Note: This post started out as a fairly light-hearted entry on the myriad assumptions we make about other people's body hair, but the more I thought about it the more I started wondering if there might be an appearance-based "absolve the accused" reflex similar to the better known "blame the victim" one.

According to the NCBI ROFL curators at Discoblogs

Mock jurors’ perceptions of facial hair on criminal offenders.

“Two studies were conducted to measure whether mock jurors would stereotype criminal offenders as having facial hair. In Study 1, participants were asked which photograph belonged to a defendant in a rape case and which photograph belonged to a plaintiff in a head-injury case after they were “accidentally” dropped. The photographs were similar in appearance except one had facial hair. 78% of 63 participants (or 49) identified the photograph with facial hair as being involved in the rape case. In Study 2, 371 participants were asked to sketch the face of a criminal offender. 82% of the sketches (or 249) contained some form of facial hair. Results are consistent with the hypothesis that criminal defendants are perceived as having facial hair.”

Source: Discover Blogs

I know I keep bringing up stuff like this but the anthropology of body and facial hair is totally fascinating. We just have so many assumptions, prohibitions, mandates, biases, fetishes, and stereotypes related to class, race, religion, sexuality, and, evidently, criminality. All of which, of course, vary from country to country and sometimes year to year.

To be honest, though, this one surprised me. Poorly-shaven faces have been a stock icon for criminality in America for decades, of course, and that in turn has derived from ethnic and class stereotypes. E.g. "the poor" have always been assumed to look shabby and to be criminal; 19th Century WASPs believed Mediterranean immigrants had a propensity for five o'clock shadows and criminal violence; 20th Century America was deeply suspicious of communists, beatniks, and hippies, all of whom were believed to have beards and, once again, to be inclined towards both crime and violence; and here in the 21st Century pop-culture America seems to associate beards with both Islamic and American-loonie violence. So that's not the surprising part.

What is surprising about the study's results, at least to me, is that bearded men would be associated not just with crime in general, or even violent crime in general but violent sexual crime.  (Remember, the research subjects were asked to guess which violent crimes were committed based on photos of men they believed had all been accused of crimes of violence.

Meanwhile if you look at the demographics of the people who really are most likely to commit rape they have a decided tendency to blend in very smoothly with the rest of the male population.

Hmm... You know, as always, that studies, and especially small-scale ones, are best taken with grains of salt at least until corroborated with further, more substantial studies.  But to the extent this study suggests implicit but substantially incorrect assumptions about rapists I wonder if there there might be a social "perpetrator absolving" reflex very similar to the "she must have asked for it somehow" victim-blaming reflex where not only are victims judged on their superficial appearance but so are the accused.

It's not at all cool to assume that a victim "deserved" sexual assault based on something she wore.  It would be equally uncool if it turned out that similar assumptions were made based on the appearance of the accused.

Might be a good question to ask Constable Michael Sanguinetti

Via Tyler Cowen Eric Barker of Barking Up the Wrong Tree points to an interesting-looking social psychology paper on entitlement and selfishness as it relates to a sense of victimization.

Does feeling like a victim make you selfish?:

Three experiments demonstrated that feeling wronged leads to a sense of entitlement and to selfish behavior. In Experiment 1, participants instructed to recall a time when their lives were unfair were more likely to refuse to help the experimenter with a supplementary task than were participants who recalled a time when they were bored. In Experiment 2, the same manipulation increased intentions to engage in a number of selfish behaviors, and this effect was mediated by self-reported entitlement to obtain positive (and avoid negative) outcomes. In Experiment 3, participants who lost at a computer game for an unfair reason (a glitch in the program) requested a more selfish money allocation for a future task than did participants who lost the game for a fair reason, and this effect was again mediated by entitlement.

via Journal of Personality and Social Psychology – Vol 97, Iss 5

Barker said it here.

Quick note: Barker may have been citing the print version. For whatever reason, though, the the article appears online in JPSP Vol 98, Issue 2: Victim entitlement to behave selfishly Zitek, Emily M.; Jordan, Alexander H.; Monin, Benoît; Leach, Frederick R. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Vol 98(2), Feb 2010, 245-255.

I’m not going to cough up ~$12.00 to read the gated version but while digging around for more information it looks like the same results turn up quite a few similar studies of selfishness, fairness, and sense of entitlement. I ought to add it makes sense because it’s been my intuition, stated repeatedly online and in real life, that privilege and entitlement (stereotypical male in particular, kyriarchal in general) derives more from insecurity and resentment than the stereotypical spoon-in-your-mouth aristocratic sense of “the peasants are revolting.” And finally makes sense because I’ve been around my children and their friends for 13 years now… although that experience might be unscientifically anecdotal. :-)

At any rate, assuming the research supports the conclusion, and assuming it confirms similar prior research, it’s going to supports my contention that those who exercise privilege tend to perceive their actions as defending themselves from unfairness or attack. With the result that asking, say, men to “give up” their privileges never seems to work (and, when it does sort of work, seems really wimpy, half-hearted, or passive-aggressive. Or chivalrous, which would be by far the least productive!)

I think it also supports my developing strategy of attempting to recruit “oppressive” classes with the entirely reasonable (and often easily-observed) point that conditions that are worse for someone don’t necessarily imply that conditions are better for you.

My city’s former chief of police, Norm Stamper, (he resigned to take a position with the Obama administration) has a nifty article in Huffington Post comparing marijuana and alcohol from a health, cost, and most importantly a police-activity point of view. (Emphasis mine.)

Alcohol contributes to acts of violence; marijuana reduces aggression. In approximately three million cases of reported violent crimes last year, the offender had been drinking. This is particularly true in cases of domestic violence, sexual assault, and date rape. Marijuana use, in and of itself, is absent from both crime reports and the scientific literature. There is simply no link to be made.

Over the past four years I’ve asked police officers throughout the U.S. (and in Canada) two questions. When’s the last time you had to fight someone under the influence of marijuana? (I’m talking marijuana only, not pot plus a six-pack or a fifth of tequila.) My colleagues pause, they reflect. Their eyes widen as they realize that in their five or fifteen or thirty years on the job they have never had to fight a marijuana user. I then ask: When’s the last time you had to fight a drunk? They look at their watches.

All of which begs the question. If one of these two drugs is implicated in dire health effects, high mortality rates, and physical violence—and the other is not—what are we to make of our nation’s marijuana laws? Or alcohol laws, for that matter.

He said it here.

By odd coincidence I quit smoking dope and drinking booze when I was 21. I had a good excuse: I was so stoned from a New Years from “how high is high” competition involving bong hits, whiskey shots, and tabs of LSD that when someone asked what my New Year’s resolution might be I smirked and slurred “I’m going to quit smoking dope, quit drinking, and hitch-hike to California.” Everyone, including me, had a good laugh. But maybe seven hours later, even though I had a job and a place to live a hundred miles to the east and didn’t know a soul in California, there I was, bleary eyed and poorly dressed for the weather, on a west-bound interstate exchange somewhere in rural Tennessee with my thumb out. I only stayed in California for a couple of months but I’ve scarcely drunk nor smoked since. (Be careful what you wish for!)

And so I ought to be able to say, using a rustic Tennessee aphorism, that I have no dog in the pot vs. potables fight. But I do. So do you. Domestic violence, date rape, stranger rape, unsafe or unprotected sex, misused or neglected contraception, uncalled for provocation, robberies, muggings, and murder tend to involve alcohol at an extraordinary rate…

Oh, and sometimes the victims have been drinking too. What, you didn’t think I was about to start blaming victims did you? Yeah, victims are often drunk, and sometimes helplessly or recklessly drunk, but… and correct me if I’m wrong… but I’m given to believe that the distinguishing characteristic of victims is the presence of a perpetrator. And perpetrators are overwhelmingly likely to be measurably drunk. (I’ll go one step further and say the likelihood of victims being drunk has waaaaayyyy more to do with their proximity to other drinkers than anything intrinsic to their own insobriety. Call me a rebel here.)

Meanwhile pot? I dunno. Pot makes you dumb and say “wow” a lot, but based on first, second, and third-hand experience people spend a heck of a lot more time regretting things they do but wanted to while high than actually regretting things they did. Whereas with alcohol? Um, not so much.

One thing that’s pretty interesting about pot, by the way. An amazing number of women have told me they first figured out how to have multiple orgasms… or sometimes to have orgasms at all… while high on pot. As for men? Well, speaking only for myself, despite smoking pot heavily during the most sexually active years of my life I honestly don’t believe I ever had sex while high. Not “I can’t remember.” Just that I tended to have other priorities. Like listening to music on headphones and talking with people about rolling another bone, bro. Alcohol? Yeah, I’m sure it boosts some people’s orgasmic potential but overall alcohol… especially frequent or heavy use… plays a very large role in “erectile dysfunction” in men, comparable dysfunction in women, and overall very high level of dissatisfaction among partners due to it’s clinical suppression of active (as opposed to “oh whatever”) libido.

Anyway, I’m not saying people shouldn’t drink, although I sincerely wish they wouldn’t. And I’m certainly not saying I wish people smoked pot instead.

I’m just saying that if everybody stopped smoking pot tomorrow society would barely register it. If everyone stopped drinking tomorrow society would noticeably lower need for police, medical, and social-services.

Hmm… I’m trying to find a non-curmudgeonly way to close this post. I guess I’ll just say that, at least for April 20th, if you’re going to drink at all drink bong water… um no, still curmudgeonly… happy April 20th.

(Via Jill at Feministe.)