Ex-pastor pleads guilty to child porn chargesNEW CASTLE A former pastor of a Slippery Rock Township church pleaded guilty this week to two counts of possession of child pornography. No sentencing date has been set for Robert D. Schmidtberger, 52, but prosecutors recommended a sentence of 12 months minus two days to 24 months minus four days with 15 years’ probation. Lawrence County Judge Thomas Piccione, who oversaw the guilty plea, ordered a psychological assessment to determine whether Schmidtberger might be a violent sexual predator.For more of this story, click on or type the URL below:http://www.timesonline.com/articles/2008/01/28/news/doc47994ee49c77b089171946.txt
alatham,
Indeed you may be right. Perhaps it is different perceptions. I would think that perhaps a female emotionally abusing a male would be equally as damaging as a male physically abusing a female.
That makes a lot of sense and I never considered it like that.
A female’s “beauty and sensitivity” is more damaged by the brutishness of male physical assaults, whereas a male’s “power and strength” is more damaged by emotional abuse, especially by a female. Each equally attacks the “essence” of one’s identity.
I would change my answer now.
3) Can we even measure the extent of physical vs. emotional pain?
No, we cannot because they are equal.
Dawn,
Please don’t say things like this, Dawn.
That argument is only valid as an anecdote, not as a logical argument.
I, for one, do not enjoy guns unless they’re virtual.
This is the kind of blanket statement that I don’t like to see here.
I don’t really buy this either. “Gender role” is a much bigger aspect of a person’s upbringing than simply how your father raised you. Certainly that had a big impact on you, but did your mother also go hunting with you?
Even then, if you discount the gender role argument, that doesn’t count as positive evidence for the sex argument.
I’m not disagreeing with you here, you may well be right. But there are too many variables to break the whole issue down with any certainty.
I think guns being something mainly for men is a sound argument.
I didn’t mean to imply every single man wants a gun or that every single woman hates them.
I don’t hate guns myself. I like having them around.
But guns are MAINLY: made by men, marketed to men and purchased by men.
I’m sure there are females who belong to the NRA but I think we both know it’s a male dominated organization.
I’m sure there are some females that hunt for sport, but it’s mainly an activity enjoyed by males.
So when I say men really really love guns it’s because they do, not all perhaps but quite a lot, I dare say a firm majority. I would need to find some kind of statistics to be sure, which I can’t only handgun stats.
In my experience, emotional abuse ALWAYS preceeded the physical abuse. A person with a crappy self-concept must be easier to confuse and then abuse, or perhaps less apt to fight back/report/leave etc.
dawn:
Yes, some, not all. Do you not accept that?
I just have a hard time accepting this as the situation 2 out of every 10 women are/were in. I kind of get the feel from you that abused women are these helpless things who can’t support themselves, and are easily manipulated, and that just rubs me the wrong way.
c4t,
I’m in no way implying I’ve never been duped, but it sure as shit has never been from a gold digger or an abusive person. But if/when I do get screwed, that’s it, I’m done. And I will get even if I deem it appropriate (moral-less atheist, heh). My own personality type is to not trust people at all though, so maybe that’s why I rarely get in a pickle.
alatham,
You bring up a very good point, it also takes me much longer to deal with emotional pain than physical. Another difference in the sexes?
mxracer,
Usually when women figure out that are “in a bad situation” they are in love, commitments have been made, and children are involved and this makes them forgive over and over and over.
A female’s capacity for unconditional love is what makes us good mothers and have the ability to care for and love our offspring regardless of the sacrifice and their sometimes monstrous behavior and that love extends to our partners.
I would forgive my husband for almost anything and I would stand by him through good and bad because I LOVE him. It would take a lot for me to leave him, even if he became abusive because he is my life, my other half.
This is NOT a fault of women it is a strength that some men take advantage of.
It is not helplessness that makes a woman stay it’s love, which in a very bad situation becomes fear and total confusion for the female.
One of the main feelings of women who have left abusive husbands is guilt. Guilt for leaving them, abandoning them, not being “good enough” to not be abused.
Love causes this. It is our instinctual nature to provide unconditional love. We would not abandon our children if they have mental problems so to expect women to easily abandon their love and commitment we have for our husbands, well it just isn’t easy for us.
It would take years for me to leave my own husband because I love him so very much. I would die for him, I would do ANYTHING for him, so just to leave him seems wrong no matter what he did to me.
I would like to think I would just walk away, but that’s just not what happens.
OK, I get it better now, thanks for explaining.
I love my wife too, but there’s a variety of things that I wouldn’t tolerate & would result in an automatic “get out now”. I don’t have a very high tolerance for BS.
mxracer,
I am glad that even though men and women are so very different that we have love to bring us together.
Perfect compliments to each other when all is well mentally at least LOL.
Alatham
Yes. There are some folks here assigning mystical powers to sociopaths. MOST are much easier to spot than some of you think.
But all of this aside I am amazed that nobody commented on the Milgram experiment. It clearly shows that women can be mindless abusers just as easily as men.
Also violence among lesbi*n couples is approximately equal to that between hetero couples. The difference between male perpetrated violence and female perpetrated violence is that men are usually physically stronger and therefore can do more damage. The correlation between gender and inherent (I have intentionally used this word twice above) violence is just not as strong as some here think it is.
Mystical???? I’m simply trying to say that sociopaths are more difficult to spot when one is young and inexperienced. It definetly gets easier with age. Also, I think being a victim is equal opportunity among the sexes. I was a bartender for 10 years. I’ve seen just as many men hook up with idiots as women. And yes, I’ve seen them be abused (as being an idiot is also equal opportunity among the sexes).
Also, I may be wrong, but IMHO as soon as someone declares they’re impervious to society’s predators is the minute s/he becomes the most vunerable. Always keep up your guard, and don’t hesitate to educate our youths, who easily misjudge.
And please don’t overshelter your daughters. They need to see the horrific side of humanity while they’re still under your protection. Let them watch “The Burning Bed” (my first indoctrination to violence). Point out news that delinates crimes against women (by both strangers and loved ones). Allow them to read memoirs of victims. Explain to them the red flags. Educate them! Don’t allow them to be more vulnerable than your sons.
Do all this with love, and maybe she won’t have the stories to tell that I do.
Is George W Bush a sociopath?
Good advice and I wish you the healing you richly deserve.
Many thanks What.
Well, let’s look at this from the male POV, shall we.
Wife starts a physical fight with the husband, then calls the police. Cops show up and an arrest has to be made, since it’s a domestic disturbance call. Who goes to jail? The man.
It happend to me personally.
Gee, maybe I should kill a woman now so that you broads here can turn this into something anti-male.
And another comment on this anti-male thread.
The wife I mentioned and I got divorced. Any guess how that went?
1) Who got the house? the woman
2) Who got the kids? the woman
3) Who got money? the woman
So in my life – and many many other men’s lives – it is we men who are the discriminated against gender.
STFU you retarded, ignorant bitch.
That’s a very biased assertion that is flat out wrong.
There are women who rape men. There are also women who rape their own sons, and others who rape their own daughters.
There are women who kill their boyfriends or husbands, and others who hire other people to kill their boyfriends or husbands.
DNAunion
I too found that post from Dawnisis to be ignorant. IMO she has a romanticized view of women and a patronizing attitude towards men.
rna2dna,
RE your previous post:
I certainly don’t think that saying “men have a increased capacity for violence, due to evolutionary history” is any kind of an excuse for violence…it certainly isn’t. But the fact remains nevertheless.
The comparison between chimps and pygmy chimps is facinating in this sense.
Chimps use the threat of violence to assert their superiority over rivals (for food, sex etc) whereas pygmy chimps use the reward of sex to do the same. In both cases these behaviours have evolutionary bases. Personally I prefer the pygmy chimp approach
I should add, that much of the sexual reward offered by pygmy chimps, is non-procreative in nature.
Fellatio
Cunninglulus
Mastabation
Mutual mastabation
Homosexuality
Paedophilia
These little perverts have been up to the above in the jungle for millions of years. just goes to show there us nothing new under the sun!
Danger,
Can’t seem to find that anywhere, is there a source?
What percentage of the male population would you guess will at some time make little bow knots using shoe laces?
Does the answer mean that the act isn’t a learned behavior?
rna2dna,
while there is no “proof” per se, there is reason to beleive that men (in general) have a higher capacity for violence than women (in general)
physiologically, male hormones elicit an aggresive response (think ster0ids, angry men with tiny balls)and if we look at our closest relatives we see some shared attributes that suggest that our shared ancestores burdened us with this aggresiveness.
also there’s the fact that all human societies, many developing independantly of one another, have for some reason ended up with their men being more violent/aggressive than their women. chances are against the unilateral development of all these societies without an underlying cause.
Milgram experiment!
what:
the milgram experiment (testing a subjects willingness to “harm” a third party based on orders from an authority figure)doesn’t seem to have much to add to the gender discussion, the rates of compliance were roughly the same for males and females and besides that, it can be argued that the willingness to comply with the authority figure isn’t really related to one’s own propensity for violent behavior, at least a valid conclusion on that can’t be drawn from the one experiment.
someone should do a study on that though…
rna2dna,
I appreciate your point that behaviours (such as tying shoelaces) need not have evolved , but I would suggest that our capacity for violence is rooted much deeper in our nature.
I believe that emotions such as rage, fear and love are not simply the way that brains happen to function, but are traits that have been selected over our evolutionary history. Do you have a better explanation for why these traits exist??
Do you really equate basic primal emotions such as rage, fear and love, with learned behaviours such as tying shoelaces?
I do appreciate your point though. Just because we do something, doesn’t mean that it is a naturally selected adaptation. It’s just that I disagree with you that rage/violence fits into this catagory.
Of course violence CAN be a learned behaviour as well.