What are the reasons behind gender disparity in violence and empathy?

girlwriteswhat · 2019-12-09T20:23:34+00:00

First off, I am not left-wing (I'm center-right on fiscal issues and center or center-left on most social ones).

But I DO believe it's important that the left does not allow the right to own men's issues, which is certainly what I have seen happening over the last two years. I've been invited hundreds of times to discuss men's issues on right-wing talk radio shows in the US, but only once to a liberal show. Despite the liberal host and I being able to find some common ground and the conversation being cordial, I was not invited back.

A: Is it mostly cultural or biological? If so, how and can it be tackled?

Regarding the empathy gap, mostly biological. And it can't.

The primary problem lies in the fact that biology and culture are not two separate things--they are a feedback loop. Culture is the manifestation of an agreement (spoken or unspoken) between people whose biological propensities inform their values.

Culture arises largely from biology. External constraints and limitations (such as scarcity, danger, disease, predators, etc) used to exist that prevented us from going too far in our indulgence of certain biological propensities. We did not have the luxury of totally lacking compassion for our men, because they were the people standing between women/children and the harshness of the world. We could not neglect, disrespect and denigrate them wholesale and still reasonably expect them to do that.

And yes, I'm going to probably ruffle a few leftist feathers here, but the job that was once the responsibility of individual men--women's husbands, fathers, brothers, and even sons--has been outsourced to the state. The state keeps women safe. The state ensures they have material support if they can't provide it for themselves. The state takes action in natural disasters, or when an enemy approaches.

That state is disproportionately (some would argue solely) funded by men, sure. And the people within it who put their lives on the line to perform those tasks are mostly men, sure. But the mere existence of that intermediary--that forcibly extracts men's money and hands it to women and children, and that calls protection a job of the police and military rather than husbands, fathers, brothers and sons--it tricks people into thinking that individual men aren't every bit as necessary to the wellbeing of individual women as they always have been.

It has only been since technological, governmental and economic advances have been made that have liberated women from their social contract with men that we have seen men derogated the way they are now, and that we have not only engaged in callous disregard for men's contributions and sacrifices, but blithely deemed men not "necessary", or "obsolete".

Women don't need "men" anymore. They just need "the system" (one built, funded and operated by men, but which is not "men"). Women may be, in real terms, entirely dependent on men, but no individual woman is dependent on any individual man, therefore no man is entitled to gratitude or compassion.

The contract between men and women is no longer one of voluntary exchange, where both men and women had to bring something valuable to the other to the table. Men are now held to a contract they didn't sign, and women are held to no contract at all. Women don't see men as a group as providing them welfare, food stamps, benefits, privileges, quotas, education, etc, because they don't accept any of the money that pays for that stuff from the hands of the men who earned the money to fund it.

Distance breeds inhumanity. Experiments consistently show that people are more willing to make a decision to kill someone if that person isn't standing right in front of them than if they're on a screen. If that person is not shown to them on a screen, but someone they don't have to look at before pushing a button.

And we KNOW from research that people are already more willing to sacrifice men than women. What happens when someone who benefits from a sacrifice not only doesn't have to look that person in the eye, but isn't even aware they exist? Because you're not really allowed to say that men are the only net taxpayers. That the average woman takes more out in government spending than she could ever hope to put in, and so her existence is subsidized by a government willing to take money from men and handing it to women without any reciprocal benefit.

This is what the state does. It takes men's humanity--what little there was to begin with--out of the social contract.

Men hold the entire edifice up, but because the contract is involuntary, what little consideration once existed--gratitude and respect for their contributions, and consideration of what they needed to provide them--that's gone.

And there is no biological imperative toward empathy for men. Quite the opposite. It is only when men are necessary and perceived as necessary that they are valued.

This is the challenge facing left-wingers. If you replace the contributions of individual human men with a nameless, faceless thing called The State, you necessarily devalue men. If the only value men have--the only reason society has to care about them--is that they can provide for and protect others, then what can the political left do but further devalue men?

We have liberated women from their dependence on individual men. We could only afford to do it by appropriating all men's money.

By definition, this means that we cannot afford to liberate men. There's no one left to foot the bill.

Oncefa2 · 2019-12-09T15:00:44+00:00

I've been wanting to run some numbers based on a couple of studies about the sentencing gap.

Men are ~60% more likely to be found guilty, and are around 50% more likely to be arrested (depending on the crime). So combined that makes men some 2.4 times as likely to be convicted after committing the same crime.

All we need are conviction records and you can start to estimate how big of a difference it is (prison numbers, while readily available, wouldn't work due to men also getting longer sentences, and being less likely to get paroled).

It wouldn't surprise me if men are still more likely to commit murder and things like that. But it would surprise me if the gap was fairly large (like more than a 10 fold difference). For example, less than 3% of the sex offender's registry is women, but around 40% of all rapes and other sex based crimes are committed by women. So there's a 13x disparity between who's committing crimes, and who's being officially put down as having committed crimes.

And I'm pretty sure the prison population difference between men and women is about the same. Which makes you question the narrative for other crimes. For example, if the bias against men for jailable crimes is the same as the bias against men for sexual assault, then logically that would mean around 40% of all jailable crimes in general are committed by women.

A lot of crimes are of course committed due to desperation. Men are more likely to be homeless, destitute, disabled on the job, less likely to receive support for poverty, for domestic violence, and are more likely to lose their home, custody, etc, in a divorce (leading to men being more likely to respond with violence since they have fewer non-violent options compared to women). So there's definitely a strong "social" and even a "legal" element to this difference. Being a man is, essentially, a crime in and of itself.

AFAIK men don't have less empathy / sympathy compared to women though. Men are simply less likely to be the targets of sympathy, from both men and women alike. There's some research showing that women are better able to read facial expressions compared to men, but I don't think there's anything showing that men are less likely to display sympathy and compassion for other people. If anything, the fact that men are more likely to sacrifice themselves for other people shows that men might be more compassionate / sympathetic compared to women.

Oncefa2 · 2019-12-09T13:09:26+00:00

With the danger of getting flayed I suggest at least majority biological, since I don't know a single place in the world where make up 90+ of the prison population. Perhaps some room can be made from the explanation that men are merely stronger so women-violence gets counted as less even when it happens, but even that is born out of biologi.

cromulent_weasel · 2019-12-09T21:12:53+00:00

A: Is it mostly cultural or biological? If so, how and can it be tackled?

I'm sure there is a component of both. People take small differences and exaggerate them until they are bigger. For example, boys have more testosterone and are slightly more aggressive/physical than girls. But then adults EXPECT boys to be more physically aggressive and basically turn it into a self-fulfilling prophecy through gendered treatment of boys and girls. Girls can be as unruly and aggressive as boys but have their behaviour curtailed more than boys, who are written off as 'just boys'.

Then too, there are differences between men and women and like it or not, kids DO model themselves more on their same sex parent. Little girls are way more likely to breastfeed a doll as their mother feeds a younger sibling even though boys do it too. My wife cut her hair really short about two years ago, and within 3 months both of my daughters were asking for short hair like that too.

B: Why are disproportionate number of violent people are men and not women?

The Dunedin study has an interesting point to make about this, and it basically again comes down to both genes and environment. If you combine being raised in deprivation/poverty and having the gene MAOA then that is hugely predictive of violent and antisocial tendencies.

5% of men commit more than 50% of the violent crimes.

C: Why is there difference in empathy between men and women?

I think that's MOSTLY cultural. Empathy is something we learn when we are raised by people that care for us and out baseline needs are met. Women are socialised more to be more caring and that's also the role models they are presented with in older generations.

I think the two world wars emotionally stunted two generations of men, and the scars of their emotional stuntedness is still echoing through the generations today.

GaborFrame · 2019-12-10T17:31:18+00:00

A: Is it mostly cultural or biological? If so, how and can it be tackled?

One thing that should be kept in mind is that "cultural" does not mean "arbitrary", but cultural memes is a result of selective pressure just like genes. For instance, a society that sent women to fight in war rather than men would not have survived for very long. This, to this day, probably explains the expectation that men are supposed to be tough, while women are supposed to be protected.

The other fallacy is assuming that if something is "natural", it must be good. So to me, the key to progress is to understand where something comes from and how we should deal with it today.

What are the reasons behind gender disparity in violence and empathy?

Comments

Stemple, L., Flores, A., & Meyer, I. H. (2017). Sexual victimization perpetrated by women: Federal data reveal surprising prevalence. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 34, 302-311. Available from: http://webshare.law.ucla.edu/Faculty/bibs/stemple/Stemple-SexualVictimizationPerpetratedFinal.pdf

Ybarra, M. L., & Mitchell, K. J. (2013). Prevalence rates of male and female sexual violence perpetrators in a national sample of adolescents. JAMA Pediatrics, 167(12), 1125–1134.

Title	What are the reasons behind gender disparity in violence and empathy?
Author	Strikester101
Upvotes	8
Comments	56
Date	December 9, 2019 11:55 AM UTC (6 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/comments/e890pt/what_are_the_reasons_behind_gender_disparity_in/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/what-are-the-reasons-behind-gender-disparity-in.1202212 https://theredarchive.com/post/1202212