The stats seem to suggest so, don’t they? Unless women are simply more adept at getting away with things, men just commit more crimes, it’s a fact.
Men murder more, they rape more, they’re more likely to be pedophiles, they bully more, they abuse animals more, they’re the ones that start wars usually. It just seems like the majority of people who do evil things happen to have a penis.
I’m not a feminist and I hate admitting this, but would you say that there are simply fewer “bad” women than “bad” men? I’m not saying all women are angels and incapable of evil because I find a lot of women are quite dislikable, but even most b*tchy and dislikable women tend not to go beyond being vengeful and judgmental. It’s pretty uncommon for women to severely hurt innocent people.
My theory is that women have more empathy and self-control on average, due to their different hormonal levels. I also notice whenever I do see a mugshot of a female criminal, they almost always have an intersexual or masculine appearance to them. It’s almost unheard of for a pretty, feminine looking girl to murder someone or abuse children. This is why cases like Jodi Arias and Karla Holmolka are so famous; they’re pretty much one in a billion.
Or are you seriously suggesting that of the million-odd mothers who abuse their kids every year, all of them were ugly and non-feminine?
Women do commit fewer crimes overall, but the reasons for that are complicated. Women take fewer risks. Women are physically weaker and so much less capable of committing physical crimes (which is worth bearing inmind in light of who commits most crimes against children). Women are better able to coerce men into committing crimes than vice versa. Laws are written in such a way that the same act committed by a woman is non-criminal or less serious or else the laws are applied in that manner. And so forth.
But you need to look at all those things in the context of actual facts. You can’t just look at TV reports and conclude that’s how the world works. There’s a world of difference between “more empathy and self-control” and “less risk taking and fewer potential victims”.
For any generalization that one makes about men and women personality-wise, one can find a few individuals of both genders who defy it. That should not stop us from noting general ways in which men and women think differently.
Men are, on average, more desiring of sex and more prone to using violence to get it. More focused on competition and rising up a social hierarchy. More interested in physical activities. More men than women play organized sports, despite decades of attempts by the government to force it to be otherwise.
One result of these facts is that men commit more crimes, at least major crimes like the OP discusses. Of course morality is more than merely avoiding crimes.
A third of family murders involved a female as the killer. In sibling murders, females were 15% of killers, and in murders of parents, 18%. But in spouse murders, women represented 41% of killers. In murders of their offspring, women predominated, accounting for 55% of killers.
Among black marital partners, wives were just about as likely to kill their husbands as husbands were to kill their wives: 47% of the victims of a spouse were husbands and 53% were wives. Among white victims murdered by their spouse, wives were much less likely to be the killers: 38% of the victims were husbands and 62% were wives.
There is a lot more to this than women being more “just” or “moral”.
And yet despite this, we are told that any income disparity between men and women is because of discrimination against women, not the fact that men on average are more likely to have the traits required for higher incomes.
This is where these discussions always turn to mud. Men are overwhelmingly more likely to be bankrupt, homeless, have mental problems, be in jail and abuse substances, and we are asked to accept that as simply the a result of men being more aggressive, competitive and risk taking. It is not indicative of rampant sex discrimination in our society and should not be corrected by ensuring that more women are placed into those positions.
But women are less likely to be employed as engineers, less likely to be on company boards, less likely to be in the top 10% of earners in their profession. But that can not possibly be the result of men being more aggressive, competitive and risk taking. It must be indicative of rampant sex discrimination in our society. and should be corrected by ensuring that more women are placed into those positions.
I’m having trouble finding the study, but I remember there was some experiment for game theory and it turned out women operating under anonymity were much more likely than men to respond with overwhelmingly disproportionate retribution. Does that sound familiar to anyone? Funny, when I tried searching for it I found MRI studies saying men love watching retribution much more than women do. Men just can’t catch a break.
You could say a lot of what we call civilization has been the domestication of men’s violent inclinations. Religious people in certain cultures tout the social benefits of FGM, but I bet if we went full human eugenics and started neutering boys like we do dogs, bulls, and horses that would collapse the murder, assault, and rape stats. More realistically, I wonder if genetic engineering will have something to say about that in the far future. But that might be like disarming yourself, if other countries don’t do it too.
I basically agree with that. Feminism and political correctness have almost entirely shut down discussions of innate gender differences in many forums, including mainstream media and politics. Undoubtedly there have been many goofy and wrong theories about the hard-wired differences in the male and female psyche. (Sigmund Freud, I’m looking at you.) That still shouldn’t make the topic off-limits.
Call me old fashioned, but a lot of it is that women are less empowered. This means limitations to the heights of their success…and also limitations on the depths of their failure.
If women were equally empowered in our society, they’d be equally represented as drug lords, mass murderers, extortionists, embezzlers, traitors, drunks, and suicides.
But they’d also be equally represented as Senators, Congressmembers, CEOs, Generals and Admirals, and billionaires.
I agree with the consensus - It’s empowerment and risk-taking that makes men seem like the more offensive party. Both men and women have the same biological imperative (to procreate) but have necessarily developed very different strategies in carrying it out. Women have a much more valuable payload to think about. Their aversion to risk is well established.
But seriously, these days only the most extreme feminist crackpots dispute that there are genuine, genetically-based behavioural differences between men and women. the evidence for that enormous.
I think the insinuation is that “real” women don’t murder or abuse children. Only those defective, butch, lesbian-type faux-women do that. Real women are maternal and caring and angelic. Ugly women are physically and mentally defective so they look and behave like men.
Whilst the characiture of the feminist argument is that there are no innate gender differences, the more common argument is that cultural roles have such an overwhelming influence over gender differences in behaviour and achievement that any “innate” effect is lost in the noise.
Pick any difference in outcomes - whether it’s the number of women in CEO positions, or the number of men with mental illness and homelessness, and there are strong cultural explanations. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t biological differences, but it means that anyone claiming such differences needs better evidence than simply pointing to the outcomes.
The claim that women are more moral than men is one of those annoying things that in principle should be scientifically testable, but in practice we have neither the power nor the ethical permission to create the controlled circumstances necessary to test it. We normally resolve such problems by looking for natural experiments - good luck with that when it comes to gender, culture and crime.
I agree with this. Even after millions of years of evolution, we are wired to procreate. Men can accomplish this daily by impregnating as many women as they can. Raping, pillaging, and looting (for more supplies to strengthen the body for more procreation) make sense from a biological perspective.
Women can only procreate once per year and must be pregnant and not in her peak of fitness for that time. She is in a vulnerable position then and must be selective about her mate. She must choose a person who will stay around and care for her and the vulnerable new born.
That’s part of the reason why a man who sleeps around isn’t viewed as disfavorably a woman who does. The man is doing what he is wired to do, whereas a woman is acting against her natural self-interest by not being selective in who may possibly impregnate her. One a year is all she can possibly get. A man can play a raw numbers game. Impregnate 100 women and 5 babies survive. A biological win.
Yes, I realize that this is terribly simplistic, and I do not subscribe to these views as far as modern society (or any decent society) goes. I am merely talking about a base, animal level.
50 years ago, there were basically no female engineers or CEOs. Women who worked worked in a narrow range of fields- teachers, nurses, secretaries, etc. And this was supposed to be human nature.
But along came feminism, telling us that it wasn’t necessarily human nature, but result of systematic discrimination. And so they worked to dismantle some of this discrimination.
And boom, like magic, there were suddenly a number of female engineers and CEOs. And that number has been steadily growing, basically at the pace that discrimination is reversing.
That leaves the “women don’t have it in their nature to lead or do technical jobs” people with two explainations. One is that human nature underwent a massive transformation in the last fifty years, which seems kind of unlikely. The other is that we were wrong about what we thought was human nature 50 years ago (oops), but we’ve got it right now, and 2015 American society is the actual real reflection of human nature.
