I cannot recall any instance of any fight in a school involving weapons… unless you count hitting someone with class materials, which did happen once or twice. The people involved were of both sexes, but they trended short (the ones most likely to hit were also the ones least likely to give a shit about gender yet).
And if you’re including fights that make the newspapers there have been some where girls used weapons. The ones I’ve seen in the news tended to involve knives rather than guns but that’s due to location.
That’s great, but differences among men, and among women, also frequently correlate with exposure to androgens during prenatal development, so this actually strengthens the case that things like aggression have a (partly) hormonal basis.
Anyway, for a normally distributed variable small differences in means are magnified at the extremes, so it’s perfectly possible for the average man to be only a bit more aggressive than the average woman, but at the same time for men to be massively overrepresented among the population of extremely aggressive people. There are reasons that murder is mostly a male endeavor.
IIRC (though I don’t remember where the citation was from), domestic violence is actually more common in lesbian relationships than in opposite sex or gay relationships, so it’s not that female violence is utterly unknown. My guess (no evidence though) would be that lesbian domestic violence is less likely to be seriously damaging / lethal than male on female violence however (that study ony looked at incidence not severity).
Its difficult to answer the question, to be honest. Women and men are not identical biologically, and they are also not programmed with the same values and behavioral norms. In a world populated with only women, would values and behavioral norms associated with women remain exactly as they are now? Or would they shift so that a large percentage of women would fill the vacuum of traits and roles currently associated with men?
I don’t think it’s inevitable that a female society would have as many wars as a male one. In my view, changing the demographic makeup of society so drastically means, in some sense, we might as well be talking about an imaginary race on an imaginary planet. To answer “yes” requires believing that war is some inherent, unassailable property of a functional civilization. But I don’t accept that assumption. The propensity for violence–whether on an individual level or a community level–depends on a lot of factors. Eliminating the Y chromosome from humanity–and the testosterone that comes with it–would be a factor too big to dismiss out of hand.
Well, for starters, I expect there might be less pink-coding. And none of that “girls don’t use tools!” unless you want houses to start falling down on your ears.
Basques used to be accused of being a matriarchate by our more patriarchal neighbors. Basque women could inherit, enter contracts, be major of a town*, trade real estate and other things which Castillian and/or French law banned. This was from our point of view mainly a matter of practicality: when a lot of the men spend weeks or months away from home, you simply can’t have the local economy grind to a stop every time the fleet leaves for the cod banks. The other areas in Spain where women had relatively more rights were areas whose men also traveled a lot: the merchant coasts of the East.
And I’ve wrapped up a lot of discussions on genderized professions with two words: hermano enfermero. Nowadays many people think of nursing as a female profession, but in a male monastery, there is a position called Brother Nurse. Which were the exceptions to those Castillian laws about trades of real estate? Abbesses and titled ladies. The titled lady might have an equally-titled husband, but attempts at making abbesses have to depend on a man to manage the monastery’s lands didn’t go well.
Not between the early 19th century and the 2nd Republic, or under Franco. It’s one of the aspects in which the Enlightment wasn’t particularly enlightened, removing representational rights from women.
You’re rather less cynical than me, then ;). I think struggle for resources and the creation of out groups is fundamental. Perhaps even necessary for the creation of civilization. Again, I think resorting violence is a less likely outcome on average over competition of this sort in an all female society. But I don’t think never resorting to violence is likely either.
Just to clarify, I assume you are speaking metaphorically here. Because literally, it is inaccurate. You’re producing testosterone in your ovaries and adrenal glands this very instant - you just maintain much lower ambient levels than men. But among other things it helps in the production of new blood cells in your body. Similarly my male body is producing estrogen. Low testosterone in women and low estrogen in men both have adverse health effects( BOTH can cause loss of libido, interestingly enough - one needs all of their proper sex hormones ).
Some primates are male dominated, not all by any means. Read, for example, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy and her survey of sexual dynamics among different primate species.
For those interested in exploring the idea of what happens to society when all the men (except 1) suddenly die, I recommendY the last man. Then ending sucks but its an interesting read. Long story short according to this author the answer is yes, women can be just as ambitious aggressive as men.
Well sure women can be just as ambitious and aggressive as men. But the question of this thread is whether they’d get in a fight with Russia or just start spreading rumours that Russia is a total slut and has strange hygiene habits?
To paraphrase Rick James, testosterone is a hell of a drug.
People who change from hormone levels typical for one sex to hormone levels typical for the other sex very frequently experience personality changes. Some of that could be the placebo effect–you expect to feel more masculine or more feminine, and so you experience feeling more masculine or feminine.
I wouldn’t say “never” either. That said, the “struggle for resources” doesn’t necessitate war (diplomacy has always been a thing), and resources that have spawned wars historically have not always been essential to community survival. Take the land wars resulting from European imperialism, for example. Expansion into the Americas was driven by monarchical greed and the pursuit of power. In a world where these interests are not valued or promoted, wars of this type very well might not occur. I doubt that a an all-women society would not value greed and power at all, but it’s seems a big assumption to assert that it would to the same degree that patriarchal societies have and currently do.
My comment was not inaccurate, literally or figuratively. My point is that men have much more testosterone than women, courtesy of their y-chromosomes. Yes, women also produce the hormone to a lesser extent. What I said doesn’t negate that.
Crack away, but I don’t know of any stats that show estrogen and progesterone fluxes track with violence and aggression anywhere to the extent that testosterone does, do you?
Would you be amenable to stuff that links – oh, I dunno; let’s maybe call it a whole pre-menstrual syndrome, I guess? – to irritability and mood swings?