What is seriously making you think right now?

[das kranke Tier]

Also, and something I forgot to mention before, juries tend to be softer on women than on men.

Also, this is only true in certain types of cases.

Word

[Aglaya]

Also, and something I forgot to mention before, juries tend to be softer on women than on men.

Also, this is only true in certain types of cases.

Word

That's probably fair point, though my friend who is a mental health counselor in the criminal justice system is the one who told me. 
Someone made a good point earlier that when women kill, the opposite is true.  I could see how maybe both points are right.  Maybe generally, on little crimes, women are better at getting sympathy from the jury, but when it comes to murder, probably not so much.

[dieblucasdie]

Or that people are generally willing to buy "I'm just so angry and violent I can't control myself" defense as mitigating for men, but not for women.  Akin to the "boys will be boys" defense in rape cases.

The OP is the kind of thinking that directly contributes to this attitude.  ie, if you buy that men are NATURALLY more violent than women it follows that men are less culpable when they are violent.

[coldforge]

That's facile reasoning and not true in any but the simplest value systems. Acknowledging that men are born with a greater proportion of hormones that have a direct causal link to violent behavior doesn't have to mean that anyone lets them off the hook for their criminal behavior, and indeed it *doesn't*, in any system but the straw one you just created. We live in a society that expects the arbitrary violent criminal to be male; we don't think he's probably got a good reason for his violence.

[dieblucasdie]

That's facile reasoning and not true in any but the simplest value systems.

coldforge, meet American juries, American juries, Mr. Coldforge.

[Andrew_TSKS]

either way, blucas is right to point out that "men are naturally more violent than women" is an assumption that should be questioned.

[Greg Nog]

Or that people are generally willing to buy "I'm just so angry and violent I can't control myself" defense as mitigating for men, but not for women.  Akin to the "boys will be boys" defense in rape cases.

The OP is the kind of thinking that directly contributes to this attitude.  ie, if you buy that men are NATURALLY more violent than women it follows that men are less culpable when they are violent.

Wait, I'm confused.  Who was saying that natural predilections reduce culpability?

[Aglaya]

either way, blucas is right to point out that "men are naturally more violent than women" is an assumption that should be questioned.

Yes, except that they actually to tend to be.  It's hard to say if it's nature or nurture, but men are generally more violent than women.  Men actually commit more violent crimes.

[Andrew_TSKS]

either way, blucas is right to point out that "men are naturally more violent than women" is an assumption that should be questioned.

Yes, except that they actually to tend to be.  It's hard to say if it's nature or nurture, but men are generally more violent than women.  Men actually commit more violent crimes.

jesus christ.

[elpollodiablo]

Going by raw numbers--and I know how suspect and generally unreliable the numbers are, historically--that's the god's honest truth, man. Violent crime statistics show men in the majority by a damn country mile.

[Aglaya]

Look it up.  Either men commit more of them, or women are far, far better at getting away with them.  So either men are more violent or women are serious criminal masterminds, practically across the board.

Edit: No, not criminal masterminds, criminal geniuses.  So able to commit violence and get away with it that no superhero could ever catch them.

[Andrew_TSKS]

you're missing the point. either that or you're not paying attention to what i'm saying, or i'm wording it badly, or something. the point is "QUESTION THE ASSUMPTION THAT THIS IS NATURAL." just because something happens doesn't mean that there's a good and right and logical reason for it to happen. it might happen because our society is fucked up and totally twists the minds of men while they're growing up. besides, i noticed that you had to come up with about half a dozen qualifications for what constitutes a serial killer that don't fit in with the usual assumption of what a serial killer is (that being someone who kills people serially--in other words, someone who decides to kill someone due to some compulsion, goes out and kills someone, then feels the compulsion again within a certain amount of time, and then goes out and kills someone again, etc, until they get caught) in order to prove your thesis that only males kill serially. the reason i'm pointing that out is because i think there's a bias inherent in a lot of people's thinking on this issue. they WANT to believe that only men are ever serial killers. so they twist themselves into rhetorical pretzels in order to "prove" their thesis. then when their thesis is contradicted through example, they find a reason why said example doesn't count. it's ridiculous.

why do you want so badly for women to be incapable of committing serial murder?

i'm about a hair's breadth away from turning into jim goad here.

EDIT: and i gotta calm down. i'm going to get some food. catch y'all later.

[elpollodiablo]

Well I'm about a cunt hair away from being shitty drunk, so we're even.

I'd bet my next paycheck that if we were able to take into account every murder committed since the inception of writing we'd see that males committed the lion's share of them. I'm not saying that murder comes more naturally to my sex--but men have historically been the bigger sinners when it comes to violence against their fellow human.

[Andrew_TSKS]

on that, i completely agree. again, that's not the point i'm trying to make.

[elpollodiablo]

I got you!

[Greg Nog]

So Andrew: if a person were to take an equal number of males and females, strand them on an island somewhere, all tabula rasa style, no influencing "society" -- are you saying that you think there would be as just much violence committed by the sex who has lesser amounts of the naturally-occurring hormone that raises levels of aggression?

[Aglaya]

Well, if you'd read through what I wrote, and you quoted earlier, I did say:

It's hard to say if it's nature or nurture...

Also, there is serious professional debate about whether there has yet been a woman who was, the the definition of the National Institutes of Justice, not something I made up, is what causes that debate.  I am interested in why there is only one woman whose crimes have been defined as possibly serial killing, though there is some debate as to whether they actually were.  I am aghast that that is the case, it makes no sense to me, I'm just trying to chew the fat over why.  Don't take this as a personal attack on yourself.

[Andrew_TSKS]

So Andrew: if a person were to take an equal number of males and females, strand them on an island somewhere, all tabula rasa style, no influencing "society" -- are you saying that you think there would be as just much violence committed by the sex who has lesser amounts of the naturally-occurring hormone that raises levels of aggression?

if you postulate a primitive society, you're postulating a society in which animal-style gender roles serve a purpose. in a society like that, things will evolve the way they've evolved in our society. my point is more that, going forward from here, there's no reason to assume that things will necessarily stay this way in future (assuming we don't have an apocalyptic breakdown in our society). if in five thousand years we've reached some kind of science fiction level society where there's absolute equality between the sexes, then yeah, i think the difference in physical violence between men and women would be negligible. fuck, there are almost as many violent crimes committed by women as by men RIGHT NOW. the only case in which that isn't true really is serial murder, and then we get back to what aglaya was saying in her last post--some of this is because of how the national institute of justice is defining serial murder. where that's concerned, two things: 1) i think there's still probably a vested interest in defining serial murder in such a way as to exclude women who would otherwise be included; i guess the vested interest is not aglaya's but that of someone who's work she's read. and 2) i think the points that were made earlier about the difference between male and female gender roles, and the way that these differences cause similar psychological issues to manifest in completely different ways, is much more at fault than any difference in hormones between males and females.

i can't rule out the possibility that biological differences between men and women make some amount of difference in the manner in which they behave, but the more i look into what people say about "intrinsic differences between men and women", the more i notice the fact that said differences almost always have their root in socialization. and the more i notice that, the less easy it is for me to take anything that is supposedly a "natural biological difference between men and women" on faith as being real.

[Andrew_TSKS]

Don't take this as a personal attack on yourself.

certainly not trying to give that impression, so i'm sorry if i have. lately subjects like this have been getting me really riled up, so if this discussion is causing me to react in a heated manner, it's because of that, not because i feel like anyone's mad at me.

that said, i do want to point something out, and i'll try to be delicate and nice about it, because i do like you as a person. but crissee, you make posts in which you take it on faith that men and women are naturally different in many different ways on a really frequent basis. i feel like you and i have butted heads on this a lot. so when i saw that this was yet another "men are like this, but women are like this" threads, i did get a little upset, because it's something i feel strongly about, and you're constantly making offhand statements that go against things i believe to be true. so it gets frustrating sometimes, and i do realize that i need to deal with that in other ways than by lashing out at you. so i apologize for that.

[jess]

So Andrew: if a person were to take an equal number of males and females, strand them on an island somewhere, all tabula rasa style, no influencing "society" -- are you saying that you think there would be as just much violence committed by the sex who has lesser amounts of the naturally-occurring hormone that raises levels of aggression?

if you postulate a primitive society, you're postulating a society in which animal-style gender roles serve a purpose. in a society like that, things will evolve the way they've evolved in our society. my point is more that, going forward from here, there's no reason to assume that things will necessarily stay this way in future (assuming we don't have an apocalyptic breakdown in our society). if in five thousand years we've reached some kind of science fiction level society where there's absolute equality between the sexes, then yeah, i think the difference in physical violence between men and women would be negligible. fuck, there are almost as many violent crimes committed by women as by men RIGHT NOW. the only case in which that isn't true really is serial murder, and then we get back to what aglaya was saying in her last post--some of this is because of how the national institute of justice is defining serial murder. where that's concerned, two things: 1) i think there's still probably a vested interest in defining serial murder in such a way as to exclude women who would otherwise be included; i guess the vested interest is not aglaya's but that of someone who's work she's read. and 2) i think the points that were made earlier about the difference between male and female gender roles, and the way that these differences cause similar psychological issues to manifest in completely different ways, is much more at fault than any difference in hormones between males and females.

i can't rule out the possibility that biological differences between men and women make some amount of difference in the manner in which they behave, but the more i look into what people say about "intrinsic differences between men and women", the more i notice the fact that said differences almost always have their root in socialization. and the more i notice that, the less easy it is for me to take anything that is supposedly a "natural biological difference between men and women" on faith as being real.

All of the stats I've seen show that men commit the VAST majority of assaults, rapes and murders (serial or not), and that most of their victims (except in rape) are other men, at least in U.S. Definitely not a neglible difference or even close. It's something like 90% of violent crime committed by men in the stats I've seen actually. It also tends not to be a factor in crime that's discussed or analyzed much in the media. For instance, in a NY Times article on school shootings by children, it was only in a paranthetical that the fact that all of the perpetrators were boys was mentioned. You can bet that if they were all girls that would have been the headline, but our society just shrugs its shoulders at men and boys being violent because its part of the images we constantly see of them, in the media and elsewhere. It's what we assume to be natural, and so no one thinks twice about the fact that there's a societal problem with overly violent boys and men and that it's a gender issue. And, well, I blame the patriarchy, at least for a good deal of it.

These days, just as women are given so many messages to make their bodies into some impossible ideal and to be people-pleasing and submissive, men from an amazingly early age are instructed that power and strength are gained through aggression and being tough. I've seen examples of ads with little boys and girls where the boys are already standing in dominant stances while the girls are looking down and being shy. It's everywhere and it can be subtle and it can be blatant. Parents reinforce different behaviors in their children too. Men are taught not to generally express their emotions except for anger, whereas women are taught to suppress their anger but otherwise to express emotion. You see a lot of men who come in to therapy who can't even clearly identify other emotions besides anger because of that. Is it so surprising then that men are more violent towards others then? I suspect a lot of the men on this board aren't really buying into this tough male role so much, but I think that a lot of men out there do feel that pressure, and that's where the differences in violent acts starts to play out.

Andrew in particular, but also anyone intrested in socialization/gender, have you ever heard of Jackson Katz and his work on masculinity from a feminist perspective? I think you'd find it really interesting. If you can get your hands on his documentary Tough Guise, which is about how the emphasis in our society on being tough, invulnerable and aggressive for men results in this disparity, I highly recommend checking it out. The ideas I'm talking about I was exposed to from there in part.

I do think that there's likely some degree of biological differences at play here too, but the dramatic extent to which violent is gendered in the US at any rate seems to go way beyond that. Maybe the instinct to diverge into these roles started with some biological traits, but there's also a significant cultural/social component at this point that can and should be altered imo.

[Andrew_TSKS]

jess, your post fascinates me because you're agreeing with me and disagreeing with me at the same time. i'm really interested in what you're saying about all this stuff, and i will check out that documentary. anything else you'd recommend? books, perhaps?

[jess]

Let me ask my friend who runs anti-violence/anti-rape education programs for boys and young men based on Katz's work and similar ideas. He's taught me a lot about the topic and likely has a lot of good references.

[Andrew_TSKS]

awesome, i'd appreciate that!

[RavingLunatic]

Also, compared to other primates, there's a much narrower size and hormonal difference between human males and females.

Compared to all other primates? Obviously, for primates like gorillas and orangutans this is true, but is it so for bonobos and chimps and baboons and such? Just wondering. I'm trying to think which primates are also primarily monogamous, but I really don't remember which ones are. Those would obviously be the ones where the sex differences would be less.

[Good Intentions]

That should read for the large primates. There's a large difference in size in babboons, but from there downwards the relative difference diminishes.