The animal inside men and violence

Abstract

In societies around the world people seek scientific confirmation of widespread preconceptions about men and aggression, and we find ourselves riding a perpetual motion hamster wheel of misinformation and cant. Not infrequently, certain populations of men— poor men, African men, Mexican men, Wall Street men, rural men, urban men—are tagged as especially prone to violence, because they are purportedly less able and less intent on controlling their supposed primordial male urges to act out hostilities. Using examples including mass murders in the United States, World War I in Europe, the gender binary at the Vatican, and male suicidality around the world, we examine popular beliefs about men and violence in a range of cross-cultural contexts that are couched in terms of nature and animality (and sometimes hormones, Y chromosomes, and evolution) to analyze more closely the components of gender-based violence and to question the everyday language used to describe presumed inherent qualities of maleness shared by humans and other animals.