According to the stats, nearly 90 percent of murderers are men, more men abuse animals, more men kill their spouses, the majority of (and the vast majority of convicted) sex offenders are men, and men also commit more minor crimes like theft, albeit at less extreme ratios.
Are women genetically less prone to criminal acts, perhaps due to suffering less mental illness? Perhaps there’s simply fewer female “bad seeds” because of the more stable XX chromosome.
Do men feel entitled to commit crime because of their position in society?
Does it simply have to do with men being larger, stronger and hornier?
I wonder if it’s possible that a lot of female-perpetrated violence is swept under the rug because people view women as being innocent. After all it’s known that women are treated more lightly by the justice system and abuse perpetrated by women is taken less seriously than abuse perpetrated by men.
I doubt it would explain why 90 percent of murderers are men, but it might explain some of the discrepancy.
I’d also like to add that the vast majority of people doing ‘stupid/reckless things’ like skateboarding off a roof, shooting fireworks at someone, those sort of things you see on YouTube, are guys. I dunno if it’s a society thing or a testosterone thing. But since this sort of thing seems to go across cultures, I’m guessing it’s hormonal. I always tell my nieces and my daughter that if you’re unsure about something and a boy thinks it’s a great idea, then it’s probably a horrible idea. Not sure if that’s good advice but lol I’ve yet to see it proven wrong.
(I’m guessing a lot of “normal” people have a fair share of defects, but they have genes that mitigate their effects. My hunch is that perhaps some of these “mitigating” genes are on the X chromosome. Or maybe they are activated by genes that are on the X chromosome. It could also be that testosterone exacerbates the harmful effects of defective genes.)
I don’t think most bad behavior is due to willfullness or character flaws, but rather to untreated medical or psychiatric issues working in concert with ill-fitting lifestyle and social pressures.
What I remember quite clearly from 1st, 2nd, and 3rd grade was that for girls, being good was considered an active state, holding one’s self up to a standard of social expectations; being bad, for girls, was a weak and passive state, a sad and pathetic failure to monitor one’s own behavior and display the maturity to control it. But for boys, being good was a passive state, a state of being intimidated into not expressing one’s natural bad-boy self and instead, due to fear of authoritarian consequences, being cowed into submission; being bad was active, affirmative, being rebellious and true to one’s bad-boy self.
Gender is a thing. Seriously. It’s not just the plumbing you got between your legs and some hormonal differences. It’s a social institution. It shapes stuff, it colors things.
The usual explanations revolve around evolutionary just so stories or game theory. Sperm are abundant, cheap, and motile. Eggs are rare, expensive, and mostly stationary. Males can impregnate as many females as they can have sex with. Increased sex for women has marginal rewards. This leads to different mating strategies. Males seek risk because it can result in a huge genetic payoff. Women avoid risk because they’re more likely to have a sure bet if they just sit pat. The payoff matrix for a female vs. male Genghis Khan is way different. If you follow that logic out you can get plausible sounding explanations for most sex differentiated behavior.
Anyways OP, you may wish to be careful. You have one foot in radfem territory. One of their slogans is “name the problem.” The problem being male violence.
The behavioral gulf between the sexes can be hard to fathom. One game I like to play is to mentally reverse the sexes of new stories, history, entertainment, gossip, and so on. This leads to some strange places.
Imagine if tens of thousands of women picked up guns and went off to fight another army of women on the other side of the world. Maybe they fight for years and years, dying by the thousands. And then after they were done they occupied a town and raped the men or took them for their husbands. That’s such an alien concept you barely see it in fantasy fiction about matriarchies.
Or imagine if there were huge female street gangs and mob families, complete with woman on woman drive bys or trafficking and prostituting of men. Or take fiction. In the HBO series The Sopranos, there’s a scene where Tony, the mob boss, has a bit of a mid-life crisis. He’s fat and out of shape and things aren’t going so well. He feels his status among his underlings slipping. So he picks a fight with a big tough guy over nothing and beats the shit out of him. His peers are suitably impressed and Tony feels a lot better. How bizarre would this be if they were all women?
I’ve read anecdotes of women who go on testosterone. The most notable effect is a dramatically increased libido and a warping of their sexual psychology, focusing more on body parts and a variety of different partners they barely know instead of constructing narratives around individuals who strike their fancy. I can’t recall any where they go on T and become stereotypically angry or roided out or want to fight over the barest provocation. Maybe they considered that less alluring.
IIRC, female hyenas have higher testosterone levels than the males.
Factual reality is of no matter in things like this. I’ve personally read men accused of sexism and wanting to keep women barefoot, pregnant and making sandwiches merely for pointing out that there are indeed areas of employment where women aren’t as good as men - firefighting for instance, where the greater upper body strength of men is need to carry people down ladders, etc. But no, we’re supposed to pretend for the sake of political correctness that reality doesn’t exist and that what is false is true. (And this from the same sort of people who complain so loudly that their opponents are stupid and immune to facts.)
Of course if the issue at hand casts men in a bad light, then distinctions between the sexes is not only permissible but welcome.
My reading of the OP is that men commit more crimes than women. We’re not talking about physical differences between the sexes, but the propensity to commit crimes.
Certainly. And did you now read my response to octopus, which is that factual reality is of no matter when it comes to the politics of things like this?
I will state for the record though that men are far more likely to engage in the type of behavior described in the OP, and much of it is stupid and detrimental to society…especially when it comes to war.
But men throughout history are also the ones who’ve developed agriculture and farming and aquaducts and plumbing and architecture and the construction of homes and magnificent buildings and factories and products which make our lives more comfortable, pleasant and entertaining, and medicine, which is allowing us to live longer and often in much less pain than before.
On the whole I’d say the world is far better off for having had men in it, despite the bad and/or silly things men on occasion are prone to do.
I think you are confused. I wasn’t denying anything as I’ve already said. It’s just fascinating that some group differences are perfectly fine to discuss and others aren’t.
Well, yeah, depending on what you do with that information, it certainly could be sexist. If you prevent women from applying for firefighting jobs at all, or refuse to hire them even when they apply and meet or exceed the same criteria your male hires meet, then yeah - guess what, that IS sexist.
If, on the other hand, you merely establish a valid set of criteria for each job (ability to lift a certain amount of weight and carry it down a ladder - an objective and easily tested criterion) and apply it to all people, regardless of gender, and you end up with more male than female firefighters then no, that’s not sexist. The key there is making sure that your criteria really are relevant to the job and that you don’t impose artificial barriers to letting women apply.
Men are probably present in greater numbers at the tail-ends of the human behaviour and ability curves.
That’s likely where lots of the aberrant behaviour comes from.
