Aswad
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Joined: 4/4/2007
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ORIGINAL: undergroundsea
Just thought I'd comment on some things you said.
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Without any adjusted research, it seems empirically that men are more prone to violence and aggression.
More prone to physical violence and aggression, definitely.
There is no question about the contemporary empirics on this point, and we are most overrepresented when it comes to violence with a severe outcome, including rape. 3% of all Danish men will have been convicted of rape by the time they reach my age, which is a significant number by any metric. One can reasonably assume slightly higher figures in the US, and significantly higher in certain parts of the world, as the figures for immigrants are 6 times as high as for native born; even assuming a higher likelyhood of conviction due to racism and prejudice, we are still left with a significant cultural difference in that statistic.
Cape Town and Somalia come to mind
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I am unsure how much of it is biological (which I see to apply more to aggression), and how much of it is cultural conditioning (which I see to apply more to violence).
I have the benefit of having grown up in the midst of a rapid and significant culture shift, with a sister that is some years younger, and thus has offered a fair bit of insight as to the developments in the upcoming generation. Also, I have a fair bit of contact with various police officers, psychiatrists and the like, who tend to share statistical developments. What is clear, is that women are rapidly closing the gap to men when it comes to violence, especially among youth. It is even reflected in suicide statistics, where they are generally moving toward more traditionally male routes, i.e. irreversible means. That basically translates to violence: firearms, knives, etc.
I've seen several police departments stripped of people to respond- in riot gear- to a showdown with girls carrying cudgels with nails driven through them, illegal length blades that have no other use than violence, and so forth. I've heard credible threats to the effect that "I'll slice you upen from cunt to ribs if you so much as look at my boy again" from girls sporting knives and the like. Bear in mind that this is Norway, with a measly 4.5 million inhabitants, and violent crime rates that are orders of magnitude lower than what is seen in the US, along with a similar improvement in recidivism rates across the board.
Fact is, the girls are now a lot more vicious than the boys in some areas of this country, particularly with each other.
There is some correlation to hormones; feminine girls on average have a lot more testosterone than all but the outright masculine ones, and these are the ones that are most strongly represented. However, there is no getting around the fact that the dominant factor in all of this is cultural. My sister was always something of a tomboy; she'd rush a boy twice her age, get knocked down, get back up, and keep going. In my own generation, that would be (irrationally) looked poorly on. In hers, it was unusual, but cool. In the one that followed her, the boy would have a pack of them to contend with, and end up in the hospital if he was lucky. Over name-calling. There's a cultural imperative that females should avoid violence that is fading away, about which I make no value-judgment.
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If I see counterexamples to the generalization--men who avoid violence and women who are violent--it suggests that cultural conditioning plays a more significant role than biological tendency towards violence.
I used to be a steaming pile of testosterone. A comparatively non-violent one, in the sense that I would refrain from using it until I either lost it (and my self-control hasn't been a limiting factor there), or had no other recourse. The result being, obviously, that boys who respected nothing but violence would occasionally (a lot rarer than what one would expect) push me that far. Which was a one-time deal; I've never had to deal with the same guy twice, whether the resolution was them backing down upon seeing that invisible line being palpably crossed, or from owing their survival to circumstance. Growing up, the threshold kept going up, and is currently at the point where I've responded non-violently to physical attacks that could have been crippling when I've had any option to do so.
All in all, I was involved in far fewer altercations than most of the boys my age, and never did engage in skirmishes and brawls, but biology suggests it shouldn't have been so. Perhaps it is because I chose not to be part of the culture around me. Or perhaps it was because I had parents who understood that respect does not equate to fear, and had a surprisingly open-minded and rational view on most things in life. Maybe I just had a solid grasp of the human cost of violence. Or maybe I just had no need for it, most of the time.
Either way, I was atypically peaceful, while my sister was atypically aggressive (on par with an average boy of her generation).
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To the extent the tendency for violence comes from cultural conditioning, I think both men and women share the responsibility for effects of upbringing and cultural conditioning.
Quite so. And that raises interesting points, since women were, until recently, the primary caregivers in the West. They remain so in various other parts of the world. One can make a good case that cultural inheritance, under such circumstances, is primarily matrilineal in nature. Which has implications, as does the recent shift in this area.
Personally, I've found little use for placing blame; trying not to repeat past mistakes has generally worked better for me.
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I think the tide is headed towards generations where the balance in power will shift towards women.
Up here, if all women's rights efforts halted today, the inertia would settle on a balance that slightly favors women in a few years.
This is how things work; people are impatient for change, so they apply more force to get changes more quickly, neglecting the fact that all significant processes involving culture and society take time. Consequently, the pendulum keeps swinging; what electrical engiineers would refer to as "overshoot and ringing" (a consequence of an underdamped circuit, i.e. too high Q value). It's somewhat sad that a single, numerical value can accurately describe the entirety of a concerted effort by humanity in such a noble endeavour as to bring an end to gender-based discrimination.
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When such power lies with women, I expect there will be instances of abuse of power.
That has been the case with a slightly higher percentage of women in power than men in power up here, so it seems a reasonable assumption. If inertia causes the balance to swing too far toward an outright female-dominated society, as seems likely to happen, you will likely find that this causes a problem. Not to mention if the sentiments expressed by the OP are in any way representative; that can quickly end up with a backlash that- again- hurts all women, which is (I hope) the last thing anyone wants. I prefer to think, as you do, though, that those sentiments are rare, and usually tempered with a realization that the generalization does not hold. If so, it can work out well for both genders in the end.
Kudos on a lot of good posts here.
Health,
al-Aswad.
_____________________________
"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind.
From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way.
We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.
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