Agreed....simply put

If it were biology then why don't all males act that way? We would have no choice but to act like that, wouldn't we?

@MacTavish Biology isn’t monolithic. It distributes traits across a population unevenly. Not every male is taller than every female, but consistently, most are.

@VictoriaNotes Yes, at the level of final manifestation, culture plays a role, and is more malleable than biology. But at the underlying foundational level biology creates cultural potential (E. O. Wilson). While nature and nurture are coworkers at one level, evolutionary forces have already created all potential at another. This is how it seems to me. I’m open to learning.

@VictoriaNotes For me the practical aspect of the issue comes down to... is there an evolutionary (biological) component to male aggression? And by component I mean foundational, not incidental. I mean, is it likely, or not, to go away if we just make it unpopular culturally? There are some human traits on both sides of this divide. The male fad of trying to look like Bruce Willis finally died out (thankfully) but was replaced by the hipster look. I'm confident that looking like Bruce Willis in particular is incidental, subject to cultural approval. But the need for adolescent males to groom according to their preferred identity image is not going away. So I say it is based more in biology than in culture. The rule of thumb being, as I understand it, if a trait is present in all cultures, across all time periods, then it is most likely an evolutionary adaptation. Evolutionary adaptations are not going away. They can be constrained by culture to some extent, but it will always be a maintenance task, never a finished project. I listen to Sapolsky a lot and think he is brilliant, but I don't think he denies what I'm saying here. Will male aggression go the way of soul patches and shaved heads, or will our great grandchildren still be coping with it?

@VictoriaNotes I would love to be able to talk with him and ask him if he meant possible within two or three generations or possible within two or three hundred thousand years.

@VictoriaNotes Well I hope that’s the way it is.

@Beach_slim A lot of us women (generally speaking) got our mental health problems from men beating us up or being sexually innapropriate - thats how I got my D.I.D Dx

@jacpod Finally a comment in this thread that is eloquent, and simply stated with feeling in it, and absolutely correct.

@Beach_slim To say we have evolved from the species of Apes is an insult to that species. Were it so, we ought to have monuments to our ancestors, not cages, zoos and extermination. Of course one must remember this is not the case with the Native American indigenous population which honors and respects all creatures. There are a few others as well. Anyway, Darwinism is the modern era's mythology. Nevertheless, your comment is well composed.

@Beach_slim I think you have a faulty view of evolution. If I say we evolved from chimps, I'm not saying that we "are on the same level" as the genus Pan. The separation took place six and a half million years ago. Think of the branch of a tree. After the bifurcation each branch went their separate ways. Humans are now of the genus Homo.

@jacpod likewise here with my DID and PTSD

Right on. My book mentions "The Lord of the Flies" that deals with this. The book looks at humanity as through a microscope. Our base instincts, what Freud called "Id", William Golding called "Jack" and Carl Sagan called "the Reptilian Complex" is nothing more than our feral survival instincts. TLOTF can't be killed, it's what we are. It can only be controlled. Religious people call it "the Devil" but they don't understand evolution.

@Aristopus Yep, I follow the Sagan line and compare the actions various classes of animals watching how they define gender roles. Most diversification of course comes with vertebrates

@Rugglesby Did you know the Hebrew word for "Lord of the Flies"? Beelzebub.

The devil is nothing more than the anatomical, reptilian remnants in the hindbrain, the oldest part of the brain..

@Aristopus ha, how cool is that, and the Hebrew bible never mentions hell, only sheol, which means grave. So it fits.

I'm not sure if it is a case of elephants in the room or pigs flying past your windows. ?

@SKDeitch I do fully, I mean fully, I would feel much safer if women led the negotiations and then enforced the laws. History only shows a predominant male leadership with war and power . The few women have shown wonderful compassion. Can you imagine a committee of only women deciding the abortion issue with both sides represented, Men should not be deciding this issue, NOT AT ALL

"Men are uncomfortable with (for lack of better words) their feminine side."

Are you saying male homosexuals are not "men"?

@Aristopus Not at all. Male homosexuals are probably more comfortable to embrace what is considered "feminine," but that does not mean they're not men. But I suppose that might be a matter of opinion. There are probably those who think that gay men are not "real men" by the standards of some. As for myself, I think that the typical American standards of masculinity are a bunch of BS.

Also, on the topic of gay men, there are many of them who exhibit incredibly masculine behavior. Maybe they do this to avoid suspicion, or maybe that's the way they naturally behave, but being gay doesn't automatically mean that your behavior is going to cross gender stereotypes.

@captainphilbo I can attest to that. Ever see the Al Pacino movie, "Cruising"? Took place downtown NYC in the meat packing area on the west side. You wouldn't want to mess with these guys. I drove a taxi in college days and can speak from experience. As tough and scary as they were, overall they were nice guys. Just wanted a ride home to Brooklyn.

Biology and chemistry drives the neurology and social conditions finish the job !! Peer pressure .. dominance etc !! Competition elements. Some people break the mould.

I would say not all men do it because people in general have a slightly different genetic and chemical make up. For some those levels can be off, causing higher aggression and lower self esteem. Throw in familiar nurture hiccups and social/cultural demands and we have quite the recipe for a lovely disaster stew.

@AmyLF It's neurological largely... Sooooo it's dependant on the structure of your brains ... Ego control is centred in the rear left parietal lobe ... Empathy in the right frontal (I seem to recall) .. any difference in those area's has a multitude of effects.. For me in rear left parietal lobe lesion damage means my emotional memory content of self is less strong than of others.. So I tend to be a little less self driven than average.. By that i don't judge its just a fact of life .. Just the way I am "made" lol (or damaged). In someone with that alteration plus lesions on frontal area could have disastrous effects .. having lesions on just the frontal area again can have some quite strong effects that could lead to full psychopathy and such conditions ... once you lump those factors into the chemical soup all the answers are there .. In essence .. we aren't half as clever or controlled as we imagine we are

[sciencedaily.com]

[news.vanderbilt.edu]

what have foul mouths got to do with it? plenty of people have foul mouths and do not enslave, murder or rape anyone!

g

@genessa my fucks to give on this site are gone. I have no answer for you.

@djswan well, if you don't fucking know, i don't fucking know either.

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Yes I agree. Women's suffrage was only recently achieved in Western culture. I think men discriminate against women a way similar to racial discrimination. Making laws that are supposed to end discrimination (of any kind) may legally end it, but it will take many generations for the law's actuality to be realized in society.

@cava those laws are often twisted to protect those in power . giving plausible deniability while allowing the bigotry to continue but quietly. Laws only get us so far while those writing them are the same folks commiting the acts.

@Blindbird you hit this point right on, lady. If i was drinking I would cheer you on. Just as much as religion is a double standard so is the people behind the law the same thing.

@Maiasaura So, if the societal way to put the brakes on psychopathic tendencies of people with these kind of brain abnormality and the MAOA gene is a good childhood, then we should invest more in reducing poverty, which potentially exposes children to violence. And here we have the makings of a huge societal injustice. This brain/gene combination occurs in a percentage of the population regardless of socioeconomic status (SES). So, upper economic classes have it too, but their children are less likely to be exposed to violence. Lower SES populations are more likely to expose their chilldren to violence. That can make us unfairly believe that there are more psychopaths among the poor. The answer is: NO, among the poor, psychopahic tendencies are les likely to be stopped. And among the poor, the vicious circle perpetuates itself. We have to increase the poor population’s chances of protecting their children from violence; first, to help them out of that cycle, and second, to protect ourselves from being exposed to psychopaths that were not stopped on time.

Thank you for your input. I take it your are a neurologist?

@TheInterlooper Thank you.

Perhaps @Scrabblenut instead of women proving the Peter Principle they should firstly use the skills they avoid - those of parenting.

Parenting by teaching, succouring and enabling their children to successfully contribute to society. Skills they should have learnt from their mothers.

Then as @SKDeitch succinctly points out there will be no need for cloning and eugenics.

( from a male) This post shows great understanding!

Desmond Morris and his student Richard Dawkins both deal with this theme. In a pride of lions only about 10% of males get to reproduce. So the "hawk gene" gets stronger and stronger but has its limits. Two overly aggressive males will kill one another if nature didn't provide a stop gene. In wolves the loser has an irresistible urge to expose its neck. The victor then has an urge to urinate high on the nearest tree.

Sadly, in humans the natural stop gene often doesn't work anymore. When killing a group of civilians with a drone thousands of miles away, crying "uncle" doesn't work anymore.

Our Australian First Nations People have been in occupation for 50,000 years or more. They have not however managed to evolve into a single homogeneous tribe but are something like 800 competitive warring tribes with strict rules regarding inter marriage. These are people who never aspired to property until the arrival of white people.
I therefore suggest that your blame of the end of subsistence living being the start of the problem does not hold good.

I don't know what to say except thank you. Speaking as a woman it amazes me that you speak with such integrity in our defense.

Wikipedia: The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity, explores the controversial subject of stupidity. Stupid people are seen as a group, more powerful by far than major organizations such as the Mafia and the industrial complex, which without regulations, leaders or manifesto nonetheless manages to operate to great effect and with incredible coordination.

These are Cipolla's five fundamental laws of stupidity:

Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
The probability that a certain person (will) be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.
Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.
A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.
Corollary: a stupid person is more dangerous than a pillager.

As is evident from the third law, Cipolla identifies two factors to consider when exploring human behaviour:

Benefits and losses that an individual causes to him or herself.
Benefits and losses that an individual causes to others.

Graph with the benefits and losses that an individual causes to him or herself and causes to others.
By creating a graph with the first factor on the x-axis and the second on the y-axis, we obtain four groups of people, with an additional category either existing in its own right or drawn from the members of each previous category whose position with respect to both axes is least extreme:

Intelligent people (top right), who contribute to society and who leverage their contributions into reciprocal benefits
Helpless people (top left), who contribute to society but are taken advantage of by it (and especially by the "bandit" sector of it); note, however, that extreme altruists and pacifists may willingly and consciously (rather than helplessly) accept a place in this category for moral or ethical reasons
Bandits (bottom right), who pursue their own self-interest even when doing so poses a net detriment to societal welfare
Stupid people (bottom left), whose efforts are counterproductive to both their and others' interests
ineffectual people (center)
Cipolla further refines his definition of "bandits" and "naive people" by noting that members of these groups can either add to or detract from the general welfare, depending on the relative gains (or losses) that they cause themselves and society. A bandit may enrich himself more or less than he impoverishes society, and a naive person may enrich society more or less than he impoverishes himself and/or allows himself to be impoverished. Graphically, this idea is represented by a line of slope -1, which bisects the second and fourth quadrants and intersects the y-axis at the origin. The naive people to the left of this line are thus "semi-stupid" because their conduct creates/allows a net drain of societal welfare; some bandits may fit this description as well, although many bandits such as sociopaths, psychopaths, and non-pathological "jerks" and amoralists may act with full knowledge of the net negative consequences to a society that they neither identify with nor care about.

LOL. I haven't seen this movie in years. I like the Monty Python movies. My favorite is The Meaning of Life. Maybe some binge watching is in order soon.

As I like to point out, were are still, genetically, upper paleolithic hunter gatherers. Tribal people. That is why sports and nationalism are so important to so many.