Are Men Inherently

Violent?
January 7, 2011 By Tom Matlack 4 Comments

Is fighting an essential
ingredient in manhood? Is
violence a part of who we are?
 Guys weigh in.

One of the big issues surrounding manhood and goodness is

the role violence plays in how we express our masculinity. Is
violence innate, or is it learned? Even if we could unlearn it,
should we?

I grew up in a household of Quaker pacifists. My dad taught

me early on that civil disobedience is stronger than fists and
guns. Gandhi and Martin Luther King accomplished what no
army could. In Amherst, Massachusetts, where I grew up,
there was an uncomfortable mix of rural kids and faculty
brats—and as a brat who stood head and shoulders above
the rest—six feet tall by the seventh grade—I became a
natural target for bullies hoping to prove their mettle.
One particularly tough kid started bumping into me in the hall
in front of all my classmates. When I wouldn’t respond, he
grabbed my books and threw them down the hall, yelling at
me for being a sissy. Finally, he figured out my schedule and
waited for me outside each of my classes, pinning me up
against the nearest locker to spit in my face.

I went to the guidance counselor’s office to use the phone so

I could call my father: “Shouldn’t I fight back, Dad?”
As original Good Men Project contributor Steve Almond puts
it below, “aggression is the means by which boys learn to
share their feelings. Not even the most loving father can
protect his son from the playgrounds, bars, and parking lots
where bullies lurk, where soft emotions are hunted down and
targeted, where fear becomes rage, and rage becomes
violence.”

And for men, as much as we may not like it, violence is

currency. When words and logic fail, when virtue isn’t
shared, violence becomes power—in the schoolyard, among
boys, or on the battlefield, among men. But just because it’s
always been that way doesn’t mean we can’t help create a
less violent world for our kids. Does it?

What do you think? Are men inherently violent?

♦◊♦
We nerds and sissies disprove the notion.
—Bennett Schneider
♦◊♦

Testosterone is not destiny; despite what the peddlers of

third-rate evolutionary psychology sometimes insist.
Manhood, as we practice it in America, traditionally expects
violence as an initiation ritual of some sort. But manhood (as
opposed to maleness) is an artificial construct. As a
construct, it can be altered—if we want it.
—Hugo Schwyzer, gender studies professor

♦◊♦
There is no way to prove that violence is innate to manhood.
We can’t even define manhood. There is a lot of evidence to
suggest that human males are more aggressive and
assertive by nature, but that is not always the same as
violent. My thinking is that men end up more violent because
men have to compete with one another with displays of
powerful characteristics in order to compete in the male
hierarchy, which is ultimately about being selected by
women for reproduction. It makes sense to me that violent
tendencies are cultivated in that competition. So it’s a
learned behavior, born of our innate reproductive
programming.
—Paul Elam, men’s rights advocate

♦◊♦
Dave and I are fighting in the TV room. It’s a boy fight:
hurled fists and grunting. Our dad is seated on the piano
bench, watching this awkward spectacle. He believes we
need to “get our aggression out,” and that there’s no other
way to do it. He’s even sort of rooting me on, because Dave
is bigger and I need to stand up for myself. …

I fight with my twin brother, Mike, too, until he hits a growth

spurt and becomes too big to tangle with. Our final fight is
especially vicious. We grapple and punch and tumble across
the bed. We can smell each other—our skin, our breath. The
intimacy is disorienting. Not so long ago, the two of us
walked to school pressed together at the shoulder. But the
prohibitions of boyhood have torn us apart. These days, the
only time we touch is when we fight.

Having pummeled each other to exhaustion, we stand face

to face. Our chests heave with adrenaline. We’re confused,
not sure how to bring this to a close. My hand flies up and
slaps Mike across the face. It’s a loud, clean blow, delivered
so quickly neither of us can quite believe it. Mike bursts into
tears and runs from the room. I stand, staring down at my
hand. My palm stings, but the rest of me feels nothing.
It’s tempting to blame all this on my father. That would be
the safe It’s tempting to blame all this on my father. That
move. would be the safe move. Perhaps if he’d
Perhaps if encouraged us to share our feelings rather than
he’d pummel each other, my brothers and I would
have entered the world without fear and loathing.
encouraged us to share our feelings rather than pummel
each other, my brothers and I would have entered the world
without fear and loathing. We would have become secure
citizens, ready to talk things through. But that would miss the
point, that masculinity has always been governed by
aggression.

To put it more starkly: Aggression is the means by which

boys learn to share their feelings. Not even the most loving
father can protect his son from the playgrounds, bars, and
parking lots where bullies lurk, where soft emotions are
hunted down and targeted, where fear becomes rage, and
rage becomes violence.
—Steve Almond, from “Here’s the Bad News, Son”
in The Good Men Project

♦◊♦
In mainstream American culture, we teach boys and men
that they should be violent, or at least ready to be violent if it
becomes necessary. Among other things, we tell them that
“a man never backs down from a fight,” “men protect others
(especially women and children),” and that we can “step
outside and settle it like men.” When a guy doesn’t follow
these dictates, we call him a wimp.
—Andrew Smiler, psychology professor,
president, SPSMM.

♦◊♦
First I had a daughter. She was sweet and beautiful and
seemed to smell good all the time. She lived in harmony with
all creatures. Then I had a son. And he started breaking all
my shit.
—Chris Zito, comedian and author

♦◊♦
I was always big for my age, so guys were trying me all the
time—warranted, unwarranted, just all the time. Mom got
after me to stop running in the house every time I got chased
home from school. One time she met me at the top of our
steps when she saw me running away from a fight. She said,
“Andre, you turn around. You’re going to fight them. You’re
not going to keep getting chased home.” I dove off the top of
the steps onto those guys. That was the end of me getting
chased home.
—Andre Tippett, NFL Hall of Famer, from “Heart of a
Beginner” in The Good Men Project

♦◊♦
The greatest problem of every army in world history is, when
a battle begins, how do you stop soldiers from running
away? In combat, our flight response is far more powerful
than our fight response, but if we were naturally violent the
opposite would be true.
The myth that human beings are naturally violent is refuted
by all of military history, if people look below the surface.
Armies must train people to fight and kill, and war is one of
the most traumatizing things a human being can experience.
Even the people who support war say “war is hell.” If human
beings are naturally violent, why would war drive so many
people insane?

Most people’s natural reaction when you try to Most

stab them with a sword or shoot them with a rifle
is to run away as fast as they can, as far as they
can.
people’s natural reaction when you try to stab them with a
sword or shoot them with a rifle is to run away as fast as
they can, as far as they can. Ask anyone who has been in
combat and they will tell you that it’s terrifying. To make
soldiers fight, the Greeks realized that if soldiers believe they
are fighting to protect their friends, family, or loved ones,
they will not only fight, but they will even sacrifice their lives,
because our instinct to protect our loved ones is far more
powerful than our instinct for self-preservation. Think about
how you would react if you saw your loved one being
attacked. Think about how you would rush to their aid and
try to protect them.
—Captain Paul Chappell, author of Will War Ever End?:
A Soldier’s Vision of Peace for the 21st Centuryand The
End of War: How Waging Peace Can Save Humanity,
Our Planet, and Our Future.

♦◊♦
Violence is innate in men. And in women. If we expect men
to be violent, we’ll interpret the evidence that way, and this
will reinforce our expectation. This confirmation bias is very
hard to break.
Think of what it’s like to “act like a caveman.” OK, now
remember that there are many highly symbolic cave
paintings. Now try to interpret “act like a caveman” to mean
painting symbols of self, nature, and community. If this
doesn’t make sense, it’s because you really haven’t ever
made an attempt to think about what it was actually like to
be a caveman. And why should you? The importance of “the
caveman” for most of us has nothing to do with a passion for
amateur paleontology, it has to do with justifying some
behavior as “natural” and criticizing other behavior as
“unnatural”—in other words, enforcing stereotypes.
—Dylan Wittkower, ethicist
 ♦◊♦
Answer: No. Anthropologically we know different. Violence in
men is a product of years of shift from agrarian to
industrialized to modern-day conditioning. Men are not
innately violent.
—Matt Yeazel, psychotherapist and social worker

♦◊♦
Friday night in Mongolia’s Bulgan City was like the Wild
West meeting the 21st century. Men would ride their horses
through town—right alongside the cars—tie them up to fence
posts, and go into the bars. They’d get drunk and eventually
a couple of them would piss each other off and box it out
with bare knuckles—no guns, no knives; that was bitch to
them. “Who fights with guns and knives?” they’d say if
anyone asked. “That’s not how Genghis Khan did it, and
that’s not how we’re going to do it.”

Typically during one of these Friday night fistfights, one of

the guys would fall, his face all bloody. Then he’d pull
himself back up, and he and the guy he’d been fighting
would share another bottle of vodka, hop on their horses,
and head home.

The Mongolians were big, burly people, and they would say
to me, a kid from an East Coast inner city, “You guys are big.
Why don’t you fight like we do? Why do you shoot each
other?”

Killing did play a part in the Mongolians’ concept of

manhood: If you could kill a sheep or a goat and dress it, you
were considered a man, even if you were only 12 years old.
When you could kill animals you became the breadwinner of
your family. You were strong, and you were reliable.
—Curtis B., from “Khan Without the Wrath” in The Good
Men Project

—Polina Sergeeva photo/ Flickr

Filed Under: Featured Content, Good Is Good Tagged
With: Andre Tippett, Bennett Schneider,Chris Zito, Curtis
B, Dylan Wittkower, Good Is Good, Hugo
Schwyzer, masculinity, Matt Yeazel, Paul Chappell, Steve
Almond, The Good Men Project book, Tom Matlack, violence

About Tom Matlack

Tom Matlack is just foolish enough to believe he is a decent
man. He has a 16-year-old daughter and 14- and 5-year-old
sons. His wife, Elena, is the love of his life.
Comments

1. mordicai says:

January 7, 2011 at 7:13 am

I might say masculinity is violent? Which is a controversial

discussion in & of itself, but talking about sex & gender tend
to be that way. I disagree with wide blanket statements like
“No. Anthropologically we know different. Violence in men is
a product of years of shift from agrarian to industrialized to
modern-day conditioning.” Ötzi the Iceman puts the lie to
that statement, as does the other evidence of hunter-
gatherer violence. First, let me caveat by saying that ALL
evolutionary psychology is dangerous nonsense– it can
have value, but is almost NEVER used for its own purposes,
& instead tends to serve cultural bias in a really gross way.
That said, hey! Lets be hypocritical & indulge in a bit of it.
Men, especially young men, represent excess labor. Heck,
you only need them around for a couple of minutes to
procreate. This is why– again, I’m indulging in the sign of
evolutionary speculation here, so take me with a grain of
salt– men have increased muscle mass & endocrine
tendencies towards aggression. They can be risked, they
can hunt & fight, because hell, from a biological standpoint,
they are extraneous. Important note to people who would
extrapolate from those statements– most humans aren’t
hunter-gatherers any more. & sex is not anywhere near as
hard & fast as people like to pretend, let alone gender.
& women? They are human beings, as well. There is
violence in the human condition, because humans are crude
animals, & life is fragile. That is really all it takes. Being
omnivores is part of it, too. For a (fictional) example of what
I’m talking about, I recommend Nicola Griffith’s “Ammonite.”

Reply

2. Daddy Files says:

January 7, 2011 at 9:56 am

Violence is not a requirement for manhood. Violence is a

human condition, prevalent in each gender, which manifests
itself in various ways.
I believe in a happy medium. Avoid violence when
necessary like your father taught you, Tom. But when
you’ve tried talking it out, going to others for help, killing
them with kindness, etc., there comes a time when it’s not
only wise to fight back, it’s completely necessary and
warranted.

Reply

3. Jim Mitchem says:

January 7, 2011 at 10:12 am

Violence is a choice. I have a bad temper. It’s not a choice.

But I do not let my temper lead to violence. Perhaps
biologically, males are more programmed for violent acts,
but what separates humans from animals is our ability to
make choices.

Reply

4. Tom Matlack says:

January 7, 2011 at 11:13 am

Just for the sake a full disclosure I have taken kick-boxing

with a mad Russian for a couple years now. And I have
taken the NRA handgun course (got perfect score on the
exam) so if I wanted I could get a license to carry a
concealed weapon. I had a long debate with my editor
Henry about this topic since his POV, I think, was that to
even ask this question was kind of silly because obviously
violence in men is not innate. I am really not so sure. The
history of men isn’t too helpful in making that argument. I
look at it the other way around: violence is an innate instinct
in guys, peace is something that is learned. I suppose you
have to define “violence” more carefully. Murder isn’t innate.
But my desire to pound a heavy bag and the rush I get
holding a cold piece of steel capable of delivering a
Magnum bullet is something I really cannot explain or
control. It scares me though. Scares me enough to actively
do the things I do to beat the violence out of myself, to work
out until I puke, to meditate, to think about the man I want to
become rather than the animal I might be if I let myself. Just
so you know. Pacifism is a higher calling that some of us
aren’t capable of, including me.

Reply