact statistic: that “42% of all murdered women are killed by the same man.”

The basic trick of the Ad Council’s ad is that a high percentage of murdered wives are murdered by their husband or ex-husband exactly because married women are so rarely murdered to begin with.

But aren’t husbands more likely to kill their wives than vice-versa? Again, we enter the arena of “who’s the biggest victim?” It bothers me to have to document that the sexes kill their spouses about equally, but there are life-and-death consequences that result from feminists persuading the public that it is almost exclusively husbands who kill wives. It leads to financing of only women’s shelters and hotlines without shelters and hotlines for men, thus leaving men with no place to go when they are in danger, so he becomes a powder keg that can endanger his wife rather than someone who can find a supportive retreat while he cools off.

The brief answer to this accusation is that no one knows for sure which sex kills the other more. In a second we’ll see why it’s likely that more wives kill husbands, but until the government is willing to collect data about the three female methods of killing, we can only do an educated guess. I’ll explain...

On the surface, the Bureau of Justice reports women are the perpetrators in 41% of spousal murders.80 However, the male method of killing is with a knife or gun, done by himself. The three female methods of killing are different. The third female method is poisoning, but I’ll deal first with the first two methods, both of which are “multiple offender killings” – that is, a wife either hires a professional killer or persuades a boyfriend. We only know that in multiple offender killings there are four times as many husbands as victims than wives, according to the FBI.81 These multiple offender killings are meant, of course, to not be discovered, but even a multiple offender killing that is discovered is not recorded by the government as a wife killing a husband, it is listed separately by the FBI as a “multiple offender killing.”82 That is, the 41% figure does not include either of the first two female methods of killing.

How common are contract killings? We don’t know. Perhaps the best hint we have of how many husbands could be killed by contract comes from the FBI, reporting that some 7800 men were killed without the killer being identified (vs. 1500 women).83 This number is almost 9 times larger than all of the wives killed by spouses and ex-spouses put together.84 However, this “9 times as many” figure is a very inadequate hint since many of these men were doubtless killed by other men, and many are unmarried – and our comparisons are among married people.

Most important, of the hundred or so contract killings about which I have read, only a small percentage were originally recognized as such. The very purpose in hiring a professional was to have the husband’s death appear as an accident so she can collect insurance money. And that is also the purpose of the third female method: poisoning.

Joyce Cohen exemplifies a typical contract killing. Stanley Cohen was a Florida millionaire when Joyce became his secretary. Eventually they got married, but soon got bored enough with each other that, among other things, they had not had sex for two years. (I did not personally investigate this.) Joyce feared a divorce would return her to being a secretary. So she used $100,000 of Stanley's money to hire some young men to kill her husband. When he was asleep and naked, she had him shot four times in the head with his own gun.85 Joyce’s motivation is obvious (although statistically her existence as a spouse-killer is invisible).

A husband is much more likely to kill in an emotional fit of rage (so much for the rational sex!). Or he kills his wife and children, and then turns the gun to his own head. Next time you read about a husband killing a wife in the newspaper, read a little further in the article and you’ll be surprised to see how often he also kills himself. And obviously the killing of himself indicates that money is not his primary motivation. When people commit suicide, it is because they feel there is no one who loves them or needs them.

In brief, a wife’s style of killing reflects her motivation which requires the killing not be detected; a husband’s style of killing reflects his motivation and, well, a husband who kills himself is pretty likely to be caught – a dead husband is a dead giveaway. Even if her killing does get detected, it is much more likely to never be recorded as a spouse killing – but as a “multiple offender” killing, or an accident or a heart attack. When a woman is murdered, we are more likely to track down the killer than when a man is murdered.86

As a result of the invisibility of the female methods of killing, women who do kill benefit from the stereotype of women-as-innocent, and are treated very differently by the law: 13% of spousal murder cases with woman defendants result in an acquittal, vs. 1% of murder cases with men defendants.87 Similarly, the average prison sentence for spousal murder (excluding life sentences and the death penalty) is almost three times longer for men than for women – 17.5 years vs. 6.2 years.88 And, thus far, a woman has never been executed for killing only a man. When we can only see women as innocent, the law becomes equally blind.

Just as there are different male and female styles of killing and the female’s has remained invisible, there are also different male and female methods of violence that does not involve killing. The women’s style has been so invisible we haven’t called it domestic violence....