Posts Tagged ‘sport’
a world turned….
Australia knocks Denmark out of the World Cup – time for a hug
Often, in my usually brief discussions with women on the concept of a ‘bonobo humanity’, I get, first of all, ‘What are bonobos?’, and second, ‘But we’re not bonobos’, and third, ‘This female [boss/politician/influencer] was a disaster’. So, in this post, I want to write about this third response.
A thought experiment. Men are banned from running for political office of any kind, and also from voting. And, somehow the world’s richest people – say the top twenty, are all women (though they may not all be multi-billionaires – it just might be a more sharing human society). In other words, forget about female x or y who’s reached the top in an essentially patriarchal society. Think more about a world in which care and concern, and collaboration, and yes a bit more of lovey-dovey sex, has become the norm, and men are mostly happy about not having to make all (or any of) the decisions.
Okay, perhaps that’s going a bit far, but if you consider that the bonobo world is in some ways an inversion of the chimp world, then it might be worth considering what would be an inversion of the current human world, horrendously complex though it obviously is. And for me the obvious transformation would involve gendered power relations.
Do I see it happening? Not globally, of course, but human society is both highly fragmented and yet more inter-connected, technology-wise, than ever before. The Scandinavian countries, observed from my distance, which is about as far away as one can get, seem the most likely pioneers of this New Order, with Sweden, the Netherlands and Denmark ranking as the least machismo nations by some August Body or other (what’s the female version of machismo? – apparently we’re still working on it), but there are any number of nations vying for the title of most patriarchal.
Perhaps we need to look at what the ingredients need to be, to bake a female-dominated society. One ingredient would surely be female solidarity. Here’s a nice solidarity statement that says all the right things:
Women supporting women is a powerful concept that helps foster success and empowerment. Women are more successful in all facets of life when they support one another. Building a community or a tribe of supportive women boosts morale and creates opportunities for growth and collaboration that lead to a more harmonious and inspiring environment. Mutual support among women is essential for overcoming cultural and systemic hurdles, promoting gender equality, and providing a sense of companionship, healing, and encouragement.
Read this and think bonobos. Don’t worry so much about ‘gender equality’ – genders are no more equal than people are. Just think about how female gender support can create a generally better environment for all, humans and non-humans alike, and as we think more on this, and as the evidence grows that female, as opposed to male, empowerment generally leads to more group ‘companionship, healing and encouragement’, without reducing our ability to innovate and problem-solve, female leadership might just become the order of the human planet, with the assent, if at times grudging, of cantankerous males.
So, when you think of female leaders you consider to be ‘disastrous’, or simply not much chop, think of all the male leaders, particularly in what we broadly term ‘politics’. Have there been any female Genghis Khans? (the Mongol invasions have been estimated to have killed nearly 40 million – but who was counting?). How about Mao Zedongs? (whose ‘Great Leap Forward’ in 1958-62 led to the deaths of some 45 million of his own countrywomen, and men – someone has been calculating), or Adolf Hitlers? (whose war-mongering and racism resulted in 15 to 20 million deaths in Europe), or Joe Stalins? (the numbers for him are hard to calculate as they include deaths from forced collectivisation as well as mass executions, gulag neglect, and more or less avoidable famines). Then there was Leo Victor, aka Leopold II of Belgium, whose atrocities in the ‘Congo Free State’ as it was grotesquely named at the time, have left a legacy from which the region has never recovered, as recent extreme crimes and punishments have shown.
Would female leaders have been just as bad, as even some females are prepared to argue? Well, I would point to bonobos as compared to rather more murderous chimps – but we’re not bonobos, are we?
So the point is not to become bonobos but to note that women are in general less violent than men, more co-operative, and – well they have other features that are more attractive than men, just as bonobos, in their social behaviour, have features that are more attractive than chimps. I’ve written about women’s soccer as an example. Opposing teams in the women’s game can be tough and testy with each other – I’ve seen it – but I’ve never seen anything like the bad behaviour I’ve observed in the men’s game, while group hugs in the women’s game are much more frequent and demonstrative. It’s just something in women’s nature – or is it socialisation, it’s hard to pick it all apart. The point is to utilise these better natures, however begotten, for a better world.
And yes, we can learn from bonobos!
References
https://modernminds.com.au/journal/latest/women-for-women-why-do-we-need-our-tribe-to-grow
a century’s creeping progress towards a bonobo humanity? – 1: this unsporting life
Having read, in Virginia Woolf’s A room of one’s own, about women and football, of all things, to the effect that women were no more allowed to play football (meaning soccer) than they were allowed to obtain a decent education, and given that Woolf’s lectures are almost a century old, it might be interesting to note the differences in women’s opportunities, and achievements, in sport but also in science, academia, business and politics, in the WEIRD world in particular (since that’s also my world), over the past 100 years or so.
Soccer first – my favourite sport. By the 1920s it was very much international (the first World Cup was in 1930, but soccer was an official Olympic sport from 1920), but of course the idea of women playing it at a serious level was barely conceivable. Fifty years on, in the 70s, it was a different story. At the beginning of that decade the first unofficial women’s world cup tournament was held in Italy, but it took another 25 years for FIFA to stage the first official tourney. The most recent one was held in 2023 here in Australia, and New Zealand, and was hailed as the biggest and best yet. Women’s soccer clearly has a bright future, though it’s very much worth noting that the total prize money pool for the 2018 FIFA World Cup was $400 million, compared to that for the women in 2019, a ‘mere’ $30 million. Of course these are eye-watering figures, but there’s obviously no excuse for awarding the men 13 times more than the women. I don’t have figures for the most recent tournaments (2022 and 2023), but I suspect the gap has narrowed a bit more, given how vocal a lot of female players and officials have been about the matter.
The one obvious sport, to me, in which women have had, historically, as much of a profile, or almost as much, as men, is tennis. Which raises a question which came to me even in my early youth – why are women’s professional tennis matches best of three sets when men’s are best of five? Does it have to do with women’s physical stamina being measurable at three compared to men’s five? Is the women’s marathon distance measured at three fifths that of men? Of course, the answer is the obvious one – women were traditionally considered to have less stamina, along with all their other limitations vis-à-vis men. But then there’s this:
From 1891 to 1901, women played best-of-five matches in the finals of the US National Championships, the predecessor for what is now known as the US Open. A lot of those finals went to five sets, but the United States National Lawn Tennis Association Council reduced the format to best-of-three sets, thinking five sets would be too strenuous a task for women.
The same site points out that this is a good excuse for awarding less prize money to women than to men, but currently the prize money for the Australian open is equal for men and women, as has been the case since 2001. Wimbledon and the French Open have had equal prize-money only since 2007, but the US Open was by a long way the first, in 1973.
So if equal pay is now the standard in elite tennis, what about equal work? It’s easy to see that in making big tournaments best of three for women, tournament organisers (and they’re apparently to blame for maintaining this format, not the players) have made a rod for women’s backs. Their excuse, apparently, is that having best of five matches for women too would be a scheduling nightmare. Just not enough hours in the day… So why not make the men’s matches best of three as well? Problem sorted? Ummm. Presumably they’ve found, or assumed, that the men’s games are a bigger drawcard, and better suited to longer, gladiatorial-style combat? It’s, mucho macho, a puzzlement.
Okay so what about golf, another internationally-watched sport with oodles of thrills and spills, and skills-per-gender equally celebrated. I won’t go into mixed play just as I haven’t mentioned mixed doubles in tennis, but of course it’s worth mentioning that in both sports the equipment used differs along gender lines, though there is individual variation too. Women in general have less upper-body strength and will tend to use lighter clubs (though with racquets there are likely complex aerodynamics involved which I won’t explore).
I’ve found a useful article, ‘How big is golf’s gender pay gap?’ on a golfing website (linked below) which unfortunately is undated (a constant source of irritation for me), but the mention of ‘the Rio Olympics this year’ dates it to 2020. Here’s a quote:
Golf has been a slow mover in the gender equality stakes, as only a year and a half ago, the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews issued their first women’s memberships. As the home of golf, St Andrews are to lead by example. But what example does it set for the next generation? And the vast gender pay gap is unavoidable, as our research shows professional male golfers can expect to earn 83% more in winnings this year than the next winner on the female tour. They play the same game, to the same level, the only difference is one chromosome, yet their trophies and achievements are worth less.
It’s a bit confusing – does it mean St Andrews should lead by example? It’s something of a personal issue for me as my mother’s family are from Fife and my brother was born in St Andrews, and I was born just across the Tay, in Dundee. Anyhoo, to claim that ‘the vast gender pay gap is unavoidable’ makes no sense. And the rest of this short article doesn’t provide any answers, or confidence in the future. It does point out that equal pay for women, in standard employment, has been achieved in many countries (though equal pay is only a part of the battle given that women alone are the child-bearers, and need to have employment scenarios that can accommodate this), so why such disparities in elite sport? The only answer I can think of is patriarchal tradition. As with may other ‘sports of kings’, golfing history is rooted in sexism (and racism). The US Masters is played every year at Augusta, Georgia, where women were first allowed to become members in 2012. The first section of a female tournament played on the Augusta course was in 2019! So much for the self-proclaimed land of freedom and opportunity. But then, Georgia is so far from New York that to call that country ‘the United States’ is a bit of a joke, at least to us outsiders.
So that’s enough of sport, or the ‘fun’ side of life, for now. I’ll look at other aspects of inequality – and matriarchal improvements – in future posts.
References
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/04/08/masters-tradition-is-rooted-racism-sexism/
on testosterone bullshit and bonobos
testosterone guru – aka the ugliest human on the planet?
I’ve written about testosterone before, here, here, here, here and here (!), but as I’m currently getting just too many ‘testosterone crisis’ pieces on my YouTube feed, I feel the need to return to the fray, with bonobos in mind, of course.
So, there’s nothing particularly wrong about men wanting to boost their testosterone levels, I suppose, but I just think that the focus is wrong. The focus should be on health. If you eat well, exercise daily, sleep effectively (and sleep routines can vary with individuals), and avoid too much stress, your hormone levels will tend to take care of themselves. It’s likely true that testosterone levels have reduced in the WEIRD world in the past few decades, but this doesn’t amount to a crisis. In the same WEIRD world, at least since the sixties, male machismo has become more a focus of derision as female empowerment has become a focus for – well, women. In that period, and especially since the 80s and 90s, physical work has become mechanised, or transferred to non-WEIRD countries – I worked in about five different factories from the 70s to the 90s, all of which have since shut down, as Australia has virtually ceased to be a manufacturing nation.
So men are mostly not doing physical work like they used to. Even so, we’re all living longer. And it’s worth looking at a couple of ‘longevity hotspots’ such as Tuscany, Okinawa, Switzerland, Singapore, and last but not least, here in Australia. Forget looking at the testosterone levels in these regions, look at how they live and the challenges they face. But let me first use a bonobo quote which I may have used before, from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Mate competition by males over females is common in many animal species. During mating season male testosterone levels rise, resulting in an increase in aggressive behavior and masculine features. Male bonobos, however, invest much more into friendly relationships with females. Elevated testosterone and aggression levels would collide with this increased tendency towards forming pair-relationships.
It would be interesting to research the apparent fall in testosterone levels in WEIRD nations, to see if there are any links to increased sucking up to women. Or just an increased role in family life, as opposed to the old mostly-absent, hard-working father scenario. Certainly, with the better angels of our nature prevailing, males aren’t dying so much in wars, or limping along in the aftermath, and factories are generally safer or being removed to less affluent parts of the world. I recall reading that, in northern Italy and in Sardinia, the high life expectancy for men is pretty well equal to that for women. Key to this appears to be an active life both physically and socially. Take this blurb from the Visit Italy website, which closely resembles what I’ve learned from an essay on Okinawan society:
Scholars believe that this phenomenon [longevity] is due to a constellation of factors, not only genetic. This is where lifestyle comes into play: a set of practices aimed at a happy, active and inclusive existence. Social relations also seem to be surprisingly decisive when it comes to longevity.
Here people, even when very old, continue to be an integral part of the community and participate in social life. Family ties, in particular, are absolutely solid; there is no room for loneliness or even absolute rest.
Gardening, looking after grandchildren, and cooking are all activities taken very seriously by Sardinian nonni [grandparents], who continue to have as much weight in the family dynamics as their children and grandchildren. Being together and being useful at all ages: could this be one of the secrets to a long life?
Caring and sharing – isn’t this the bonobo way?
And testosterone bullshit goes both ways – it makes you more ‘manly’, whatever that may mean, or it makes you stupid, responding with ‘brute’ violence to situations that require greater (feminine?) nuance. But what makes a person more or less ‘masculine’ according to social norms of masculinity (which are changing, especially in the WEIRD world) involves a huge array of determining factors, including hormone levels of course, but far from confined to them. Focussing more or less solely on testosterone is just dumb male shite.
Humans are evolving, I hope, to become more like bonobos. I’m not against competition and aggression, in its place. I like watching competitive sports, especially soccer, and I’ve enjoyed watching the women’s game progress rapidly in recent years. Unsurprisingly, I’ve noticed that women’s soccer is just as aggressive but with much less of the biffo and play-acting and referee-confronting that you find in the men. There’s also less crowd violence. It just seems ‘unseemly’ to even imagine crowd violence, which generally involves males, at a women’s soccer tournament. Some interesting psychology to unpick there. Bonobos and chimps don’t play sport of course, but they do come close to it, especially as youngsters, chasing each other to get the ‘ball’, whatever it might be, in quite a rough and tumble way. This kind of competitive rough-and-tumble is a feature of cubs and pups and calves etc in thousands of mammalian species, and is set to continue, encouraged and regulated by watchful adults. It’s neither a male nor a female thing. The manufactured testosterone crisis, on the other hand, seems all about ‘maleness’, a tedious fiction that even some women are buying into. What’s most funny about all those ‘boost your testosterone levels’ videos by men is the way these ‘influencer’ guys are built. Truly, I’d rather be dead than look like that!
In my view they just need to be educated about bonobos. Vive les bonobos! Would that we could all be as happy and sexy and caring and sharing as them!
References
https://www.visititaly.eu/history-and-traditions/why-people-in-italy-live-longer-reasons
A bonobo world, etc, 18: gender and aggression in life and sport
bonobos play-fighting
human apes play-fighting?
If anyone, like me, says or thinks that they’d like to be a bonobo, it’s to be presumed they don’t mean they’d like to live in trees, be covered in hair, have a shortened life-span, a brain reduced to a third of its current size, and to never concern themselves with why the sky is blue, how the Earth spins, and whether the universe is finite or infinite. What we’re really interested in is how they deal with particular matters that have bedevilled human societies in their infinite variety – namely sex, violence, effective community and the role of women, vis-a-vis these matters.
While making a broad generalisation about human society, in all its billions, might leave me open to ridicule, we seem to have followed the chimpanzee and gorilla path of male domination, infighting as regards pecking order, and group v group aggression, rising to warfare and nuclear carnage as human apes became more populous and technologically sophisticated. One interesting question is this: had we followed the bonobo path of female group bonding and controlling the larger males by means of those bonds, and of group raising of children causing reduced jealousies and infanticides, would we have reached the heights of civilisation, if that’s the word, and world domination that we have reached today?
I realise this is an impossible question to answer, and yet… Human apes, especially in post-religious societies, are recognising the power and abilities of their women more and more. Social evolution has speeded up this process, bringing about changes in single lifetimes. In 1793 Olympe de Gouges, playwright, abolitionist, political activist and author of the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, was guillotined by Robespierre’s disastrous Montagnard faction, as much for being a moderate as for being a woman. Clearly a progressivist, de Gouges opposed the execution of Louis XVI, and capital punishment generally, and favoured a constitutional monarchy, a system which still operates more or less effectively in a number of European nations (it seems better than the US system, though I’m no monarchist). Today, capital punishment generally thrives only in the most brutally governed nations, such as China, Iran and Saudi Arabia, though there are unfortunate outliers such as Japan, Singapore and arguably the USA (none of those last three countries have ever had female leaders – just saying). One hundred years after de Gouges died for promoting female equality and moderation, women were still being denied a university education in every country in the world. However in the last hundred years, and especially in the last fifty, we’ve seen dramatic changes, both in the educational and scientific fields, and in political leadership. The labours of to the Harvard computers, Williamina Fleming, Annie Jump Cannon, Antonia Maury and many others, working for a fraction of male pay, opened up the field of photometric astronomy and proved beyond doubt that women were a valuable and largely untapped intellectual resource. Marie Curie became the most famous female scientist of her day, and inspired women around the world to enter the scientific fray. Today, women such as Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, of CRISPR-Cas9 fame, and Michelle Simmons, Australia’s quantum computing wizard, are becoming more and more commonplace in their uncommon intellect and skills. And in the political arena, we’ve had female leaders in Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Germany, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Denmark, Belgium, France, Portugal, Austria, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Serbia, Croatia, Russia (okay, in the eighteenth century), China (nineteenth century), South Korea, Myanmar, Pakistan, India, Indonesia, the Phillippines, Sri Lanka (the world’s first female PM), Israel, Ethiopia and Liberia, and I may have missed some. This may seem an incredible transformation, but many of these women were brief or stop-gap leaders, and were all massively outnumbered by their male counterparts and generally had to deal with male advisers and business and military heavyweights.
So it’s a matter of rapid change but never rapid enough for our abysmally short life spans. But then, taking a leaf from the bonobo tree, we should look at the power of female co-operation, not just individual achievement. Think of the suffragist movement of the early 1900s (the term suffragette was coined by a Daily Mail male to belittle the movement’s filletes), which, like the Coalition of Women for Peace (in Israel/Palestine) a century later, was a grassroots movement. They couldn’t be otherwise, as women were then, and to a large extent still are, shut out of the political process. They’re forced into other channels to effect change, which helps explain why approximately 70% of NGO positions are held by women, though the top positions are still dominated by men.
When I think of teams, and women, and success, two more or less completely unrelated fields come to mind – science and sport. In both fields cooperation and collaboration are essential to success, and more or less friendly competition against others in the field is essential to improve quality. Womens’ team sport is as competitive as that of men but without quite the same bullish, or chimp, aggressiveness, it seems to me, and the research backs this up. Sport, clearly, is a constructed form of play, in which the stakes are sometimes very high in terms of trophies, reputations and bragging rights, but in which the aggression is generally brought to an end by the final whistle. However, those high stakes sometimes result in foul play and overly aggressive attempts to win at all costs – and the same thing can happen in science. Sporting aggression, though, is easier to assess because it’s more physical, and more publicly displayed (and more likely to be caught on camera). To take my favourite sport, soccer, the whole object for each team is to fight to get and maintain possession of the ball for the purpose of scoring goals. This battle mostly involves finesse and teamwork, but when the ball is in open play it often involves a lot of positional jostling and other forms of physicality. Personally, I’ve witnessed many an altercation in the male game, when one player gets pissed off with another’s shirt-tugging and bumping, and confronts him chest-to-chest, nature documentary-style. The female players, when faced with this and other foul play, invariably turn to the referee with a word or a gesture. Why might this be?
In 1914, the American psychologist E L Thorndike wrote:
The most striking differences in instinctive equipment consists in the strength of the fighting instinct in the male and of the nursing instinct in the female…. The out-and-out physical fighting for the sake of combat is pre-eminently a male instinct, and the resentment at mastery, the zeal to surpass, and the general joy at activity in mental as well as physical matters seem to be closely correlated with it.
three things: IQ and longevity, the Taliban and Americans, the real World Cup
Nerissa: …. superfluity comes sooner by white hairs, but competency lives longer
The Merchant of Venice, Act 1 , scene 2
Thing one
I don’t know what my IQ is, having never knowingly sat a test, but I assume it’s a number just short of infinity. So it was interesting to read, in Carl Zimmer’s book on genetics, She has her mother’s laugh, that IQ is highly correlated to longevity. Not that there’s a genetic link, at least not directly, but it stands to reason. The higher your IQ, the quicker it takes for you to ‘get’ things. This was more or less confirmed by a simple, ingenious brain processing test. Subjects were shown simple shapes flashing very briefly on a computer screen – two vertical lines spaced apart with a horizontal line sitting on top. The participants had to guess which of the two vertical lines was the longest each time. Researchers had worked out that if the images were flashed too briefly, the participants just resorted to guesswork. It required approximately 0.1 seconds for people, on average, to perceive the shape correctly. The key, though, lay in the variation of that perception. It ranged from 0.02 seconds to 0.136 seconds, and researchers found a pretty reliable correlation between accurate perception time and intelligence (presumably measured by IQ – Zimmer doesn’t say). Unfortunately it’s not quite reliable enough, apparently, for us to do away with those pesky, long-winded IQ tests and replace them snappy shape tests, but as mentioned, it does seem to confirm the intuition that intelligence has to do with sharpness and quick-wittedness. Which brings me back to longevity. Some work done in Scotland, which has turned out to be accidentally longitudinal, provides interesting evidence. In 1932 the Scottish government conducted a massive testing program of nearly 90,000 eleven-year-old students – just about the whole of the country’s kids of that age. They were all given a 71-question exam involving decoding, analogising and arithmetic among other things. Over time this ‘experiment’, or what you will, was forgotten, but the records were unearthed in 1997, and then researchers tried to get in touch, some 65 years later, with the ‘kids’ who’d been tested. They managed to gather together 101 elderly citizens in an Aberdeen hall to resit the gruelling test. They found that the score on the original test was a pretty good indicator – 73% – of the score second time around. But there was another interesting finding – the percentage of the test-takers who had scored well and were still alive in 1997 was considerably higher than those who’d scored poorly. Some 70% of the women in the top quarter of scores were still alive, compared to 45% in the bottom quarter:
Children who scored higher, in other words, tended to live longer. Each extra 15 IQ points, researchers have since found, translates into a 24% drop in the risk of death.
Carl Zimmer, She has her mother’s laugh, p296
Why is this so? Smarter people generally know what to do, and are quicker to learn what to do, to live longer, to make more, financially and otherwise, of the circumstances they find themselves in, to be safer, healthier and the like. Stands to reason.
Thing two
A huge fuss is being made of allegations, probably true, of Putin offering and paying bounties to the Taliban to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan. My first reaction to this news was – surely the fervently anti-American and anti-western Taliban were already hell-bent on killing infidel foreigners, and many of the purest ideologues among them would be insulted by the offer of bribes to do so? Then again, many of them would’ve been laughing up their ample sleeves at the thought of being paid by the Russkies, whom they likely consider only slightly less odious and infidelious than the Yanks, to do what they were already heaven-bent on doing. For this reason, it would surely be impossible to prove that any deaths of Americans, or their coalition partners – including Australians – at the hands of the Taliban, could be sheeted home to Putin and his fellow thugs. Even if money traced to Russia appeared in Taliban bank accounts after some atrocity or other, this doesn’t exclude the possibility that the atrocity would’ve occurred in any case. Win-win for the Taliban.
Thing 3
The announcement that the real World Cup will take place in Australia and New Zealand in 2023 makes life a little more bearable, though it’s three years away and I’m not getting any younger. This competition combines two of the most life-affirming enities in life, for me at least – women and soccer. Hopefully we’ll have learned many lessons from Covid-19 by then haha, and at least some of today’s thuggish political leaders will have been placed where they can do no more harm, and we can get on with the more exciting stuff of life, like having fun.
the male violence thing: why deny it?
I’ve written a few pieces on women, power and such things, from a position of frustration that there haven’t been enough women in power, and that women, and men, have suffered too much from male abuses of power – and that of course includes violence. At the beginning of last year I attended a vigil of sorts on the steps of our state parliament, which involved a solemn roll call of all the women who died violently in Australia (not including those who died in vehicle accidents, of which more later), and the sad circumstances of their passing. I noted that not all the women were victims of male violence – only 90-95% from memory – but clearly male violence was the principal problem. I was also aware, from research, that most victims of male violence are other males.
Around 95% of all victims of violence, whether women or men, experience that violence from a male perpetrator.
White Ribbon Australia, citing the Australian Bureau of Statistics
So I was a bit disconcerted when, some time ago, I brought up the obvious issue of male violence, in the context of sport (as opposed to the relative lack of violence, on and off the field, or court etc, in female sports) and I received pushback, as the Yanks say, from someone who more less completely denied that there was any imbalance. In fact he appeared to argue that women were just as violent as men, in every way.
So, to be clear, this is a question of fact, not of opinion, and in order to be factual we need to define violence precisely. I’m defining it as an act which results in death or physical injury, to the self and/or others. This isn’t to deny that psychological or emotional violence exists, of course it does, but it’s virtually impossible to measure. Any conversation between two people could be seen as profoundly coercive by one, totally benign by the other, or anything between these extremes by observers. It’s very subjective. Nor am I denying that psychological violence can be totally life-destroying. It just isn’t measurable in any clear way, unlike physical violence. And it was physical violence that our conversation was about.
Reliable statistical data on this topic is available everywhere on the internet. It tells us a sad, but fairly obvious truth. Men are more violent than women in every country and in every culture on the planet, without exception. And men have been more violent than women in every age of which we have record, since the appearance of Homo sapiens some 300,000 years ago.
Looking at the matter historically, there’s a certain amount of controversy, due to the patchy evidence as to whether hunter-gatherers were more ‘prone to violence’ than humans in a more ‘civilised’ state. Certainly it’s true that after the establishment of expansionist states, war was more often than not a central component of politics, and war was carried out by men, generally young men from their late teens into their late twenties. This state of affairs was the norm for centuries, and one could reasonably argue that warfare as policy was only abandoned when weaponry became so devastating that it was too costly for each state to engage in it, though I think Enlightenment values, a more scientific understanding of universal human nature and the subsequent development of trans-national treaties and organisations have all played a role.
But even in hunter-gathering societies the pattern of male violence was set. The hunters were of course more or less exclusively male, and, with rewards going to the best hunters, fierce competition was bound to arise within hunter-gathering tribes. It’s quite likely that the most successful competitors would have high status, even chieftain status, within the group. And with the division into groups, or tribes, with their more or less self-appointed hunting territories, rivalry and competition between groups would have arisen, the precursors of later, more destructive forms of aggression. We see exactly this pattern, of course, in our closest living relatives, chimps – battles between males of different groups over territory and resources, and battles between males within groups over hierarchy and access to females.
It might be argued that the modern world is quite different. But there’s a pattern in modern society that needs to be accounted for, though it’s not exactly a modern pattern, even if it’s given a modern spin. Men – and boys -tend to join gangs. Of course, not all young men do this, but a substantial proportion do. Women tend not to do so, or not nearly to the same extent. I’m talking about street gangs, crime gangs, ethnic gangs, ‘football hooligan’ gangs, bikie gangs, neo-nazi gangs, white supremacist gangs etc. I even joined one myself as a teenager, and we roamed the streets looking for trouble but rarely managing to find it.
What drives this behaviour amongst this section of the male population (from the mid-teens to the mid-twenties, roughly speaking)? Hormones appear to play a primary role, and it’s no coincidence that exactly the same aggressive, show-offy group behaviour is to be found in the young males of other complex, highly social mammals, including chimps, dolphins and elephants. I have mixed feelings for those who scoff at all comparisons between homo sapiens and other mammals, because of course science has taught us about our profoundly mammalian nature, while our development of scientific explanations and understandings is precisely what marks us off from other mammals, and provides us with the potential to transcend our mammalian nature. Biology doesn’t have to be destiny.
The preponderance of male violence in our society is a problem for which we need to find solutions. But first we need to admit that there’s a problem. Let me give one compelling statistic as proof. The major cause of violent death and injury in peaceful countries – those not engaged in internal or external warfare – are males between the ages of approximately 17 and 25 behind the wheel of a motor vehicle. On a per capita basis, males cause 1.5 to 2 times more vehicle accidents than females, regardless of country, and it’s entirely that 17-25 age group that causes the disparity. It’s of course no coincidence that this is the same age that young males join gangs or the military. It’s the hormonal age.
In presenting this brief account of male risk-taking, aggression and violence, I’m not pretending that females are passive victims of all this. Of course the picture is enormously complex (in humans and in other mammals). In the cyber-age, female teenage bullying has become a serious problem – and of course it was a problem in the schoolyard before that. People in general can be brutal and malicious to their neighbours in times of stress, but we’ve emerged from, or are trying to emerge from, a highly patriarchal culture in which being a physically tough male is still a source of respect – in my own schoolyard, everyone knew who the toughest kid was, the ‘best fighter’, not the ‘brainiest’.
So, to return to my conversation, which was about sport and violence, and the claim that men are no more violent on and around sporting arenas than women. It amazes me that, given all the evidence about male violence, someone would think that sporting arenas would be an exception to the well-attested facts about male violence, in comparison to that of women. The sport I follow most by far is soccer, and I’ve particularly enjoyed the rise in women’s soccer in the last few years. It’s of course fiercely competitive, full of rough and tumble, with plenty of pushing and shoving at corners and free kicks, but having watched a lot of female matches over the years, I’ve rarely seen an example of the face-to-face, ‘I’m tougher than you’ behaviour shown at the top of this post, which is very common in the male game. The image prompts more or less amusing comparisons with wildlife programs, with rival males competing to be the pack leader. Men are too often like that, but of course not all men, and with the broad societal changes that have occurred in recent decades and centuries, there’s no need for men to think and act like this today – though the profound inequality that persists still sanctions and rewards this behaviour in poorly resourced, embattled parts of the world.
Where I see most progress and feel most hopeful is, again, the enterprise of science. In reading, for example, Venki Ramakrishnan’s book The gene machine and Meredith Wadman’s The vaccine race, I find the mix of competition and collaboration in fields of research to be favourable to both genders (or should I say all genders these days), and its success will hopefully flow on to politics, sports and other aspects of life.