"I only like 25 year old blondes. I know I'm kind of screwed up, but I can GET 25 year old blondes, so I have no reason to try to change."I recently saw an article titled Why We Love to Hate Women Who Grift. I didn't read it when I first saw it. Good call as it's a fluff piece saying essentially "Read my other articles about all these women con artists." I only dug it back up for purposes of mentioning it here.
-- Some monied 40-year-old guy in some article
We seem to expect women to be more moral than men. That used to bother me. It seems unfair to expect people with so little money and power to be the ones who take a moral stand.
But the reality is that it's easier to take a moral stand if you live a private life. Relatively few people will care what you do and you only answer to a short list of people who know you well.
It's much harder to be a moral person and highly consistent if you are in the public eye. If you get a reputation for it, people will take advantage and expect good things from you while not doing anything to deserve it and may even actively behave badly towards you. It can be very hard to guard against such abuse.
If you have a serious career, you will be in the public eye to some degree and pulled this way and that by different people wanting different things from you. What you do will be watched, even if you try to keep it on the down low, and judged, often based on very incomplete information.
If it gets unfairly maligned, trying to defend the action by explaining your reasons at length may amount to digging your grave deeper. Plenty of people have no real interest in justice and merely claim such as a means to further their agenda. In such cases, their agenda can be quite nefarious.
We also tend to expect women to be more moral than men because we expect women to raise children and men to be good providers. Since the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world it matters if the person raising the children is of good moral character. You get a better society if the people who are full-time parents are highly moral individuals who do right by their kids when they are alone with them and no one is watching.
It perhaps explains part of why society is so willing to look the other way if a well-heeled older man wants to marry some pretty young thing. We all know it's probably basically a polite form of prostitution. She is trading on looks and sex for the good life, he is buying his way into her bed.
But such women may not be looking to have kids at all and if they do have kids and he is retirement age or comfortably well-off and working relatively little, well, HE can mostly raise the kids. If she marries well as her solution for keeping a roof over her head and if the man paying for that roof is okay with how she operates, then either no one is really harmed or it minimizes the damage she can do.
Marrying well minimizes her public footprint. Even if she marries someone rich, powerful and influential and he tries to back her career ambitions, he may be helping her sell perfume or some other relatively trivial and inconsequential means for a child bride to line her pockets and pretend to have a real career.
She probably won't be using him as a stepping stone to political power or something like that.
If she has no public ambitions at all and is pretty and good in bed -- or good enough in his opinion -- but doesn't cook or clean, he can hire a maid and they can eat at restaurants. The rest of the world will not be noticeably materially harmed by her being little more than a trollop with a polite cover story.
No one REALLY cares whom you sleep with. They mostly care if it negatively impacts THEM in some way.
When men have good reputations, they have generally earned them over many years and those reputations are hard won. Women are sometimes assumed to be good simply because they are female.
Another reason to hate women grifters: Traditionally, the power women have is primarily social in nature. They have the favor of a powerful man, such as their father or their husband, and they can ask a personal favor because he is fond of her.
Women are generally expected to have better social skills and to generally be more interested in and knowledgeable about social things, like clothes. If you have a woman who has those stereotypical "female traits" but lacks the expected good character that is supposed to go along with such, you have a serious problem. She can potentially take advantage of a lot of people and do a lot of harm before she is stopped.
Using gender as a proxy for whom to presume to have good character is a fundamentally broken mental model on the face of it. It's one that serves us especially poorly at the moment with full-time wives and moms largely going the way of the dinosaur in developed countries.
The tendency for humans to assume that women will be of good moral character at a time when few women have the lived experiences that may have historically fostered good moral character among women opens the door to a lot of bad things.
It makes it relatively easy for women of poor moral character to try to sleep their way into promotions and career reputation. If your internal wiring tells you that simply being pretty entitles you to trade sex for The Good Life but the world around you expects you to have a real career in place of marrying well, for some women the new Easy Button in life is sleeping with a powerful man who can further their career.
Again, no one REALLY cares with whom you sleep. They mostly care if it negatively impacts THEM.
The world typically does not care if a married couple runs a company together. It's probably not going to materially harm the product they are selling to the world.
Women trying to further their careers via The Easy Button are usually sleeping with someone secretly.
Elizabeth Holmes told the world she was celibate in her twenties because she was supposedly so devoted to her company that she had time for nothing else. The world later learned she was secretly sleeping with and living with Sunny Balwani, an investor in her company.
Her company turned out to be a case of fraud. It went overnight from a valuation of ten billion American dollars to zero.
Had the world known Holmes was sleeping with Balwani, they would have viewed the millions he invested in the company differently. They would not have accepted that as an argument that he was confident the technology really worked and this was a good financial bet. They would have realized he was basically buying his way into the bed of a much younger woman.
It also opens the door to the possibility that a bad man may wish to try to "redeem" his bad reputation by seducing a female colleague, having a secret affair with her and asking her to essentially shill for him in his efforts to whitewash his bad reputation.
You pretty much have to be suspicious of a woman trying too hard to go to bat for a man she claims is merely a professional contact and not her lover. That kind of loyalty is typically hard won. When it's not, it tends to involve some dirty secret that could undo both of them.
You have to be especially suspicious if she is basically trading on the assumption that people will assume her to be a good person because she was born with girl bits between her legs. If she has no established career reputation of her own on the line but is nominally pursuing a career, the odds are high this is a con game.
If you are serious about helping someone whom you genuinely believe to be innocent, there are ways to do so. Making a public stink and trying to use your association with him to further your nominal career reputation is not likely to be one of them.