Frankly I’d rather shit outdoors than be raped, pillaged, and razed to the ground. Just my crazy preference.
And also, testosterone explains almost everything. Show me where it doesn’t.
Has anyone raised that point in “what would happen in a women-only world?” thread? Right now, I can picture a woman being less likely to, say, pick fights in bars because she can readily overpowered and tossed by any male bouncer. Take that element away, i.e. the current bimodal graph of human strength loses its rightmost peak, and women who are now in the uppermost human range can run wild.
It vaguely puts me in mind of an Arliss episode (not a common occurrence these days) in which a female bodybuilder threatens Sandra Oh (who played the assistant of the title character, an agent for athletes). Oh’s character laughs, saying people twice the size of the bodybuilder walk through the agency every day.
Karla allowed Paul to rape and murder her 15 year old sister. She’s just as bad as he is, if not worse IMO.
I can’t really get on board with that, unless it seemed likely that Karla was going to offer her sister up to any boyfriend, or kill the sister herself.
That said, I would not have objected to Karla getting a life sentence or, if Canada had the death penalty (a whole other issue in itself), it being used on her and Bernardo.
I imagine it’s a self-reinforcing problem. Testosterone leads to more aggressive action, which reinforces stereotypes about men and women, resulting in differences in expectations, which are then reinforced by biological tendencies, ad nauseam. I’ve never understood the hand-waving ‘‘well, that’s just the way it is’’ attitude toward any problem, much less one that results in so much suffering. It honestly puts me in mind of the minister who didn’t understand why I supported LGBT rights since ‘‘you believe in evolution, therefore you must think people who can’t reproduce should die.’’
‘‘I believe in evolution, therefore men and women should be treated differently’’ is just as silly.
Evolution, our biological reality, is not a value statement. It just establishes the constraints of our reality. Part of our biology is our brain, that prefrontal cortex that can decide about the kind of society we live in and make choices respectively. Mankind was meant to evolve; why would that not also include culture? Mankind kills by nature, so we made laws against killing. It’s almost as if we recognized that instinct need not trump the good of society. Yet any talk of equality between genders and we’re back to square one. ‘‘That’s just the way it is.’’ Yawn.
As someone raised by a violent woman, it also bears mentioning that if a woman flies off the handle and punches a guy, it’s less likely to result in a hospital visit than vice-versa. Doesn’t mean she’s not behaving violently. While the rate of women who kill spouses is not exactly equal to men, it’s closer than you might think. Once you involve a weapon, all bets are off.
DV against men is difficult to get a handle on for many reasons - they aren’t coming into shelter, so we don’t know much about them. The shelter I work for takes in both men and women escaping violence, but only 1% of our clients are men. Are they not coming in because of the social stigma? Or because they don’t feel as physically threatened? By and large, men do more physical damage to women than vice-versa, for what should be obvious reasons, so part of it must be lack of exposure to the system. But when it comes to domestic and sexual violence, male victims are by and large a mystery.
It’s frustrating because at least with sexual assault against women, I understand the nature of the problem, the consequences, the social barriers, the possible solutions. With men it’s a big question mark. And we (feminists) are always accused of not caring enough about male victims, but if you knew how hard it was to get any reliable data on male victims, to even know how to approach the issue, you’d see it’s not a matter of indifference but rather silence. We can’t help people who aren’t asking for help, and as a nonprofit development professional I can sure as hell promise we aren’t getting funding to help people who aren’t asking for help.
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Karla allowed Paul to rape and murder her 15 year old sister. She’s just as bad as he is, if not worse IMO.
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Everything I’ve read about this case, on these boards, suggests Karla is a really good example of the ‘‘women are always the victim’’ mentality that plagues a certain subset of gender essentialists. I’ve even seen the, ‘‘well we all do stupid things when we’re young and in love,’’ defense, and I mean holy shit, can’t say in all my youthful indiscretions I’ve ever raped and murdered a bunch of fifteen year olds. Trying to parse which of those two horrific individuals is worse breaks my brain and kind of diminishes humanity.
Figures I already posted once (about child murders in the USA) :
Mother alone 32 %
Father alone 11 %
Both parents 21 %
Mother and another person (not the father) 16 %
Father and another person (not the mother) 1 %
Other family member 5 %
Foster family 6 %
Other acquaintance 6 %
Stranger 2 %
So, the mother is involved in 69% of child murders, the father in only 33%, so that’s not exactly similar rates. And 81% of murdered children are killed by one or both of their parents, so even assuming that all child murders by a non-parent (other relatives, foster family members, acquaintances and strangers) are commited by men, children would still be killed more often by women than by men.
Women seem to be just as likely to commit thefts. I’m not aware of men being more likely to commit animal abuse.
Men commit more violent crimes in total, most of those being against other adult men. Women are more likely to initiate domestic violence, elder abuse and child abuse. So being larger and stronger seems to be an important factor. The difference pretty much disappears with violence amongst people who know each other. You hit your kid, you know you’re not getting beaten to death by him. You hit a stranger, you need to be a big strong chap.
Perhaps we should be talking about how acceptable violence against men is seen as being, insofar as victimisation of men is vastly more common that victimisation of women.
The double X chromosome does have a homogenising effect, which is likely to reduce abberant behaviour.
The idea that men commit crimes because of a privileged position is exactly as correct as the idea that black people and poor people commit crimes because of their privileged positions.
Tesosterone makes people more active, and more likely to do both good and bad things. Low testosterone and high oestrogen can both also cause aggression.
Reading the title, not all ‘bad things’ are ‘violent things’… for instance say women having higher salaries was a bad thing [ men behind the scenes berating each other silently for being weaklings, inner unseen strife… ] [ ‘be classy’ ] [ 'what for? untouchables and with higher salaries many less aesthetically desireable instances within which to stay classy, we’ll do just fine berating each other, sending each other’s jobs offshore… ]
I think there is probably some genetic differences between men and women that cause men to commit more bad things than women, as well as other factors such as social conditioning, etc. The trouble is you’re on thin ice here because any suggestion that men and women do have biological differences is immediately pounced on by the rabid feminists who seek only to promote their agenda by insisting men and women are identical and it is our historic patriarchal society that has oppressed them.
I don’t know, I’m a pretty rabid feminist and I don’t think that’s a fair rendition of what I said.
Men’s and women’s brains are different. Even one-day old babies (where the is no social pressure) show differences in preferences (girls prefer faces, boys objects).
There is a social aspect to how these differences get expressed, but the foundation is genetic.
(The) boys (who) are encouraged to play sports because they are the boys who don’t like sports (or climb trees); most boys need no encouragement. Heck, I’ve been risk-averse all my life and still got to do stupid stuff as a kid. There are trees I’d climbed when I was eight that send shivers down my spine when I see them now, in my late-forties. “How was I so irresponsible? A fall meant death”
Without men’s needless risk-taking we wouldn’t have the needed risk-taking that improved the world. We wouldn’t have started hunting large animals with stone-headed spears at close range and our brains wouldn’t have developed.
In general. Not to the point that you could look at an individual brain and say “this one is female”, or not least not without referencing the chromosomes. There’s a lot of overlap. It’s a statistical diff.
Taken as a whole, the set of characteristics considered “masculine”, associated with men, are not intrinsically deplorable characteristics. Under at least some circumstances they manifest as admirable traits. I do in face admire them although because of how my own brain is wired I’m most inclined to admire them when manifested by female people.
It is testosterone. Testosterone makes you agressive. All mammals are the same. When men get older, they have less testosterone and become less agressive. Most men who are convicted of crimes and go to prison are 45 or younger.
That’s in part because some behaviors which would not be tolerated in a younger man are tolerated in an old one, or at least met with lower consequences.
An old man screaming “they should just stay where they were born!” is a racist old fuck but people say “maybe he has Alzheimer’s”. The same by a guy in his 20s gets the police called.
An old man grabbing the cashier’s ass gets carefully removed from the premises; police will only be called if it is considered necessary to get him home (he appears disoriented, the storekeepers don’t know where he lives); if his family is known to the store, they will be called apologetically ‘please come get your grandfather and keep him out of here’. The same by a guy who doesn’t look like he may break if handled forcefully will, at the very least, get handled very forcefully and police is likely to be called on him (rather than ‘for’ him as with the disoriented-looking gramps).
My only understanding of this question is my own kids. My oldest child is male. Except what he learned in the Marines, he has been the most stable of my children. My middle duaghter was the rebel. She tested me sorely, every rule was a debate. Every discussion ended in tears and slamming doors. She is a lovely educated young Mother now, I couldn’t be happier with her.
My baby was just that, petted, spoiled, and unapologetically entitled.
My Son was always singleminded and sure of himself. The only thing I ever worried about with him was his fearlessness. He had no fear about anything he tried. And was often very successful. He, too, is a very good young father, and is raising 2 beautiful girls.
My baby girl is sort of a player. She is a confirmed flirt who generally gets her way. Not a bit ashamed of herself.
I don’t get why this is even much of an argument. Men are evolutionarily selected based on high testosterone levels that cause aggression and risk taking. It’s not ‘societal.’ We can say that because in every single society on earth women outlive men (if you exclude child-bearing related deaths. Even including child-bearing related deaths, women outlive men everywhere but a few countries in sub-Saharan Africa whose maternal care is rough to say the least.) We also know that the primary reason women outlive men is due to risk-taking behaviors by men. We smoke more, drink more, drive cars more crazily, jump off of more roofs into swimming pools, light more bottle rockets that are stuck in our anuses and any of many, many other foolish risk-taking behaviors which include criminality and violence. This is something we see in ancient societies as well. Naia, the early-American skeleton from 11000 BC found in Mexico has arm stress fractures that we typically associate with abuse and while we can’t guarantee that the abuse happened at the hands of a male, the fact that she and other early female skeletons show very little muscle development in their upper bodies points to a male as the most likely perpetrator.
As others have said, there are very good biological reasons that risk-taking is a good thing. Non-risk takers huddle in their caves until they starve to death, while risk-takers think it would be awesome to stab a mammoth with a stick. Even in modern societies, risk taking is not an inherently bad thing, it’s just that some parts of risk-taking do lead to negative outcomes and technology is allowing us to amplify those negative outcomes. In a pre-modern society, a risk-taker that has gone off the rails might stab a person or two which is a tragedy, but a smaller tragedy. Now, we have technology that allows such a person to shoot 900 people and cause 58 deaths. As technology becomes more powerful and more widely available, we should expect the death toll from these events to continually increase. I can imagine the day when a disgruntled hacker finds a way to cause a million cars to suddenly accelerate simultaneously to high speeds before taking a sharp left turn.
The exception never disproves the rule. I can find people who smoke a pack a day and are still alive at 80. It doesn’t prove that smoking isn’t bad for you.
This is true, but there is more to it than that. Women, as a rule, tend to be more subtle, but can be just as ruthless nevertheless.
A good example is the behavior of children in a group setting such as a classroom. When the boys have a problem with one another, it tends to be open, bellicose and even violent on occasion, but then it is basically over. With the girls, however, it becomes a very subtle and long term conflict involving various social alliances and aggression expressed in the form of social punishment such as ostracism.
Throughout history, men have always been superior in terms of force, so women developed other effective methods involving psychology such as manipulation.
First off “bad things” is a bit too broad. There are the “bad things” that are violent acts, and the “bad things” that are abuse of power.
Not sure that given the same position of power men are any more likely to abuse it than women are. Men may be more likely to abuse it sexually than women are but more than anything else there I’d guess it’s an n issue with just many more men in those positions of relative power.
Acts of violence “bad things” is incontrovertibly more commonly male and certainly recently pointed out in the media lots recently specific to mass shootings.
The two broad groups of explanations for the latter: biology and sociology. Are males, especially young unattached males, predisposed biologically to violence as an evolutionary heritage (or as monstro posited, more neurodevelopmental defects)? Or is violence among males a consequence of societies that promote a gender norm of “toxic masculinity”?
My WAG is that of course it is both but the consistency of male violence throughout history in diverse societies is solid evidence that biology plays a prime role. Cultural factors exacerbate or ameliorate those tendencies. There are cultural reasons for the fact that Japan has so relatively few males committing violent crimes relative to, say, Brazil. Biology is not destiny.
Their happens to be a good article on this published recently in Quillette: The Behavioral Ecology of Male Violence. It confirms with solid data what’s been said in this thread. Males commit far more murders in every human society; on average, about 95% are committed by males. There is some variation but not very much. Similar patterns hold true among chimpanzees. Males that are willing to commit violence on average have more reproductive success.