Of men and bears
What do YOU think?
There’s a lot of commentary these days on Medium about the meme of women feeling safer running into a bear than a man. Here’s how that one goes:
- Women present the real statistics about injury and death from a woman-man encounter.
- They illustrate that danger semi-humorously (/s) by comparing the relative risk of a woman-man vs. woman-bear encounter. It’s a risk-management thought experiment. It’s similar to informing a person who fears flying that their relative risk of death in flight is hundreds of times LOWER per mile than when driving a car, so they should really worry and prepare more every time they get behind the wheel.
- Many men (not ALL men! 😉) ridicule the man-bear comparison, deny the validity of the data, and minimize the magnitude of the problem.
- Women rage silently and with each other in response to this invalidation.
Any comments?
I have noticed that some of my comments on other writers’ stories get more attention than my own stories here on Medium (that probably says something about my writing!). In a recent story about men and sexual violence, the author asked
Why do sweet young boys grow up to be violent predators?
Here is what I wrote as an answer to the author’s question above in a comment:
Testosterone + toxic culture.
Many societies had rituals and practices for channeling the aggressive sexuality of many (not all) boys and young men into non-violent pathways. Our culture enables and amplifies and glorifies sexual violence, even packaging it as “entertainment”.
That comment got a lot of attention. What I was suggesting is that the formula for sexual violence has (at least) two important variables: biology and culture.
When boys become men, most (not all) of them develop a certain … fascination with the female body (or the male body if they are so inclined). They are drawn to it and powerfully motivated to explore it. Some people argue that many “males” are just born sexual predators who use their (on average) superior weight and upper body strength to force themselves on women without their consent to get what they want. They say it's “just biology” and the law of the jungle and all you can do is accept it or maybe lock up a few rapists for a little while (conviction/incarceration rates are very low and sentences tend to be relatively short compared to other crimes).
But … SCIENCE
A purely biological paradigm of male sexual violence has a fatal flaw. When you do a science experiment, you are looking at whether the thing you are studying is affected by certain factors and conditions (variables). Example:
Do people with cancer X live longer, the same or less long if they take medicine A vs. radiation vs. no treatment?
If you randomly assign patients to those three groups (to control for other variables like general health, age, gender etc.) and you find that people on average live longer with medicine A than with radiation or no treatment, you can have some (though never 100%) confidence that medicine A is beneficial for treating cancer X.
Well, it turns out that if you (kinda) randomly assign millions of men to different places around the world (aka migration), and compare the frequency/prevalence of violence toward women, the statistics are DIFFERENT from one country to another.
[NOTE: The statistics above are for intimate partner violence, which accounts for the majority of cases. The total numbers including stranger danger would be even higher.]
How can you explain that variance in the data if you’re a fan of the theory that men are just innately programmed to be sexual predators? The biological equipment of men in country A is the same as those in countries B and C and … Z, so the differences in rates of violence toward women between those countries can NOT be explained in simply biological terms.
There must be something else at work here.
It’s complicated
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. — H.L. Mencken
Reducing human beings and their behavior to pure biology is, well, reductionistic. It’s oversimplifying a very complex organism. We humans like to simplify things. It makes us feel more in control, but we pay a price for that because our attempted solutions often fail to work.
When I work with people and try to come up with a plan to assist them, I use a 4-level paradigm called the bio-psycho-socio-environmental model. It’s a bit more complicated than thinking about people JUST like a biologist OR a psychologist OR a sociologist OR as an environmentalist would. You need to wear all those hats simultaneously and figure out WHICH factors are most relevant for each individual person.
If we can’t explain violence toward women in purely biological terms (which is fortunate because we could never “treat” our way out of this epidemic!), that leaves three other areas to explore for possible solutions:
- Psychological: how do people think and feel, and how does that affect their behavior?
- Sociological/cultural: how do group rules, norms, traditions, values and shared beliefs/practices affect how their members think, feel and behave?
- Environmental: how does the physical environment, (both natural and human made/built) affect how people think, feel and behave?
Given the magnitude of male-on-female violence, a psychological (e.g. individual therapy) solution will be totally impractical and inadequate to meet the challenge. The physical environment has at best only a small impact on the prevalence of violence (mostly related to population density and anonymity) and the cost of major architectural or landscape redesign is prohibitive.
So that leaves us with human CULTURE (aka civilization) as the best arena for designing and implementing solutions to the epidemic of sexual violence against women.
SOME QUESTIONS FOR YOU
Based on your own experience, reflect on how the majority of (not ALL!) men in your culture behave toward women: at home, at work, and in print/visual media (including video games, “movies” and the internet)?
Based on your observations:
- Which specific cultural rules, norms, traditions, values, shared beliefs and practices would need to change to reduce the prevalence of violence against women?
- Which people and change levers (political, economic, tech, media etc.) would have the best chance of making those positive changes over time?
- What would be the greatest sources of resistance to those positive changes? How could those be overcome?
This bears/men thing is a good conversation to be having, and can prompt good questions (and maybe some good answers). Please share your answers and thoughts in a comment so readers will have the benefit of your thinking.
This is what I write about ⬇️
