an autodidact meets a dilettante…

A bout of illness and a general sense of despair about blogging has prevented me from posting here for a while. For my health and well-being I’ll try to get back on track. So here’s a brief post on my hobbyhorse of the moment.

It surprises me that people could try to argue with me about the violence of men compared to women, trying to explain it away in terms of physical size – I mean, really? And then, when this doesn’t fly, they point to individuals of established combativeness, the Iron Lady, Golda Meir, and why not mention Boadicea, or [place name of fave female serial killer here]?
And it really demoralises me when this argumentative cuss is a woman. I mean I love a feisty female but really…
It reminds me of a scenario from my not-so-youth, when I briefly hung out with a perverse young lass who insisted with unassailable feistiness that men were clearly more intelligent than women (by and large, presumably). It certainly made be wonder at how intelligence could be turned against itself. But was it intelligence, or something else?

But let’s get back to reality. Men are more violent than women in every country and every culture on the planet. This is a statistical fact, not a categorical, individual claim. Of course there are violent women and much less violent men. That isn’t the point. The point is that you cannot sheet this home to sexual dimorphism. Two examples will suffice. First, look at death and injury by road accident in the west – in countries where both men and women are permitted to drive. The number of males killed in road accidents is considerably higher than females in every western country. In Australia males are almost two and a half times more likely to die this way than females, and in some countries it’s more, but it’s everywhere at least double. The WHO has a fact sheet On this, updated in November 2016:

From a young age, males are more likely to be involved in road traffic crashes than females. About three-quarters (73%) of all road traffic deaths occur among men. Among young drivers, young males under the age of 25 years are almost 3 times as likely to be killed in a car crash as young females.

The second example is youth gangs, including bikie gangs. These are, obviously, predominantly male, their purpose is usually to ‘display manhood’ in some more or less brutal way, and, again obviously, they can’t be explained away in terms of size difference. Other causes need to be considered and studied, and of course, they have been. Some of these causes are outlined in Konner’s book, but I can’t detail them here because I’ve lent the book out (grrr). An interesting starting point for thinking about the social causes of male violence is found in a short essay by Jesse Prinz here. Prinz largely agrees with Konner on the role of agricultural society in sharpening the male-female division in favour of males, but I think he oversimplifies the differences in his tendency to apply social explanations, and he says nothing about gene expression and hormonal factors, which Konnor goes into in great detail. It seems to me that Prinz’s line of reasoning would not be able to account for the reckless, life-threatening behaviour of young male drivers, for example. While there is clearly something social going on there, I would contend that something biological is also going on. Or something in the biological-social nexus, if you will. Clearly, it’s a very complex matter, and if we can uncover hormonal or neurotransmissional causes, that doesn’t rule out social factors playing a regulatory role in those causes. Social evolution, we’re finding, can change biology much more quickly than previously thought.