I am not seriously opposed to men. Honest. I am one. Some of my best friends and closest relatives are men. But the truth is that those of our species suffering from X chromosome deficiency syndrome (aka congenital testosterone poisoning) are responsible for more than their share of the world’s trouble. If we could somehow eliminate male-generated violence, we would pretty much eliminate violence. Altogether. Ditto for sexual acting out. “Girls gone wild” don’t hold a candle to “boys being boys.”
This is not intended to condone such egregious acts of male misbehavior, but rather, the opposite: To point to the deplorable fact that misbehavior—especially of the more lurid and dangerous kind—is something to which males are disproportionately prone. Now why might this be so?
Well (here’s a bow to psychology): Maybe its because they are positively reinforced for being violent and sexually pushy. Or (here’s a bow to sociology): Maybe its because they are conforming to the social norms and mores of their society. Or (anthropology): Maybe it’s a matter of cultural tradition. But all of these “explanations” fail to identify why it is that men are more prone to violence and sexual aggressiveness in every known human society. If male-female differences in this respect are simply a function of arbitrary patterns of learning, social norms and cultural traditions, then why do all these patterns, norms and traditions all point in the same direction?
Hint: When you vary one thing, such as examining different human societies around the world, and hold another thing constant (such as the underlying human genotype, the nature of human nature), then you are in fact observing an experiment. And when we reflect upon our own species in this regard, there is every reason to conclude that the common behavioral patterns that we observe, regardless of how much we vary such considerations as language, geography, eye shape, skin color, learning rules, social expectations, and cultural traditions, are likely due to the other thing we have held constant: Our biological nature.
In this respect, the especially relevant component of our biological nature is intimately connected with the very definition of male and female.
Being male or female has essentially nothing to do with beards or breasts, penises or vaginas. Biologists have no doubt whatever as to the sex of different birds, for example, even though most of them have no external genitalia. Or even oysters. Maleness vs femaleness turns on one trait and one trait only: The nature of the gametes (sex cells) each individual produces.
For reasons that are still obscure (although there has been some interesting theorizing), nearly every sexually reproducing species is divided into two kinds of gamete-making specialists, those who make a relatively small number of large gametes (eggs), in which they invest heavily and those who produce a very large number of exceedingly small gametes (sperm), each of which represents a negligible investment.
The sperm-makers among us have been selected to compete among themselves for access to the egg-makers, and herein lies a tale of profound asymmetry when it comes to violence and sexual aggressiveness (modulated, to be sure, by all sorts of social, cultural, and learning-related influences). But if you want to understand what underlies so many of today’s headlines, you’ve gotta start here.
My fellow bloggers, not to mention opinion-makers around the country, have written persuasively about some of the psychological questions raised by Weinergate—along with the stunning misbehavior of literally hundreds of politicians and prominent people … nearly all of them men. Laurie Essig, for example, wrote about some of the unanswered sociological questions raised by the Weiner scandal, concluding that there is a “deeper and more psychological question” yet to be answered. And Gina Barreca asked us to imagine what would happen if female politicians sent photos of their genitalia. To understand why such behavior is so much a “guy thing,” not just in the U.S. but around the world, ask yourself what “guys” everywhere have in common.
(Image from wikimedia)
