ANN ALTHOUSE: “Look at the prison population. It’s less than 10% women. Does that mean men are held to a high standard of behavior? I think we’re comfortable with the extreme gender disproportion because we feel awfully sure that men commit many more crimes, especially the kind of crimes that deserve a substantial prison sentence. We like thinking that the prisons are confining individuals who pose a danger to the rest of us, and we think of those people as overwhelmingly male. Maybe we’re wrong, but you can see we’re pretty resistant to the idea that there’s a /double standard’ that’s unfair to men.”
Well, in polite company, anyway. In impolite company, the term “pussy pass” has been around for decades, suggesting that not everyone is as resistant to the double standard idea as you may think.