Posts Tagged ‘sport’
A bonobo world, etc, 18: gender and aggression in life and sport
bonobos play-fighting
human apes play-fighting?
If anyone, like me, says or thinks that they’d like to be a bonobo, it’s to be presumed they don’t mean they’d like to live in trees, be covered in hair, have a shortened life-span, a brain reduced to a third of its current size, and to never concern themselves with why the sky is blue, how the Earth spins, and whether the universe is finite or infinite. What we’re really interested in is how they deal with particular matters that have bedevilled human societies in their infinite variety – namely sex, violence, effective community and the role of women, vis-a-vis these matters.
While making a broad generalisation about human society, in all its billions, might leave me open to ridicule, we seem to have followed the chimpanzee and gorilla path of male domination, infighting as regards pecking order, and group v group aggression, rising to warfare and nuclear carnage as human apes became more populous and technologically sophisticated. One interesting question is this: had we followed the bonobo path of female group bonding and controlling the larger males by means of those bonds, and of group raising of children causing reduced jealousies and infanticides, would we have reached the heights of civilisation, if that’s the word, and world domination that we have reached today?
I realise this is an impossible question to answer, and yet… Human apes, especially in post-religious societies, are recognising the power and abilities of their women more and more. Social evolution has speeded up this process, bringing about changes in single lifetimes. In 1793 Olympe de Gouges, playwright, abolitionist, political activist and author of the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, was guillotined by Robespierre’s disastrous Montagnard faction, as much for being a moderate as for being a woman. Clearly a progressivist, de Gouges opposed the execution of Louis XVI, and capital punishment generally, and favoured a constitutional monarchy, a system which still operates more or less effectively in a number of European nations (it seems better than the US system, though I’m no monarchist). Today, capital punishment generally thrives only in the most brutally governed nations, such as China, Iran and Saudi Arabia, though there are unfortunate outliers such as Japan, Singapore and arguably the USA (none of those last three countries have ever had female leaders – just saying). One hundred years after de Gouges died for promoting female equality and moderation, women were still being denied a university education in every country in the world. However in the last hundred years, and especially in the last fifty, we’ve seen dramatic changes, both in the educational and scientific fields, and in political leadership. The labours of to the Harvard computers, Williamina Fleming, Annie Jump Cannon, Antonia Maury and many others, working for a fraction of male pay, opened up the field of photometric astronomy and proved beyond doubt that women were a valuable and largely untapped intellectual resource. Marie Curie became the most famous female scientist of her day, and inspired women around the world to enter the scientific fray. Today, women such as Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, of CRISPR-Cas9 fame, and Michelle Simmons, Australia’s quantum computing wizard, are becoming more and more commonplace in their uncommon intellect and skills. And in the political arena, we’ve had female leaders in Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Germany, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Denmark, Belgium, France, Portugal, Austria, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Serbia, Croatia, Russia (okay, in the eighteenth century), China (nineteenth century), South Korea, Myanmar, Pakistan, India, Indonesia, the Phillippines, Sri Lanka (the world’s first female PM), Israel, Ethiopia and Liberia, and I may have missed some. This may seem an incredible transformation, but many of these women were brief or stop-gap leaders, and were all massively outnumbered by their male counterparts and generally had to deal with male advisers and business and military heavyweights.
So it’s a matter of rapid change but never rapid enough for our abysmally short life spans. But then, taking a leaf from the bonobo tree, we should look at the power of female co-operation, not just individual achievement. Think of the suffragist movement of the early 1900s (the term suffragette was coined by a Daily Mail male to belittle the movement’s filletes), which, like the Coalition of Women for Peace (in Israel/Palestine) a century later, was a grassroots movement. They couldn’t be otherwise, as women were then, and to a large extent still are, shut out of the political process. They’re forced into other channels to effect change, which helps explain why approximately 70% of NGO positions are held by women, though the top positions are still dominated by men.
When I think of teams, and women, and success, two more or less completely unrelated fields come to mind – science and sport. In both fields cooperation and collaboration are essential to success, and more or less friendly competition against others in the field is essential to improve quality. Womens’ team sport is as competitive as that of men but without quite the same bullish, or chimp, aggressiveness, it seems to me, and the research backs this up. Sport, clearly, is a constructed form of play, in which the stakes are sometimes very high in terms of trophies, reputations and bragging rights, but in which the aggression is generally brought to an end by the final whistle. However, those high stakes sometimes result in foul play and overly aggressive attempts to win at all costs – and the same thing can happen in science. Sporting aggression, though, is easier to assess because it’s more physical, and more publicly displayed (and more likely to be caught on camera). To take my favourite sport, soccer, the whole object for each team is to fight to get and maintain possession of the ball for the purpose of scoring goals. This battle mostly involves finesse and teamwork, but when the ball is in open play it often involves a lot of positional jostling and other forms of physicality. Personally, I’ve witnessed many an altercation in the male game, when one player gets pissed off with another’s shirt-tugging and bumping, and confronts him chest-to-chest, nature documentary-style. The female players, when faced with this and other foul play, invariably turn to the referee with a word or a gesture. Why might this be?
In 1914, the American psychologist E L Thorndike wrote:
The most striking differences in instinctive equipment consists in the strength of the fighting instinct in the male and of the nursing instinct in the female…. The out-and-out physical fighting for the sake of combat is pre-eminently a male instinct, and the resentment at mastery, the zeal to surpass, and the general joy at activity in mental as well as physical matters seem to be closely correlated with it.
three things: IQ and longevity, the Taliban and Americans, the real World Cup
Nerissa: …. superfluity comes sooner by white hairs, but competency lives longer
The Merchant of Venice, Act 1 , scene 2
Thing one
I don’t know what my IQ is, having never knowingly sat a test, but I assume it’s a number just short of infinity. So it was interesting to read, in Carl Zimmer’s book on genetics, She has her mother’s laugh, that IQ is highly correlated to longevity. Not that there’s a genetic link, at least not directly, but it stands to reason. The higher your IQ, the quicker it takes for you to ‘get’ things. This was more or less confirmed by a simple, ingenious brain processing test. Subjects were shown simple shapes flashing very briefly on a computer screen – two vertical lines spaced apart with a horizontal line sitting on top. The participants had to guess which of the two vertical lines was the longest each time. Researchers had worked out that if the images were flashed too briefly, the participants just resorted to guesswork. It required approximately 0.1 seconds for people, on average, to perceive the shape correctly. The key, though, lay in the variation of that perception. It ranged from 0.02 seconds to 0.136 seconds, and researchers found a pretty reliable correlation between accurate perception time and intelligence (presumably measured by IQ – Zimmer doesn’t say). Unfortunately it’s not quite reliable enough, apparently, for us to do away with those pesky, long-winded IQ tests and replace them snappy shape tests, but as mentioned, it does seem to confirm the intuition that intelligence has to do with sharpness and quick-wittedness. Which brings me back to longevity. Some work done in Scotland, which has turned out to be accidentally longitudinal, provides interesting evidence. In 1932 the Scottish government conducted a massive testing program of nearly 90,000 eleven-year-old students – just about the whole of the country’s kids of that age. They were all given a 71-question exam involving decoding, analogising and arithmetic among other things. Over time this ‘experiment’, or what you will, was forgotten, but the records were unearthed in 1997, and then researchers tried to get in touch, some 65 years later, with the ‘kids’ who’d been tested. They managed to gather together 101 elderly citizens in an Aberdeen hall to resit the gruelling test. They found that the score on the original test was a pretty good indicator – 73% – of the score second time around. But there was another interesting finding – the percentage of the test-takers who had scored well and were still alive in 1997 was considerably higher than those who’d scored poorly. Some 70% of the women in the top quarter of scores were still alive, compared to 45% in the bottom quarter:
Children who scored higher, in other words, tended to live longer. Each extra 15 IQ points, researchers have since found, translates into a 24% drop in the risk of death.
Carl Zimmer, She has her mother’s laugh, p296
Why is this so? Smarter people generally know what to do, and are quicker to learn what to do, to live longer, to make more, financially and otherwise, of the circumstances they find themselves in, to be safer, healthier and the like. Stands to reason.
Thing two
A huge fuss is being made of allegations, probably true, of Putin offering and paying bounties to the Taliban to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan. My first reaction to this news was – surely the fervently anti-American and anti-western Taliban were already hell-bent on killing infidel foreigners, and many of the purest ideologues among them would be insulted by the offer of bribes to do so? Then again, many of them would’ve been laughing up their ample sleeves at the thought of being paid by the Russkies, whom they likely consider only slightly less odious and infidelious than the Yanks, to do what they were already heaven-bent on doing. For this reason, it would surely be impossible to prove that any deaths of Americans, or their coalition partners – including Australians – at the hands of the Taliban, could be sheeted home to Putin and his fellow thugs. Even if money traced to Russia appeared in Taliban bank accounts after some atrocity or other, this doesn’t exclude the possibility that the atrocity would’ve occurred in any case. Win-win for the Taliban.
Thing 3
The announcement that the real World Cup will take place in Australia and New Zealand in 2023 makes life a little more bearable, though it’s three years away and I’m not getting any younger. This competition combines two of the most life-affirming enities in life, for me at least – women and soccer. Hopefully we’ll have learned many lessons from Covid-19 by then haha, and at least some of today’s thuggish political leaders will have been placed where they can do no more harm, and we can get on with the more exciting stuff of life, like having fun.
the male violence thing: why deny it?
I’ve written a few pieces on women, power and such things, from a position of frustration that there haven’t been enough women in power, and that women, and men, have suffered too much from male abuses of power – and that of course includes violence. At the beginning of last year I attended a vigil of sorts on the steps of our state parliament, which involved a solemn roll call of all the women who died violently in Australia (not including those who died in vehicle accidents, of which more later), and the sad circumstances of their passing. I noted that not all the women were victims of male violence – only 90-95% from memory – but clearly male violence was the principal problem. I was also aware, from research, that most victims of male violence are other males.
Around 95% of all victims of violence, whether women or men, experience that violence from a male perpetrator.
White Ribbon Australia, citing the Australian Bureau of Statistics
So I was a bit disconcerted when, some time ago, I brought up the obvious issue of male violence, in the context of sport (as opposed to the relative lack of violence, on and off the field, or court etc, in female sports) and I received pushback, as the Yanks say, from someone who more less completely denied that there was any imbalance. In fact he appeared to argue that women were just as violent as men, in every way.
So, to be clear, this is a question of fact, not of opinion, and in order to be factual we need to define violence precisely. I’m defining it as an act which results in death or physical injury, to the self and/or others. This isn’t to deny that psychological or emotional violence exists, of course it does, but it’s virtually impossible to measure. Any conversation between two people could be seen as profoundly coercive by one, totally benign by the other, or anything between these extremes by observers. It’s very subjective. Nor am I denying that psychological violence can be totally life-destroying. It just isn’t measurable in any clear way, unlike physical violence. And it was physical violence that our conversation was about.
Reliable statistical data on this topic is available everywhere on the internet. It tells us a sad, but fairly obvious truth. Men are more violent than women in every country and in every culture on the planet, without exception. And men have been more violent than women in every age of which we have record, since the appearance of Homo sapiens some 300,000 years ago.
Looking at the matter historically, there’s a certain amount of controversy, due to the patchy evidence as to whether hunter-gatherers were more ‘prone to violence’ than humans in a more ‘civilised’ state. Certainly it’s true that after the establishment of expansionist states, war was more often than not a central component of politics, and war was carried out by men, generally young men from their late teens into their late twenties. This state of affairs was the norm for centuries, and one could reasonably argue that warfare as policy was only abandoned when weaponry became so devastating that it was too costly for each state to engage in it, though I think Enlightenment values, a more scientific understanding of universal human nature and the subsequent development of trans-national treaties and organisations have all played a role.
But even in hunter-gathering societies the pattern of male violence was set. The hunters were of course more or less exclusively male, and, with rewards going to the best hunters, fierce competition was bound to arise within hunter-gathering tribes. It’s quite likely that the most successful competitors would have high status, even chieftain status, within the group. And with the division into groups, or tribes, with their more or less self-appointed hunting territories, rivalry and competition between groups would have arisen, the precursors of later, more destructive forms of aggression. We see exactly this pattern, of course, in our closest living relatives, chimps – battles between males of different groups over territory and resources, and battles between males within groups over hierarchy and access to females.
It might be argued that the modern world is quite different. But there’s a pattern in modern society that needs to be accounted for, though it’s not exactly a modern pattern, even if it’s given a modern spin. Men – and boys -tend to join gangs. Of course, not all young men do this, but a substantial proportion do. Women tend not to do so, or not nearly to the same extent. I’m talking about street gangs, crime gangs, ethnic gangs, ‘football hooligan’ gangs, bikie gangs, neo-nazi gangs, white supremacist gangs etc. I even joined one myself as a teenager, and we roamed the streets looking for trouble but rarely managing to find it.
What drives this behaviour amongst this section of the male population (from the mid-teens to the mid-twenties, roughly speaking)? Hormones appear to play a primary role, and it’s no coincidence that exactly the same aggressive, show-offy group behaviour is to be found in the young males of other complex, highly social mammals, including chimps, dolphins and elephants. I have mixed feelings for those who scoff at all comparisons between homo sapiens and other mammals, because of course science has taught us about our profoundly mammalian nature, while our development of scientific explanations and understandings is precisely what marks us off from other mammals, and provides us with the potential to transcend our mammalian nature. Biology doesn’t have to be destiny.
The preponderance of male violence in our society is a problem for which we need to find solutions. But first we need to admit that there’s a problem. Let me give one compelling statistic as proof. The major cause of violent death and injury in peaceful countries – those not engaged in internal or external warfare – are males between the ages of approximately 17 and 25 behind the wheel of a motor vehicle. On a per capita basis, males cause 1.5 to 2 times more vehicle accidents than females, regardless of country, and it’s entirely that 17-25 age group that causes the disparity. It’s of course no coincidence that this is the same age that young males join gangs or the military. It’s the hormonal age.
In presenting this brief account of male risk-taking, aggression and violence, I’m not pretending that females are passive victims of all this. Of course the picture is enormously complex (in humans and in other mammals). In the cyber-age, female teenage bullying has become a serious problem – and of course it was a problem in the schoolyard before that. People in general can be brutal and malicious to their neighbours in times of stress, but we’ve emerged from, or are trying to emerge from, a highly patriarchal culture in which being a physically tough male is still a source of respect – in my own schoolyard, everyone knew who the toughest kid was, the ‘best fighter’, not the ‘brainiest’.
So, to return to my conversation, which was about sport and violence, and the claim that men are no more violent on and around sporting arenas than women. It amazes me that, given all the evidence about male violence, someone would think that sporting arenas would be an exception to the well-attested facts about male violence, in comparison to that of women. The sport I follow most by far is soccer, and I’ve particularly enjoyed the rise in women’s soccer in the last few years. It’s of course fiercely competitive, full of rough and tumble, with plenty of pushing and shoving at corners and free kicks, but having watched a lot of female matches over the years, I’ve rarely seen an example of the face-to-face, ‘I’m tougher than you’ behaviour shown at the top of this post, which is very common in the male game. The image prompts more or less amusing comparisons with wildlife programs, with rival males competing to be the pack leader. Men are too often like that, but of course not all men, and with the broad societal changes that have occurred in recent decades and centuries, there’s no need for men to think and act like this today – though the profound inequality that persists still sanctions and rewards this behaviour in poorly resourced, embattled parts of the world.
Where I see most progress and feel most hopeful is, again, the enterprise of science. In reading, for example, Venki Ramakrishnan’s book The gene machine and Meredith Wadman’s The vaccine race, I find the mix of competition and collaboration in fields of research to be favourable to both genders (or should I say all genders these days), and its success will hopefully flow on to politics, sports and other aspects of life.