As a consequence, we don't even know how to begin understanding the consequences of boys growing up internalising this continual certainty of violence, along with this narcotic indifference to it. Boys learn early on that the slashing and slaughtering and raping and battering and butchering of males by other males is the default condition, the neutral and shruggingly immutable background against which violence towards women and female children starts forth as a repugnant perversion of the order of things. Repugnant, but also vividly picturable and therefore morally quickening. Look back on the expiring century and it is hard not to see its leading achievement as the ever more intricate machinery to accelerate the transformation by men of other men's bodies into sewage. If it is vital to understand the inflicting of violence in terms of gender, and it surely is, it is a vileness to think of its victims in the same way.
Violence is fundamentally and inescapably an issue of gender.
Suffering is not.