There is nothing wrong with feminists that reasoning with them won’t aggravate. No one was ever convinced by facts or logic. Make ‘em laugh and it shorts their prejudices momentarily. Then quickly inject laughing gas. The relaxing effect lasts long enough to pull a tooth. AEC

March 13 — Women do not, by and large, make terrific criminals. We men have to help them overcome this weakness.. In the United States, women commit only three crimes as frequently as men. The first is shoplifting and the second is towing the shop away usually after dark to a location where they can ransack it at their leisure. And they don’t even return it.

Somehow, women — who commit less than 13 percent of all violent crimes in the United States — commit about 50 percent of all parental murders. Why do so many women direct their most violent impulses toward their own children? For the same reason men are pedophiles. They are easier to control and in most cases nobody finds out.

Mothers now work, yet they don’t kill their colleagues; they kill their babies. Why?

Could it be because colleagues aren’t pushovers. Even women lift weights at gyms. That may also be why mothers don’t kill teenage sons. They’re damn lucky, too, they aren’t butchered more often by these bruisers, knowing what testosterone-crazed males are capable of.

A 1969 study by Dr. Phillip Resnick, the "father" of maternal filicide (the murder of fish fry by their mothers), won the Nobel Caprice Prize for his originality. He found that while mothers convicted of murdering their children were hospitalized 68 percent of the time and imprisoned 27 percent of the time, which means the state has to maintain a shuttle bus service, fathers convicted of killing their children were sentenced to prison or executed 72 percent of the time and hospitalized only 14 percent of the time. Men are cheaper to dispose of. All the state needs is a chair, a wire, a plug and a hearse.

Researchers, building on the bogus work of the Phillip Resnick, who disappeared after getting the last installment of his federal grant, explained when arrested in New Zealand last year that he was only attempting to fly across the Pacific to return Amelia Erhart’s lost luggage to her. He claimed that women tend to kill their own offspring for one of seventeen reasons, such as the child being unwanted; out of mercy for whom he doesn’t say; as a result of some mental illness that are created and destroyed as suits the current fashion; in retaliation against a spouse; or following a lifetime of abuse. The rest of the reasons are as insightful.. One is that some person needs to be "erased" in order to save or preserve a relationship. This used to be the exclusive preserve of the Mafia.

Although the United States does not have any formal equivalent to England’s Go-For-It Infanticide Act — which codifies a sort of postpablum depression defense — American juries and judges have taken it upon themselves to excuse these mothers for mental illness while condemning the fathers as violent criminals even if they were in Uganda at the time of the killings. This is a view taken by that popular Laundromat owner, Bill O’Reilly, who runs the "No Spin Cycle."

THE MENTAL-ILLNESS FACTOR

Perhaps it comforts us to believe that anyone who violates the sacred mother-child bond is simply crazy. Or maybe that sacred relationship went down the slippery slope with the legalization of abortion thirty years ago. And since women are not violent in other contexts, most scholars, including Oberman, whose girlfriend beat him up a week before they planned to marry argues that the majority of maternal murderers suffer from depression, postpablum psychoses, and a slew of other mental afflictions.too small to study scientifically. But no one has put forth an analogous medical theory to explain whether fathers who kill their offspring are also depressed, isolated, or psychotic.

Who cares? "They deserve what they get," says Kim Gandy, NOW’s new president. "Look how they treated our great-grandmothers, built their fortunes on slave labor and exterminated the Indians and the whole city of Buffalo."

Aided and abetted by corrupt analysts, patients who have nothing better to do with their lives often use the psychoanalytic situation to transform insignificant childhood hurts into private shrines at which they worship unceasingly the enormity of the offenses committed against them. This solution is immensely flattering to the patients-as are all forms of unmerited self-aggrandizement; it is immensely profitable for the analysts-as are all forms pandering to people’s vanity; and it is often immensely unpleasant for nearly everyone else in the patient’s life. Thomas Szasz (b. 1920), U.S. psychiatrist. The Second Sin, "Psychoanalysis" (1973).

"Men are naturally connivers," Gandy opined. "They waited until their wives and daughters fell asleep to commit these atrocities. Women were deliberately kept in the dark about where the money came from to furnish their mansions, hire cheap Irish cleaning ladies and pay for their expensive parties and wardrobe.

CRIMES AGAINST ‘PROPERTY

We still view children as the mother’s property. In the few instances in which women had the courage to divorce in the early 19th century it was assumed they would get the children. Or was it? Oh! well, I’ll check that out.

My boss said, "Dahlia, can’t you tighten up a bit on the numbers, confirm your arguments and get some more recent statistics. It looks a little too spur-of-the-moment."

I called a lawyer friend who practices in New York. He had a offbeat explanation. "Most New York judges," he explained, "have no trouble reconciling being heathens with adoration of the Virgin Mary. After all, they perform somersaults with words every day. In New York by statute and case law all females are saints. By the same standard no male could qualify, even Jesus of Nazarath, not of San Juan. Besides, how else would they get re-elected?"

THE NUMBERS, THE MEDIA

Crime statistics reveal that of the children under 5 killed by their own parents from 1976 to 1999, 30 percent were murdered by their mothers while 31 percent were killed by their fathers. Which father, I almost forgot to ask myself. The one who impregnated the mother or the one she married after driving the father out of his children’s lives or the steady stream of boyfriends she brought into the home after she, in turn, screwed the children’s father?

Research-By-the-Mile, Inc., who gets paid to conduct assembly line studies found children are as likely to be murdered by their fathers (here the government for its own unexplained reasons defines as "father" biological fathers, step-fathers, live-in boy friends and lesbian partners, etc.) as by their mothers.

She uses statistics the way a drunk uses lampposts-for support rather than for illumination. -attrib. to H.L. Mencken

Even I have to ask myself, hey, wait a minute. With orders of protection handed out by the courts like Christmas candy canes, the long reach of biological fathers is absolutely amazing, unless the mother who wanted exclusive custody originally is now doing the rounds of the local bars, leaving her children unprotected, with babysitters not much older than they are. Maybe, divorcees should make up their minds whether they want full charge of their children 24/7 or as a friend’s former wife put it, "what do you think I am a ^*&)+ hausfrau."

Statistics can count up the number of states and other useful things. But they can’t reveal mental states. For that you have to listen to the alleged offender.

Newspapers currently following every motion in the Andrea Yates trial completely ignored last month’s Los Angeles filicide, in which Adair Garcia killed five of his six children by asphyxiation. Why is Yates a front-page story while Garcia is disregarded? I was told by police officers who didn’t even interview him that he did it to punish his estranged wife, who had abandoned her "property" as well as him. But they listened for hours to her bitching.

THE MOTIVES

These same researchers agree that both mothers and fathers consider children to be a woman’s property. I would think the question is not whether researchers agree, but whether fathers agree. How can they presume their motives otherwise? Maybe no one interviews fathers or bothers to glance at courthouse filings contesting custody even though such challenges are expensive and sure to lose. Why would these legal researchers care what fathers think? They show no sympathy for troubled fathers. In fact, they conspire with the system to make more trouble for fathers than if he were left alone with the divorce and loneliness.

Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings. R. D. Laing (1927-89), British psychiatrist. The Politics of Experience, Introduction (1967).

Mothers attempt post-filicide suicide but rarely succeed. Some scholars suggest that’s why women earn less than men. They don’t try hard enough. These scholars suggest this is because mothers tend to view their children as mere extensions of themselves and that these homicides are in fact belated abortions. In fact in Jewish tradition, a son is not a real person until he graduates from medical or law school.

METHODS OF MURDER

When a person can no longer laugh at himself, it is time for others to laugh at him. Thomas Szasz (b. 1920), U.S. psychiatrist. The Second Sin, "Social Relations" (1973).

Perhaps more revealing than the differences in why they kill their offspring are the differences between how fathers and mothers do so. For one thing, parental murderers tend to be highly physical. All other murders are psychic. According to a 1988 survey done by the U.S. Justice Department, while 61 percent of all murder defendants used a gun in 1988, only 20 percent of the parents who killed their children used one. In interviews, mothers explain "why would I waste a perfectly good bullet when I can kill the kid so easily. After all, he trusts me." Children were drowned and shaken, beaten, poisoned, stabbed, and suffocated. These methods betray a certain "craziness" in both genders — they betray an intense passion and a lack of planning.

Don’t ask, I know. Why are stabbing and poisoning less premeditated and "crazy" than shooting? Who do you think I am, Agatha Christie?

THE ENCRYPTED MESSAGE LEAKS THROUGH
The Yates trial

A study by an obscure organization called the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children shows that fathers are far more violent. And 86.9% of mothers dispose of the corpses in what unidentifiable researchers call a "womblike" fashion. Bodies are swaddled, submerged in water, or wrapped in plastic. Moreover, the NCMEC study showed that while the victims of maternal killings are almost always found either in or close to the home, fathers will, on average, dispose of the bodies hundreds of miles away.

Pardon me while I take some Dramamine. This distinction must be very reassuring to future little victims. Maybe we hit a stonewall because we are asking the wrong question. Maybe the question should be "who is crazier, men and women on the one side or the institutions of this society like feminism on the other." Perhaps we ought to take another look at the long scorned view of British psychiatrist. R.D. Laing (1927-1989) that psychotic societies make psychotic individuals rather than the other way around.

I realize the reader, especially fathers tired of being scapegoated, were initially waiting on the other platform when the train came in. But we’re not quite finished yet. So keep your running shoes on, fellas. The train will yet pull in on the predictable track where women will be forgiven all and everything imaginable will be blamed on men.

QUEEN OF THE CASTLE?

When a woman kills her own child, perhaps she’s sending a powerful message about who’s really in charge. If that’s what she’s doing, she and reality have perilously parted ways.

Women still believe that they have sole dominion over so little property that arson and armed robbery and rape make no intuitive sense to them. King George III of England had the same delusion, which is why they locked him up.

It would, of course, help if we could stop thinking of children as anyone’s property. But whose "we"?

We are told fathers show no interest in their children after divorce. Those who have been through the thresher know the schizophrenia of family law. These fathers borrow their children from a lending library, although the overdue penalties go on forever.

So we were standing on the right platform all along.