Headscratchers / Maury

• On the out-of-control teen girl episodes, the girls are always sent to jail for a day and yelled at by prisoners to straighten up. However, on the abusive boyfriend/husband episodes, the abusive mates only have to go help out at a soup kitchen, homeless shelter or something similar. I have only seen ONE episode where the abusive partners go to jail. So it's okay to send TEENAGE girls to jail for a whole day to be screamed at by scary prisoners, but GROWN men get off easy with simply helping out at a soup kitchen or homeless shelter? Please tell me I'm not the only one who sees what's wrong with this.
  • I think it's absurd as well, but it gets more crazy when they show the women they abuse are "dead" (their wives/girlfriends lie in a casket pretending to be dead to induce a wake up call) due to their abusive ways. The men ALWAYS cry or wishes he had changed his ways and then the woman wakes up and forgives their man for the abuse since they saw the possible bad future. Men who abuse their spouse for years are very unlikely to change overnight, especially with how the show tries to show them the error of their ways. And also, what about the families of the women who are abused? Where are they? Why haven't they called the damn police!?
    • OP here. I completely agree and it's the same with the teen girls. Where in the world is the rest of the girls' families? A father is almost never seen. It's almost always the mother. I refuse to believe that these mothers are completely on their own and, just like with the abusive men, these out of control girls will not change overnight. This is getting off the topic of my original question, but I sometimes wonder about those girls' upbringings. In my opinion, for things to even get to that point, the mothers must have allowed it to go on that long.
    • I've been wondering about where the fathers are on the teens gone wild episodes for years now!
    • Or is the fact of the father being gone is what allows these girls to run wild? Nobody wins here.
    • No, I don't think so. I know an absent father can have an effect on the child, so that may be part of it, but I think it's really the mother's lenience that's to mainly blame.
    • And while we're on that topic, how come Maury never has any Wild Teen Boy shows? Surely there's some boys out there that are having sex, skipping school, and doing God knows what else.
    • I've wondered that a few times myself. It kind of makes it seem like the show is purposely out to simply exploit teenage girls or give the message only teen girls can get out of control. Boys are saints.
    • I think (at the risk of Flame Bait) that it's done as something of an equalizer. The majority of shows are about paternity tests (by default turning men into rude, obnoxious deadbeats,) especially since most of these guys sleep with a woman then call her a slut/ho/etc. I think it's a way of showing that yes, women can be just as bad as men, they just tend to be caught earlier. Especially since, while boys aren't saints, it's not uncommon for the young girls on this show to admit dating men over twice their age, whoring themselves out for money, clothes, and even for drugs, and many of them admit to having sex with any man that'll agree in order to have a baby. Usually, by the time a boy would be that out of control, he's likely done something that would get him arrested.
    • You're probably right that it's done as an equalizer, but two wrongs don't make a right. And I disagree with the last part, women and men are equal.
• If a woman can find 11 possible fathers for their child, doesn't that say more about the woman than the men?
  • I think this is even addressed on the main page of The Unfair Sex. While the men don't exactly help themselves by making a scene, the women are never called out on their promiscuity, which is very unfair.
    • More often than not, the accused impregnator will call the woman seeking paternity a slut/ho/etc. But this is looked down upon by the audience. I think they're less likely to be sympathetic to the men because they usually walk out on the women whose choices are more limited since they are the ones carrying the babies. Sure, they have some choices, but less freedom overall.
• The sheer amount of Failing Sex Ed confuses and scares me. A woman can bring anywhere from 8 to 20 men on the show, each time she's positive he's the father. The time frame for paternity is always about one month or less (basically the time since her last period.) Either this woman has slept with over a dozen men in less than 30 days, or they're really clueless about where babies come from.
  • I eventually figured the woman was just bringing any man she had any contact with, regardless of how long that contact lasted or how long ago it was.
    • And, in some particularly stupid cases, regardless of whether that contact was sexual.
    • It's also been suggested that some of these "ladies" might be bringing on well-off men in hopes of getting a false positive and exploiting them for child support.
• It's probably just a minor thing, but why does Maury not interfere when, on the Abusive Men episodes, the man "demonstrates" his control over the woman? On one episode, for example, the man had his girlfriend/wife rub his feet. I believe another one showed another man make his wife/girlfriend kiss his feet. Why did Maury not intervene?
  • Most likely Rule of Drama. It makes for "good" (if you can call it that) TV, and likely he's only giving them enough rope to hang themselves.
• On the "Is My Man Cheating?" episodes, I've started to notice that if (as he does 90% of the time) the man says something like, "My wife's crazy, I'd never do a thing like that/anything to hurt her", it nearly always means that she's not, he did and he has.
  • Also, WHY does the accused cheater always fall for the sexy decoy in the waiting room? Are they all that hot to trot?
    • Apparently so. Hence why they're called sexy decoys.
    • Alternately, sexy decoys are used more often than we know, but they only show it when the man did something with her.
    • A lot of the times, the men are trying to be clever. They know the sexy decoy is a sexy decoy, so they decide to just go along with the facade to troll. Unfortunately they end up being cheaters anyway and playing into the Sexy Decoy only digs them in deeper.
• The episodes where they show mothers with their critically obese children (usually from ages 2 to 8) always get me head scratching when you have mothers that either act clueless on why their child is so fat or act like their child being so huge is a "beautiful thing" and no one should tell them otherwise. Firstly, how can you not know why your child is gaining weight, even if you claim to have monitored their eating habits (remember, kids do snoop around and steal stuff from the cabinets and we are assuming they don't have some medical condition)? Secondly, how can one think their child weighing as much as a pre teen is beautiful?
  • Many, many parents are like this nowadays. The parents don't want to face that it is their fault their child is unhealthy and own up to their irresponsibility.
  • Parents who grew up starving will sometimes force their children to over-eat, giving them enormous portions of food and expecting them to clean the plate (cleaning the plate being a traditional expectation of children). Those kids get punished when they don't eat everything, or belittled when they serve themselves too little. So if the child's got a bit of "baby fat", they've succeeded... even when the "baby fat" is in fact morbid obesity. Of course, it's not only parents who grew up with little to eat who do that; parents who got plenty to eat during childhood will heap adult-sized servings onto a plate and expect their small children to finish it all.
  • Honestly I find thse ones really, really hard to believe (it's really hard to make toddlers eat more than they want to/can comfortably eat - they're incredibly self-regulating). Sometimes there's ridiculous things like chocolate milk in the baby bottle, but I honestly wonder if some of it isn't actual disorders that people are just rationalizing. Prader-Willis syndrome is a possibility.
• Sometimes on the cheating spouses episodes Maury says "more than X women, more than X times." How does a polygraph determine how many times someone cheated?
  • It has been suggested, possibly somewhere on this very wiki, that the lie detector administrator/s throw out numbers of women that the men have possibly cheated with X number of times in order to determine if they have cheated and if so, with how many partners. As to how they determine how many numbers of partners to guess, you got me. Perhaps they ask the women accusing their boyfriends/husbands of cheating how many other women they think their men are sleeping with?
  • Did you sleep with more than 1 woman? Than 2 women? Then 3 women? Repeat until the detector says he's telling the truth.
    • That's true, although it may sound weird to ask about "more than 2 women" if he has just said no to "more than 1 woman". A possible alternative is that they may start with a large number (more than 10 women), then repeat going downward, and take note of when (and if!) it starts to registers that he's lying.
  • Honestly, lie detectors are a crapshoot. Click the Lie Detector trope, there's a linked Cracked article that's a great read.
  • There was an episode discussing lie detectors on Penn & Teller: Bullshit!. In it, they showed a guy who was getting tested because his fiancee thought that he cheated on her at his bachelor party. The tester reads off some questions, then he unhooks the guy from the equipment and asks him a few "off the record" questions about the bachelor party, and the guy says he may or may not have partied a bit too hard. The tester took that and spun it off into a claim that the test showed he cheated. Seems like if Maury's tester is doing the same thing, it'd be easy for him to find out how many women the guy cheated with.