Violent men

Male aggression is being recast as a cultural phenomenon, but the biological causes are being ignored, says Carole Hooven in this extract from her book Testosterone.

It’s popular today to blame high rates of male aggression on the patriarchy and its social codes. Those codes, the theory goes, prompt men and women alike to teach boys, but not girls, that emotions and weakness are bad and that stoicism and aggression are good.

Here, for example, is how the American Psychological Association put the theory in “Harmful Masculinity and Violence,” a newsletter that has circulated widely since its release in 2018. “Primary gender-role socialisation aims to uphold patriarchal codes by requiring men to achieve dominant and aggressive behaviours. The concept of gender roles is not cast as a biological phenomenon, but rather as a psychological and socially constructed set of ideas that are malleable.”

Matthew Gutmann, professor of anthropology at Brown University and the author of the 2019 book Are Men Animals?, agrees. He says that new research that is “just now reaching the general public” shows there is “little relation between testosterone (T) and aggression (except at very high or very low levels).” This, along with his interpretations of other scientific literature, has convinced him that biology, and testosterone in particular, is not where explanations of male violence are to be found: “If you believe that T says something meaningful about how men act and think, you’re fooling yourself. Men behave the way they do because culture allows it, not because biology requires it.”

Behaviour is always a product of interactions between an animal’s external environment and its biology, including its genes. And testosterone’s primary job is to coordinate male sexual anatomy, physiology and behaviour in the service of reproduction. For many male animals that must compete for mates, one of the behaviours that most directly supports reproduction is aggression. T’s central role in male violence is well established for many non-human animals. Could men really be exceptions?

THE PURPOSE OF AGGRESSION

Aggression, defined broadly, is behaviour intended to harm (or at least intimidate) another. It’s a fact of life. Animals do what they need to do to survive and be reproductively successful. They need to eat, find mates, avoid being eaten and ensure that enough of their offspring are able to reproduce themselves. Sometimes animals have non-aggressive strategies for achieving these ends – they have a sensitive nose for food; they make themselves look attractive to the other sex; they hide from predators; they produce thousands of young, a few of which will beat the odds and have their own offspring. Other strategies involve physical aggression: fighting off hungry and romantic rivals and predators that threaten either parent or offspring. Aggression is a strategy used by females as well as males throughout the animal kingdom.

But when the two sexes face different challenges to succeeding reproductively, the solutions for each sex will be also be different. For males more than females, reproductive success is limited by access to mates. That means that primarily in males, the solution, sculpted through the forces of sexual selection, is to develop traits that enhance fighting ability, like weaponry and the motivation to fight rivals.

IT’S NOT ALL ABOUT MEN

Although the stereotype of men as the more physically aggressive sex is backed up by a wealth of data, it would be a mistake to think of women as incapable of promoting – and sometimes of carrying out – extreme acts of violence. In 1994, during the genocide in the East African country of Rwanda, during which at least half a million people were killed, Pauline Nyiramasuhuko was the Minister for Family Welfare and the Advancement of Women. She was later convicted on charges of genocidal rape. One witness recounted that right after Nyiramasuhuko ordered militia members to burn 70 women and girls using gasoline she had in her car, she said, “Why don’t you rape them before you kill them?”

It’s true that men are more physically aggressive than women overall, but women can also be physically aggressive. Intimate-partner violence – violence or physical aggression between a current or previous partner or spouse

– is distressinglyngly common and severely under-reported.rted. Research on sex dif-differences in intimate-ntimate-partner violence is controversial,sial, methods are variable, and in manyy parts of the world, reliable data are not available. While men are the mainn perpetrators, this is one area in which women’s rates of physical aggressionggression may often be (at leasteast in West-Western countries)es) as high as men’s. (To bee clear, this is evidence aboutout parity in the frequencyency of physical aggression, ression, not severity or motives, and does nott concern other forms of abuse, coercion, andd control.)

For example,ple, as Helen Gavin and Theresaheresa Porter report in their eir book Female

Aggression, in a study of 6200 physical assaults between married partners living in Detroit, Michigan, the wives were more often the perpetrators of physical assault, injuring husbands through the use of weapons such as knives and guns. Another group of researchers reported on the frequency and characteristics of intimate-partner violence in six European cities: London, Budapest, Stuttgart, Athens, Porto (in Portugal) and Östersund (in Sweden). The researchers did not find that women assaulted their partners more often than men did, but they did find that “within each city, men and women presented equivalent prevalence of victimisation and perpetration except for sexual coercion, more often perpetrated by men.”

When I first learned of this evidence, I was sceptical. It ran contrary to everything that I thought I’d learned about domestic abuse, and it was hard to imagine women as significant perpetrators. But I hadn’t looked closely enough, and when I did, although the evidence was uncomfortable, what I found made sense. While women and men may not differ in their rates of physical aggression toward partners (or ex-partners), when women are aggressive, they are less likely to inflict serious physical damage. When a woman targets a partner and throws plates, slaps, punches or kicks them, the partner’s injuries will be less serious, on average, than when a man carries out the aggressive act. This is particularly true in heterosexual relationships, in which there is a relatively consistent asymmetrasymmetry in size and strength.

The reason that men are more liklikely to severely injure the targets of thetheir aggression than women might not just be because they have bbigger, stronger bodies – psychpsychology might matter, too. EmpEmpathy is our ability to underunderstand how others are fefeeling, and men are lesless able to do this than women,w across culturecultures. This is a widely replicatedrep and consistenconsistent finding, and it’s not true just ofof hhuman males and females.fe In chimpanzees,chimpanz bonobos, gorgorillas,las, elephantelephants, dogs, and wwolves, researcherresearchers have observed that males engage in lower rates of behaviours related to empathy, such as caregiving, cooperating, helping and comforting. Reduced empathy might not only exacerbate the effects of greater male strength; it might also help to explain why men more often use lethal weapons, such as guns, against partners. In any case, although rates of intimate-partner violence may be roughly equal between the sexes, the outcomes of these aggressive interactions are not. Men cause more damage and dominate in the most extreme form of intimate-partner violence, homicide. Worldwide, women are six times more likely to die at the hands of an

Rates of intimatepartner violence are roughly equal between the sexes, but the outcomes are not. Men cause more damage.

Maternal aggression helps to serve the reproductive goals of female animals, but it does not appear to be linked to testosterone.

intimate partner than are men.

The motivations for physical aggression toward a partner appear to differ. Both sexes can become violent when they fear a loss of a mate’s fidelity, but men are more likely to use violence as a means to try to keep a mate from straying. And in all parts of the world, when women seriously injure or murder their partners, it is more likely to be in response to a history of threats and abuse to themselves, their children or other family members. Women’s motivations are more often self-defence.

Women, like all female animals, can physically be aggressive when they need to be. And they need to be aggressive when their lives, the lives of their children or their future reproductive success are at risk.

MEAN GIRLS

Humans are strange animals in many ways, one of which is our creativity in causing each other pain. Not all human aggression involves a direct confrontation, such as shouting “You’re a pussy!,” raising a fist in someone’s face or clashing antlers – all examples of what’s called “direct aggression”. “Indirect aggression”, unique to our species, involves using language to get others to do your dirty work, such as spreading gossip about a

supposed friend or colleague and orchestrating their expulsion.

If you know anything about high school girls, this sort of aggression will be familiar. In junior high school, the alpha female of my friend group orchestrated the exclusion of one of my childhood friends from the group. I’m ashamed to say that I failed to confront our leader in an effort to stop it. I never understood how awful it was for my friend until we met up at a high school reunion, when she described how traumatic that event had been. (There was a silver lining – it helped her make new and more faithful friends.) Of course, boys and men indulge in this sort of viciousness, too, but girls and women seem to have an affinity for it.

Threats to one’s children bring out a strong form of aggression in female animals. This morning on the way to school, I’ll admit, I hollered at a driver who ran through a stop sign as my son and I attempted to cross the road. Maternal aggression helps to serve the reproductive goals of female animals – humans and non-humans alike. But it does not appear to be linked to testosterone. In fact, studies on non-human animals show that the likelihood of maternal aggression is increased by the hormones of pregnancy and lactation. Because female aggression generally serves different purposes than male aggression, it tends to be modulated by different hormones.

If you define aggression broadly, so that it includes the indirect, maternal, and intimate forms discussed above, you can make a pretty good case that (human) females can be as aggressive as males. And there is clear evidence that women are just as disposed to anger as men. But if you define aggression more narrowly, as the kind of aggression that puts the perpetrator at physical risk, like inflicting bodily damage through acts such as headbutting, rape, and murder, there’s no contest. Men win, hands down.

ENVIRONMENT MATTERS

Many societies positively prize some physical aggression – men are expected to use it to defend their families and reputations.

This kind of “culture of honour” is found in the American South, which has historically higher rates of violent crime than the North. It is much less common in Singapore, however.

The rate of violent crime in Singapore is minuscule compared with Jamaica, the United States or even relatively peaceful Canada, whose assault rate is about 50 times greater than Singapore’s. Singapore has the lowest murder rate in the world, alongside Japan.

Why is Singapore so different? The Government doesn’t pump pacifying chemicals into the water supply. The explanation presumably lies in the Singaporean culture, which is one of lawabidingness, strict discipline in families and lack of poverty, plus harsh criminal penalties, among other factors.

Rates of violent crime don’t vary just from country to country, but also vary over time. As Steven Pinker has documented in The Better Angels of Our Nature, the homicide rate in Europe fell astonishingly steeply from the 13th century on, from as much as 100 per 100,000 people per year, to the present rate of about 1 per 100,000. The explanation for the reduction in violence is not in changes in our genes but in centuries of large cultural and social changes, including the monopolisation of violence by the state.

Despite these variations, one thing that remains constant is the gendered pattern: across vast reaches of time and space, men are more violent than women. That is a striking fact that requires an explanation, and the most parsimonious one, consistent with vast amounts of evidence from across the animal kingdom, invokes sexual selection and its handmaiden in males – testosterone.

Although humans are not held captive by evolutionary forces, genes or hormones, we still experience their profound influences. But we are unique among animals in some important respects, including our ability to carefully consider the consequences of our actions and inhibit our baser instincts. The more we understand the forces that shape us, the more control we have over how we behave.

Behaviours that show sex differences are often heavily influenced by culture – and aggression is a clear example. Laws and cultural and social norms can push physical aggression up or down. We can hope that social changes will reduce violence – perpetrated largely by men – yet further. But one can’t solve a problem if one misunderstands its causes. Frank talk about T will help us appreciate how changes in the environment can rein in problematic male behaviour. It is within our power to close or widen sex differences in aggression – but the underlying tendencies producing those differences precede culture, and they exist because of testosterone. No good can come from denying that. l

Testosterone: The story of the hormone that dominates and divides us, by Carole Hooven (Hachette, $37.99)

The rate of violent crime in Singapore is minuscule compared with the US or even relatively peaceful Canada, whose assault rate is about 50 times greater than Singapore’s.