Sex differences in physical aggression

One fairly influential school of thought today holds that there are no interesting innate psychological differences between men and women. This view is mistaken.

We're talking average differences here -- two bell curves overlapping to various degrees. Here are some curves for <the physical attribute of height>. You see the bell curves overlap quite a bit, but we feel that "men are generally taller than women" is a valid observation.

Human males are on average more physically aggressive and violent than females. I know of no convincing evidence of any other society in history where that was not true. It is a biological difference. It is not an excuse for bad male behavior, but it suggests a baseline against which to gauge progress and expectations.

In today's world, there are few places where such tendencies are adaptive. In the military or police, they serve to guard against those same aggressive tendencies in other men. They are also valued in sports competitions -- and it is worthy of a footnote that a fair number of women enjoy watching football, where male physical aggression is highly prized. But on the whole, aggressive and violent tendencies in men and boys have negative effects and society -- coastal liberal society, especially -- would like to reduce violent behavior by men.

Suppose we set out to transform society to cleanse men of their aggressive tendencies and establish new cultural norms so male aggression would not arise again. It would fail. In each generation we have to train boys and men to suppress and civilize those innate aggressive tendencies. Our society is set up with some such programs already, as in prohibitions on fighting in school, and instruction on how to deal with feelings of anger without violence.

We can do more, but I do not think we could ever reach a society where as many women as men are interested in becoming soldiers or police. Nor do I think we would ever reach a society where as many men as women were interested in becoming child care providers.

Some claim the US is a patriarchy (the subject of an upcoming blog post). One observation related to this is that some men control women by violence or the threat of violence against them -- something I and most right-thinking people strenuously oppose. But it is not evidence for a patriarchy.

If men banded together to inflict violence on women while never being violent with each other, that would be some evidence of a patriarchal social structure But in fact men are even more likely to be perpetrate violence against other men than against women. Male physical violence against women is a sort of side effect of men being more violent towards all people in comparison to women being less violent towards all people.

As such aggressive tendencies are innate, it does not support an "-archy" designation for our society. It would make no more sense than calling the US a "female-pregnancy" society, as that is part of our biology, not our society. Society does have some influence on how much male aggression is controlled, and modern US society has it better controlled than just about any other society in history. What's more, men beating women is a crime and prosecuted as such. There may be arguments about evidence, but if a video clearly showed a man seriously beating a woman, I don't know of any US jurisdiction where it would be dismissed under some version of male prerogative.

One quote I've seen recently is, "Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them." It's snarky and annoying, but worth considering further. We could add, "Men are afraid that other men will kill them", and "Women are afraid that other women will laugh at them." So we could more accurately distill the situation as, "The danger posed by men towards anyone includes a possibility of killing them. The danger posed by women towards anyone has killing so low in probability that emotional abuse is the more salient danger."

Steven Pinker, in "Better Angels of Our Nature", shows how societies have become much less violent over time. What that really means is that men in society have become much less violent over time, because men were doing almost all the violence -- and still are. No one ever said that there would be equality in how hard a person has to work to be civilized and behave well. On average, men have to work harder at it. We always will.

Could a claim of an innate male tendency to greater physical aggression be misused by those who want to justify bad male behavior? It could. They would be mistaken and we should set them straight by argument. But lying -- in this case denying the innate difference in aggression -- in support of any particular social goal eventually backfires.

There is one class of women who have perhaps more compassion for male misbehavior than others: mothers of boys. They know their boys were not indoctrinated in any obvious way to behave badly towards others. And yet, all too often, they do, much more than girls. Despite all their best efforts, such mothers often have to adjust their expectations of male children and they do so, instead of disowning them.

My observations have been about ordinary "cis" men and women, the overwhelming majority of the population. Trans, intersex, and non-binary people are valuable and important, but I do not know how to accurately place them in what I've written above.