‘HE SAW WHAT HE WANTED TO SEE’: REPUTATION, JEALOUSY, AND THE LAW. THE UXORICIDE OF GISELDA ZANOLO

Drawing on articles published in the Corriere della Sera, Il Popolo d'Italia and La Stampa, this study examines a case of uxoricide that occurred in 1923, focusing on the way in which the murderer and his lawyers were able to convince both the general public and the jury that the murderer's jealous nature was a mental illness, leading to him avoiding a prison sentence. The victim, the murderer's wife, was depicted as a physically attractive woman of dubious sexual reputation. Such characteristics were deemed to have triggered her husband's jealousy, thus rendering her culpable, the agent of her own homicide. In place of a picture of uxoricide in revenge for tarnished honour, the murderer portrayed himself as the powerless victim of love and jealousy. Through a close analysis of the strategy adopted by the defendant's lawyers, this article shows how centuries-old gendered stereotypes and ideas of respectability affected the law in action and permeated early twentieth-century Italian society.

The ‘Woman in Red’ effect: pipefish males curb pregnancies at the sight of an attractive female

In an old Gene Wilder movie, an attractive woman dressed in red devastated a man's current relationship. We have found a similar ‘Woman in Red’ effect in pipefish, a group of fish where pregnancy occurs in males. We tested for the existence of pregnancy blocks in pregnant male black-striped pipefish ( Syngnathus abaster ). We allowed pregnant males to see females that were larger and even more attractive than their original high-quality mates and monitored the survival and growth of developing offspring. After exposure to these extremely attractive females, males produced smaller offspring in more heterogeneous broods and showed a higher rate of spontaneous offspring abortion. Although we did not observe a full pregnancy block, our results show that males are able to reduce investment in current broods when faced with prospects of a more successful future reproduction with a potentially better mate. This ‘Woman in Red’ life-history trade-off between present and future reproduction has similarities to the Bruce effect, and our study represents, to our knowledge, the first documentation of such a phenomenon outside mammals.

Attraction at first fright? What Datton & Aron really demonstrated almost 40 years ago

Almost four decades have passed since Dutton and Aron (1974) published their classic article in JPSP in which they present the results of three studies. According to interpretations of the results done by the authors, the suffi cient condition of obtaining the effect of increased sexual attraction toward the object (an attractive woman) - which must be present shortly after or while waiting to become an aversive stimulus - is the induction in the subjects of a strong autonomic arousal. This can be done via crossing a high suspended bridge or anticipating the receipt of strong electric shocks. However, the results of reanalysis do not allow such a conclusion. In the article the author presents the results of secondary analysis and lists methodological, theoretical and interpretative incoherences.

Now It's the Nurse Who Needs Emergency Care

She is an attractive woman around 30 with two sons, the same husband she started out with, their mortgage (not the same one they started out with), and a license to practice nursing in Massachusetts.And her story, anonymous but otherwise undisguised, will tell you more about the nursing shortage, the women's movement, the Medicaid crisis, the conservative revival and social change in America than any compilation of research, analysis, punditry and feminist literature. She is angry and the only reason she is going to take it any more is that she has not discovered a decent alternative.She works odd, inflexible hours, some nights and Sundays, in the emergency room of a community hospital outside Boston. It is the kind of place to which your kindly old family doctor, interrupting a weekend frolic with the new cookie, refers his less affluent patients.

Effects of Victim's Physical Attractiveness on Juridic Judgments

For written descriptions of cases, ratings of guilt of the defendant, recommended term of imprisonment, and seriousness of crime by 108 male and 72 female undergraduates do not support the hypothesis that the defendant who victimizes an attractive woman (photograph) is judged more harshly than one who victimizes an unattractive woman.