Are these two statements inconsistent with each other?

[ScienceRoar]

I have found myself saying both of the following statements, at different times. Is it possible to reconcile them? Or am I being a hypocrite?

1. Gender is a social construct; there's no such thing as a 'blue brain' and a 'pink brain'
2. Males commit more violence than females.

Gender is a social construct yes. Males commit more crimes for a number of factors including social conditioning.

The gender construct (men are tough, men don't express emotion, women are nice, women avoid confrontation) is a huge contributor to the fact that men commit more violence.

So no.

Sorry, what follows is absolutely epic.

TL:DR - "pink" and "blue" brains makes it sound like there are discrete types, but even if there are slight differences on average at a population level those differences are tiny. You can't look at a brain scan or a set of cognitive test results and say "that one came from a woman." Social explanations make much more sense. But physical difference does play a role, because you don't just have to want to commit violent crime, you have to be able to - and if you are systematically at a physical advantage (bigger, stronger, more muscular) you will be able to. There will then be a social feedback loop which amplifies this difference in ability.

Epic post (with references and pictures) follows :

Pink brains and blue brains (i.e. discrete different brains for each sex) are not the same as saying there may be slight differences in the distributions of some features of brains between the male population and the female population.

However where such differences have been observed (see picture) they have d-values well below 0.5 and - because studies of brain development indicate that the brain is incredibly plastic we have no way of knowing whether the tiny differences in some cognitive measures we can measure are down to nature or nurture.

In any case, even if there are such differences, picking an outlier in the distribution and saying to a woman (e.g.) "you have male mathematical ability" makes no more sense than going up to a tall woman and saying "you have male height". There's no cognitive test measure or MRI feature that can be used to sort a random sample of brains unequivocally into "pink" and "blue" brains (any more than you could use height to sort people into "pink" and "blue" heights - incidentally, the d-value for height is much greater than 0.5 - much closer to the d=2 graph in that figure). (Neuro-scientist Lise Elliot's book Pink Brain, Blue Brain is very good on this).

What we do know from prison statistics is that men commit about 90% of violent offences and 98% of sexual offences. These numbers suggest to me that if you were able to graph this as a kind of probability density function of "seriousness of level of violence displayed", you'd end up with a male and female distribution with a high d-value (unlike the d-value for cognitive differences).

This could be down to different distributions of brain features at a population level (but even then we couldn't disentangle nature from nurture) but given that the differences in cognitive performance between sexes largely overlap (small d-value) whereas the distributions in "propensity to commit violent/sexual crime" are very different between the two sexes, this is likely to be only a tiny part of the explanation.

A more plausible biological explanation (plausible as a hypothesis worthy of testing, which is a million miles from being a done deal) might be that we know sex hormones also act as neurotransmitters, and possibly testosterone plays a role. However, as Cordelia Fine's book Testosterone Rex suggests, that's actually a massively over-simplified and flawed hypothesis.

So for my money the biggest explanation is sociological. I gloss it as "means, motive, opportunity." The means comes down to being physically stronger, so you can dominate other people. The opportunity comes from the whole patriarchal set-up (think for instance of the way rape trials are set up, where the victim is merely a witness, not the complainant, so doesn't have her own solicitor - and the very low conviction rates). And motive - usually gain of some sort.

Behaviour is incredibly dependent on social context. Anthropologist Kate Fox makes the point (in This Racing Tribe ) that the typical audiences for horse racing and football are drawn from the same demographic, and often even made up of the very same individuals - typically white working class and lower middle class males. They both involve all-day drinking, they both involve a competitive edge, they may also involve quite large (relative to income) sums of money being bet on outcomes. All the ingredients are there in both situations for the men in question to become overly emotionally involved and agressive about the outcome. Yet one and the same group of young men will typically behave themselves well at the racecourse, yet get into fights over football. Football has a violence problem, racing does not, and it's down to social context.

Male violence is part social (I have a right to do this) and part biological (I have the strength to do this).

I don't see a problem with both of these being true and both contributing to the problem of male violence.

I think this taps into the big nature/nurture debates.

Gender is a social construct, sex is a biological fact. Why are males more violent? Socialisation? Testosterone? The interface between both.

Excellent post, thank you Fermat

Is it socialisation that means many (not all) men think about sex (ie having it) much more than many (not all) women do? Or is that a biological difference? if so is that a function of hormones?

We constantly underestimate the effect that socialization and peer pressure has on our behaviour. Unfortunately it's so difficult to measure objectively.

This is a bit of a hole that feminists understndably dug.

Women were excluded from a multitude of things due to our supposed inferiority. We were not allowed to vote, own property. We were property. Children belonged to their fathers. We were shut out of systems of power, commerce. We were not allowed to compere in lots of sports stuff like FA essentially banning women's football when it was a really popular sport with crowds coming along, boston marathon, of course parliament, you know all that stuff.

So our argument has to be, we can do what men can do. Our brains are not inferior. We can think.We do so maths, science, we are rational, we should be allowed to vote, to be in business, to be in parliament & etc.

Of course for that - for all of that - it never really occured that anyone would say OHO so you say there are literally no differences between men and women >> the differences being so self evident that no-one really mentioned them, they were not on the table. So sports were separated by sex.We were now allowed to compete, the idea of playing the men was never on the table as it was self evident it wouldn't work. For example.

The "OHO so you say women and men are the same" started coming out from smug men and MRAs however many years back usually citing the different numbers of sets at wimbledon and saying women should play rugby against men and HA see how you like equality now.

So the message that was needed >> we can do anything men can do (but actually we never meant that stuff > and no-one took it to mean that stuff because it was obvious) to get the RIGHTS that we needed to be at least theoretically equal in society was right for the time.

Now we need a different message because when feminsts essentially said "we can do anything men can do, we should be treated equally" we didn't ever mean that men aren't much more violent than women which they undoubtedly are (nature / nurture) nor did we want things like that prick thingy davis (?) the MRA on the equalities committee demands, such as more women being sent to prison so the numbers match the men, in the name of "equality".

This also applies with a return to valuing things like pregnancy / maternity ect - previously the only way to get our stuff was to pretend that these had no impact that they were trivial that they would not "hold us up" in a man's world, otherwise we would still be locked out. Few decades now these areas of specifically women's experience and the rights we need around them have been flagged more BUT it suits commence capitalism to pretend these things should not prevent women working for more than 2 seconds etc etc.

It's all a bit complicated.

The fact that women are as capable of thinking and working and driving and voting and stuff as men

Does not mean that we are exactly the same as them

The self evident truths that no-one bothered mentioning are now being challenged (women and men should play sport agianst each other. sex segregated spaces are sexist to women and oppress us. women are just as violent as men and commit just as many sex offences) and so we need ot challenge back.

Luckily we have facts on our side so that is great.

I can see that men are a bit pissed off that we have invaded and "taken" all their stuff - while we still demand some things just for us. But, they're missing the historical context, the fact of systemic oppression of women and girls for centuries, the facts of our biology, and the fact that men present a genuine danger to pretty much everyone, but expeically to those smaller / weaker / more vulnerable than them and most men are heterosexual so girls and women are more at risk.

etc etc etc

I always seperate gender (imposed upon us by society) from biological sex (undeniable physical differences) so certain things are clearly down to gender such as lipstick, the burka, the colour pink and other fashions, whereas some things are obviously biological, women are the child bearers, men have larger feet and more facial hair, men are stronger physically etc.

Wrt male violence and certain other areas like women being "more nurturing" there are probably a complex combination of factors that are both socially learned and physical. As a society we need to address male violence as a matter of urgency. We need to re-educate males. If it is indisputably found that male hormones such as testosterone and being larger means that men are naturally inclined to violence, then they need to be trained out of their violence. If it is socially conditioned then we need to stop conditioning them to violence.

FermatsTheorem brilliant post, thank you.

Testosterone has a massive role in this - surely?

Trained labradors commit less aggressive attacks than untrained labradors.

Training is a social construct. Behaviour can be influenced by environment. Environment can change the brain.

This is why London cabbies can physically change their brain structure by doing 'the knowledge'.

Men are more physically violent. The only way to ascertain for certain how much of that is innate is to remove ALL the external influences of society, and see what remains. (Nice dream)

In nature Vs nurture, the thing you can modify is nurture.

In essence OP, the two statements are not inconsistent at all.

I agree that was an epic post Fermat

Great responses, thank you. Fermat and nothing on telly, thanks for giving up your afternoons to reassure me.

Not hypocritical because of the biological element, testosterone and the opportunity to commit violent crime due to social constructs, gender being the main one.

I find reading stuff that has been written by females who have decided to take testosterone. They believe that their new-found sense of assertiveness and confidence comes from their chance to finally ‘live as their authentic self’ but it seems obvious to me that it is a very basic drug effect (probably also acting as a placebo to cause a sort of ‘pink cloud’ effect similar to the rush alcoholics get when newly sober). It’s like any other drug - it’s going to have an effect - people take all sorts of street drugs for exactly that reason. And sure - if a drug makes you feel a something that you enjoy (like assertive and powerful) you are going to want more of it.
I’m interested into the research of effects of testosterone on women (not really the physiological - afaik it can have adverse effects on the female reproductive system and hysterectomy is recommended after a certain number of years, it can also have adverse effects on other organs - but I’m interested in behavioural and social effects, and interrogating the self-reported personality effects in women taking it. I do think it might lead to some interesting hormones/ behaviour stuff. (In my head there are links to previous use of bromide to control unwanted behaviours in specific settings lol). It’s ethically a minefield, but fascinating.

Have you read "testosterone rex" mamaryllis?

I need to get around to that soon

I’ve ordered it. My very tiny local indie bookstore loves me