I wonder how much of the Missing White Women Syndrome makes white women over-evaluate their vulnerability, and how much it makes others under-evaluate theirs?
According to this cite, people of color and white males are more likely to be victimized by violent crime than white women.
I once worked with a young woman who told me she felt unsafe as a white female living in the city. I don’t doubt that it can be scary living in the city sometimes, but she seemed to believe that her whiteness made her a special target. I’m sure if I had told her she had a lower chance of being a victim than me, the negro, she would have laughed. And I probably would have too if I had been in her shoes. When is the last time you saw Nancy Grace crying over a black lady?
Conversely, I have never been all that afraid of being a victim of street crime. Perhaps this is also the result of not being constantly bombarded with images of black women being victims.
OMG! That’s like so stuupid that I can’t tell if you’re being deliberate stupid or you’re the real deal!!1
It’s fine that you have a point. I don’t. I was merely stating the obvious. I don’t really care one way or the other that the media does not treat all human life equally. The media reflects the interests of the viewers. And they do elevate the worth of women over that of men, and beauty over ugliness, youth over age, celebrity over commons, locals over foreigners, etc. So do I personally, so I guess I’m one to be upset about that. You, a middle aged guy, goes missing. I don’t give a damn. A child goes missing, or girl goes missing, that has the potential to evoke a sense of the tragic in me.
And you feel like you have the moral authority to be the judge of what and whom deserves the attention of the masses and what and whom deserves just to be forgotten?
btw. you’re wrong about the women and children bits too.
I’m with Rune here. In the situations that he describes - bombs, plane crashes etc. - women and children are not more vulnerable. So that’s not it.
I think the reason black women are more often victimized is not because they’re more likely to be victimized in the same type of situation, but because they’re more often in dangerous situations - most notably that they tend to live in high crime areas.
Which is the same reason they’re less afraid of being victimized by street crime. They’re much more inured to it.
[I’m sometimes struck by videos of prey animals standing around calmly watching lions and other predators close-by, where any person would be freaking out. But that’s life, and you get used to things.]
This gets into the question of how people rate danger to themselves.
I think people do not rate danger based on actual statistical chances, as on emotional criteria: a danger is weighted more highly if the risk seems horrifying, than if the risk seems mundane. This is why people tend to overrate (going by statistics) the chance of being eaten by a shark when swimming in the ocean (vanishingly rare) over the (much more serious) risk of dying in a car accident on the drive to the ocean. You could easily demonstrate that by statistics, but even if you do, it will not aleviate the fear some folks have of swimming in the ocean and being attacked by sharks.
Similarly, one could demonstrate with statistics that the risk of violence to (White) women was less than that to (White) men or Blacks, but that would not diminish the woman’s fear of violence, particularly of the horrific raped-and-murdered variety. Like a shark attack, it may be vanishingly rare, but it is horrifying, and that horror weighs more heavily than statistics. Particularly comparative statistics: it is no comfort to know that others face even more probable horrors than you do.
The media stokes that horror by constantly bombarding everyone with stories depicting it. The wider the reach of the media, the more stories they have concerning some horror or other. If a particular horrific event (statistically) occurs to one in one million people every year, there will, on average, be one such event occuring at least every day somewhere in North America … leading to the impression of a constant parade of horrors, if the media reports every one.
I assure you it’s neither. I know that media does not have any obligation to treat everyone equally. But the media does not HAVE to drive how you think.
See, this is where we differ. An innocent man is killed by a stranger. Is that really any less tragic than the same headline with the word man replaced by the word woman? Notice I didn’t ask if it was more newsworthy.
Never said that. Nice strawman though.
Meh, we’re looking at this differently. I know the women and children on the airplane that just crashed in the Alps were not MORE vulnerable than the men on the same flight. But that expression, and it’s accepted use as a ‘hook’ in a new story goes back to the 1800s. News media has learned what attracts eyeballs. And they manipulate the hell out of their viewers.
This doesn’t get you where you need to go. You’re just saying it’s not the media which values w&c more than men, but the viewers. That doesn’t undermine the point being made - it supports it, actually.
I don’t know. Is it more tragic that when a child is killed than when an adult is killed? Is it more tragic that when some great man dies than when a do nothing couch potato dies? Is it more tragic when an innocent man dies than when a guilty man dies? There aren’t really any answers to such questions. However I was merely giving my emotional reaction. And I react more strongly to children and women dying than to adult men. I don’t think that’s wrong as such, since no one has a claim my emotions and I’m free to direct them whereever I want.
I don’t think the media values women and children over men, unless yall are using some other definition of value that I’m using. If men were of lower value, they wouldn’t be disproportionately cast as the protagonists in so much of our shows, male-dominated sports wouldn’t be featured on the six o’clock news, and commercials targeted to men would be more rare. Men are valued a lot.
It’s easier to portray women and kids as victims, because we’re programmed to see them as vulnerable. If male kidnapping victims were presented on the news, people would be less inclined to see them as needing rescue, because rescue is what helpless women and children require. Men are either the brave heroes who do the rescuing or the Bad Guys who do the kidnapping. This narrative is in keeping with the stories we grow up reading and fantasizing about.
From a feminist standpoint, this portrayal is annoying for the reasons monstro pointed out. A woman who decides to go out alone at night opens herself for judgment and shaming, because she’s acting “recklessly” by not curtailing her own freedom and independence. In contrast, a man who is cautious about protecting himself from others is seen as weak and unmanly.
Why did you juxtapose minorities with white crack whores then? Obviously you think we can use the treatment of one group to predict or understand the treatment of another. So if you aren’t drawing these parallels, should we conclude your comment was a non sequitur?
Completely agree, we are all free to interpret data and react however we want, with no judgement from anyone else.
I guess I’m just a little too cynical with what passes for news coverage. I worked in the industry back in the 90s and became very jaded with the thought process that goes into deciding what stories get on the air, and which “power words” they intentionally insert to play on the emotions of the viewer. I know that appealing to emotions is a commonly accepted thing, even in day to day interpersonal communication. I do it myself, of course. But I don’t feel that news coverage, which is what this thread is all about, uses that emotion button in a responsible way.
