| Male & Female Violence |
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This article was originally created for my sociology class in 2007. The question I was asked to respond to was, Are men more predisposed to commit more violent crimes than women? Since then I have added on to the article with more insight as I continue to read books similar to the topic. It is important to note that in today's modern society we are offered much more media influence through communicational technology, let alone the closeness of people in back-to-back cities and towns, than humans were millions of years ago. Back then, the majority of new cultural influence came typically from dictatorships or invasions, and usually it was very selective. Now we have access to any cultural influence we choose, and are bombarded daily with our own or others', whether we like it or not. So what kinds of effects do media and cultural influences have on the way humans behave? Firstly, we know that we cannot have a culture nor a media without first having a human being. Therefore, our behaviours must have some original basis. They have had to begin somewhere, if we go back far enough, and for valid reasons, those of which I have already explained in the article, "Why Are There Sex Differences In Humans?" To quickly reiterate what I found out, men have evolved to be more aggressive and physically larger than women, for the mating purposes of combat with another male. Though just because males have evolved to be more aggressive or physically larger than females does not necessarily mean they are more predisposed to acts of violence. The female's ability to be violent, in my opinion, is just as solid as the male's. The only difference is, biologically, her position in evolution never actually needed her to use violence to the same extent that it required of the males, leaving her physical attributes relatively the same. Yet the male and female's ability or actual predisposition to violence, in today's society, I believe, could still be balanced. Females just commit aggressive behaviours in more passive ways because our recent culture has taught them that anger should look different in men and women. This results in the same aggressive behaviour, stemming from the same fundamental emotion, just acted out differently. One example is that aggression in females is more commonly acted out by intending to place extreme social or emotional harm on a person rather than strict physical violence. Society looks upon this much differently, although it is the same crime. And so, if it is acted out differently, then we might have a tendency to look at these actions differently, and assign them different roles and attributes than seeing them for what they are: acts of aggression. It is very hard to say, then, if men commit more acts of violence than women because we are focusing on the men too much, and only distinguishing aggression itself by how men will be aggressive. Our culture has created a different standard for women in this sense, and us and our beliefs, because "violence," (and I use that term loosely in combination with any act of aggression) is the same for men and women but has been viewed differently. Women are forced to be violent in more passive ways than males so these behaviours slip by much more unnoticed, leaving us to question the male's capacity for violence over the female's. However I should clarify, then, that my original statement about men having more of a biological setting to be aggressive does not mean they are more predisposed to violence in the literal sense. There is a chance I could be misinterpreting the information but I think the idea is that males have the biological setting that allow them to be more aggressive than the female, in order to gain the mate and/or territory, but not that they necessarily are or always will be, more aggressive. Bibliography Pinker, Steven. How The Mind Works. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company Inc., 1999. Simmons, Rachel. Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls. Orlando, Florida: Harcourt Inc., 2002. Brizendine, Louann. The Female Brain. New York: Morgan Road Books., 2006. Written by CJ H, 2007. Last updated July 12 2007. |