The law is written by men, for men.  It comes from a time when men controlled the world and women were mere property.  Because of that, it "thinks" in male terms.  The law criminalizes behavior that men find inherently offensive, but not behavior that women find inherently offensive (unless men also find it offensive).

That is why a man can cheat on his wife and three mistresses, lie to them, subject them to possible STD infection, defraud and deceive them, betray them and humiliate them, and the law provides no remedy.  But let these women avail themselves of a little self-help by humiliating him and gluing his penis to his leg (since they get no help from the law), and they are facing felony charges and possible prison sentences.  In this regard, the law is de facto misogynistic.

By  now, you have no doubt heard about the four betrayed women (including the betrayer's wife) who glued a cheating man's penis to his leg.  If not, go see the posts by Blackflon and Natalie Not Pedantic.

One of the justifications for making laws and punishing criminals is that it transfers the power to punish from the individual to the state, thereby creating a more orderly, sane, coherent society.  Were it not for the law and the state's official punishment, we would all be getting our justice at the point of a gun or a knife . . . or a Krazy Glue stick.  Criminal laws promote order by giving the right of punishment and retribution to the state, and taking it out of the hands of the people.  Giving that power to the state allows for an orderly society in which personal retribution is removed, but it still allows the victims of abhorrent behavior to feel vindicated.  Justice is thereby served.

When our laws were being conceived and developed around the time of the Magna Carta, the world was dominated by men.  Naturally, the men who conceived the laws criminalized bad behavior that they perceived, as it occurred to them.  Much of it was based on biblical notions of wrong.  Some of it was based on notions of medieval property rights.  And the remainder of it was based on personal interactions between men.  What offended a man's sensibilities became criminalized.  That is where crimes of violence come from.

Men were -- and predominantly still are -- the violent sex.  The biggest man-made risk to a man was the possibility that another man would commit an act of physical violence upon him or his property (which included his wife).  Thus, that behavior was criminalized, and the state assigned punishments to various kinds of physical violence.

Because men were not deemed to be particularly susceptible to emotional violence, that behavior was not criminalized.  A real man was expected to absorb or deflect emotional violence with immunity, and thus no punishment was deemed necessary.  Thus, the particularly male notion that "sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never harm me" was codified into law.  And so it remains in large part, today.

Women had -- and in many ways  continue to have -- different sensibilities, different vulnerabilities and different effects from certain kinds of behavior.  Since at the time the law was conceived, women were deemed mere property and of little import beyond child bearing and keeping her husband's home, laws were not written to provide punishment for behavior that tended to harm only women or offend only women's sensibilities.  So crimes of emotional violence were not written into law to the extent that crimes of physical violence were.

Enter modern times.

A married man cheats on his wife, not with one but with at least three other women, lying to and deceiving each one of them.  For each, he subjects them to the possibility of sexually transmitted disease.  For each he leads them on and gets them to rely on his lies and deceit.  From each he extracts sexual consent under false pretenses and an emotional commitment based on lies.  If he is carrying an STD, they can suffer physical harm.  Upon discovery, they all suffer emotional harm.

The law provides no remedy for this emotional violence.  This is true even though the physical and emotional risk of harm rises exponentially according to the number of women cheated upon at once, so we can conceive this as a greater wrong than garden variety infidelity to one other person or to serial single events of cheating.  No remedy.  The women are just supposed to take it.  Caveat emptor, and all. 

I had a female client who was cheated on and filed a lawsuit.  Most of the suit was tossed out, and prosecutors refused to file charges.  She had gotten engaged to the perpetrator who she says, unbeknownst to her, simultaneously had at least one wife (maybe two) and 51 other fiances, and was also seeing dozens of female and shemale prostitutes, all of which he had unprotected sex with.  He gave her an STD, convinced her to abandon her career and take care of his busy international social calendar, isolated her from her friends and family and caused emotional abuse to her and her family (which may have contributed to her father's death), and then tossed her away, penniless, when she discovered his betrayal.  And the law provided ZERO remedyfor her, telling her in effect that all is fair in love and war.  I blogged about her story here.  Several other of his other victims also sued and tried to have criminal charges filed, all to no avail.

So when the four penis-gluing women discovered the betrayal and suffered emotional (and potential physical) injury, the law gave them no protection.  And it should have, because their only recourse was self-help, which laws are written to prevent.  So other than suffer silently, they did the only thing they could: they captured the guy and punished him for his crimes.  They became their own police, judges and jury, since the law provided them with none of these tools of justice.

But they made a mistake.  They captured him (a crime under male thinking), they allegedly pointed a gun at him (a threat of physical violence made criminal under male thinking) and they glued his penis to him (a battery under male thinking, made even worse because it involved the ultimate assault upon manhood -- I doubt this would have been filed had they superglued his thumb to his forefinger, for instance).  So now the victims stand accused of crimes against male sensibilitiess, and face possible prison terms.

I see this as a failure of the law and of society, not a failure of these women.  The law should provide a remedy for crimes against behavior that only  women find abhorrent (I'm not saying that men don't find the cheater's actions abhorrent, only that when our laws were conceived it was not so considered).  Such a law would have given these women some recourse and the pursuit of justice through approved means, rather than being forced to suffer in silence or avail themselves of self-help.

It is time we refashioned the laws to consider more than just the sensibilities of medieval men.  If women are to be equal partners in society, the law has to recognize that there are more differences in the sexes than mere body parts, and provide protections for interests that are predominantly, if not exclusively, women's, as it does for men's.