The Grit: Should Men Step Down?
The feminists were right. We do live in a capitalist phallocracy that utilizes the military/industrial complex to keep us in a permanent state of testosterone-fueled chaos.
A new study, called Evolution and the Psychology of Intergroup Conflict: the Male Warrior Hypothesis, has finally nailed it. Men are eejits:
“Where there is intergroup conflict characterized by violence, injury or death, we find that such acts of aggression are perpetuated almost exclusively by men. In fact, research suggests that men’s tendency to engage in coalitional aggression is manifest in all cultures, modern and traditional, and is therefore considered a human universal.”
The report’s authors spell out a suspicion many of us have held for a long time. Human males are hardwired to act aggressively, and violently, toward other human males—especially those who are not within their social or cultural groups.
This aggression is enhanced when men from the same group combine to attack a clearly identifiable, weaker individual or group—hence “coalitional aggression.” The pattern goes back through recorded time and is demonstrably, without brooking any argument, a man thing.
Predictably, it’s about sex:
“Men may form coalitions with other men to extract reproductive resources from members of other groups… in lethal intergroup conflicts, the marginal gains to a group's average reproductive success will be much lower for each additional male survivor compared with each additional female survivor... So, although the potential costs are quite high for males who join a coalition... the benefits bestowed upon victorious males could be immense.”
Basically, a group of males with access to a group of females will produce higher numbers of offspring with different mates. It is therefore worth taking the individual risk of fighting as a group to get that access, because the potential number of progeny they will produce is exponentially higher.
This was crucial stuff in the days when we marked our boundaries with urine, rather than picket fences. Nowadays it’s nothing more than an immensely destructive evolutionary hangover.
Sexist? We tried it with just guys for hundreds of years, and look where that got us.
Yet men are still allowed the whip hand when it comes to things like international diplomacy, religious doctrine and gun control.
You wouldn’t let a child play with a naked flame, so why are we still putting men in positions where they are biologically predisposed to cause considerable (potentially self-defeating) damage?
Perhaps it is time to consider removing men from arenas they are gentically unsuited to succeed in. Perhaps we should ban men from making decisions on national security. Or ban them from becoming bishops or imams. Or just take all the fellas out of the Middle East peace process and give a room full of women the opportunity to sort things out. Sexist? We tried it with just guys for hundreds of years, and look where it got us.
Please remember The Grit is a svelte, androgynous journalistic construct, and therefore has no wish to take sides in any gender battle. But the startling fact remains: individual beatings and murders, gang violence, and international aggression originate almost overwhelmingly within the male domain. Why does civilized society tolerate this?
The scientists behind Evolution and the Psychology of Intergroup Conflict suggest that a better understanding of the urges that drive men, or at least every man’s internal “warrior,” can defuse potentially violent and aggressive situations. Yet by doing so we are sailing into very dangerous territory.
Most instances of social and political progress made over the last 65 years have been predicated on the notion of equality. Women have fought hard to be recognized as equals in every aspect of life. The more we discover about the differences between the male and female brain, the less we like it.
If we accept the “male warrior hypothesis” of this study—that modern men have evolutionarily dysfunctional brains which give them a natural unsuitability for working in the field of global diplomacy, Pandora’s box gets reopened.
If there are things men’s brains aren’t biologically suited for, it follows there may be things that women’s brains aren’t suited for. Give it ten minutes and we’ll be back in the 1960s.
But we can’t just ignore our evolutionary baggage and unconscious, deeply held, animalistic prejudices. Perhaps we should just accept them. Or at least one of them. Men really are eejits.
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