Benefit of Doubt vs Attitude of Incrimination: Internalized Male Welfare

Challenging our conditioned reflex to provide benefit of the doubt to men while wielding an attitude of incrimination against women

Patriarchy produces a state of chronic male welfare. One of the most potent yet ineffable structures of this welfare is our conditioned reflex to provide benefit of the doubt to men while wielding an attitude of incrimination against women.

An attitude of incrimination means that we perceive, judge, and respond to women from a place of innate suspicion and accusation. What was she wearing? Well, she had a couple of glasses of wine that night, so who can say she wasn’t asking for it? She should have picked better.

She decided to hang out at home with those kids - did that princess think that was fair for that poor man? She’s the one that decided she still needed that career and worked instead of raising those babies herself - what did she think would happen?

How many dicks do you think she took to get promoted that high? Ugh that fundraiser is so fake - she just wants people to think she cares.

You get what I’m saying. An attitude of incrimination is always viscerally present against scapegoats within a society or dysfunctional family unit.

This attitude projects an assumption of malice, manipulation, and reckless disregard onto the intentions of a woman to preemptively delegitimatize her experiences, credibility, and value. It is a projection of assumed guilt and fault before any statement can even be made, let alone heard.

The reciprocal phenomena of reflexively affording men with the benefit of the doubt can be understood as an affirmation of patriarchy’s culture of male narcissism that requires structures of male welfare.

Men’s patriarchal entitlement to receive the benefit of the doubt and projections of positive intentions, love, or maturity where a man has not expressed or demonstrated such dispositions is a critical structure of male welfare.

The reflexive benefit of the doubt often portrays men as well meaning but ignorant - and helplessly so. He didn’t mean to exploit her labor by refusing to participate in the labor of maintaining a household and investing in the wellbeing of all members.

He just can’t be expected to see a sink full of dishes and take the initiative to clean them. I mean, how would he even know if she didn’t give him a list of what to do and do the work alongside him to ensure it gets done? But also, don’t nag him - if you nag him about completing minor tasks to contribute to his own care and the care of those he loves, then aren’t you the real problem?

Benefit of the doubt and attitude of incrimination are twins - they work together to shield men from being accountable for their own care, choices, and development of basic cooperative life skills.

Brock Turner Case Example

But it goes much deeper. The Brock Turner case was an excellent example of benefit of the doubt in action. Brock Turner, a Stanford student, was arrested after two individuals found him raping an unconscious woman behind a dumpster. Turner fled, but was tackled and restrained until authorities came.

Turner fought the case and put the woman he raped through an extensive and invasive trial. While prosecutors wanted Turner imprisoned for 6 years, the judge ruled that he would serve 6 months and then go on probation.

His father submitted statements to the court urging leniency because any criminal repercussions for Turner’s choice to rape a woman was a “steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action”. Plus, despite being an athlete who enjoyed “a big ribeye steak to grill”, the trauma of being held accountable for RAPING AN UNCONSCIOUS WOMAN had reduced his appetite.

The character letter went on to say,

What I know as his father is that incarceration is not the appropriate punishment for Brock. He has no prior criminal history and has never been violent to anyone including his actions [rape] on the night of Jan 17, 2015. Brock can do so many things as a contributor to society and is totally committed to educating other college age students about the dangers of alcohol consumption and sexual promiscuity.

Let’s unpack that. Turner deserves the benefit of the doubt and to be shielded from experiencing the consequences of his choice to rape an unconscious woman because he has never been held accountable for a crime before.

Raping a woman, apparently, is not a violent crime. I say raping a woman, of course, because if Turner had been raped by another man, he would obviously consider that to be a violent crime.

Turner’s father goes on to argue that it would be a crime to punish Turner for his adult choices because it would deny his potential to contribute. This trial demonstrates that Turner takes opportunities to rape when he believes he will get away with it, but we’re also asked to value his potential to benefit others, which has not been established.

There are no arguments demonstrating that this choice was out of character, only arguments that he is entitled to a benefit of the doubt that assumes this was out of character.

How can he contribute in the future? By educating others that binge drinking is at fault.

When a woman is sexually assaulted while drunk, our conditioned attitude of incrimination blames her. She drank, she invited assault. When a man sexually assaults while drunk, our conditioned attitude of benefit of doubt excuses his sexual violence by blaming the presence of alcohol. It wasn’t his fault - it was the alcohol.

Benefit of the doubt is a welfare tool for men to avoid experiencing the consequences of their own choices and behaviors. Attitudes of incrimination ensure that women are scapegoated and punished for the consequences of men’s choices and behaviors.

Where we assign benign ignorance to men, we condemn women.

Pattern in Action

This pattern is pervasive. In the workplace, when a man repeats a woman’s idea as his own and the woman has the audacity to remind the group that he repeated the idea she already shared, the intellectual theft is dismissed. Everyone assumes she’s being too sensitive and aggressive by asserting her claim to her own idea.

The projection is that she’s stepping out of line, demanding too much credit, too much attention for asserting ownership of the idea. Shouldn’t she just be happy to contribute? Why is she being so masculine and inconvenient by demanding respect and appropriate credit?

Simultaneously, the man is placated with assurances that everyone knows he didn’t intentionally steal her idea to take personal credit and professionally profit from it.

That too is an attitude of incrimination v benefit of the doubt scenario. We are conditioned to receive women asserting themselves and the value they contribute as self-serving, inappropriate, icky, demanding, and overbearing.

We are conditioned to excuse men when they violate the contributions or existence of others by projecting innocent ignorance onto their intentions. He didn’t mean to, he must have had the same idea, or he didn’t remember hearing her say it first, etc.

All of those projections onto intention is the internalized state of male welfare.

Men are so accustomed to receiving it that violations against a projection of positive intention, ignorant innocence, or other deterrents to protect men from experiencing direct consequences for their own choices, are perceived by men as malicious.

We see this clearly with current online discourse. Too many men feel personally attacked when denied projections of benefit of the doubt. As women refuse to offer benefit of the doubt and speak out against rape culture, male entitlement, and the myriad of normalized or dismissed abuses and violations men commit against women, many men are responding hysterically.

Losing the benefit of the doubt creates barriers to accessing women for pleasure and labor. It forces men to invest in demonstrating their character and intentions and earning trust and access. Many men are reacting by claiming victimization and male discrimination.

Facts on the Ground

Please keep in mind - men commit 99% of sexualized violence. Girls and women experience 91% of that sexual violence, while boys and men are the victims of the remaining 8-9%. Rapists are only tried and convicted 2% of the time.

Globally, 1 in 3 girls and women are at some point in their lives beaten, sexually assaulted, raped, or otherwise abused by men within their households - romantic partners, male family members, or close family acquaintances.

And yet, men feel a birthright entitlement to receiving the benefit of the doubt from women without first having to prove themselves to be safe and trustworthy?

Facts don’t mean much to these guys though. These men feel that being denied benefit of the doubt assumptions from women is a worse fate than a woman being killed by her intimate partner. Because she must have done something to make him do that, right?

Where Does This Gendered Conditioning Grow From?

This dichotomy grows from patriarchy’s culture of male narcissism. This culture isn’t limited to shaping men’s self-aggrandizing worldview and perceptions of women as subhuman appendages designed and intended to be subsumed into a man’s self-concept and lifestyle as a utility and resource.

An attitude of incrimination sets women up to be scapegoats and men’s entitlement to receiving benefit of the doubt and positive projections sets them up to be the golden child of society. The purpose is to create standards of perception where feminine scapegoats can do nothing right and the masculine golden child can do nothing wrong.

Scapegoats are assigned wherever narcissistic orientations exist. A narcissistic fantasy of innate superiority needs a scapegoat to avoid experiencing and appropriately responding to the unmitigated consequences of their own beliefs, behaviors, and choices.

This is true on the family raising level and the societal level - a person or group will be assigned to be scapegoated wherever narcissistic orientations are enabled and empowered.

Attitudes of incrimination blame all failures and shame onto the scapegoat, while benefit of the doubt protects and enshrines the golden child.

When we see this dynamic in families, boys are statistically more likely to be the golden child role that can do no wrong, while girls are more likely to be scapegoated by the family in comparison. It makes sense that the pattern holds true at scale since we’re talking about microcosm (family) and macrocosm (patriarchal society) expressing the same patterns of narcissistic dysfunction.

Our society and nuclear family standard both center the needs, desires, fears, and limitations of adult men as the organizational purpose of human life, which is the root of dysfunction.

Healthy societies and family structures are centered around caring for the children first and foremost as the mandate and purpose for social structures.

Matriarchy creates healthy families, communities, and societies. Patriarchy creates narcissistic dysfunction, untamed inequality on a civilization destroying scale, and a fundamentally weak, immature, and disordered vision for human life.

Social Functions of Incrimination

A prevailing attitude of incrimination is necessary to blame populations for experiencing the intended victimization and exploitation that the system subjects them to. To avoid reckoning with the systems and social logic that produces widespread dysfunction and targeted punishment against those most affected, an attitude of incrimination must be cultivated.

The tropes and projections of that attitude must be repeated until they become common wisdom - no matter how inaccurate, hypocritical, and dishonest the representations are. Most patriarchal myths were created to service this process.

Indoctrinating that attitude into common wisdom functions to redirect energy and attention away from genuine problem solving and innovation - which would threaten, if not dismantle, the problematic status quo.

Projecting disdain and condemnation through an attitude of incrimination both reaffirms and absolves the status quo through illusions, projections, and mandates for further exploitation and violence against the scapegoats as resolution. As the only resolution.

That is why it is more critical than ever that we call out patriarchal entitlement as the system of male welfare that it is. We must directly confront every tired trope and projection that male supremacists throw out to justify their demands for welfare and the glorification of male incompetence.

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