BAD GIRLS, BAD GIRLS

Last Tuesday, February 3, Texas prison officials filled the veins of Karla Faye Tucker with poison and watched her die, while camera crews and prayer squads and ranting protesters and cheering death-penalty advocates swirled in an ugly little mill outside her prison gates.

Even after more than a dozen transforming years on death row, Tucker hardly made a good pin-up girl for those who oppose capital punishment. In the last twenty-five years, since California gassed Elizabeth Ann Duncan in 1962, only one woman has been judicially killed in the United States: Velma Barfield, executed in 1984, a North Carolina grandmother who poisoned a friend and promising she’d never do it again — seemed to many a fairly good example of the pointlessness of the death penalty. Tucker wasn’t anywhere near as presentable. A drug addict and prostitute, she had helped kill a man and a woman during a 1983 burglary — puncturing the man eleven times in the throat with a pickaxe while (as she later confided to a friend) orgasming with every swing.

Nonetheless, Tucker’s sentence was stayed several times between her conviction in 1984 and her execution in 1998. It had something to do with the fact that behind bars she’d managed to kick the drugs and find Christ (even joining in an unconsummated wedding with the prison chaplain). And it had something to do with the legal machinations of volunteer groups that fight every execution in America. But it had perhaps most to do with the increased discomfort voters feel when capital punishment involves a woman. And a considerable number of right-wing Evangelical groups, left-wing “blame-the- culture-first” prison-reform activists, and uneasy middle-wing Texans banded together in the unsuccessful effort to save Tucker from the fate Governor George W. Bush and the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles had in mind for her.

Notably absent from the hoopla over Tucker, however, were America’s feminists, those activists who have so much to say on every other topic that touches upon women. And they were absent — or utterly incoherent, on those occasions when they did try to make a statement to the press — primarily because feminism hasn’t been able to decide what to think about the gentler treatment accorded women by the justice system. It’s hard to say you’re out to help women if you want women treated as harshly as men; but it’s hard to say you’re for equal treatment if you don’t.

Recent months have seen the publication of a pair of books that take up the question of violent women: Patricia Pearson’s When She Was Bad: Violent Women and the Myth of Innocence and a collection of essays, No Angels: Women Who Commit Violence, edited by Alice Myers and Sarah Wight.

It quickly comes clear in reading these books that there is an insoluble rift in feminist theory on the topic: Either violent women act from their own natural violence (which lets men off the hook) or violent women are merely victims of male violence (which reduces women to traditional gender roles). Pearson takes the first line, arguing that we need to shuck our misogynist oppression by punishing women just as harshly as men. And Myers and Wight take the second line, whining that we need to fight misogynist oppression by saving women from men’s cruel, masculine law.

It even more quickly comes dear, however, that none of these feminist authors cares much about evidence, truth, justice, right and wrong — or anything beyond semanticizing about the correct feminist perspective. The contortions to which feminism is put in these volumes makes them fascinating reading.

Pearson’s When She Was Bad is based on one correct fact, wrapped round by incredible silliness. Aiming at a sort of cross between Betty Friedan’s 1960s feminist classic The Feminine Mystique and such 1990s television schlock as Real Stories of the Highway Patrol, Pearson spends the better part of three-hundred pages cataloguing female acts of violence. She doesn’t seem particularly engaged until she reaches the topic of serial murderesses, but by way of building up to it, she provides a handy taxonomy to female mayhem First come the tales of women who kill their babies for no good reason. Then come the modern-day Medeas who kill their babies for what we are assured are very good reasons. Then there are the women who kill their lovers, and finally the women who decide instead merely to kill along with their lovers.

The one true point Pearson labors so hard to make with all this is that violent women are rarely punished as harshly as their male counterparts — in part, as she rightly surmises, because it’s unsettling to imagine that the culture’s chief nurturers might be threatening: There’s a reason that the forty-eight women on death row in America account for only 1.5 percent of the 3,365 inmates awaiting execution.

Take, for instance, Karla Homolka, a fetching Canadian girl who had the misfortune to meet a man named Paul Bernardo. Bernardo had previously been a serial rapist, and just before their wedding day, the couple decided to cement their relationship by kidnapping, raping, and torturing to death several young girls, including Homolka’s younger sister. But when the police came calling to ask about Bernardo, they cut a deal with Homolka — who promptly confessed the couple’s later killing spree (about which the police knew nothing) before they could even ask her about the earlier rapes (about which she knew nothing). Bernardo was sentenced to life imprisonment for first-degree murder; Homolka was convicted merely of manslaughter.

Pearson is irate that this woman got away with murder. Her concern with gender bias in crime and punishment, however, has nothing to do with protecting society from evil. It’s all about the feminist crusade: Denying women responsibility for violence “affects our capacity to promote ourselves as autonomous and responsible beings, . . . affects our ability to develop a literature about ourselves, . . . demeans the right our victims have to be valued, . . . [and] radically impedes our ability to recognize dimensions of power that have nothing to do with formal structures of patriarchy.” Without the ability to own their violence, how can women “be aggressive on every front — the Persian Gulf, the urban police beat, the empires of business, sports, hunting, politics, debate?” The patriarchical power structures are the real evil for Pearson, so oppressive that they turn women to violence instead of allowing them constructive, creative outlets: Had she only been a man, Marybeth Tinning, for instance, who killed eight of her nine children, “might have been a particularly ruthless entrepreneur.”

It all makes sense once you realize that Pearson doesn’t see murdered people as victims, but women, all women, as the real victims — victims of society’s oppression. Law-abiding women? Victims of a society that won’t let them express their violence. Murderesses? Victims of a society that won’t let them take credit for their violence by submitting to harsh punishment.

The icky apotheosis of much feminism has always been lesbianism, and female homosexuality is hinted at throughout Pearson’s breathless descriptions of her subjects. Karla Homolka is “headstrong and sexy, intelligent, hungry to take on the world.” The now-dead Karla Faye Tucker is described as “a spry Texan teenager, eyes bright, spirits quick, . . . a fawnlike beauty,” while Myra Hindley, the neo-Nazi of Britain’s infamous 1960s Moors Murders, is “a shapely blond ‘looker’ in a uniform.”

The kicker, however, comes in a chapter ominously entitled “Island of Women. ” It seems that while only 20 percent of women enter the big house gay, almost 60 percent of female inmates become so during their stay. Butches in California, Pearson carefully informs us, are called “stud-broads,” while their sisters in Michigan prefer the term “aggressors.” But whatever the words, it looks to the author a lot like utopia, where women “fight, make love, run a thriving illicit economy, launch lawsuits, gather in groups to compare notes on abuse, and arrange themselves into an all-female hierarchy of power that combines masculine and feminine strategies of aggression in a virtually unprecedented way.” Litigation, love-making, and support groups: Right after murdering an evil man in the popular 1991 middle-brow feminist film Thelma & Louise, Susan Sarandon says with steel, “I’m not ready to go to jail just yet”; if only she had read When She Was Bad.

Or perhaps she should have read Alice Myers and Sarah Wight’s No Angels. The eleven essays collected in the volume contain their share of sociological fem-speak, as for example: “Feminist writers must acknowledge and confront the issue of violent women in order to facilitate the process of establishing a new language which will allow us to analyze women’s violence outside the ‘mad versus bad’ framework, and thus challenge the imposition of silence which has dominated women’s experiences.” But the point, cutting across most of the essays and underlying all the argot, seems to be that women just don’t do anything violent unless compelled to by evil men — and thus, however softly they’re treated by the criminal justice system, it’s not softly enough.

The male-oriented legal system has only two explanations for why women sometimes murder: Either they’re mad, or they’re bad. And “when women attempt to resist the mad/bad categories by presenting their own logical and rational explanations of their violent crimes, they are disqualified as speakers — their accounts become ‘muted’ by dominant ‘expert’ (and commonsensical) knowledge constructions around violent women.”

The consequence is that the legal definition of exculpatory self-defense favors men because women aren’t strong enough to strike back during the attack. They have to wait until a safe time afterwards, such as while the attacker is sleeping. Thus the law should be amended to allow women to kill whenever they want, so long as they were at some earlier point provoked.

Of course, one is compelled to ask, if women are so weak, how can they seek to be in ground combat or on the police beat? But the essayists in No Angels are unconcerned about such things, preferring to see women as helpless, Victorian creatures first driven to violence and then punished for it by oppressive male structures. After a parade of false statistics exploded long ago — four women are killed in the United States every day in domestic violence, one out of four women has been raped — the authors can only conclude, “In light of such systematic abuse and terrorization of women, is it not more surprising that so few women have lopped off penises than that Lorena Bobbitt did so?”

When all is said and done, Western society has little use for harming its women. Myers and Wight are wrong and Pearson is right (though she hates it): Women and men do occupy separate places in the collective psyche of society. We have a visceral reaction to seeing women harmed in any context. That’s why we don’t want them in ground combat in the armed forces, why we view “wife- beater” as the harshest of epithets, and why we don’t generally execute women or even let them rot in jails for prolonged periods of time. Because society has a low tolerance for seeing them harmed, women — even criminals — have traditionally been treated differently by the justice system. Differently, but still, at least possibly, with justice. The loss of that difference is part of what makes last week’s destruction of Karla Faye Tucker so disturbing.

A research associate at THE WEEKLY STANDARD, Jonathan V. Last edits the on-line magazine Squire.