Why do so many men turn bad...?

[Destinysdaughter]

Was just thinking about this, May be simplistic but was wondering why so many men end up being rapists, paedophiles, DV abusers, stalkers etc?

Is it something in their family background, being a victim of abuse themselves, conditioning, or something else?

Vis a vis middle class v working class men and likelihood of abuse, I would be really interested to see if there is any research done on power dynamics between the sexes by class.

Anecdata is not reliable, but I have nearly always found that when talking to men, middle class men are much more likely to have deep seated sexist assumptions about being better and knowing more, than women.

Working class men tend not to mansplain to me, even about things like cars (of which I know very little, but if you know what an alternator is and can refer to the fact that 2010 models had this problem, but since this is a 2009 model, it's probably not that, they're suitably impressed that you have some basic knowledge and they treat you like an equal, even if they know you're bull-shitting), whereas middle class men patronise the effing fuck out of me, even about stuff which I am much better informed about.

This may also be because when I want to, I talk posh and am what working class men call "educated". So there's a class issue there, which interplays with the sex issue. I think working class men face scepticism about their knowledge and competence about things outside their allotted role in life (so it's OK to know about cars or football, but not politics or nutrition or breastfeeding and research shows that working class graduates, male and female, are paid less and go less far in their career than middle class ones, even when they got the same grades) and I think that class thing in the UK, probably knocks off some of the entitlement when interacting with women who they assume are better educated than them.

Whereas middle class men tend to think that because they've got a degree and a high status career, they know fucking everything. Even though they know fuck all about anything outside the subject they studied and their careers.

I think we are all born with inherited good and bad genetic traits, but the nuture we receive as children determines, whether we are evil or good. But to complicate things further, there are no hard and fast rules, as to who it is triggered in. I personally think how empathic/sympthatic each of us are, determines what bad things, we are capable of doing.

I watched a very interesting documentary (ch 4) about psychopaths. Where 2 men had the psychopathic gene, but one had a loving and good upbringing, and turned out to be a hard working decent member of society who now has his own grown family. The family did say he was different to them though emotionally and in his thought processes.

The other was on death row for murder, had a horrid childhood.

I would like to believe males and females are born the same, with the same chances but research into paedophilia has shown males are slightly more likely to perpetrate these crimes statistically, most said they had been abused themselves but when offered a polygraph, a highl % admitted they lied to get a lesser sentence and had decent upbringing.

If you think back to prehistoric times, where men would have had to kill animals etc, it would make sense for them to be mentally more suited to the task at hand, whether this is genes or man evolved over time to be that way inclined is food for thought.

I don't believe men are more abusive and evil, I think the majority of bad men, know exactly what they are doing, and do it because they can. I think it's more down to power than gender.

HelenDenver I was totally wrong and you are entirely correct. Do you feel better now? I really don't care anymore.

Anyway, AskBasil so this would imply that class tops gender in terms of equality. Working class men defer to your class despite your gender. However, if you are a working class woman you are exploited by everyone, including middle class women.

Is this a specifically British way of dealing with gender inequality? Are rich Saudi women on equal terms to poor Saudi men, I would suggest not.

The working class boys I teach - white, black, Pakistani, seem to really struggle. They want to be good guys but have few positive role models. They struggle to communicate emotions and when they do they are often dismissed by their peers, male and female. I know some of the sweet lads I teach will go on to treat their wives and partners like crap but I still pity them.

And it is my DS, middle class white men, who are the ones who will opress the next generation of women. Hmmmmm

" I was totally wrong and you are entirely correct. "

I agree. Glad you see it that way.

"Do you feel better now?"

Always better if people are responding to actual posts not straw men, so yup.

I think you've taken my post to places it didn't go Moomin.

Yes, I think class trumps sex (not gender) in many instances. But not always of course. And yes, I suspect that this is a peculiarly British phenomenon, the class system is still so ingrained here and most British people don't notice it, it's like breathing for them.

I don't know how Saudi society works in this respect.

"And it is my DS, middle class white men, who are the ones who will opress the next generation of women. Hmmmmm".

Well, I guess that depends on how you bring him up. But middle class white men are the ones who make the law, organise the workplace, own the media, control healthcare... so yes, it's largely up to them how much oppression of women (and black people, and working class people) goes on.

This doesn't mean working class men don't oppress women; but we are talking about the specific issue of abusers, rapists, murderers etc. My point, is I'm not sure what the demographic breakdown in terms of class is, of abusive men. I suspect it's probably proportionate to class, but it may not be.

A comment like - "Women like looking after children "it's in their nature" would have been, rightly condemned.

I'm not so sure. I have always liked looking after children, well my children at any rate, and I'd be extremely surprised if there weren't some biological basis for that considering our very separate roles in evolution.

I can however totally understand why feminists have sought to deny the biological basis (if indeed they have) because it has been relentlessly used to minimise women's contribution to history, to keep them away from the public world and to restrict their options in life. Which is pathetic because it's perfectly possible to be nurturing and intelligent at the same time.

I also think that to say that biologically men tend towards being more violent is not to condemn men as bad at all. It is simply to acknowledge that in our evolutionary past aggression in certain circumstances was more adaptive for men than for women (an example being the tend and befriend response).

But the important thing about all that is not to run away with it, to recognise that there is a huge amount of overlap, a huge amount of variation which also has an evolutionary basis and to see that society has conflated a whole load of things that are not related and that really socialisation is where differences get exaggerated or minimised.

With respect to class, research into family annihilators suggests most of them are successful strong providers for their family with a stereotypical view of the role of the husband and father.
The characterisation of "successful strong provider" suggests to me a correlation with being middle/upper class.
It would be interesting to see what the class demographic of rapists/DV offenders. I know based on prison stats that a much higher percentage of convicted sex offenders are white than for other kinds of crime- I noticed it when I was looking at rape stats for another thread and thought it was interesting.
If rape/DV are about power and control, then maybe those men who feel entitled to that power are most likely to offend
www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23686913

This is interesting too and I'm going to pin it for next time there's a thread about why women shouldn't get drunk round men
sapac.umich.edu/article/196

Devi It would be interesting to look at crime statistics. However, I would also be interested to know if middle class women are less likely to report crimes to the police as they are shamed and humiliated?

Also, perpetrators of sexual crimes are mainly white, could this be because as most sex crimes happen within families some cultures have much stronger taboos on reporting?

I would assume it is harder to report and get a conviction against a 'successful respectable' provider than a bloke who works on the bins! Please forgive my example.

Basically, we don't know do we?

I would assume it is harder to report and get a conviction against a 'successful respectable' provider than a bloke who works on the bins! Please forgive my example.
Yes so would I which is why I was surprised that sex offenders were disproportionately white compared with other crimes and the population as a whole. Given the racial stereotypes that prevail about crime generally I suspect that black offenders would be more likely to be convicted and so white men are more likely to commit sex crimes. Why is that?
I would love a job where I could analyse all this stuff properly rather than using online info but it's in the patriarchies interests to not look to closely

I think one of the big holes is the lack of reporting. We can't analyse figures that don't exist.

In terms of white make sex offenders. I work with a lot of young people from the Pakistani and Bangladeshi community. Shame is a massive factor in their lives. Sexual shame can be overwhelming. For a child to report would be virtually impossible without leaving the whole community.
I have had female students sobbing in terror when they have lost their phone in case their family finds out what is on it. What they are terrified of their family finding is, to me, totally reasonable for a teenage girl.

Not a lot of reporting going on and I can only speculate about the amount of abuse.

It's a combo of nature and nurture. Male animals behave differently to female animal, so it will not surprise me at all if someone can produce some research that shows that children raised in an entirely gender neutral environment end up with, on average, slightly different traits depending on if they are girls or boys. Someone upthread made the point that the biological role of women probably predisposes us to be more nurturing.

Doubling down on this is the role of society. DH nearly lost his shit at a swimming pool once, when a stroppy little boy barged one of our DDs out of the queue for the water slide and his mother, rather than sweeping him round to the end of the queue with a few admonishing words, just said, 'Oooh, boys will be boys.' DD1 had a real moment of glory at primary school, and I was summoned in to be told that 'it wasn't behaviour appropriate for a Y5 girl' - as if WAS okay, or at least understandable, for a Y5 boy.

(And, as an aside, think of the shit girls get given to play with. My DDs were not impressed when small by the familial outlawing of Barbie, but they now say, 'God, I'm glad you never let us play with that crap'.)

So... if you get a baby boy who is particularly influenced by his testosterone, and lives in the sort of environment where the adult women are skivvies and the males the lords of all creation, it's not going to be surprising if he has an overwhelming sense of entitlement and then, if his girlfriend, partner or wife doesn't toe the line or act the role, she ends up getting decked, or stalked or manipulated with threats of violence.

Boys will be boys. Yes, they will be, but when that involves them acting like anti-social little shits, they should be gently corrected (and sent to the end of the waterside queue).

*waterslide

That was long. Sorry.

"it will not surprise me at all if someone can produce some research that shows that children raised in an entirely gender neutral environment end up with, on average, slightly different traits depending on if they are girls or boys. "

There's no such thing as a gender neutral environment.

People with higher levels of testosterone tend to have higher sex drives - this applies to women also, although the levels are different. If you have a deviant aspect to your sexual expression it is possibly easier to control if your testosterone level is low.
Add to this the fact that people with high testosterone levels are men - they tend to be bigger and stronger than women and are socialised to think they are entitled to take what they want. It is not surprising that sex offenders tend to be male.

And in hunter-gatherer societies both men & women kill animals for food.

Because they are Psychos? The same as women who become child abusers, stalkers, murderers etc. Some people are just bad. I know of people who had brilliant role models growing up, yet they turned out selfish and totally lacking empathy. Myself, I had a crap upbringing. I haven't repeated history with my family though. I think some people genuinely lack a balance of self awareness and empathy.

There's no such thing as a gender neutral environment.
Look, I can hope, okay?

Whereas middle class men tend to think that because they've got a degree and a high status career, they know fucking everything. Even though they know fuck all about anything outside the subject they studied and their careers

Yup I know some men like this.
Not just middle class ones either- the overconfident upper middles that I work for are totally jaw dropping for this, and based on zero normal life experience.

The thing is that while probably not so much can be done about the "just bad" / psycho people, there are a large proportion of crimes that are perpetrated by people who are quite "normal". These are the crimes that can be reduced, and we see being reduced in different types of societies.

On whether levels differ through different cuts of society - I think probably not. I do think that if you have a larger house and more to lose and a "behind closed doors" upbringing then it's easier to hide things / not have the neighbours etc notice. On race / religion / whatever, then any differences IMO are down to the society / prevailing attitudes in that community - the fact that in the UK the vast majority of sex offenders are white - the vast majority of men are white.

Although - I think in the US family annihilation and mass shootings are almost always white men? This may well be to do with entitlement / feelings related to what position in society should be vs what they feel it is.

"The same as women who become child abusers, stalkers, murderers etc. Some people are just bad."
How depressing. Why do you think there are so many more "just bad" men than women?

"Look, I can hope, okay?"

Sure. But in the context of postulating an experiment to determine whether difference between females and males are innate or a product of their social environment, the fact that a gender neutral environment is impossible is highly relevant.

There is such a thing as male aggression. You can observe it in animals. If you keep small pets such as mice, it is usually recommended to keep two females, as the males will fight among each other. It is likely that such a tendency towards violence exists in human males, too.
(Yes, it is encouraged by society, but at one point, society was invented, right? They didn't just throw a coin and decide to bring boys up to be violent.)

In humans, yes, childhood does play a role, but it is not like all male criminals had an oh so terrible childhood, it is more like the parents did not, or could not, make enough of an effort to teach them that aggression is not okay. (If you live in an environment where all other parents teach their sons to be aggressive, it's a lot of work to try to counteract that - it is like the pinkification of girls, only, you know, much more dangerous and horrid.)
Boys can be perfectly pampered only children and still turn out horrible - there are studies on criminals reporting less abusive childhoods if you use a lie detector, so ....

Society needs to be more aware of the problem of male violence. Programs that aim to tackle the problem have often been rather successful - and this is not 24-hour-intervention, it is things with social workers that takes perhaps a few hours a week.

Men do have a natural tendency to turn bad, but that's a) not an excuse, they should go to prison if they're criminal, period, and b) it is not something we just have to accept. It can be counteracted.

I think its self-evident that men in general are more aggressive than women - there's much to be said as to the pros and cons of testosterone.

Vestal There is such a thing as male aggression. You can observe it in animals. If you keep small pets such as mice, it is usually recommended to keep two females, as the males will fight among each other.

... and if you keep two rabbits, and I think guinea pigs too, the most likely pairing that will work is male-female, followed by male-male, with femal-female being the most likely to fight (this is with them all neutered). Unneutered females in particular are the most aggressive.

I might not be making much sense because I have raging PMT including feeling confused and angry but it just occurred to me that women have these kind of hormonal things and we don't go around being aggressive to people although I feel like it right now.