Jealousy

[leo9]

To me, the expression 'a crime of passion' is simply used to gloss over murders out if jealousy or obsessive feelings of ownership. To me, the socalled 'passion' is an enraged feeling that someone is getting away from them. It cannot be grief, I do not think you kill out of grief, and it certainly cannot be out of love. The use of that word, love, is, again to me, a gross abuse of what that word means. Putting in connectin with taking someone's life is - gross..

One of the reasons modern lawmakers are unhappy with the concept is that, historically, it has almost exclusively been a man's defence. I don't have statistics for this, but I do have folklore! In the best known ballad of a woman's "crime of passion," Frankie and Johnny, every version that describes Frankie's eventual fate agrees that she is executed - even though, as the version I learnt in school says, the Judge and jury all accept that "He was her man, but he done her wrong."

Those who still defend the legal concept are reduced to arguing that men are inherently less stable than women and liable to temporary insanity in such situations - a claim which the same people would furiously reject if it were advanced by some female-supremacist. (I have a half-written novel, set in a matriarchial world, where the excuse for oppressing men is that their instinctive urge to violence makes them unfit for responsible positions in a civilised society. But I wasn't intending that seriously.)

Historically, the justification for this has been more to do with inheritance than jealousy. The expression "cuckold" for a man whose wife is unfaithful is derived from "cuckoo" because, originally, what was supposed to be enraging him was the possibility of another's eggs in his nest. (Yes, Denuseri, very sociobiological, though it was the inheritance of property and rank rather than of genes that concerned the people who coined the term.) But since the gender bias remains (for every "Fatal Attraction" female jealousy-killer, there are a jailfull of men whose last words to their ex were "If I can't have you, no-one can,") even though most people outside the 1% have little property to leave and little concern who gets it, I suspect that inheritance was always an excuse for urges that ran much older and deeper.

It's possessiveness, not the practical consequences of loss, that makes you destroy something rather than let someone else have it. If someone burns down a house rather than let it be repossessed, the law does not consider the fact that they felt desperately possessive to be a mitigating factor. So perhaps the root of modern changes in the law's attitude is that we no longer feel it reasonable to be insanely possessive about a person.