it’s been hashed and rehashed so many times that I don’t want to directly discuss it. But you know what I mean. In romance novels, the hero can start out conniving and cruel. He can plot to seduce the heroine and ruin her. He can be the most cold-hearted selfish bastard on earth, and as long as he learns his lesson, we sigh happily at the end of the book. He can screw a different woman every night, but so long as he stops once he meets her, we sigh happily.
But let the heroine raise her voice once to her father and she’s a disrespectful bitch. Let her have so much as kissed another man, and she’s a slut.

It’s a double standard. I don’t want to get into the why and wherefore of it all. What I do want to do is mention something I learned a while back that seems to be connected. Several years ago, I was talking to a prosecutor. She wasn’t just a prosecutor; she specialized in prosecuting rapes. She was the one who would talk to the women and help them be able to accuse their rapist in a courtroom in front of at least a dozen other people.

As I’m sure you know, who those dozen people are mattered a great deal. Picking a jury is vitally important; when a crime comes down to he said-she said, as rapes very often do, the prosecutor wants to pick jurors who will most sympathize with the victims. Naively, I would have thought that would mean you’d pick jurors who were most like the victim–women. But she said that almost universally, women were the worst jurists in rape cases. They were least likely to believe the victims who testified, and most likely to think that she deserved or asked for the assault. The best jurists were usually men who had daughters or granddaughters about the victim’s age.

So what do you think about this? Do women act as our own worst enemies? And is the double standard in romance just more evidence of this fact?

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