The Volatile Male: The Statistical Evidence for Toxic Masculinity
By: Joe Duncan
Tags: Violence, Culture, Feminism, Science, Women

The Volatile Male: The Statistical Evidence for Toxic Masculinity

The Statistics of the Male Problem Revisited

I honestly cringe and my heart sinks every time I think of the comments and private messages that women receive, something I’ve written about at length, unrelentingly, because it’s something that I feel needs attention. The banal, vitriolic, hate-filled sewage that are constants rather than exceptions in the inbox of literally every single woman I know (and sickeningly, young girls, as well). Unruly behavior is off the charts these days, but bad male behavior is especially off the charts.

Women all over know this to be their only reality, meanwhile, I step into it on occasion, as a voyeur, and am able to step out of it. I make no mistake that for me the vitriolic nature of intergender conversation these days is, to me, mere sport, an eye-opening trip into the everyday lived experiences of women, an excursion into the downright range, anger, and hatred that men in large numbers have against women and aren’t afraid to show it.

There’s the guy who just types “hey” seventy-six times without ever hearing a response from the woman, the guy who pretends to be the nicest, most charming man in the world — he even picks his voice up two octaves for you every time you speak — and many more.

Every word I scroll passed, every utterance I take in, every phrase I interpret and decode, all of it looks like a train crash of domestic violence waiting to happen. So many women friends of mine express frustration, discontent, and even despair at how difficult it is to find a good man in the world — and I can only empathize. It’s bizarre that problematic men so often wear their bad behaviors on their sleeves and once you learn the code you learn how to decipher who’s who by looking for specific patterns.

This is something most men don’t think about. They don’t entertain it. Most men — but not all men! — are so arrogant that they can’t even fathom things going wrong in a conversation, so full of themselves that they cannot imagine that women might show the vile hatred they receive to other people, the stalking, the harassment, the ugliness.

Too many men out there can’t conceive for even a minute that women might have self-determination and make decisions that don’t involve keeping men’s ego in the sweet Goldilocks zone where they don’t implode and meltdown like a nuclear reactor that’s being run by drunken chimpanzees.

Yet, when we ask just about any man what they think about women, they’ll say women are volatile, emotional creatures who can’t be taken seriously. They’ll dismissively crack jokes about how “emotional” women are to the point where it’s been a long-running meme that’s become ingrained into our culture. Currently, there’s the #challengeaccepted hashtag trending to raise awareness to femicides in Turkey and to the violence women face the world over. Photos are appearing everywhere in black-and-white as people show solidarity. The goal is for women to support women.

Who’s More Emotional, Men or Women?

Meanwhile, bad jokes, wives' tales, and so-called “common knowledge” are just a few of the things that attempt to sway us, leading us to believe that women are the emotionally erratic, volatile, even explosive sex between the two. These notions paint a caricature of what it means to be a woman.

Folklore everywhere perpetuates this stereotype and we find it all around us — from media to things that our friends say. Western society often bemoans effeminate behavior, charging it with accusations of senselessness and a lack of reason. I’d like to challenge this notion.

I’ll even go as far as to say that the whole idea was born out of a deflection away from the male expressions of emotion to perpetuate a myth: the myth of the overly emotional woman. A myth which simply isn’t true.

This assumption (and let’s call it what it is, sexism) is flat out wrong. It is sexism because it’s not based in fact, but rather, the opposite lies spread to shift focus and blame. It is the male sex which is much more likely to display an erratic lack of composure and traits which are anything but sober and stoic.

In almost every measurable category, men display a propensity toward the discharge of emotion that isn’t matched by our feminine counterparts — this is largely due to varying evolutionary pressures; in our ancestral history, emotional tirades and violent outbursts from men often worked — that is, they increased the likelihood of that particular male’s survival and procreation. Men willing to fight — and die — were simply much more valuable to society for an awfully long time, and aggressive men were much more likely to obtain mating opportunities.

But the world has changed with the advent of civilization and the creation of a new, civilized society that we inhabit today, leaving many men to question just what exactly they are to do with their maleness.

Perhaps this story can shed light on some possible answers to that very question. While I don’t mean to bash my fellow males, the prognosis is pretty grim, and I think we’re going to have to do some serious soul-searching on the individual level, and radical changes on the societal level to overcome the parts of ourselves deep down that we find ourselves perpetually at war with, as we begin to paint a clearer picture of what the face of that person looks like. It’s time that we men actually listen to women’s struggles, rather than deflect and dismiss because the reality of the numbers speaks for itself.

Let’s Talk About Crimes of Passion

Why do we kill? This is a very interesting question, considering that murder happens every day, and each and every murder has a causal chain of events in the way of the thoughts of the perpetrator which leads up to another life being taken. For every person that’s murdered, there’s another person who decided why they needed to die.

While possessiveness isn’t a wholly male trait, it’s a predominantly male trait, and though women can exhibit displays of possessiveness as well — even going as far as sometimes killing their spouse — men definitely carry the torch of possessiveness, with a seemingly innate sense of entitlement to women’s minds, bodies, respect, and so forth. A lot of this has to do with basic biology, variances our hormone levels, with testosterone playing a role in provoking our aggressive and possessive natures, and the so-called “male monogamy hormone,” vasopressin playing a role in our inclination to defend our territory and property.

The idea that some have that there are a lot of murderers and serial killers out there just waiting to kill women is quite misguided, though 85% of serial killers in the United States have been men.

Less than 9%, only 8.9% of all women who are murdered are murdered by a stranger. The truth hits a little closer to home than we’d like to believe, that murder isn’t typically the act of some ravenous serial killer, but ordinary people we have established relationships with.

A full 30% of women who are murdered are murdered by their spouses. On top of this daunting statistic, we can tack on 18% more of the women murdered by an ex-spouse. This glaring contrast highlights the true nature of the vulnerability of men to spontaneous acts of rage-fueled violence. About one in every two women who are killed are killed by their male lovers or ex-lovers. You read that right, a little shy of half of all women murdered total are murdered by a “lover”. Guys, if you’ve ever wondered why women are so hesitant to date you, here’s your sign.

We can contrast these numbers with the comfortably low 5% of men who are murdered by their spouses or lovers. Men are, by and large, the perpetrators of crimes of passion, according to FBI statistics. If spontaneous murder is our guide in observing our tendencies to discharge emotion recklessly, it seems that men are significantly more prone to moments of passionate rage where they end up taking the lives of their female counterparts.

I specifically highlight homicide, here, because there is very little room for homicides going under-reported, as is the case with sexual assault and domestic violence — men could be significantly less likely to report these two crimes — the dead don’t have a choice in whether their victimization is discovered after they’ve been murdered.

Crimes of passion are things that men downplay when they call women “emotional”, but crimes of passion are a particularly male flaw. What can we do to address this? I’ll attempt to answer this question later…first, let’s get back to the statistics…

Eight out of every ten family murderers are males, while females make up 58% of victims. Why the discrepancy? How can females only be 58% of the victims while males represent a full 80% of perpetrators? Children. Children make up only 3% of murder victims in non-familial settings but make up 23% of murder victims in familial settings.

Some more upsetting statistics from the Bureau of Justice:

“Nearly half of all the family violence offenders in State prisons were serving a sentence for a sex offense against a family member. More than threequarters of parents convicted of a violent crime against their son or daughter were in prison for a sex offense. Of the crimes for which family violence offenders were in prison • most were against a female (78%) • more than half were against a child under age 18 • more than a third were against a child under age 13. About 90% of offenders in State prisons for family violence had injured their victim: • 50% of family violence victims were raped or sexually assaulted • 28% of the victims of family violence were killed • 50% of offenders in State prisons for spousal abuse had killed their victims • Of State prison inmates imprisoned for a crime against their son or daughter, 79% had raped or sexually assaulted the child, and another 10% had killed the child. Among family violence offenders in State prisons in 1997 — • most were male (93%) • 6 out of 10 were white, while about a quarter were black • about 80% were between ages 25 and 54.”

Eliminating Biases in Reporting

Now let’s start controlling for a variable because I know some of you guys out there have to be thinking, “Well, men are just more shameful because society looks down on male assault victims more and thus those don’t get reported.”

Glad you brought this up…

According to a Bureau of Justice publication, the reporting rate in instances of familial violence among females is not significantly greater than the reporting rate among males from 1999–2002, a time when sex and gender roles were much more rigid than in America they are today.

Spousal murder is a big problem and a uniquely male one. But murder isn’t the only category of even violent crime, let alone being the sole measure of emotional volatility…

Let’s Talk About Rape

While I’m very glad to report that there’s been a 60% decline sexual violence and assaults against women from 1995 to 2010, something we should all think about for a minute to put things into perspective, but we find that rape, too, is a very male phenomenon.

1 in 3 women have survived a rape or attempted rape in America in their lifetimes, while 90% of all adult rape victims are female, and 1 in 5 women are sexually assaulted in college…those aren’t negligible numbers. So, it’s a false equivalence to say that men and women should be treated equally and thus we should be skeptical of the concept of rape culture. It’s like when people say that we’re not being “fair” to their views which deny climate change, those views don’t deserve fairness because they’re wholly incorrect, as has been demonstrated by the facts, science, and statistics. Climate change is happening, and to pretend that it’s not happening is irresponsible to the point of flagrant abuse. Toxic Masculinity, as described, closes itself off to these ideas because “equality between the sexes” (or male domination) at all costs is the chief goal when the real world is anything but equal.

Yes, in an unequal world, striving for some notion of equality while millions of people of one sex are suffering unilaterally at the hands of another is toxic masculinity.

To put this in starker terms, statistically speaking, 1 out of every 3 women we know, be they, friends, be they our wives or girlfriends, or even our own mothers, have survived an attempted physical rape or completed rape. Having been granted permission from both parties, I can say here with their blessing that my girlfriend has been raped and my mother has been raped. By this, I don’t mean that they’ve been sexually assaulted, I mean rape. And, just speaking statistically, if you’re reading this, there’s a good likelihood that those closest to you, like my girlfriend and mother, have also been raped. Think about that for a second, if you’re a man, and try to wrap your head around it.

Stop and think about all the women you know in your life and realize how many people that is, imagine their faces, imagine the pain they’re going through that they just might not be telling you about. In fact, I can’t think of a single woman I know who hasn’t been raped or sexually assaulted. Not one.

But since the rest of the world isn’t my personal network, here are some statistics that should solidify things a bit more…

Pretending these numbers deserve “equality” is a notion that’s deserving of criticism. Pretending that males are the victims of rape anywhere near within the vicinity that women are is just downright wrong and it’s even more insulting because, as the CDC says, of the 87% of men who were the victims of a completed or attempted rape, the perpetrators were other men.

But What About Prostitution?

Prostitution is quite unusual for one reason, and one reason alone: it’s the only category where women display higher criminality than men.

Men are more often criminals in every single other category of crime — they commit more crimes, and they’re punished for more crimes, especially violent crimes. And while it is true that men are more likely to be the victims of crime, guess who the perpetrators are — also men. And while prostitution is the lone category of crime where women are in the majority, it should also be noted that every act of prostitution is a transaction, a transaction with a client who’s guilty of soliciting prostitution; for every one prostitute, there are several “Johns.” So, if crime is the measure, there are likely many more men contributing to prostitution than there are women prostitutes.

Now I’m assuming that some of you might be thinking, “Well, that’s simple, the laws have been written to favor women much more than men, and thus it jades the numbers, because of course men are going to be more criminal in the United States with many effeminate laws!” There’s a tired male trope that society has been femininized to the point where men just no longer fit in with the rigid, emotionally-inspired, and senseless rules that women have imposed upon us (their words, not mine). Way to play the victim, guys. This is just plainly untrue.

The unique maleness of criminality holds true in every nation where we can gather data on crime, meaning it’s a cross-cultural phenomenon. Women make up less than 20% of the criminals in most crime categories, meaning that 80% of criminality is carried out by men — universally, in every country where data is collected on criminals. Men steal more, men assault more and batter more, men destroy more property and commit more white-collar crimes.

It seems that we men have something in our wiring which makes us significantly more prone to violence, emotional outbursts, criminality, and impulsiveness — but what?

Genetic Influences

I’ve written extensively about the genetics of alcohol-related violence in Meet the Genes Responsible for Alcohol-Related Violence, which can be found here. Genetic influences certainly play a role in our biological hardwiring, something which has been shaped over millions of years of evolution to suit certain purposes, accomplish certain tasks, and deal with certain pressures.

Throughout the bulk of human history, the environmental pressures for men and women have been vastly different. Even in today’s highly refined society, men and women live vastly different experiences, and have to take massively different things into consideration every single day: a woman has to think about her safety and possible predators everywhere she goes, whereas a man can usually stroll through life casually, without much fear of being violently attacked on impulse. Men, on the other hand, have to be extremely careful in regards to their emotional well-being, lest they become one of the 71% of people who successfully complete suicide, which are men (77.97% of completed suicides in the United States are carried out by white men).

The story on alcohol-related violence covers the so-called “human warrior gene,” a gene that influences antisocial behaviors, such as risk-taking and impulsiveness, as well as the propensity towards violence. The MAOA gene is the gene in question, and interestingly, when it comes to the gene expressing itself through acts of violence, outbursts, and risk-taking criminality, childhood trauma and, or abuse have no effect on the outcome of the gene manifesting in such behaviors. If you carry the gene, it doesn’t matter if you experienced trauma or came from a broken home or not, the propensity towards violent crime was the same for people of all backgrounds.

Why do I mention this “warrior gene?” Because only men carry it. And men aren’t just more violent in the human species, we’re also much more violent across all species of primates as well. And one contributing factor for this is an excess of testosterone.

Contrary to widespread belief, testosterone doesn’t actually cause one to become violent. It does, however, play a role in the propensity toward certain traits which are the precursors to violence, traits which suggest a strong emotional fragility, like aggressiveness, competitiveness, possessiveness, as well as impulsiveness. These traits often end in violence.

Testosterone, per Robert Sapolsky Ph.D., Human Behavioral Biologist, Professor of Human Behavioral Biology at Stanford University and primatologist, isn’t the sole cause of societal violence in primate societies, it’s actually the other way around, aggressive societies produce males that produce more testosterone and thus aggressiveness becomes reinforced. Males who live in cultures that are less aggressive, more chill, more laid back and refined, tend to have lower testosterone levels.

If we want to change the society to make way for a more cohesive, peaceful society, we have to reduce the amount of aggression we have cumulatively if we want to address men as a sex. Male testosterone levels, which lead to competitiveness and the discharge of hostility including violence, are a byproduct of men growing up in aggressive, unforgiving, and competitive societies. We’d do well to view them as two heads on the same coin; violence and competition are intertwined like few other things are. To promote competition is to inadvertently promote violence and our society — especially the men — promote competition as a way to fashion the best products, though that’s yet to be proven and our weird, Anglo-American brand of free market capitalism is more like a dangerous religion than bona fide economic principles. It’s really just another way for men to be violent without physical confrontation, it’s a secondary violence that precedes the real deal.

I also know for a fact there’s another component to this whole thing, another element that when combined with the so-called “warrior genes” should bring things into focus and make this picture clearer for anyone who might be on the fence.

The propensity to violence certainly has genetic underpinnings and while the human warrior genes aren’t strictly the sole genes that cause violence in human beings, we know that genes play a significant role. Another surprising finding is that the combination of childhood violence and genes don’t play as big of a role as we once thought. And while childhood or past trauma and, or abuse don’t affect the outcome of those carrying the gene, something else does…

Alcohol

Alcohol plays a significant role in human violence and emotional outbursts. Alcohol consumed over a period of time can cause radical emotional instability up to and including psychosis. Alcohol has a so-called two-way street in the world of violence and pain, in that it promotes the use of violence, which creates victims of violence, victims who often turn to alcohol to deal with unresolved pain.

Alcohol is a major contributor to the loss in control of people through the way that it affects the brain, by inhibiting our impulse-control centers, making us more susceptible to emotional outbursts on a whim. It doesn’t exactly take a neuroscientist to go down to the local bar, observe for a while, and draw this conclusion.

And not only do men drink significantly more than women, with higher rates of alcoholism, but new science is starting to discover the link between alcoholism and a lack of empathy in men, a patently antisocial trait. Male alcoholics seem to be able to understand the words of a language but cannot resonate with the emotions attached to them — this means that for the male alcoholic, emotions are a one-way street. If what we mean when we say that “women are the more emotional sex,” is that ONLY women can comprehend the emotional experiences of others, than perhaps it is often correct; but this is a ridiculously jaded view of what it means to be emotional.

Is a spontaneous and physically violent outburst not an emotional one? Are cases of alcohol-fueled sexual assault NOT also people incapable of keeping their emotional natures under control?

Could alcohol be a major cause of concern in regard to the emotional outbursts in men? I simply can’t see why not. For some hard statistics to back up this notion, 86% of homicides involve alcohol; 60% of rapes occur when the perpetrator is under the influence of alcohol. Over 50% of all violent crimes involve the consumption of alcohol beforehand.

Guess what else alcohol plays a significant role in — suicide…another particularly male problem. Male violence doesn’t stop at women or other men, it’s also something we often carry out upon ourselves. There is a long, documented history in the scientific literature that tells of the extent to which alcohol contributes to successful suicides. For both men and women who complete suicide, alcohol played a role in about one-third of the suicides, 36% for men and 28% for women. 80% of the suicides in which alcohol was a factor, were men.

If we men are going to analyze ourselves and our place in the world, alcohol and its effects are undeniable factors in this analysis. This is certainly a lot to think about, and it should be strikingly apparent by now that men who are prone to emotional outbursts, aggression, and risky behavior should likely avoid alcohol altogether.

The Faces of the Sexes

An interesting study was conducted to test the hypothesis that women are more emotional than men, which showed subjects videos and measured their facial responses using facial recognition technologies that would decipher the mood and emotions conveyed by their facial expressions.

As it turns out, women did indeed score higher on emotional responses such as smiling and other gestures of emotional affinity. A causal link between stimuli and a greater emotional response on the behalf of women? Not so fast.

The study clearly notes:

We find that women are not universally more expressive across all facial actions. Nor are they more expressive in all positive valence actions and less expressive in all negative valence actions. It appears that generally, women express actions more frequently than men, and in particular express more positive valence actions. However, expressiveness is not greater in women for all negative valence actions and is dependent on the discrete emotional state.

Men do seem to express certain other emotions more with their faces, emotions like anger, frustration, and signs of aggressiveness. So, there is a difference between which sex shows which emotions more frequently, at least on their faces.

So why is it that men seem to subconsciously resonate with seemingly “negative” emotions more frequently, and have a much more difficult time smiling and displaying positive expressions? What if we’ve had to be the aggressors for a very long time (think, millions of years)? Perhaps our aggression has been our key to survival as individuals and as a species. Perhaps because we were designed by millions of years of evolution to be protectors and the ones charged with defending our territory? Right?

Right. But we don’t live in the Paleolithic; we live in the 21st century, and our anguish on what we do with our baser natures is more real than ever in a civilized society. We’ve erected a vast, wonderful, and expansive society built upon reason (and some unreason) a society which has outpaced many aspects of our ingrained identity and genetic usefulness. It’s time for a change.