HETEROSEXUAL AGGRESSORS VS. ADULTS: FOURTH VARIETY OF OFFENDERS
The next variety of aggressor vs. adult, and one accounting for perhaps as much as 10 per cent of the group, is the double-standard variety. The males so classified divide females into good females whom one treats with some respect and bad females who are not entitled to consideration if they become obstinate. While one would not ordinarily think of maltreating a good girl, any girl one can pick up easily has in essence agreed to coitus and can legitimately be forced to keep her promise. These double-standard aggressors are somewhat like the amoral delinquents in attitude, but differ from them in being less criminal, in resorting to force only after persuasion fails, and in not being so generally asocial. In brief, the double-standard variety may be described as rather average males of lower socioeconomic background who feel that with provocation the use of moderate threat or force is justifiable when applied to females judged to be sexually lax or promiscuous. There are strong philosophical parallels with the Latin American “machismo” phenomenon. These double-standard males share with the amoral delinquents a penchant for group activity, the logical result when several males cruise about looking for female pickups. This trend may include a sort of man-to-man generosity, the female being shared much as men would share food or liquor, and with about the same emotional affect. Indeed, we have one case in which the man left a pickup girl and his friend in his car to go to a nearby parked car containing three other men and suggested sharing the girl in exchange for a gallon of wine. Yet this man strongly desired to marry a virgin and had refrained from coitus with his fianc?e.
Another man of limited intellect and education who had a clear record, save for juvenile car theft (not uncommon behavior in his social milieu), helped a woman get her stalled auto started, mistook her appreciation and offer of a lift for an indication of sexual willingness and then threatened and struck her when she refused coitus. The prison report is illuminating: “[The subject has] habitually a naive expression … anxious to have everyone understand that he was neither brutal nor violent with his victim . . . admits that when he could not persuade her in friendly fashion he uttered threats. . . . Frank to admit he sees nothing wrong with what he did for the victim was not harmed in any way and it was nothing more than what he has done on many occasions in the past to other girls. . . .”
The rationalization of a double-standard aggressor might often be in the following vein, to quote one of them: “Man, these dumb broads don’t know what they want. They get you worked up and then they try to chicken out. You let ‘em get away with stuff like that and the next thing you know they’ll be walking all over you.” If a large segment of the population of any socioeconomic class subscribed to this view, we might regard this variety as a “subculture” variety like the offenders vs. minors. However, no large social segment approves of force although it is easily forgiven.
After subtracting the above varieties, nearly one third of the aggressors vs. adults remain. A few of them may be recognized as clear cases of mental defectives and a few others as unquestionable psychotics, but the others strike one as being mixtures of the varieties described.
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