Gender and violence

I was thinking about the nature of gender and violence. Are males naturally more inclined to fight, and females more inclined to flight? Does gender affect your psychological preparation to kill another person, and your reaction to death? Is stereotypical female pacificism a matter of cultural gender roles, or are more violent females the product of male conditioning?

What are your experiences, boys and girls?

(Please try to keep an open mind with this, as I understand many gender topics can be heated.)

edited 30th Oct '10 11:01:30 AM by Shichibukai

Gender differences with regard to violence are part nature and part nurture, as trite as that argument sounds. Our current predispositions are the result of both evolution and extensive social engineering. Social influence on gender (a more accurate term would be sex) has become so pervasive that we often cannot tell the difference between cultural/interpersonal reinforcement and pre-determined biological constructions.

Men, on average, have greater physical strength than women, and women have a higher percentage of body fat, but most of the major differences end there. We perceive women to be weaker because we have spent thousands of years teaching them that they are weaker. This assumption has been taken to such an extreme that the whole notion of a woman being able to physically overpower a man strikes many people as quite quixotic.

Violence is a fundamental side-effect of the human condition insofar as we desire to preserve ourselves at nearly any cost. Look at some of the topics regarding the use of military power, sexual assault, and revenge culture, and you'll see how prevalent this is to all of us. Women have the capacity to be just as violent as men, but again, they aren't as violent only because patriarchal societies have programmed them not to act as such. In short, our species capitalized on basic physiological dissimilarities between males and females, and our cultural architecture reflects this trend closely.

I have to work with this issue directly and very frequently when I'm training students. Many of my female colleagues especially walk into martial arts with the belief that they have to find alternative strategies to beating male assailants, and I have to dispel that myth immediately because the fact of the matter is that all people have to find alternative strategies when studying hand-to-hand combat. That's essentially the point of fighting.

To clarify, some people erroneously exaggerate anatomical differences between males and females with regard to strikes to key areas. Aside from the breasts and testicles, it's more or less all the same in terms of target acquisition. I guarantee anyone on this forum that I can drop a woman on the ground with a swift kick between the legs just as easily as I can do it with a man, and I can do it with very little strength.

A woman half my size can do just as much damage as me - if not more - with the proper training and a desire to defeat their opponent. Proper fighting does not solely come from strength, but more importantly from leverage, threat analysis, and a stable economy of motion. This is the reason why I refuse to advertise myself as an instructor in "women's" self-defense because to call it such is to imply that women require a relegated set of skills in order to accomplish the same confrontational tasks as their male counterparts. That misconception is the result of internalized sexism and a lack of understanding about physics, biomechanics, anatomy, psychology, and the legal system. Again, look at the treatment of Rihanna and Chris Brown compared to the treatment of Tiger Woods and Elin Nordegren. Both are domestic violence situations that were publicly handled in totally different ways.

How many times have I used the "different"? Jeez...

To get back to the broader subject, misconceptions about gender and violence come from two key components. First, male violence and violence-related mortality among males is more acceptable because we view them as an expendable resource. The United States' unwillingness to allow women to participate in ground combat missions should be a big indicator here. Secondly, we regard females as more fragile than men, and because they are the component of our species that carries our offspring, the female body has a certain sanctity to it that should not be violated.

There are some clear exceptions to what I'm saying here, but we've somehow tricked ourselves into believing that males and females have significant elemental qualities that determine their response and proclivity toward physical destruction of others or themselves. There are numerous subjects that elucidate an artificial ambiguity toward gender-based violence.

Examples that act as a sedgeway into the OP's topic include the following:

- females' portrayal in art and literature. Look at the number of paintings and poems in which women are killed, maimed, and raped as well as ones where men destroy themselves over a woman. Homer's Iliad is pretty much built around the duality of this concept.

- the widespread one-dimensional role of female characters in action movies even in the midst of movies and television shows like Salt, Alias, The Bourne series, UFC tournaments, etc. We're very picky about how we want to see women beaten up.

- the public image of female athletes, especially in contact sports

- the perception of men engaged in war and our willingness to accept male casualties as a "natural" part of war

- the ostracization of men who do not embody traditional masculine traits, an affinity for violence among those traits

This isn't a groundbreaking argument, and we have many tropes on the website that tackle this subject in detail. Look them up if you haven't already. Tropes such as Beauty is Never Tarnished and the one about violence being okay when it's female-on-male are among the best ones to read.

edited 30th Oct '10 12:27:52 PM by Aprilla

Does gender affect your psychological preparation to kill another person, and your reaction to death?

In academic use, "gender" is by definition socially constructed. Since there's no documented culture where men are less predisposed to violence than women, the reverse being an apparent universal, I'd say it's sex (biology) that has this effect.

I tried shaking my magic eightball of SCIENCE, and all i got was "evidence is inconclusive." Seriously though, from the people I have met there are far greater variations between personalities, rather then gender. Just my experience.

And people (society, parents) treat genders differently from a very early age, (colour, toys, activities, acceptebal behaviour.

Killing and death, Yikes. Well, crime statistics seem to indicate men are more violent. There are a greater number of male socioopaths (i.e. not feeling guilt, empaty), but ALL normal people are by definition averse to killing. Soldiers are the exeption, but they too have to conditioned themself to it.

My take on it is there is a difference, but what is nature and what is nurture is... well tricky.

http://www.cracked.com/article_18760_6-things-everyone-knows-about-women-that-arent-true.html

Refer to #6 and #1.

Women are far more violent then the media likes to portray.

I can't find the exact study (it was in one of my sociolinguistics textbooks), but a team of biologists, sociologists, and other professionals determined that there is a factually positive correlation between violent civilizations and sexually repressive civilizations. The essay went into great detail explicating links between an increase in violent crimes and an increase sex-based criminal offenses, as well. The study was not scientifically conclusive (remember that statistics don't tell the full story behind a data set), but it was quite substantial in opening the door to other issues in gender roles such as the one we're currently discussing.

Even if predisposition towards violence is predominantly in favor of males, I'm resigned to the stance that socialization surmounts this predisposition with relative ease, or at least socialization has the potential to do so. I don't think it would be infeasible to construct a matriarchal civilization that emphasizes militaristic jingoism, but we haven't see very many civilizations like this simply because of what I said before.

When our species initially socialized and developed the faculties for deductive and inductive reasoning, it probably didn't take us long to realize that we can form communities based on the physical and intellectual aptitude of each member of the community, hence the advent of hunter-gatherer tribes. In a sense, we are still operating on a heavily modified and modernized version of the hunter-gatherer mentality, but several anthropologists have suggested that hunter-gatherer societies were not respectively male-female by default.

It just so happened that males' physical strength lent itself well to stalking and capturing prey while females' ability to give birth to children made them a commodity - as objectified as that sounds - for the survival and propagation of the community. It wouldn't be a stretch to say that early male humans took it upon themselves to distance females from a life of violence primarily because of the importance of begetting children. As mentioned before, we can still find vestigial remnants of these habits in modern civilization, although these habits are far from universal across humanity as a whole. But that delves into evolutionary psychology, which, as a previous poster noted, is a bit tricky.

edited 30th Oct '10 1:05:24 PM by Aprilla

Commando Dude, what are Dave Easton's qualifications on psychology? How are we to know he isn't citing sources selectively?

Part 6 is only about simulated killing, where even in-game the killing is done remotely with bombs, not with knives or guns. It is clearly a matter primarily of competitiveness, and the willingness to do an in-game method of impersonal killing does not suggest a violent nature.

That males are not necessarily the main perpetrators of domestic violence is plausible, but again, domestic violence is not necessarily for the sake of violence, and is often a means to another end, whether that end is controlling her boyfriend, (whenever sex appeal is not sufficient) or finding out just how emotionally attached he is to her, etc... and that females do more of it could be because they are more likely than males to expect to get away with it, rather than a further inclination to resort to it.

I think the real issue here is whether we are talking about violence for the sake of violence, or violence as a means to another end. Obviously males are more inclined than females to the former, since they have more testosterone. However, the latter, while I would not quite call it equal, is something that I think is a lot more ambiguous. People like Margaret Thatcher ordering the bombing of the Falkland Islands or the sinking of retreating ships, for example, blow the women-running-world-would-mean-no-wars argument out of the water.

However, this does not mean we ought to ignore the role of hormones like testosterone in violence either.

Moving The Goal Posts much? He cited sources, some very long and well documented ones.

On what grounds do you have to say that he's biased, that's a well cited article.

edited 30th Oct '10 1:39:37 PM by CommandoDude

I already mentioned why his reasons might not apply to women being less violent than men, and the differences between violence for the sake of violence and violence as a means to another end. You are Completely Missing The Point, Commando Dude.

Irrelevant.

Violence is still violence, it doesn't matter for what reason it's perpetrated.

@Neo: I'm glad you brought that up. I don't entirely agree, but these are good points.

Saying that men have more testosterone is a bit of a misnomer. Biologically speaking, it's more accurate to say that men have higher levels of testosterone. This is a common misunderstanding about the endocrine system that people make pretty often, myself included (in case you thought I was just being condescending). The pituitary gland regulates chemicals that are already secreted into your bloodstream. One of my supervisors in the university's biology department explained that our endocrine, lymphatic, and circulatory systems are basically a self-contained filtration facility. Kind of off-topic (from me, not necessarily you), but I see what you're saying about the importance of hormones in gender studies.

While the Cracked.com article may not be the most scientifically verifiable piece of literature on its own, it does bring up a good point. I'm inclined to argue that the simulated nature of the test only raises another issue about the relationship between violence and technology. We've heard this before with the infamous "video games make kids kill" argument, but I wouldn't dismiss an evident relationship on male-female responses to simulated violence as a reflection of real-life implications of potentially aggressive behavior.

You're right in mentioning that the motivations behind violence provide a more succinct analysis of how aggression really works between males and females. Very rarely do people commit violence for the sake of violence, and there are cultural influences and gender-based motivations behind violence. I am somewhat of a feminist, and I subscribe to the belief that rape, for example, has much less to do with the acquisition of sex and much more to do with the acquisition of power. Women who have raped men have admitted to doing so out of revenge or domination, and several male serial killers target women as a result of having abusive mothers in their childhood.

As a little side note, current data on heterosexual domestic violence shows that in 67% of all cases where the female was deemed the perpetrator in the altercation, she used a lethal weapon (knife, gun, baseball bat, crow bar, broken glass, etc.). I think this information speaks volumes of the different tactics women and men use in violent situations. We might rightfully infer, based on this data, that women in fights against men are quick to recognize their inferior physical strength, so they are more likely to use a weapon of some sort.

There are other questions we could ask about motivations behind gender and violence such as infidelity, nationalism, self-defense, intoxication, or sociopathic behavior, to name a few.

Well, actually the reasons behind violence are of paramount importance to understanding why violence begins in the first place. Ignoring the reasons that compel people to act aggressively toward each other detracts from uncovering the truth of how our civilization functions.

edited 30th Oct '10 2:03:58 PM by Aprilla

Now that you mentioned video games... My wife totally loves Player vs. Player action in Star Wars Galaxies, be it in space or on the ground, and she's a very competent gamer - made the top ten list on the server for Medic, stuff like that. She's really big into the Galactic Civil War system they have.

But I think that's because she's driven to master any game she plays. She beat Homeworld without cheating. Beat Portal in four hours. Wants to be in charge of a high-level group of players when we do heroic instances in SWG. She'll have the biggest city in Sim City. Will play four generations of Sims just because. She's a Serious Gamer.

However, in the real world? Couldn't say if she's prone to violence or not, only that I've punched a wall a few times, she hasn't.

Real interesting stuff about female aggression and violence in that Cracked article. Some possibilities come to mind:

1. Women are quicker to be violent toward their (male) partners in part because they don't believe they can really hurt them. Because men are so much stronger than women, don't you see? It's laughable to think that a woman could beat up a man! So wail away, ladies, it's not like you'll do any damage! In all seriousness, whatever instincts we humans have that make us reluctant to harm one another are likely to be less effective when we don't think such harm is a real possibility of our actions.

2. Women resort to violence more quickly because they are not taught as they grow up how to keep their rage in check or manage it properly, and they are not taught this because of the widespread belief that they are not naturally prone to rage.

I don't think women are actually more aggressive or violent than men—I think it's probably about equal between the sexes—but I do think the perception that women are less aggressive and violent than men has a pernicious and ironic effect of making our aggression and violence more dangerous. Hazards are always more hazardous when you do nothing to mitigate them because you prefer to ignore them.

Very good points.

1. Women are quicker to be violent toward their (male) partners in part because they don't believe they can really hurt them. Because men are so much stronger than women, don't you see? It's laughable to think that a woman could beat up a man! So wail away, ladies, it's not like you'll do any damage! In all seriousness, whatever instincts we humans have that make us reluctant to harm one another are likely to be less effective when we don't think such harm is a real possibility of our actions.

2. Women resort to violence more quickly because they are not taught as they grow up how to keep their rage in check or manage it properly, and they are not taught this because of the widespread belief that they are not naturally prone to rage.

Both of these explanations strike me as suspect. For the first, it's usually pretty easy to tell when you inflict significant harm on someone. Also, if you resort to using some sort of implement as a weapon, it implies that merely taking out your anger by, say slapping someone isn't doing enough harm to satisfy you.

As for the second, boys are often taught to keep their anger in check with very ineffective methods. Girls are frequently taught not to express their anger, while boys are more likely to be taught to channel it through nonviolent activities. The trouble is that cathartic methods are actually not very good at reducing violence, and can even increase violent tendencies. As restrictive as it might seem, focusing on not expressing one's anger actually works better.

I'm inclined to give more credence to neo YT Pism's suggestion that women may be more likely to think that they can get away with it, and also to the fact that men are often taught that it's an exceptionally bad thing to hit a woman. For a woman, acting violently against a bigger, stronger man is less likely to be seen as shameful, whereas a man is likely to have been raised from an early age with the belief that abusing a woman reflects poorly not only on his moral character, but his masculinity.

edited 30th Oct '10 4:24:30 PM by Desertopa

Absolutely interesting and well laid points in the first reply.

You could look at the effects of a nurture environment in relation to military training. You can have an individual is not really prone to violence and is more shall we say timid for a lack of a better word.

Part of the military training is bringing out the natural human aggressiveness and learning to try and control and focus it. I will say this again the female Marines are just as dangerous, deadly, and aggressive as their male counter parts.

It is entirely possible to bring out the more aggressive human nature in more mild individuals. I would also say it is possible to make some one so overly aggressive that they are a threat to all around them.

edited 30th Oct '10 8:28:52 PM by TuefelHundenIV