Under-estimating female violence

There is more of it than is often presented.

In my post on how that we are embodied strategic actors is enough to generate sex-differentiated patterns of behaviour, I cited a Swedish study, that looked at all convictions in Sweden for violent crimes in the period 1973-2004 by folk born in 1958-1980. I used this to elucidate differences in male and female patterns of violence.

Violence—including domestic violence—tends to be highly class-based and varies dramatically by locality and ethnicity. While I noted in the previous post that one in 14 men are likely to be violent, that pattern is not remotely evenly distributed across society, either socially or by locality.

Source: Live-playing Andy Capp.

As a friend notes, the traits that lead to violence overlap greatly with the traits that lead to, and entrench, poverty.

High discount rates [.i.e., short time horizons]. Poor impulse control. Lousy executive function. Inability to understand in which direction causality flows.

Once again, we run into a serious “people unlike me” problem. What works fine in an affluent area may very much not in a poor locality: for instance, (not) keeping biological males out of female toilets and change rooms.

There is, however, reason to believe that the Swedish study under-estimates female propensity for violence, due to under-convicting for domestic violence, particularly female-perpetrated domestic violence.

Domestic violence

There is a lot of nonsense written about intimate partner violence (IPV). This is especially so from a feminist perspective, where the self-righteous collective narcissism of career feminism is well on display.

First, there is the writing out of domestic violence of violence against children, so that domestic violence becomes equated with intimate partner violence. This eliminates the area of violence that women are as likely to commit as men and in which women are clearly not victims but perpetrators. Indeed, the more helpless the child, the more likely the perpetrator of violence against them is female.

Second, there is the a priori insistence on a gendered perspective of males as perpetrators and females as victims. To which is added—when confronted with evidence of female-perpetrated domestic violence—much excuse-making that refers back to male behaviour and male power. This is all in accordance with typical feminist narcissism, whereby if something bad happens to women, it is men’s fault and if women do something bad, it is still men’s fault—but if men do something bad, it is never women’s fault.

There is the further difficulty that various studies and survey instruments in various ways presume the male-aggressor/female-victim pattern, so they prime responses congruent to that presumption while suppressing or excluding non-congruent ones. A review paper on intimate partner violence notes that:

Empirical research that addresses many of the issues listed above, typically finds mutual aggression the norm in dating and marital relationships. It also finds women are frequently the initiators of this aggression. In cases of one sided assaults women are more likely to be the perpetrator, even when using data from arrest sheets. Research has found that women’s use of IPV increased the frequency and severity of men’s IPV, and mutual aggression increased the likelihood of injury for both men and women.

Women are not a superior form of Homo sapien, hence much feminist “scholarship” is nonsense because it implicitly or explicitly presumes that they are.

The same study noted that comprehensive review of evidence found that:

Findings showed either sexual-symmetry or slightly more female to male IPV to be the norm across western society, but in more patriarchal societies IPV was more likely to be perpetrated by men than women. This suggests that a gendered conceptualization of IPV may have some explanatory power in international comparisons, but not in modern western nations like the US and Europe.

Moreover:

More, empirically rigorous research has found little support for the primacy of self-defensive explanations for women’s IPV, particularly for those women who are violent towards non-violent male partners, or lesbian IPV. Rather, such studies have highlighted alternative motivations for female IPV, such as control, anger, jealousy, and to get through to their partner.

Furthermore:

…the current empirical literature suggests that both men and women use physical aggression in their intimate relationships. Additionally, the similarity and complexity of risk profiles of men, women, and couples who perpetrate IPV provides little support for a patriarchal or gendered conceptualization of IPV.

That there is a large overlap between intimate partner violence and maltreatment of children—which men and women are equally likely to perpetrate—reinforces this. Even in the case of intimate terrorism—where one partner systematically terrorises the other—wider studies have found:

…no support for sex-differences in classification, that is men and women are equally likely to be Intimate Terrorists

Getting the facts right is vital to having effective responses. As the study notes:

Research consistently finds that mutual violence is not only the most common form of IPV but is also likely to result in the highest levels of injury.

Women are not a superior form of Homo sapien.

Patriarchy, real and imagined

This highlights another reason much feminist “scholarship” is garbage: it treats contemporary Western societies as patriarchal and/or male-centred. As the above study notes:

… current research shows normative beliefs in Western societies are chivalrous, that is they are more accepting of female violence toward male partners than vice versa.

Moreover:

Despite the wealth of evidence that exists showing similar rates of male and female perpetration, the majority of universal campaigns typically advertise women (and sometimes children) as the unidirectional victims of male IPV.

The pervasiveness in public policy, in public advocacy, and in much of academic scholarship, of the gendered view of domestic violence with men as perpetrators and women as victims in defiance of the evidence demonstrates just how not patriarchal Western societies are and how much the (spurious) claim of patriarchy is used as a weapon for social leverage.

This lack of patriarchy evolved out of a very particular set of traditions. Roman civilisation was far less patriarchal than the other major civilisations of Eurasia. As was the medieval Christian civilisation that succeeded it. This started with insisting on single-spouse marriage.

Polygyny does very bad things to the status of women, starting with elite women competing for prospects for their children, so do not operate as social partners or deputies for their (shared) husbands. The few exceptions are the rare cases where a woman was the only wife or a daughter was the designated heir. Moreover, polygyny creates an underclass of lower status males locked out of the marriage market, leading to high rates of violence, often explicitly directed at seizing women.

Conversely, it was entirely normal in the Roman Empire and Christian Europe for wives—in the latter case, up to and including Queens (or sometimes Queen-Mothers)—to act as the deputies of their husband (or son), running things while he was away. This extended to daughters being the heirs of their father, in the absence of sons, supplanting nephews.

Hence Russia had more ruling female monarchs in a single century—Catherine I (r.1725-1727), Anna (r.1730-1740), Elizabeth (r.1741-1762), Catherine II (r.1762-1796)—than Arab Islam did in 1400 years. In all that time there were only three female rulers: Sitt al-Mulk (r.1021-1023), who was regent for her nephew; Asma Bint Shihab al-Sulayhiyya (r.1047-1087); Arwa al-Sulayhi (r.1067-1138). All of whom were Shia and only the last two had the khutbah publicly proclaim their sovereignty.

There were other female rulers in Islam, but none of them were Arab—they almost all came from Steppe or Islander Islam. China managed precisely one ruling Empress—Wu Zetain (r.690-705)—in over two thousand years, though there were various Dowager Empresses who were effectively rulers.

Other aspects of the Roman synthesis sanctified by Christianity—no cousin marriage, female consent for marriage, testamentary rights for women—also made Roman and medieval Christian far less patriarchal than other Eurasian civilisations. There is a reason that women’s liberation and feminism arose out of Western, and no other, civilisation.

The simplest definition of patriarchy—the presumption that authority is male—simply does not apply in contemporary Western societies. If you treat such societies as patriarchal, you are either profoundly ignorant, deluded or lying. Hence all the feminist scholarship operating off that premise is self-righteous nonsense. Hence also the perpetuation of a series of myths about domestic violence that are destructive to good policy and clinical practice.

This feeds into the wider problem of public proscription against discussing bad female behaviour, particularly female-typical bad behaviour. If such behaviour cannot be publicly discussed, there will be more of it.

Feminism operates off the same premise that so much contemporary left-progressivism does—everyone who seriously disagrees is stupid, ignorant or evil. Which is classic narcissism. This includes “explanations” why so many women are not feminist or do not vote as feminists want them too—either such women do not understand their own interests (i.e., are stupid, deluded or ignorant) or are bigots (i.e., are evil).

Suppressing dominance

In the embodied strategic actors post, I went through the evolutionary consequences of being a bipedal tool-user, leading to biologically expensive children and systematic transfer of risks away from child-rearing and transfer of resources to child-rearing. The next crucial stage in our evolution—apart from the systematic use of fire, which mainly further pushed along the above patterns—was the systematic suppression of dominance behaviour.

This had two elements: our communication abilities becoming good enough that the beta males systematically combined to kill off the alpha males. That is, our proactive aggression—intended violence—operating in coalitions, selected against reactive aggression—violence as direct response to the behaviour of another. As they use different brain circuits, our proactive aggression—we are the equally most proactive aggressive ape, along with chimpanzees—was mobilised to select against reactive aggression. The result is that we are the least reactively aggressive ape.

Which makes it much easier for us to cooperate. This is why we are both the only surviving species of genus Homo but also the most gracile (delicate-featured) species of the genus. We do not need robust faces to ward off blows, but we do need to be able to readily express emotion. This is even more so with human females, who have more gracile faces than human males.

The other part of suppressing dominance was various levels of social pressure against it—shaming and shunning behaviour extending, in extremis, to simply killing the would-be dominants. The first part is primatologist Richard Wrangham’s hypothesis about what makes Homo sapiens, Homo sapiens. The second is based on the anthropology of foragers, particularly the work of Christopher Boehm.

The suppression of dominance led to the development of two distinctively human forms of status: prestige and propriety.

Prestige is status, admiration, from doing things which are clever, skilled, or risky. A military hero has prestige, but so does a great scientist, a popular singer, a sports star or whatever.

The Great Enrichment was fundamentally based on scientific and technological discovery—and the commercial exploitation of both—coming to have high prestige. Folk (mainly men) engaged in behaviour whose social returns were much greater than the private income they received because there was so much prestige involved.

Prestige has been—particularly before the contemporary era—male dominated. Human males have been in the position to engage in the risky or obsessive behaviour that generates prestige far more than human females, who stereotypically have had bubs in tow.

Prestige is why there have never been any matriarchal human societies. (There absolutely are matriarchal families, but no matriarchal societies.) For a society to be matriarchal, authority has to be presumptively female. The existence of a form of status—prestige—that is male-dominated precludes generating the presumption that authority is female.

Propriety is status, admiration, from adhering to the norms of a society. It is hard to gain propriety. It is much easier to lose it.

For the reverse side of propriety is stigma: the loss of status from being seen as failing to adhere to proper behaviour. Propriety is less female-dominated than a focus of female concern. It is both a way women can seek to have a supportive social environment and compete without immediate physical risks.

Stigma is also social leverage. It is social aggression. It is social/moral concern. It is a classic female weapon.

Relational aggression—destruction of people’s reputations and social connections—is recurrently a form of aggression by human females. It is aggression that can hide from itself that it is aggression. If you are the physically weaker sex, stereotypically with bubs in tow, that is obviously a huge advantage.

That hiding from itself extends to the person wielding it. Only a fraction of our cognition is conscious. To consciously lie imposes a lot of extra cognitive friction. The right sort of self-deception enables much more cognitively-coherent sincerity in one’s actions. It makes wielding moral/social concern as a form of aggression much more likely to be effective. This is much of the basis of the self-deluding claim that cancel culture does not exist: it is just moral concern, social concern.

Self-deceptive rationalising moralisers

Male-typical aggression—which is often implicitly or explicitly physical—tends to be quite overt. Indeed, if it is sufficiently so, it can work without the physical risks of actual violence. Female-typical aggression, aggression by the physically weaker sex, who so often has had bubs in tow, seeks to hide—including from itself—that it is aggression.

The two great wielders of stigma are women and clerisies. Academe has been turning itself into a modern secular clerisy, a feminising secular clerisy. Hence the use of prejudice terms in scholarly abstracts has soared. Which is to say, the use of stigmatising terms of moral abuse and relational aggression has soared. This pattern has been replicated in mainstream media.

Source.

As a social strategy, it has generated much social leverage, spreading through institutions. It has also massively undermined the social standing of both academe and mainstream media. As the use of moral-abuse terms in scholarly abstracts have soared, the popular standing of higher education has collapsed while mainstream media audience/readership has been shrinking.

What is known as “wokery”—that is, the popularisation of Critical Theory that involves casting various deemed-oppressed groups as sacred—is many things.

One of the things it is the suppression of male-dominated prestige in favour of a female-dominated, stigmatising, socially-imperial, propriety.

A key moment in this was Shirtgate in November 2014. A scientist had led a team that had done the very, very clever thing of landing a probe on a comet. That had never been done before.

In his moment of triumph he was publicly humiliated by a bunch of self-righteous harpies—who we can be absolutely confident will never do anything as clever or useful—over his choice of shirt. (A shirt which, it transpired, was a gift from a female friend.)

As Coddled Affluent Professional observed on X/Twitter (October 10, 2024):

Wokeness is a liberatory movement for midwits.

It gives them *moral authority* over people who are smarter and more talented than they are.

The power to scold is a major reason why wokeness became so popular.

Take feminist garbage “scholarship” based on the explicit or implicit presumption of women as a superior form of Homo sapien—so the use of a stigmatising propriety to suppress inconvenient facts. Add in the substituting of an intersectional moral caste system (aka DEI) for appointment by capacity or competence.

We can then see just how corrosive of institutional health and public discourse this substitution of reality-discovering prestige for a stigmatising propriety—based on the falsehoods of social constructionism—can be. Social media has enabled the shaming and shunning behaviour that originally manifested within the women’s movement to pollute public discourse, and degrade the operation of institutions, across the developed democracies, especially in the Anglosphere.

This social constructivism both denies our evolutionary heritage and origins while, in a perverse way, manifesting it. As I also noted in the original post, the reality that we are embodied strategic actors demolishes much nonsense about human behaviour being “socially constructed”.

Yes, of course, that we are highly social beings living in complex societies affects our behaviour. The social orders we live in create constraints and possibilities that we react to and so shape our choices. But we react to them in the context of being embodied strategic actors where the biological differences in our bodies by sex also create differing constraints and possibilities, so lead to differing responses.

We remain embodied strategic actors, responding to the constraints and possibilities before us. Neither sex is a superior form of Homo sapien to the other. They are, however, biologically different, and that matters.

References

Books

Joyce F. Benenson with Henry Markovits, Warriors and Worriers: the Survival of the Sexes, Oxford University Press, 2014.

Fatima Mernissi, The Forgotten Queens of Islam, University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson, The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life, Oxford University Press, 2018.

Will Storr, The Status Game: On Social Position And How We Use It, HarperCollins, 2022.

Robert Trivers, The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life, Basic Books, [2011] 2013.

Articles, etc

Christopher Boehm, “Egalitarian Behavior and Reverse Dominance Hierarchy”, Current Anthropology, Vol. 34, No.3. (Jun., 1993), 227-254 (with Comments by Harold B. Barclay; Robert Knox Dentan; Marie-Claude Dupre; Jonathan D. Hill; Susan Kent; Bruce M. Knauft; Keith F. Otterbein; Steve Rayner and Reply by Christopher Boehm).

L. Dixon, & N. Graham-Kevan, 'Understanding the nature and etiology of intimate partner violence and implications for practice and policy,' Clinical Psychology Review, 2011, vol. 31, no. 7, 1145-55. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21851805/

O¨rjan Falk, Ma¨rta Wallinius, Sebastian Lundstro¨m, Thomas Frisell, Henrik Anckarsa¨ter, No´ra Kerekes, ‘The 1% of the population accountable for 63% of all violent crime convictions,’ Social Psychiatry & Psychiatric Epidemiology, 2014, 49, 559–571. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3969807/.

Jo Freeman, ‘Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood,’ Ms magazine, April 1976, pp. 49-51, 92-98. https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/trashing.htm

Chris D. Frith, ‘The role of metacognition in human social interactions,’ Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 2012, 367, 2213–2223.

Herbert Gintis, Carel van Schaik, and Christopher Boehm, ‘Zoon Politikon: The Evolutionary Origins of Human Political Systems’, Current Anthropology, Volume 56, Number 3, June 2015, 327-353.

Emily Hurren, Carleen Thompson, Brian Jenkins, April Chrzanowski, Troy Allard, Anna Stewart, ‘Who are the Perpetrators of Child Maltreatment?,’ Report to the Criminology Research Advisory Council Grant: CRG 18/13-14, May 2018. https://www.aic.gov.au/sites/default/files/2020-05/18-1314-FinalReport.pdf

Harold Robertson, ‘Complex Systems Won’t Survive the Competence Crisis,’ Palladium: Governance Futurism, June 1, 2023. https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/06/01/complex-systems-wont-survive-the-competence-crisis/

Daniel Seligson and Anne E. C. McCants, ‘Polygamy, the Commodification of Women, and Underdevelopment,’ Social Science History (2021), 46(1):1-34. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/354584406_Polygamy_the_Commodification_of_Women_and_Underdevelopment

Jordan E. Theriault, Liane Young, Lisa Feldman Barrett, ‘The sense of should: A biologically-based framework for modeling social pressure’, Physics of Life Reviews, Volume 36, March 2021, 100-136.

Richard W. Wrangham, ‘Two types of aggression in human evolution,’ PNAS January 9, 2018, Vol.115, No.2, 245–253.