StacyM on the “Sexism punishes women!” thread:
Granted, that’s a multipurpose, humorous line, but I’ve encountered waaaaaaay too many men of varying political stripes who actually reference hormones, brain differences and evolutionary psychology as a means of excusing anti-social male behavior. No doubt you’ve encountered, “It’s all in men’s biology, hence it’s inevitable. We’ll just have to learn how to suffer through the whole matter.” Funny, but guys usually aren’t the ones doing the suffering. The study of female screen names certainly demonstrates that.
While it gives me a cheap thrill to pretend that women are somehow biologically superior, I prefer not to play into some men’s lack of introspection.
Forgive me, but this is a BIG pet peeve of mine.
Oh, mine too. I’ve encountered it on both sides. On the one hand, there’s the spectre of “testosterone poisoning,” such that starting T will turn a peaceful dyke into a raging violent abusive asshole. On the other hand, there’s “testosterone made me do it,” which is when T is used to justify behavior that ranges from antisocial to horrendous. Oddly enough, this is especially common when the behavior in question is misogynist. Transmen sometimes do this, just like cissexual men.
I know plenty of men who manage to refrain from raping women. (I guess I should send them a card or something.) I don’t think it has much to do with their testosterone levels. I think it has to do with whether or not they are permitted or encouraged to hate women.
You mean it’s out of my hands? It’s all due to what other people permit and encourage me to do? Damn, and here I thought we were personally responsible for our actions.
The evo psychos and others promote the most damaging, yet lamest, ideas. “It’s the testosterone!” means that men can’t control themselves. Men who batter and rape are just doing what their biology compels them to do.
If they were sincere in their beliefs, they would advocate punishing men who behave this way and they’d advocate keeping them off the streets so they couldn’t cause any more harm. Instead, it all comes down to the “boys will be boys” garbage.
I really can’t get my brain around this one. Fortunately, I’ve stopped trying.
Natalie Angier takes on this topic quite nicely in her biology book, “Woman: An Intimate Geography.” I’m rereading it right now, so remind me and I’ll look up a page cite.
As I’ve surfed around various trans websites, I’ve also encountered transwomen who claim that changes in their hormonal levels have made them less aggressive, calmer, more emotional, poorer at math, less adept at spatial skills, and… the list goes on.
I suppose that if you go into transition with a number of sexist assumptions about men and women, then your interpretation of the experience is going to reflect those assumptions.
Sometimes it leaves me feeling quite annoyed. I find myself wanting to scream, “Stop saying those things! You’re making the rest of us look like a bunch of sexist reactionaries!”
I think that I need to remind myself of something piny discussed in previous posts: transpeople come from all walks of life, and as such, we reflect a great diversity of beliefs and attitudes. Big, heaping bucket-loads of people in the general populace believe that gendered behavior is rooted in biology. So, I really shouldn’t be surprised over so many transpeople interpreting transition in ways that reflect commonly held beliefs about gender and biology.
Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t challenge their messed up assumptions. I’d certainly challenge a cisgendered person’s sexist assumptions. So, why not do the same to another transperson? I just need to drop the insecurity of “you’re making the rest of us look bad.”
So there.
If I smoke a blunt, it makes me high. If I drink a few beers, I get drunk. But more than that, my behavior is affected. The choices I make actually change.
We’ve all experienced how we might do something under the influence that we wouldn’t do sober. If I can injest a chemical that alters my behavior from baseline, why is it so hard to believe that my body could produce a chemical that does the exact same thing?
Don’t get me wrong; it sounds like people are blaming biology for their own shitty thinking. But it also sounds like a lot of people are completely dismissing the idea that biology can be an influence on behavior. In regards to responsibility – sure, if I choose to pick up the bottle I’m responsible for what happens next. But I didn’t choose my sex, and my testes produce testosterone whether I want them to or not. Isn’t it reasonable to at least wonder to what degree an individual is culpable because his body is generating mind-altering chemicals against his will?
Really? Huh. I don’t see that.
Yes, “biology” affects behavior. But there’s this thing called will, which also affects behavior. Since we know that a man can think his way out of raping someone, and that many men do, it makes sense to hold him responsible for doing so.
I agree.
Men use excuses exactly like this to justify all kinds of poor behavior. You are the final arbitor of your actions. I don’t give a fig what kind of hormones you are under the influence of.
I spent 25 years living in a male body. I spent a fair portion of my teen years doing stupid, harmful things out of an unquestioned sense of male entitlement and the belief that machismo was an honorable way of life. I consciously changed most of those behaviors long before my first dose of estrogen. Why? Because I realized how harmful my actions and attitudes were, not because of some quirk of biology. I took responsibility for my stupid, harmful behaviors and my oppressive, inhumane attitudes.
And before you try to assert that testosterone lead to my f*cked up behaviors in the first place–a have darned good memories of how peer pressure and conformity shaped my behaviors. So, don’t bother going there.
If you harm someone because of your actions, YOU are responsible for the damage done.
If you engage in actions that reinforce the oppression of women, YOU are responsible for ways in which your actions hurt women. Not your supposed testosterone induced aggression levels. Not your supposed unruly male libido.
The onus is upon YOU to realize how your actions effect others. There is no wiggle room in this matter.
I don’t buy your argument. Been there. Done that.
I’m always suprised when people take a cavalier attitude as regards the complexities bound up in the concept of ‘responsibility’. It seems to me that, regarding an individul action, responsibility is always at least twofold: There is always personal responsiblity in an action that a person does. But there is also always cultural/social/environmental responsibility, too. Part of the flavor of feminism that I embrace includes a stance against atomistic views of individuals (which I think tend to reinforce patriarchy): Putting overmuch stress on our individuality in order to ignore the way our environments affect us is often a way to abdicate ‘group’ responsibility.
The thing is, I’ve heard much the same arguments from, say, right-wingers and libertarians who, when it is pointed out to them that our justice system is unfairly skewed against people who aren’t white, would reply that because each individual in person has made his or her own choices, that responsiblity is entirely personal, that it is, in effect, completely the fault of the person imprisoned that they are there. This uber-individuality stance of course ignores the racism that pervades our legal system. Pointing out the racism isn’t t meant to absolve people who are committing crimes of their crimes. But it is to say that we ought to take into account the environemental influences, the larger context that various crimes (and, more importantly, convictions!) take place in, when attributing responsiblity.
It’s much more difficult to explain how environmental factors affect why men rape, I think, than it is to explain how a racist justice system is unfair, of course. But it seems complex to me. Of course it’s ridiculous to claim something along the lines of “Well, I did rape, but I couldn’t help it, because of the testoterone,” and expect that to absolve one. It’s similarly just as ridiculous to completely absolve somebody who has committed murder because they are oppressed in a racist society–but I, at least, want to consider it a mitigating circumstance of a sort.
Also, if testosterone levels can be indicators of any kind, (and it seems the jury is out on that one)it might be important for us to recognize that fact–not to the point of letting it absolve personal responsiblity, but from the point of view of effecting change. A few men choose chemical castration because they believe, at least, that their will isn’t enough to overcome their desires. If that’s the case, it’s probably only in extreme cases, but if it can be the case, we need to consider how less extreme examples play out, too.
Another example: When trying to point out to somebody the myriad ways that women in business are oppressed by sexism, it might be pointed out that, well, look, there are women CEO’s; some women can become CEO’s–they may have an uphill battle because of society, but if they can do it, then any woman ought to be able to. This is silly, of course, because the larger ‘system’ is set up so that only a few women (right now) would ever be able to become the CEO of a large company.
Pointing out that somebody could have done otherwise, while almost always true, isn’t as informative as piny implicitly suggests, I think.
All of which isn’t to say that I disagree with piny’s statement, as far as it goes–it does make sense to hold him responsible–but it may not make sense to hold only him responsible: Environemntal factors such as societal influences as perhaps testosterone levels may be important to consider when judging the responsiblities of the individual and the society.
“Yes, “biology” affects behavior.”
I don’t understand your use of quotation marks here.
It’s a bizarre dichotomy to set up, for one thing.
It’s also a pretty lazy term to use when discussing exogenous hormones for a population received through a socially distorted framework. Transsexuals tend to encounter a lot of biological determinism in direct contradiction to physiological reality. I don’t mean to imply that there is no such thing.
Environemntal factors such as societal influences as perhaps testosterone levels may be important to consider when judging the responsiblities of the individual and the society.
In principle, yes, environmental influences may be important to consider when judging responsibilities, etc.
But in practice, I can’t think of any way to have testosterone be a mitigating factor in rape cases that wouldn’t suck for potential rape victims. How would one make it a mitigating factor? Be a little lenient on men in general, when they rape, since after all they all have testosterone, but come down really hard on the very rare female rapist? That doesn’t sound useful. Or fair, given the evidence that most men, after all, manage to have plenty of testosterone and also not rape. Make it a mitigating factor if it turns out the rapist has a higher than average testosterone level? That would hand any recreational steroid users who already feel entitled to women’s bodies a really handy excuse; no thanks.
Also, if testosterone levels can be indicators of any kind, (and it seems the jury is out on that one)it might be important for us to recognize that fact–not to the point of letting it absolve personal responsiblity, but from the point of view of effecting change.
Considering that fact, if it should ever be determined to be a fact, from the point of view of effecting change, I’d be fine with. Just not from the point of view of assessing responsibility.
Lynn Gazis-Sax–
Your points are well-taken, Lynn. And I think that, even if one agrees with me as far as the ‘in principle’ stuff goes, figuring out the ‘in practice’ parts of things is daunting–and maybe when you get down to the level of practice it wouldn’t matter much whether we think of testosterone levels as important to consider.
Part of the problem is my not-as-precise-as-I-might-be language, because I think I didn’t make distinctions between, say, legal responsibility and moral responsibility. The two overlap in various ways, obviously (hopefully!), but they are not the same. It may be that I’m advocating that we might think about testosterone levels as a mitigating factor when judging somebody morally but ignore them as a factor when doling out punishment–when figuring out legal responsibility. I am not certain about it at all–I was suggesting that things weren’t as simple as piny implied.
But let me go along with my intuition that testosterone levels might be used as a mitigating factor legally. I’ll keep my race analogy going throughout, though that might muddle things a bit. It seems to me that, while all men have testosterone (all people grow up in this racist society), some men ‘have it worse’ than others as far as having to deal with high levels of testosterone (non-white people in our society ‘have it worse’ than white people in our society as far as having to deal with racism). If norms of testosterone could be established (it may very well be that they can’t, but again I think the jury is out on this one), then we might mitigate sentences in something like the following way (just as we might mitigate sentnces for people who aren’t white–or who aren’t men, who aren’t upper-class, who aren’t straight, based on the fact that they have had to deal with deep oppression):
–If a rapist can be shown to have higher than normal (and we’d have to decide how much higher as well as what range counts as normal)levels of testosterone, then he might receive treatment while in prison that other prisoners don’t, in a similar way to the way that, say, a heroin user who is in prison for stealing to buy heroin might be given treatment, while a non-heroin user might not be.
–if a rapist can be shown to have higher than normal levels of testosterone, we might reduce his overall sentence, given that he recieves some sort of treatment to bring his levels back down to normal.
–If a rapist can be shown to have normal or lower-than-normal levels of testosterone, then no changes to regular sentencing would happen.
Your point about the steroid-user getting a different sentence seems to me to be something of a red-herring: We don’t judge (legally) a person who is drunk who, say, drives a car and kills a person by doing so while drunk as being less responsible: We say that she knows the risk of harming others when she drinks and is therefore held accountable. Similarly, we would hold the steroid-user accountable for taking the steroids, knowing that they would elevate his testosterone levels and knowing that such elevation could affect his behavior in a way such that he was more likely to harm others.
Of course there are all sorts of other complications–I don’t dispute that it’s complex in myriad ways. Men aren’t the only one’s with testosterone,for instance,, and testosterone may affect men and women differently at different levels and such. And I’m willing to acknowledge that the devil may be in the details. Testosterone may not be a clear enough ‘tell’, it may be that we would never want to say that one man has more to resist than another to a degree that matters, especially at a legal level..
Still, I think it’s important that we recognize that attributing responsiblity isn’t as simple as “Other men don’t rape, so only the rapist is responsible.” (Just to be overabundantly clear, here: I am not suggesting that the victim is in any way responsible. I am putting forth that we, as a society, need to be held accountable, and that environmental factors may also play a part.) If that were the case, then somebody could say “Other women are CEO’s, so any woman can be,” in order to slough off complaints of the glass ceiling. If that were the case, somebody could say “Other black men don’t end up in prison, so it is only each individual black man who is in prison’s responsiblity that he is there” to respond to a charge of racism within our criminal justice system. And those statements don’t hold with my moral (or legal!) intuitions. Do they hold with yours? If they do, then we might just disagree as to whether anything can ever be a mitigating circumstance legally.
I should also note that where it seems like we do consider mitigating cirucumstances, it does indeed suck for the victims of the crime, or at least potentially does. If a person with an IQ that places him in a very low-functioning disabled categoy kills somebody, and doesn’t suffer capital punishement because of the mitigating circumstances of his disability, that sure is going to suck for the vicitm’s family (or it could, potentially, depending on their conception of capital punishment). But again, should nothing be considered a mitigating factor?
One more thing, regarding when you say:
I apologize for my long-windedness, but I think there is a tight relationship between ‘effecting change’ and ‘assessing responsibility’ that can be stated thusly (though oversimplified) as: “To the degree that one can effect change of one’s situation, one is to be held responsible.”
I hope I’m not contributing to thread drift. To bring things back to the thread explicitly, I think when piny says:
I immediately want to ask two questions: Why would it have to be one or the other? Seems to me that both could be important factors (though it may be shown that societal misogyny is the most important factor). Also: Why do you think that, piny? From what (admittedly little) I’ve read about testosterone, it just hasn’t been investigated enough to say that it’s not a factor at all. You are almost certainly more knowledgable about testosterone and its effects on the brain (at least you have some experience with it!)–could you point us to anything that supports your statement?
*sigh*
Sometimes I get so darned depressed when I watch the focus of a discussion on male behaviors shift in favor of biology.
There is so much that can be changed in the social sphere that can effect positive change in male behavior. Our culture encourages—even mandates—that young males define themselves in terms of sexual prowess and dominance over others. Images of this version of masculinity abound everywhere: in movies, books, video games, and music. These images are modeled by family members, older siblings, teachers, and friends.
The pressure is there from the youngest years, “Do I measure up, or am I a sissy, a wimp, a wuss?” One struggles for dominance among other boys through constant verbal sparing or the threat of physical assault. Failing to measure up to a certain standard of masculinity in the presence of other males results in painful taunting, social ostracism, and sometimes, physical assault. One learns to define one’s sense of self via dominance and control of one’s peers.
As one grows into adolescence, misogyny becomes the common currency of masculinity. Sharing misogynistic humor serves as a popular means of entertainment and bonding. Talking about girls’ and women’s body parts as though they were cuts of meat also serves a similar role. To be a virgin is to be inadequate, unmanly, emasculated. You pretend to have had sexual conquests even if you and many of your peers have secretly never dated. Three beliefs are reinforced from adolescence onward: sex makes a man powerful, the primary goal of intimate relationships is sex, and women exist to serve these goals.
This is a limited sample of the culture I grew up in. I lived it, breathed it and was damaged by it. It existed before I got there and it continues to exist now that I am long removed. Though I never did anything as horrible as sexually assault someone, I certainly participated in my fair share of games of dominance and misogynistic discussions. Out of fear for my own safety, a desire to be one of the boys, and a quest for social prestige, I conformed to the rules and played the game. I did my part in reproducing and passing on the warped culture that young males share.
There is so much that can change in the social environment that young boys grow up in: better role modeling by adult men, changes in the representations of males in the media, teaching non-violent conflict resolution in schools, and actively discouraging children’s tendency to single out others for ridicule. Prejudice of all kinds (including, but not limited to misogyny) and the damage that they wrought can be frankly and openly addressed from the youngest grades onward.
However, instituting these changes would actually require motivation on the part of those who control most of society’s resources: adult men (particularly white adult men). Those who hold positions of power don’t often feel motivated to change in ways that benefit their subordinates. In spite of the emotional damage that male socialization does to boys and men, that socialization centers on training males in how to amass power, work with power, and function within structures of power. Giving up that kind of training carries with it the implication of giving up power—whether this means giving up power over women or over anyone else lower down in the social strata. It carries with it the stigma of somehow becoming like those who live beneath you.
Discussions of testosterone, estrogen, brain sex and evolutionary psychology serve as distractions from what can be changed in the here and now—and there is much that can be changed. These kinds of discussions also distract people from the reasons why those who have power are unwilling to change.
This is why I simply want to scream when I see discussions like this take place. It’s like having one’s landlord show up and start talking about the quality of the cinder blocks in your basement while the framework of the house is collapsing from rot and decay. There’s so much more that needs to be done now and can be done now. One doesn’t have to reengineer the human genome to accomplish these things.
Culture is the ultimate just-so story. Why would culture do these things? What leads culture to create these influences? In what way do these attitudes serve the culture, and if they don’t, how did they come to persist in culture in the first place?
“Culturists” never seem to want to address these questions. It’s sufficient, to them, to say “culture is the source of this influence” and leave it at that.
And evolutionary psychologists are criticised for spinning “just-so” stories? Even though the culturists have absolutely no idea how culture came to be just so?
And before Zuzu puts a bunch of words in my mouth – I don’t think biology constitutes justification. Humans can change biology. Biology doesn’t determine what is right. But biology is. It needs to be studied. Pretending that biology doesn’t exist doesn’t eliminate its influence.
Because they can serve valuable purposes. There are clear and obvious reasons why (for example) physical strength and stoicism, etc. would be considered valuable in certain kinds of conditions, i.e. in the absence of reliable food sources and good medical treatment. People can physically respond to environmental pressures without being reduced to animal insticts by them. To immediately jump to “hormones, duh!” as an answer for these things completely discounts the potential value certain kinds of behavior may serve (even if we find it morally objectionable).
Really? How does one reconcile these two thoughts?
By realizing that the first is asking a question, and the second is stating a position.
Seriously. How anyone views these two things as inconsistent is beyond me. I’m not trying to have it both ways; I asked a question in the first, and in the second, I told you what I thought the answer was. The inconsistency is yours and your peers, who improperly assumed my answer to the question was something that it wasn’t, and are now pissed that you’re in the position of being corrected by the one person who actually knows what I think – myself.
How are those not just-so stories? What environments? In what specific ways are these behaviors adaptive?
Why is it that the cultural explanations trigger no significant objection, but evolutionary explanations – that often include a mechanism, something your explanation doesn’t – piss everybody off?
Do you see what I mean about evolutionary psychology not getting a fair shake around here?
I trust you’re aware of the definition of “leading question”?
Hahahahaha. Wow. You can try and make yourself feel better with that one, but it’s not working.
If life is nasty, brutish and short, there isn’t a reliable food source, and medical care and pain management as we know it is nonexistant, stoicism will be advantageous. I will google for it, but there’s a lot of research about stoicism among mothers in areas where child mortality is extremely high. Because they know that so few of their children will survive, there’s no incentive to create huge mourning rituals.
So environmental pressures and the perpetuation of culture are not explanations in your mind? Duly noted. The problem with your explanations, at least to my mind, is that they’re necessarily reductionist and not helpful in trying to manage social problems. If, for example, testosterone causes rape, what are we to do about it besides start sticking men with estrogen shots?
Who’s pretending biology doesn’t exist, Chet?
You know, you’re really all over the map here. On the one hand, you ask things like, “Isn’t it reasonable to at least wonder to what degree an individual is culpable because his body is generating mind-altering chemicals against his will?”
And then you whine about the treatment you received from boys at school whose bodies were generating those very same mind-altering chemicals. Hey, if we’re all so inescapably influenced by those chemicals coursing through our system, they were just acting naturally when they picked on you! They couldn’t help it. Prisoners of their biology, you know.
See, if you stop at biology, you don’t get to your argument in the comics thread that they were objectifying you because of your geekery. You don’t get to an examination of why this kind of behavior is tacitly accepted and encouraged, what kind of social forces are at work, and who benefits from this kind of pecking order. And you also don’t get to your contention that this kind of abuse excuses and justifies misogyny and objectifying women. Because all of those are cultural factors.
Thank you. That’s exactly my point.
Biologically based explanations offer no solutions except, possibly, biological modification. Currently, science does not offer solutions to eliminating sexist oppression. Even if there were a solution available, I’m not sure how you would convince the populace to willingly alter their physiology. Sexist oppression isn’t rooted in the attitudes of a few bad apples, it’s present everywhere. Personally, I shudder at the prospect of forcing people en masse to undergo physiological modifications. That sounds a lot like a sci-fi dystopia.
More importantly, there have been a ton of advances for women in many countries since the industrial revolution. Attitudes, behaviors and roles have shifted for both women and men over the past two centuries. The amount of change that has taken place in the past four decades alone has been extraordinary. I might also add that a lot of the change that has taken place over the last four decades is a consequence of the political activism of the 60’s and 70’s. You can’t tell me that’s because human instinct has changed or some shift in the human genome is taking place. It boils down to the interplay of social forces.
So, why shouldn’t the focus be on social change, the forces that bring about social change, and an analysis of what needs to be changed in society? Those are the tools we have. Lets work with them.
Huh. That’s ironic. When I was a boy, I too went through a lot of taunting from other boys. Chet, we might have some personal history in common. I’m not saying that to be a smarty pants. I didn’t read the comics post, but I can certainly empathize with being picked on as a boy.
When I make the kinds of arguments that I have made in this thread, the horrid experiences that I had as a boy are always in the back of my mind. Always. The stuff that I’m talking about isn’t a win-lose proposition, with women coming out on top. I really do want to see both women and men gain some kind of benefit from eliminating sexism. The taunting that I experienced certainly seemed to be tied up in notions of male power and dominance. Perhaps you, too?
Just think about this in common-sense terms for a bit. In order for this thought experiment to make sense, there has to be a “normal male testosterone level” that corresponds to a “normal male sexuality” that does not involve rape. There also has to be an “abnormally high male testosterone level” that corresponds to an “aberrant male sexuality” that does include a significantly higher impulse towards rape. In other words, rape needs to be an anomaly: not caring whether the woman you’re having sex with wants to have sex with you has to be an anomaly. Not just now, but for our species across time.
Does that make sense to you?
Yeah. Jesus, how can I be so inconsistent! On one hand, I’m asking a question to see what people think; and on the other, I’m putting forth my own position on the matter!
If only I could make up my fucking mind!
To address a real argument:
They lack mechanism. For instance – suppose that an environment develops in which a certain cultural trait is advantageous. How does that cause the culture to actually react in that way? Cultures aren’t organisms; they don’t reproduce with variation. A culture is essentially immortal. Even when cultures compete, the end result is not the extinction of one culture and the dominance of another; cultures blend into each other.
Environments select traits in organisms, but the genesis of traits in organisms is not the environment (Lamarkian evolution) but in random variation among individuals (Darwinian evolution.) You propose that cultures adapt to their environment, but you haven’t actually proposed a mechanism by which culture and environment interact. And even if there was such an adaptive mechanism – that doesn’t explain the situation we have now, where you’re explaining behaviors that are maladaptive now as adaptations to environments that existed then. If cultures can adapt their behavior to environment, we should see them doing that now, and we should see the rapid “extinction” of behaviors that no longer aid our culture in its environment.
But we don’t. Do we?
Oh, golly gosh, whatever could you mean by asking a question that suggests its own answer?
So, I’m going to guess that you’re completely in agreement with the idea that those boys who beat you up were (are?) just prisoners of their own hormones, that their aggressive behavior is completely, utterly natural, that you should have expected it, that they couldn’t have helped themselves.
Ergo, you were just naturally a victim of their violence and there was nothing you could do. Which means that you have to come up with some other explanation for Frank Miller’s misogyny.
StacyM: Your #14 comment was a marvelously succinct and empathetic summary of what most males experience growing up in this society, an experience to which the word “privilege” attaches tenuously at best.
Chet: I’m not sure what you mean by “culturists” and their “just so” stories. If you’re referring to mental structuralists like Claude Levi-Strauss, then your point about their “just so” stories is well taken. However, the proper rebuttal to these mental structuralists is not pure sociobiological reductivism, which, as the late cultural anthropologist Marvin Harris liked to point out, can only explain similarites between societies and not differences.
You seem to be hung up on the question of the mechanism by which the environment changes a culture. It’s true the dynamics of this can often be obscured by the ‘veil of culture’ of a society and the ‘stories it tells itself’ about why things are done the way they are. But the causal interplay is there. It shouldn’t strain anyone’s imagination to see that if a hunter/gatherer society hunts all of the big game animals to extinction, for example, the impact on that culture will be profound as it reorganizes itself to adapt. Harris does a wonderful job explaining how this works in his book, Cannibals and Kings, among others.
None of which is to deny that sociobiological dynamics do exist. However, these dynamics are usually only useful when seen as the ‘broad stroke’ backdrop to cultures, and rarely offer much insight into why members of one society behave differently than those in another. Piny’s point that one would need to establish some kind of correlation between testosterone level and rape behavior across cultures for this to be seen as a compelling explanation is valid.
Well, humans are intelligent creatures who consciously adapt to their environments via changes in behavior. If that weren’t the case, we wouldn’t be able to survive in so many different climates. We’re all over the bloody planet, after all. The way folks do things in the desert isn’t the same as the way folks do things in the rainforest. If your culture fails to adapt adequately, you and your culture die off, and someone else moves in to take your place and try again.
This actually seems like a perfect scenario for an evolutionary process to take place—only not the evolution of biological traits, rather the evolution of group behavior. Evolution in the classical sense—the adaptation of a species to its environment via biological changes—relies upon random adaptive mutations over extremely long periods of time. Evolution of group behavior doesn’t rely upon random biological mutations; it relies upon the collaborative intelligence of aggregates of people. The point is, the process is guided by intelligent awareness, as opposed to chance. As such, this form of evolution can proceed at a fairly rapid pace, at least compared to the glacial speeds of evolution in a species’ biology.
If cultures can’t change, spread to new locations and then change some more, then it begs the question of how we wound up with so many different cultures on this planet in the first place. If culture was truly so inflexible, wouldn’t we now be living in one big, monolithic culture from continent to continent? Unless you are trying to imply that cultural differences have arisen from genetic variations between races of people? That’s heading into some questionable, perhaps dangerous territory.
Thank you for the compliment, Ballgame. :)
Just for the record, I feel that the power that is granted to people born male is indeed privilege. While the experience of growing up as a male may not feel very much like privilege, that process imbues us with certain attitudes and access points to power that help make our privilege possible.
Piny: Thanks so much for putting my post on the main page here at Feministe and discussing how it relates to your own experiences and beliefs. I’ve also enjoyed the opportunity to blab on, and on, and on… :P
It seems to me, Chet, you are ignoring the whole dimension of humanity we call “intelligence.” Human beings, like just about any animal, have neurons to carry sensory information to a central neural net–called “the brain” in most animals–which processes this information to form a model of the environment around the organism, which is used to anticipate environmental changes and to devise strategies for surviving. Animals (including us) owe this organization to Darwinian evolution of course, but the more neurologically advanced animals can accomplish a lot that isn’t genetically preprogrammed–this is their evolutionary advantage, after all, to be somewhat open-ended in their behavior, to take advantage of opportunities and avoid hazards with much greater flexibility than any repertoire of reactions derived from natural selection alone can offer. Brains are rather expensive bits of biological equipment after all; they would not be supported if there were not a huge payoff.
These statements are all especially true for human beings of course (including the one about cost–our huge brains are the major reason childbirth is so difficult and dangerous for women, and it takes more than a decade for a human baby to mature enough to possibly function among adults as an economic individual). We talk a lot about “culture” but I think it is important to distinguish between culture and _society_. The former being the body of knowledge, technique, and tools (to anthropologists, artifacts are “culture” too) and the latter being the pattern of _behavior_ that a given group expects and reproduces in the course of its survival strategy. It is not “culture” that socializes us to behave in certain ways–it doesn’t happen just because we are told one story rather than another. It is _society_ that socializes–when we are told the stories, we hear the emphasis on which parts tell us how we should behave and which parts are examples of what not to do. We see how people treat each other and draw conclusions. We know that some behavior is rewarded and other behavior is punished. We learn roles. All this is not just taken in as information; it is enforced. That’s society.
It is perfectly reasonable to attempt to understand society in the Marvin Harris sort of mode of selection for survival behavior, though I think Harris oversimplifies and takes shortcuts. If we have in mind the concept of what I think of as the human trinity–culture, society, the individual–we can make sense of things.
“Culture” alone, as I define it, certainly might suffer from the criticism you level, that it is unclear how it can evolve and perpetuate itself. But since I think you were, like most people, including society in culture, it is a rather odd objection to raise.
Not only can social patterns evolve by trial-and-error selection, but the intelligence of human individuals injects a kind of Lamarickan direction to variations-that is, people see problems, and suggest variations they have reasoned out as common-sense solutions. Thus social variations unlike Darwinian ones are not random but already directed toward solutions. Furthermore selection for social behavior need not be by elimination of less fit variants–people, being intelligent, observe their own failure and look for new solutions. They can watch what other groups do, and in fact language, which tremendously multiplies the potential of individual brains by allowing the sharing of knowledge (that is, culture) even allows different groups to communicate directly, thus it is possible for culture to be shared and social patterns copied directly.
Given the power of these aspects of human experience, it does not seem that biology can ever be taken as any kind of absoulte imperative. No matter what degree my brain might differ based on how much testosterone versus estrogen is awash in it, my mind must adapt to enable me to orient in the real world I live in. As is often the case in biology, especially neurology, relative considerations matter more than absolute ones. You can boil a frog if you raise the temperature of the water it is in slowly, and even if I grant that my testicles are swamping my brain in stuff that greatly predisposes me to be abrupt, assertive, short-tempered, lusty, and to do calculus, it is what I am used to, and when my situation calls instead for me to be patient, diplomatic, calm in the face of provocation, restrained, or even poetic, I had better be able to do so, or I have _lost_ capacity my brain should give me. That would be mind-poisoning indeed! Since I am used to the alleged raging manhood impulses, I ought to be able to control them. Vice versa if women really are suffused with stuff making them all soft, compliant, nurturing, etc and yet get into situations where they need the more macho virtues–they had better be able to.
And oddly enough, we are. The _purpose_ of intelligence, that we have our expensive brains for, is to enable us to have options when faced with difficult challenges.
I for one don’t doubt that humans have powerful emotions, but their purpose is not to pre-program us to act in certain ways. Typcially a biological response presents a creature with choices as how to respond; intelligence can always navigate between them.
Social conditioning works largely by trying to dictate which choice we will make. But any system that worked absolutely would make us literally mindless. Not even a sea urchin can survive like that.
Responsibility is another way of saying that we have intelligence and our actions have purpose and meaning.
This is likely one of those situations where you’re making a very obvious point and I’m just not getting it, and I apologize for my lack of understanding. I’m not sure what you mean. I would appreciate a clarification, but I also recognize that it may be that I’m just not getting something fundamental that it’s not your responsibility to clarify.
One possible meaning of your response: You’re pointing out that rape isn’t an anomaly. I think that rape in at least one sense isn’t ‘the norm’– in the sense that more men don’t rape than do rape, and more women aren’t raped than are raped. To the degree that it isn’t the norm, in this sense, it is an anomaly. Of course, to the degree that our culture is misogynistic, rape isn’t anomalous, but is the norm. But I don’t understand how that would stop us from setting up standards for ‘normal male testoterone level’ and the like, for our species across time. Such standards would admitedly be a mix of prescriptive and descriptive, but it seems to me that a lot of standards are this way. When we make laws regarding sexual consent, for instance, we draw lines at age limits, in part (one hopes) based on biological standards, and in part based on what we would want to be the case–any standard that completely ignores either side of things would be not very useful; for instance, the ‘abstinance only’ education platform ignores the fact that young people often want to have sex–and in a very strong way, basing its usefulness entirely on what (some) people would want to be the case–that young people not have sex. I think ignoring possible biological factors completely (in the way that I think “some men don’t rape, therefore we can only look at the will of a man who rapes as a possible cause for rape” implies) is as ill advised as ignoring cultural factors, or ignoring personal responsibility.
Also, who in this discussion doesn’t want rape to be an anomaly in the sense that we want it to be (if it happens at all) a freak occurence that we can do a lot to avoid almost all of the time? I think by taking into account both chemical processes in the brain (including how testosterone is regulated in the brain and body) and other environmental factors as well as taking into account freedom of choice is a good way to work toward making rape an anomaly.
Having said all that, after reading more of what StacyM has to say, I would have to say that if it were the case that we ought to only take one factor into account in assigning responsibility–personal choice or biological factors–then I would say we talk only about personal choice. And, (I’m extrapolating from some of her points here, I think), it may be the case that we only have so much attention to be paid to the issue–in which case perhaps it is wrong to ‘distract’ people from the important personal responsibility factors.
But I don’t think that it is the case that we can only take into account factors of personal responsibility when thinking about this, or when doing something about it. If we were to take that road regarding, say, the glass ceiling, then we would just throw up our hands at the pervasive sexism regarding hiring and promoting practices and say, “Well, some women are CEOs, so any woman can be.” We don’t do this, and for good reason: Personal responsibility probably has something to do with a particular woman being promoted–but the factor of sexism in the workplace undoubtedly makes it more difficult for some women to advance. Just like personal responsibility has a lot to do with whether a man rapes or not, but that other factors–the very culture that teaches him it’s ok, and perhaps his testosterone levels, for instance–undoubtedly make it more difficult for him to become the sort of man who doesn’t rape.
I’d like to point out something quite disturbing about your post, Jeff. You are trying to draw an analogy between a man’s responsibility for rape and a woman’s responsibility for not putting enough effort into overcoming the glass ceiling. Let me restate that: you are attempting to draw an analogy between responsibility for rape and responsibility for acquiring a job. The two do not equate. You are comparing one of the most traumatic things that can happen to a human being with acquiring a job.
If you don’t see what’s wrong with your analogy, spend some time reading rape survivors’ accounts of their experiences. Then, spend some time considering who holds power in this society and what that means in your “analogy.”
May I point out something else? If you were a woman, and you had to live with the fear that you might be raped at some point in your life, would you even think of creating an analogy between being raped and being promoted at your job?
I’m going to go out on a limb here, but I don’t think you’ve seriously considered the gravity of rape, what it does to those who experience it, and how the threat of rape constrains women’s lives.
Jeffliveshere–
Piny’s point about why the “simple” explanation of rape in terms of testosterone levels makes no sense seems clear enough. _If_ it were the case that such differentials in behavior between the genders as we see today originate in any sort of _biological_ cause, then the same discrepency should hold through all human history. No matter what the forms of society, population density, mode of economy, etc, if testosterone predisposes men to rape, that predisposition should be found in any human society whatsoever.
A major problem I’ve always found with the typical pro-masculinist “evo-psych” stuff reactionaries like to babble is that their assumptions about the social conditions under which our species evolved have nothing to do with the actual conditions anthropologists find evidence for. Humans evolved from hominids who had already adopted pretty much the same social organization as modern surviving gatherer-hunter bands have, even before our ancestors evolved the high degree of manual skill for tool-making, or language. And that social form is _nothing_ like the cave-man fantasies armchair conservatives like to have about their tough, manly ancestors who took by conquest. It didn’t happen that way.
But if testosterone, or any other theory revolving around innate bodily differences, is to be the explanation of why men rape today, then we have some serious explaining to do why gather-hunter bands are _not_ in fact the orgy of rape and domineering that “Social Darwinist” and other conservative types liked to project backward in their evidence-free speculations about what our ancestors “must” have been like. Because in terms of explanations revolving around bodies and genetic inheritances, the past 10,000 years of agriculture and “civilization” are as _nothing_ compared to the many hundreds of thousands of years in which humans of apparently perfectly modern types lived as Paleolithic gatherer-hunters, not to mention the millions of years pre-human hominids lived much the same way though without conveniences like baskets or fire. If we are in fact to explain our behavior in terms of fitness to a natural way of life, it is the gatherer-hunter mode and not anything that most people living today experience that we should fit, and any theories about our acting out evolutionary programming that apply today must fit that lifestyle even better.
But in fact the theory that says that men can become possessed by hormonal drives to the point of being driven to rape does not fit into gatherer-hunter society at all. No place is made there for such violent and egotistical behavior. It wasn’t “normal” during our evolution, so how can it be mandated by our evolutionary heritage now?
Explanations must lie in social and cultural norms. That’s not to say that primitive emotions are not involved, but it is to say these are manipulated and reorganized by society. And therefore society can be reorganized to emphasize different results.
If we choose to recognize that the current organization of society does violate the rights of women, and to work toward a society that treats all people as having equal rights to be respected, we are thus feminists. To do otherwise is to persist in oppressing women, and (as piny and others who speak for transgendered for instance can point out) anyone who deviates from the narrow script of a patriarchial society as well, no matter what sex they were born with.
StacyM–
I apologize to you and to anybody who felt the same way about my analogy; I think I thought it through from the logical side of things, but I didn’t give enough weight to the other implications of offering up the analogy. At the time, it seemed a good way to go about it, because I thought it was apt to compare the way we deal with the complexities of responsibility and rape culture with the way we deal with the complexities of responsibility and another aspect of sexist culture, as respresented by the glass ceiling. And, to be fair to myself, I think it’s important that I was comparing not the rapist to the person looking for a promotion, but the way we see responsibility in each case. However, it was stupid of me to not recognize that even making that comparison is to ignore the gravity of rape, and I again apologize. Further, I appreciate you taking the time to point it out to me–I imagine that to some it is such an obvious fuck-up that it wasn’t worth the time to point it out to me for various people who spotted it and felt the same way about it that you do.
I used the glass ceiling analogy in part because I had been talking with a friend about her work enviornment, and it just struck me as similar–neither she nor I were of the feeling that it was her fault that she wasn’t getting promoted, but a coworker had pointed out that the company has several prominent women managers, and the coworker was attempting to use that fact to justify his opinion that my friend got passed over for reasons other than sexism (which is possible, but in the particular case, unlikely). And that coworker is, of course, wrong…one or two (possible) tokens does not an anti-sexist policy make. Still, and I can’t say this enough, it was dumb of me to throw the glass ceiling analogy in there, and I apologize for my ignorance and insensitivity.
Originally I didn’t put a lot of force on the glass ceiling/responsiblity analogy. Rather, the main analogy was the analogy between how we might view the rapist’s responsibility vs. how we view the responsibility of, say, a black man charged with some crime and thrown into our criminal justice system, which is a racist institution (to whatever degree, it’s hard to argue it’s not racist to some degree). Thus, we think of (or at least I do) ‘being oppressed within a racist society’ as being a mitigating factor when doling out punishments–those who have to put up with the soul-crushingness of racial oppression ought to still be held responsible for crimes, but the fact that they’ve had to deal with more matters, I think, in how we judge their responsibility. Similarly, if we figured out that those who have abnormally high testosterone levels have a tougher time resisting violent urges, we might mitigate how we punish them in various ways (some of which I sketched out before).
I’m curious to know how you might feel about that analogy–if we might simply throw out the glass ceiling analogy because it may so easily seem to trivialize rape, I don’t think that the other analogy has the same fault. If that’s the case, is there a problem with that analogy, which I think serves to show that we oftentimes recognize the complexities of attributing personal responsibilities in ways very different from ‘if one person does/doesn’t do it, then any person can do/not do it’.
And in case it’s not clear, my point isn’t that rapists ‘can’t help it’ if they have high testosterone levels, or even that we can say much at all about rape and testosterone levels–but if higher-than-average testosterone levels are one of the causal factors (along with the will of the rapists, the societal pressure for violence against women, and many other factors), then that fact ought to be considered when trying to create a world with less rape (though, again, it may be the smallest causal factor or some such–I don’t think we yet know). It shouldn’t be considered as more important than the other factors (unless it turns out to be, which is doubtful), but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be considered at all.
Anyone, male or female, who commits a violent crime as a consequence of a psycholiciApproximately one in six women in the United States experience rape or attempted rape over the period of a lifetime. The majority of these women know their attackers. A large percentage of these women were raped when they were minors (44% to 61%).
Few of these cases make it into the criminal justice system and even fewer result in conviction. Only about 2 to 6 percent of rapists (including unreported rapes) are ever incarcerated.
Rape is a social epidemic whose sheer pervasiveness in society is often overlooked. Nearly all rapists get away with their crimes. So, am I willing to consider how biology might make some men less responsible for their crimes? With a 2 to 6 percent incarceration rate?
NO.
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Some statistical sources:
http://www.rainn.org/statistics/index.html
http://www2.ucsc.edu/rape-prevention/statistics.html
http://www.actabuse.com/SAstatistics.html
***Actually, that last post didn’t copy over correctly. Here’s the corrected version.***
Approximately one in six women in the United States experience rape or attempted rape over the period of a lifetime. The majority of these women know their attackers. A large percentage of these women were raped when they were minors (44% to 61%).
Few of these cases make it into the criminal justice system and even fewer result in conviction. Only about 2 to 6 percent of rapists (including unreported rapes) are ever incarcerated.
Rape is a social epidemic whose sheer pervasiveness in society is often overlooked. Nearly all rapists get away with their crimes. So, am I willing to consider how biology might make some men less responsible for their crimes? With a 2 to 6 percent incarceration rate?
NO.
=====================
Some statistical sources:
http://www.rainn.org/statistics/index.html
http://www2.ucsc.edu/rape-prevention/statistics.html
http://www.actabuse.com/SAstatistics.html
StacyM–
Noting how horrible rape is as an experience and noting how few men are convicted of rape, while important, does nothing to show me that testosterone levels don’t factor as one of the causes of violent behavoir, including rape. And if one of the goals is to reduce the number of rapes, then it seems to me that ignoring possible punishments/treatments of rapists on the basis of testosterone levels (if–and this hasn’t been shown, of course–that higher than normal levels of testosterone may be a factor in causing rapes) is inadvisable.
On the other hand, if this is a question of resources (as I pointed out in my first comment and in reference later to a point of yours) regarding causing change, then it’s understandable to not focus on testosterone (or other biological factors) if one believes that they don’t matter as much/enough. But not focusing on it isn’t the same thing as saying that it’s not a factor. I was advocating for the position that, except as a matter of resources, it seems wrong to rule out biological factors altogether in the way that piny seems to have.
Thank you for the statistical sources. I hope you don’t think from my earlier analogy that I am completely ignorant as regards the horrors of rape, of the number of rapes (1 in 6 is conservative by a lot of estimates I’ve seen, for instance). I am a man, I have not been raped, I have not had to live in fear of rape the way every single woman has to be, etc. But that doesn’t mean automatically that I am completely ignorant, or that I haven’t thought about it. I may not have thought enough about it–I can say that about most important topics as regards what I know and what I don’t know, because I tend to think more thinking is almost always good–but I have thought about it. That said, more info is always good, so thanks for the urls.
Hormones do not ‘control’ behavior. They may give you urges or tendencies. Rape, is an act of volition. It cannot happen accidentally. Therefore culpability attaches to every act of rape. It is considered mallum im se (evil by its nature not its context)
Rape is not so much an sexual act as an act of hatred and/or vengeance. The difference between being a human and animal is that we have a moral code and can forsee the effects of our actions. To blame testosterone (whatever its level) is patent nonsense. Remember, women have testosterone too.
Dude. Jeff. Wow. If I want a promotion, it depends on *other people*. Other people have to see me as competent, intelligent, a good leader, a successful arselicker, a good guy to have a pint with, whatever their criteria are. If I want to not rape somebody, it depends on *me* and me alone. I just have to do it. I’m doing it right now. Go me, with my extra-long ring fingers and the consistent not-raping! Although I’m female, so I guess I don’t get any cookies for controlling my testosterone-driven urges. But you do see that there’s an actual difference in the locus of responsibility here, not just a perceived one?
I’m not saying that investigating biological correlations with rape is uninteresting or unimportant (are you sure there hasn’t been a testosterone-level related study done? There are a lot of psychologists out there in the world and it seems that some of them might have already thought of this.) I’m just saying: your analogy is more full of holes than an MRA’s ex-girlfriend’s condom collection.
Also, your suggestions would amount in practice to handing rapists yet another get-out-of-jail-free card and also promoting the canard that men just can’t help themselves thereby shifting even more of the perceived reponsibility for rape onto the victims than already rests there. Anyway, no one will see this comment cos the post is old but I just can’t help responding. I wonder what the hormone is that controls that?
Magis–
Who is saying that hormones control behavior, in any sort of strict sense of the term ‘control’? I, at least, am suggesting that testosterone could be a contributing factor for violent behavior (including rape); I think this can be true without it also being the case that we ‘blame testosterone’ exclusively. To consider it as one of many factors, and to then weigh the factors (and testosterone levels may not carry much weight, but we ought to figure out if they do) seems to be a good practical way to go to me.
Niamh–
I think there are serious problems with my analogy to the glass ceiling, as I pointed out responding to StacyM. I don’t think that what you are pointing out is one of those problems. In fact, it illustrates just what I’m trying to show: Regarding promotions, we don’t just take into account the abilities of the person seeking promotion if we’re judging responsibility for getting a promotion or not; we also, as you point out, take into account how other people judge that person. In the case of being rejected for a promotion because of sexism, we not only might judge her employers/managers as sexist, but we might also consider the entire corporate (or business in general) environement which supports sexism in the workplace. And we would consider the larger envirnonment within which that sexism thrives–the larger world of sexims. Thus, the responsibility for getting or not getting a promotion doesn’t only rest on the shoulders of the woman striving against sexism–it also rests upon her sexist coworkers, and the larger business world, and our sexist culture in general. If we didn’t have a sexist culture in general, those sexist employers wouldn’t as often be able to get away with such things, for instance.
When a man rapes, he is morally responsible. He is legally responsible. But my whole point is that we may want to resist the idea that he is entirely responsible–because we don’t count other people as entirely responsible in various situations, and I don’t see the reason why being a rapist has a different standard of responsiblity than, say, murder (see my analogy to the criminal justice system, above). Just because an act is horrible and evil doesn’t entail that our view of personal/moral/legal responsibility changes from act to act. And if you think it ought to, then please explain to me why. If we judge that racism plays a part in the justice system to some degree in a way that makes us want to mitigate punishments, for instance, then why couldn’t testosterone levels mitigate punishments?
As to get-out-of-jail-free cards: I think I made it abundantly clear that thinking about testosterone levels as one of many factors would entail no such thing, just as thinking of the oppressiveness of racism doesn’t let accused murderers off the hook entirely–though it might affect how we try and punish them.
I still think that there is a thread of ‘either-or’ thinking going on here that people keep attributing to my position, and putting forward themselves, that just doesn’t make sense. Causes are complex, oftentimes, and personal responsibility isn’t clear cut, oftentimes. That’s what the racism/justice system analogy is supposed to show, as I’m guessing this audience has a lot of people who would agree that personal responsibility is a complex thing as regards race and our justice system.
I don’t see why one has to believe that either a man is completely legally/morally responsible for a rape or he isn’t responsible at all. It can be the case that men are legally and morally responsible for rape and still be the case that we ought to consider that testosterone levels could be a mitigating circumstance. Why are people ok with mitigating circumstances in other cases, but not in this one?