Just feeling really angry at all the murder, assault, rape of females that goes on

[BornStroppy]

I told my husband how horrible it is being part of a gender that is constantly attacked, murdered, etc. He had never thought about it. He doesn´t need to. So we have Tia Sharp, the lady who disappeard in London, an old lady in Scotland murdered by son´s friend, another one murdered in a taxi in Birmingham - this is just over two weeks.

I have one son, pregnant again and just hope its another boy to be honest.

Why is it OK? Apart from raising gentlemen, what the hell can we do? As a gender, we give birth, nurture, raise, care for them, and as a gender we are the ones who suffer at their hands.

its so depressing.

Well these thoughts were prompted by a video on the BBC. A young smiling soldier sitting next to happy smilling his g/f discussing his uncontrollable anger and violence towards his g/f on return from Afghanistan. The report highlighted the problem.

I think places like Afghanistan, Vietnam, Somalia, Korea, WW2, Iraq Iran, etc still involve soldiers, the majority of whom are male, to kill each other in proximity. Possibly damaging them inside. As born out by the BBC video.

Is this the guardian article that's being talked about? The study it talks about is by Parity which is a men's rights activist group. They have a lovely website here. They appear to be big fans of Erin Pizzey and are really pissy about women's DV charities (set up and run by women) for not accommodating them.

So, I don't trust them as a source of an unbiased study. They say they have used the info from the BCS and I share SGM's scepticism here: how many of those women were acting in self defence, for example? Also, DP took part in the latest BCS and they do it in your home. It's conducted in a separate room from other family members, but there are probably a lot of victims who do not feel safe to talk about DV with only a thin door between them and their abuser. I think BCS stats are one of the best sources we have but I don't entirely trust their data.

LRD I don't think it's about being a 'trained soldier' I think it's about the act of killing another human, or doing them serious harm trying to.

And as I said earlier to grow up around a violent parent possibly increaces the chances of inheriting those traits, between wars.

Though tbh there have been wars going on constantly pretty much since WW2. more than one a generation and to various degrees.

I can see how being involved in combat can brutalise soldiers and fuck up their morals and impulse controls on return to civilian life. I think that's a very specific problem though. Male violence towards women is a much wider problem than that.

Thanks SGM, I will look.

I do think it's valid to ask about warfare and the effects on men - there's an old thread about this, but I can't remember the title so can't find it, does anyone else remember? Dittany was talking about the way compartmentalization is damaging.

I would say, though, mrgin - that's only western/US forces in those places are 'majority male'.

Sorry, I cross posted.

MrGin, but if it's the act of killing/trying to kill another human being that makes people violent, how would that work? Or you mean it's that in conjunction with the influence of violent parents?

I think I agree with plenty, I feel like this is a specific factor in a wider problem.

I'm not saying that to dismiss it though, I think it's a very real possibility.

SGM, that's really interesting.

SGM thanks for that post about the decompression time it's very interesting if tragic.

I'd just add I don't think it would be the only reason for male DV. I was reading about DV in Palastine and it mentioned that the hopelessness and poverty coupled with the cultural expectations caused some men to become violent in the home. Where as the women of course were on the recieving end. Another sad state of affairs.

SGM - I am really sorry about the horrible threats you received.

All the data I have seen says that men are more at risk of violent crime (apart from rape). Women are more at risk of DV, men are more at risk of homicide.

If there are statistics that say different then I am interested to see them. I had a search on google for "the majority victims of violence are women" and it returned "no results found"

In fact the first result it returned for the words without quote marks was this one from feminist journal ...which says " women are not the most common victims of violence, most violence is committed by men on other males."

SGM, yes, terrible threats against you, interesting about the decompression time also.

Messy -

Actually I wasn't disagreeing with meow. Humans are adaptable - both male violence/aggression and "nice guy" strategies can have evolutionary advantage. One doesn't disprove the other.

These discussions always seem to kick off. I think because people want to view evolution through a moral lens which just doesn't work. So for example when I said sexual selection by women played a part in promoting the "mr nice guy" gene (figuratively speaking) you say yay because that's a morally attractive story. But when meow says that sexual selection by females has played a role in promoting male aggression everyone says that is morally offensive.

Both are likely to be true. The point is you cant judge evolution by moral standards, and you can't see evolutionary reasons as justifications. They never can be.

another excellent post hymalaya, yes it's the moral lens thats the problem, it's allmost like explaining evolution to a group of creationists.

the fact is evolution has no plan, no one sat a desk and design it, you either get selected or you dont, live or die.

natural selection and sexual selection are forces millions of years old and brutaly right wing ( if i can describe them as having politics) and you cant cherry-pick the bits that fit into your 21st cenury liberal theories. they are what they are.
this doesnt mean they justify anything, especialy violent and criminal behavoir.

Meow and Himalaya, I don't think evolution has a moral lens. I just don't think it is a significant factor in the actions and decisions of individuals, say, the UK and that socialisation is a much bigger factor.

Himalaya, I'd like to go back to a previous post of yours that has been niggling at me - Someone upthread said that female mate choice can have had no significant impact on male evolution because of arranged marriage, rape etc... In evolutionary terms choosing the mate your parents choose for you is still mate selection.

It's taken me a while to work out - it's the word 'parents' that is bothering me because it implies that mothers and fathers have historically had an equal say in who their offspring pair up with. Is this really the case? My impression is that if you have a system where it's the women who are traded (and so are separated from their birth families), where wealth is accumulated along the male bloodline and where a man's daughters (and sons) and the woman/women who bore them are considered to be the man's property, the mothers are not going to have a huge say in choosing their daughters' mates - certainly not the final say.

I suppose this goes to the very heart of what is meant by the Patriarchy - rule by fathers. This still doesn't look like women doing the choosing to me.

Meow, nah, calling me a 21st century liberal isn't going to make me see the error of my ways. I'm not disagreeing with you because what was said was morally (I'm sure you in your mind are not blaming women at all) but because it's inaccurate.

Lets review what you said. Can't find the quote exactly because it was deleted. It was something like - women mate selection is responsible for male violence

But such a bold statement ignores the following

1. that the vast majority of men aren't violent
2. that female mate selection doesn't always mean a choiceful selection but a choice imposed (semantics but important) and
3. that being bigger isn't necessarily a way to attract mates but to be able to overpower them or to establish one's dominance as the only one able to gain access to mates. Which turns out to be not quite such a successful strategy because of female infidelity keeping other "types" of male continuing down the bloodline.

So, you see, things turn out to be slightly more complicated than your original statement.

Now, onto the moral justification part. Your accusation of my moral "cherry picking" is ignorant of the fact there are quite a few cherries in your basket. I know it's fashionable to adhere to this cynical, "I'm just telling it like it is", Thatcherite, survival of the fittest way of thinking. It's been fashionable for centuries but it ignores the actual truth.

Yes, everyone has had to survive, but being top-dog isn't always the way to survive, because both altruism and social cooperation have always had strong evolutionary advantages, as alluded to by Darwin himself. It's not all "right wing politics" (although obviously sometimes it is). The "dog eat dog" idea may be fashionable amongst right-wingers who like to pride themselves on being realistic, but the truth is they're not being realistic, because they're only partially correct.

This is completely off topic but the term 'top dog' keeps coming up and someone told me the other day where it came from.

In days of old to saw a fallen tree trunk up you needed a long saw with two people at either end, on pushing one pulling.

The person at the top was of course ' Top Dog'

The person underneath getting covered in saw dust was... 'Under Dog'

sorry, as you were...............................................

When we're getting into parents selecting their childrens' partners (and I agree, often fathers not mothers), I think surely we have moved a long way rather fast?

There were points in this discussion when it was suggested that, because some mammals have physical characteristics developed both for violence and for sexual display (eg., antlers), we should assume humans developed in the same way.

I still have a pretty big issue with this and I don't believe for one moment it is good science to make parallels without investigating. The 'investigating' step seems to be missing in this discussion, replaced with some talk of imagining cave men being violent.

So there seems to be a pretty big weak link here.

To then move from this picture where we're talking about sexual selection as it works in animals (including primitive humans), to societies with complex social rules about partner choice that exclude the two people who will actually end up having sex, seems an even huger and more tenuous leap to me.

Is there any animal group we can compare to, where the parents of animals select mates for their children?

My impression of human societies in which parents choose mates for their children is that parents do not often care about the very basic things that we'd expect sexual selection to be motivated by - eg., marrying a woman to a man long past the ideal age to father children is often common. Marrying a man to a woman near menopause is common. The marriage of children is common, leading often to such dangerous births that the mother is made infertile.

I find it highly improbable that the selection of partners for a child by its parents should follow the same evolutionary motivations, as selection of one partner by the other.

Oh, and of course evolution and morality are separate systems.

My issue is that this discussion of evolution has been wheeled out in response to a thread about feeling 'angry' and about moral responses - to then say 'oh, but we didn't mean it like that' is disingenuous.

no messy i diddnt say that, so your not arguing with me , so i dont feel the need to answer it because it's indefenceable, but then i wouldnt have said anything indefencable

You mean, you don't have an answer and you don't dare paraphrase what you said again because it's been torn to shreds.

i dont want to repeat it because it will probobly get deleated again

Probably best. If you can't avoid being offensive, don't say it.