It is… in risking life that man is raised above the animal; that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity not to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills.
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
MEN CAUSE WAR.
Aristophanes knew how to stop men’s wars when he wrote Lysistrata: women should deny men sex. Spike Lee knew how when he filmed Chi-Raq: women should deny men sex. Susan Sontag, channeling Virginia Woolf, taunted that war is a man’s game, and the killing machine has a gender: it is male. She seemed to believe not only that men make war but that (most) men like war. How long has that truism tyrannized martial thought?1
From domestic abuse to international terrorism, the common denominator in contemporary discussions of violence is men. For several decades, cultural anthropologists have studied and analyzed masculinities and gender-based violence of all sorts. Meanwhile, biological anthropologists have examined how evolutionary processes, genomics, and endocrinology relate to maleness and violence. We are all trying to untangle the manly roots of violence.
Certain ideas about men, aggression, violence, and war are so widespread that when a credentialed author comes along who confirms what people think they already know—that men are habitually inclined to fight for what they want—we find ourselves in a kind of feedback loop of misinformation. Men are more violent than women, right? They have murdered and raped in far higher numbers throughout history in every known culture on earth. Plenty of studies extrapolate from male chimpanzees to humans to argue that sexually aggressive males have more offspring, thus supposedly fulfilling their evolutionary promise. This analogy is a harmful overstatement making rape seem more natural in the animal kingdom than it is and implying that all men have an enduring biological potential to commit rape.
In order to understand aggression in males of the human species, we need to step back and ask, first of all, if it really makes sense to say men are more violent than women, and, second, whether patterns of male aggression and violence really are universal. To repeat an earlier point, it is not the same thing to say “men murder” as it is to say “most murderers are men.” Most men don’t murder or rape or engage in violent behavior. Studies of aggressive behavior in couple relationships in the United States in fact point to similar rates for women and men of screaming and other forms of verbal abuse, slamming doors, slapping, pushing, throwing things, and hitting. The more extreme, dangerous, harmful, and deadly types of domestic violence are perpetrated more often by men than women. The milder forms of violence are most frequently seen with young couples, especially while they are dating.2
And it’s not just a matter of strength. It is no more helpful to say that the reason men beat women more than women beat men is because they are naturally stronger than it is to say that mothers beat their children more than children beat their mothers because the mothers are stronger. Control, power, protection, and authority are the keys to understanding violence and aggression; they are culturally and not simply biologically embedded.
Crucially, societies in which women have more power usually have a lower incidence of male-on-female violence and aggression than societies in which they have less power. Relationships between men and between women also make a difference: specifically, as biopsychologist Barbara Smuts wrote in a famous 1992 paper on cross-cultural variation and male aggression, “the form and frequency of male violence against women is related to the nature of men’s relationships with one another,” and “the nature of female relationships influences female vulnerability to male aggression.”3
Claims that women are less naturally aggressive than men have been used to keep women from combat assignments in militaries throughout history. Not infrequently, certain populations of men—poor men, Wall Street men, African men, Mexican men, urban men, rural men—are tagged as especially prone to violence, little able to control primordial male urges to act out hostilities. The jargon that accompanies these arguments lends them an air of objectivity, using terms such as “selfish genes,” “demonic males,” “the spread of agriculture,” “psychopathology,” and “politics by other means.” Yet as soon as we hear that there are more or less violent men, or about variations in rates of male violence from one group to another, or one historical period to another, we should begin to suspect a fatal defect in the reasoning. Extreme versions of biological explanations of male violence get us nowhere. We still need to explore why violence is perpetrated by men more than women, and we need to understand the pervasiveness of rape and the perniciousness of rape culture. But we should now be able to avoid casual language like “men are more violent than women.” Men as a physiological category are not violent. Some men are violent some of the time. Men as a uniform category do not rape. Some men do some of the time. If we want to stop these men we need to make sure we understand why.4
All this still begs the question of why violence has been perpetrated by men more often than by women around the world and throughout history. The first point to make, again, is that it depends what you call violence, because women commit some forms of violence as much as men. A key distinction is lethality, with far more men than women involved in life-threatening forms of violence today and historically. If the reason men murder and rape and are killed in far higher numbers than women is not about biology, then what are the social factors driving these deadly forms of violence? The answer is as simple and complicated as the patriarchy and dwells in the broader nature of male privilege at the level of states, corporations, and other social institutions as well as in more intimate settings, from communities to families.
Violence is employed to impose control over others, whether it’s about one family or individual against another or one country, class, or racial group against another. To the extent that men dominate the entities involved—whether states or families—the purpose of their violence is expressly to dictate their terms to others. The causes of individual, social, and political violence cannot be condensed simplistically to patriarchal systems of rule, but it would be hard not to connect masculinity to militarism and domestic violence. So there certainly appears to be something distinctive in contemporary societies connecting men, maleness, and masculinity with violence and aggression. It’s important we excise prevalent but erroneous beliefs about what is chronic and what is situational about manly belligerence.
I sometimes ask students in my undergraduate classes how many of them who are US citizens reported to a government agency when they turned eighteen. Usually about half the American students raise their hands. Why half? Because only young men in the United States are required to register with the US Selective Service System (SSS) on that birthday to ensure that all eligible young men are enrolled in the event of a future military draft.
Why only young men? This answer is not so easy. Depending on how you count, there are around seventy countries in the world that practice some form of conscription. With few exceptions, only young men are conscripted into the armed forces of their respective countries, and in these countries, military service is compulsory only for males of a certain age. Even in countries without conscription, of course, the armed forces make close associations between men, masculinity, sacrifice, and service.5
The notion of “service” is itself highly charged: to serve in a citizen army is often regarded as the most heightened form of modern male experience, an almost sacred duty. Those who engage in this form of sacrifice for the national good are prototypically male. Even when lives are not at stake, military training promises to teach young men skills and trades that will be crucial as they prepare for their consummate male breadwinner duties. Together with voting, joining the military in the United States is touted as the embodiment of democratic citizenship. Deployment promises youths, especially poor and male youths, with practical rewards, in the form of jobs, as well as idealized incentives, such as honor. Enlistment is presented to recruits not only as a way to serve the country and contribute to the broader good of society, but as a path to personal growth and a way out of poverty. This is as true for female recruits, who make up 15 percent of the enlisted ranks in the United States, as it is for male recruits.
The justifications in the 2010s for drafting only young men, and for the fact that 85 percent of the US armed forces is male, are historical, comparative, and physical, going back to the days when warriors were expected to carry shields and swords into battle. Since time immemorial, men have fought wars everywhere in the world. Perhaps we might explain male-only conscription through some form of collective unconscious, and our memories of who carried the spears, and later the crossbows, have led us to male-only conscription today. Even if that’s not the case, cultural considerations—such as core convictions about male and female aptitudes, emotions, and predispositions, substantiated by ideas about biological differences—certainly play an important role in military recruitment practices and policies.
As of 2014, 22 million people in the United States were military veterans, and 16.5 million of these were classified as “wartime vets” (from World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan). That means about 7 percent of the population, or one in every fourteen people (1.3 percent of women and 13.4 percent of men), had been in the military at some point in their lives. It also means that in 2014, almost one out of every seven adult men in the United States was a veteran. These numbers help shape thinking around men and the military and reveal the sway of the warrior mentality throughout US society. As the largest employer in the country, the US armed forces are also dominant players in directing US relations with the rest of the world, with more troops stationed outside the borders of the nation than the military forces of any other country in history.
The US military has always reflected general patterns of class and regional divisions in the country. In the opening decades of the twenty-first century, young men, and to a lesser extent young women, without economic, political, or cultural clout continued to be recruited to carry out the United States’ requirements of invasion, occupation, and post-conflict pacification. They were drawn disproportionately from certain regions, such as the southeastern United States. Since the rise of citizen armies and the revolutionary French levée en masse, the most marginal sectors of society have been lured into the military’s lowest rungs. It has not necessarily been a question of tricking young men into enlistment; young men have always found plenty of reasons to join the military, train, and embrace deployment, even in war zones.
The history of conscription in the United States is a history of press-ganging and seducing young men into uniform to risk life and limb, to kill and be killed. Registration was sometimes mandatory, but sometimes not. The draft that had been in place for most of the twentieth century officially ended in July 1973, when the so-called All-Volunteer Force (AVF) began operating. Between 1975 and 1980, registration was voluntary.
In 1980, after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, President Jimmy Carter reinstated registration for eighteen-year-old men. Since that time, the US government has required all men to register for the draft when they turn eighteen. Although women accounted for only 1.1 percent of active-duty personnel in 1970, the Pentagon began recruiting the hell out of women in the late 1970s. Women accounted for 8.5 percent of enlisted forces by 1980 and around 15 percent by 2000.6
Historically military service has offered a way for the most dispossessed members of American society to achieve the pinnacle of democratic citizenship. Yet the bromide of democracy in which citizens, especially male youths, will take up arms if and when requested by the nation-state is losing whatever formulaic allure it may have once held for millions of young men. The War on Terrorism declared by the US government seems as endless as it is senseless, but to conduct this war the government must not only retain public support for its efforts in general but more specifically continue to motivate millions of its young men to serve in the military and wage war.
Tina Garnanez is an Iraq War veteran. I met her in late 2005, not long after she returned from the front. She had been a medic there and nicknamed her ambulance partner Newt. They masqueraded as husband and wife, even wearing wedding rings, to keep the men at bay when they tried to hit on Tina. Newt made sure no one messed with her.
“He’s a big, big boy. I liked that. He took care of me. He spoiled me rotten and I loved it,” Tina told me. “He got me food and always kept me warm. He made me feel very safe.” If someone started to harass her, she’d look around, find Newt, and shout out, “Where’s my husband? There’s my husband!” And Newt would come over.
But there were some problems Newt couldn’t solve for Tina. Like missing her girlfriend. “I was in a relationship back home when I was in Iraq, and it helped me, God it helped me. It was my sanity, you know?” Other soldiers would sometimes ask, “Why do you have a picture of a girl on your wall?” She put up other photos to confuse everybody. Men had to be told no fifty times before they got the message. She wanted to tell them, “You’re barking up the wrong tree.”
In Iraq and generally in the military, Tina found, “Women were often seen as either promiscuous or lesbians. I just didn’t think it was fair that I had to pretend to be straight.” Meanwhile, she had signed up for only four years in the army but then got “stop-lossed,” held over for another tour of Iraq. Mosul, Balad, Kirkuk. Convoys. IEDs. Wounded. One-hour catnaps. Meals-Ready-to-Eat. Sand. Heat. But that was never the worst of it. “It’s very sad, just being a woman out there,” she said. On one base, the Morale, Welfare, and Recreation shack was a good half-mile from where Tina slept. If she wanted to check her email or call home, she had to go there. If she got back from a convoy at two in the morning, well, that might be the best time to call her mom in New Mexico.
“I would call her and then I’d have to walk all the way back in the dark. I was always ready with my knife. I’d sort of have it open, have it tucked away a little. Just ready, so I could pull it out. I was listening constantly. The road was gravel and so I’d walk in the grass next to the road, and if someone was behind me, I could hear them on the gravel.”
Tina grew quiet as she recounted more of her story to me. She’d come back to the Southwest, to reconnect with her family, with her Navajo ways, and with the arid countryside, where she could sometimes get away from the bustle of people. The consequences of encountering and avoiding men who could bring violence on Tina forced her to think about lifelong experiences of abuse at the hands of men. It helped her develop a defensive stance to cope with every new threat that could come her way.
“I was so angry at the fact that not only did I have to worry about dying on these convoys, but I’d worry about coming back to the base, about my fellow soldiers doing something to me. That really, really bothered me,” she said. She told me that before she was in the military, she had been abused. “So I’ve always had an attitude of, ‘Hey, men are dangerous.’ I don’t really trust men too much. And then to be in the military and have all the unwanted advances by older men. That just rubbed me the wrong way and scared me.”
But the associations between men and violence in the military do not impact just women. In Demond Mullins’s case, the connection was different but also disconcerting. In Demond’s last days and hours in Iraq, he began to realize that the worst was over. He was going to make it home in one piece. He had taken nothing for granted. But he would not be among those who returned home with grotesque burns and mangled or missing limbs; he would not be facing dozens of surgeries and months and years of painful rehab.7
“When I came in from my last mission in Iraq,” he told me several years later, “as we drove into the camp there were all these people from my company to greet us. And we were all shouting, ‘Wow, this is our last mission! We made it! We’re going home alive!’ My executive officer [XO] walked up to me and said, ‘You’re a man now!’ That’s what he said to me. And I thought about that, and I still think about that now. Is it violence, is it acts of violence that make me a man? Or is it my potential for violence that make me manly or masculine?” For Demond, the consequences of being a man of violence, a man who had witnessed violence and had committed violence, meant that he had to come to grips with whether the violence he’d brought down on the Iraqis had always lain dormant, latent inside him, waiting to be unleashed by war, or was something alien that had been rammed into him by military circumstance.
The comment that after participating in violence in Iraq he was now a man did not sit well with Demond: “I think that the military really plays on that,” he said. “From childhood, you’re socialized into your ideology of what masculinity is or what manhood is. And pop culture plays on that well. When you’re too young to get into the military, you’re fed these images. Then, just joining the military, it’s like you’re trying to prove that you are a man. And to say you’re a man because ‘I experienced combat.’ Well, how did that make me a man?”8
The XO’s congratulations were not so much a cultural slap on the back—“You learned through your experiences how to be a man”—as an acknowledgment that war was what allowed Demond to activate his inner warrior. It had been there all along, sitting inactive, and just required the right conditions to be unleashed through the crucible of war. The XO would never have exclaimed to a woman soldier, “You’re a woman now!”
Demond continued, “I was twenty-two when I first went to Iraq. I was already a man. Do my violent acts make me an alpha male among civilians now? It’s messed up, because even though I know all this, I internalized what I learned.” He found escape from the pain and suicidal feelings through what he called “nihility,” which “makes me feel comfortable. I’m like, ‘You don’t have a pot to piss in. Everybody’s in pretty bad shape because we’re all just trying to make it. Some people are really well off, and some people are not.’ This actually comforts me. There’s some people that it scares, that life has no point, no structure. To me, I’m comforted by it.”
Nothingness and distrust had captured Demond’s manly warrior spirit. As an African American man he was used to people telling him their opinions about masculinity and aggression and what makes a good team player. In the disjuncture between societal bromides about men and war and the maw of actual war in Iraq, Demond returned home with a quiet resolve to disprove each and every one of those patently militaristic banalities about war releasing his inner manhood.
Anyone from the United States who has spent much time abroad has been faced with the question, “Why are you Americans so violent? So many mass murders. So many wars.” But it’s not just Americans who are associated with violence and war making; militarism exists in every land, and it always has a male face. Except in science fiction and Greek mythology, there have never been armies of women who singlehandedly invaded, occupied, and subjugated enemy populations.
The associations between men, maleness, violence, and warfare are ubiquitous, and that can easily lead to the belief that there is something natural to men and aggressiveness, making it all the more important to unpack naturalist arguments about the causes of war and men’s violent tendencies. How gendered these qualities are seen to be has immediate significance for our overmilitarized societies. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, a new spate of learned reports on the origins of war revived a simple set of explanations.
One version of the naturalist argument about men and aggression that continues to hold traction is the hormonal hypothesis. In the words of Cambridge neuroscientist Joe Herbert, writing in 2015, “the occurrence of war may simply be an inevitable result of the powerful effects that testosterone has on male motivation, competitiveness, ambition, and risk-taking.” Furthermore, “testosterone is thus an essential contributor to the emergence of the war-like male responsible for the phenomenon of war.” Whether generals are supposed to have higher levels of testosterone than other people to begin with, or their levels are thought to rise after they start issuing commands to attack, the hormonal hypothesis makes the origins of war one of chemical reaction. So much for gold, slaves, oil, and territory.9
Another notable naturalist argument linking men and war concerns paternity, or rather, what is known in the trade as “paternity uncertainty.” The argument is a who-knows-whom-I’ve-sired for the Age of DNA, and it has both clarified and muddied the significance of bloodlines and, it turns out, the origins of war.
My friend Richard Bribiescas teaches biological anthropology at Yale. I always learn a lot from my discussions with him about evolution and hormones in men. That doesn’t mean we always see eye to eye. Writing in Men: Evolutionary and Life History, Bribiescas asks, “So why is it that women tend to invest more time and energy in offspring than men do?” The answer, he says, “lies in the simple factor of parental identification.” Whereas others have argued that the accident of evolution entrusting pregnancy and lactation to women is the best way to explain divisions of labor between parents going back tens of thousands of years, Bribiescas underscores another consequence of evolutionary theory: the presumed universal misgivings men have about their ability to corroborate the harvest of their seed.
“The questions facing males are: Are my children really mine?” Bribiescas asks. This leads him to a big theme of his book: “the central role of paternity uncertainty in human male evolution.” Women, Bribiescas says, “are the only people who can assuredly identify those who are genetically related to them. Men can never have the same assurance. From an evolutionary perspective, males are quite alone.” In addition, and crucially, because of their solitary condition, because men don’t know who their offspring are, they feel less reticence about going to war. Men invest less in child-rearing, and because of this lack of allegiance to others they have supposedly been more prone to wage war historically. In essence, they have not cared about whom they might kill.
Here is the logic: “Without the inhibitions that result from not wanting to harm their offspring or their kin, men might well be less restrained than women in their actions, at a personal and global level.” Bribiescas is worried (as any thinking person should be) about the old men whose fingers are on the actual buttons of nuclear war. In case the full implications of this thesis are still not clear, he concludes: “Men wage war because they can and because the potential costs of such action to their evolutionary fitness may be zero.”10
When I interviewed him in 2015 in New Haven, Connecticut, Bribiescas could not have been more receptive when I raised my concerns. With no other species is the threat of thermonuclear annihilation so present when males make war, I noted, and therefore, with no other species do the causes of war matter so much. Yes, he agreed, and he admitted that it made little sense to propose paternity uncertainty as the proximate cause in a general’s mind when he sends men into combat. In part, he meant these speculative thoughts as a provocation to further discussion about men and war. (As he likes to say: “An idea is like a cockroach. Put it on the table, and if you can’t kill it, well, then maybe it’s meant to survive.”) I admitted to being provoked: Why does not knowing who your offspring are make men more cavalier about whom they kill in battle, as opposed to being more reluctant to go to war and kill possible progeny? The question, for scientist and layperson alike, is at what cost do we consider reasonable the hypothesis that “men wage war because they can and because the potential costs of such action to their evolutionary fitness may be zero”?
Without assuming that the assassin of Archduke Ferdinand or the kamikaze pilots over Pearl Harbor had fatherhood issues that caused them to go off to war, where this leaves the rumble of empire, the economics of slavery, and the surge of national liberation movements is unclear except that in each case there is an underlying logic of fatherly ignorance. Could Bribiescas be right that, at least from an evolutionary perspective, fatherly ignorance is a constant and key catalyst to warfare? That conclusion is consistent with certain prevalent versions of evolutionary theory, beginning with war as the outcome of primordial doubts and decision making. Despite the fact that in most societies around the world, today and historically, women rely for security on men who are not in any way genetically related to them, theories that connect men and evolution to war can easily resonate with a wide public.
Obviously, then, if all it would take to stop war, end bloated military budgets, and cease all the interventions are paternity tests, we could quickly convince the men who roam the earth with their reckless germ to knock it off. The point that my friend was making was nothing so simplistic, but his argument could reinforce the idea that the origins of war have more to do with evolution and male biology than is the case. To explain why we take easy comfort in paternity uncertainty as an explanation for war, we might consider the power of wishes, and how the wish to understand can trump the wish for things to be otherwise. If we can explain in an elemental way that war results from the ambiguous nature of paternity, and if we are pretty sure that males will continue to sire progeny, then at least we can know some of the limits on our ability to limit war and better avoid the fool’s errand of contesting the evolutionary roots of war.
The predicament this line of thinking poses also relates to the difference between an error and an illusion. In discussing the resilience of religion, political philosopher Wendy Brown asks why religion does not collapse under the weight of illogic alone. The reason, she says, paraphrasing Freud, is that religion “is not merely an error, but an illusion.” Brown clarifies: “Errors are mistakes, while an illusion is powered by a wish.” Today wars continue despite mistaken goals and strategies, their existential error, you could say. And, as with religion, illusion is central to maintaining every war. Hypothesizing that war is caused by evolutionary controls and compulsions of paternity uncertainty could be called an error, but that would not explain the currency given to this error or others tracing the origins of war to the biologies of our male ancestors.11
Explanations for war may be illusory, yet war is far from an illusion. Moving people from illusions about war to engaging in the practices of war requires a conjurer’s trick of symbolic reasoning and the ability to move people from one state of understanding to another. We need to better understand what maleness has to do with norms and categories—civilian, enlisted, tooth-to-tail, obedient, resourceful, intimidating and intimidated, weapons savvy and pacifistic—for the fog of war to be transcended and military conflict buried in the annals of history.
Man does not cause war. Particular men do, and the reason is always to impose their will on an opposing force.
The United Nations’ peacekeeping forces have a significant problem of Sexual Exploitation and Abuse (SEA, pronounced S-E-A). Despite a zero-tolerance policy on missions around the world that prohibits sexual relations between UN personnel and members of the local population, almost no one in the United Nations believes this policy is feasible. Why they don’t is directly relevant to widespread assumptions about men, war, and sexual violence. Blue Helmets have been caught buying sex, including from children, for a dollar, for eggs, for a cup of milk, for a cookie. In UN camps and cars, in towns and in the forest, in hotels, apartments, and everywhere else, women and girls as well as boys are targets for SEA. And peacekeeping soldiers and police are not the only ones who leave behind “Blue Helmet children” and “peacekeeper babies.” UN civilian personnel are perhaps the biggest offenders. But regardless of a perpetrator’s position, the United Nations would in most cases sooner repatriate an employee from a mission than arrest, prosecute, and punish him onsite.
A 2013 UN investigation into SEA concluded that “virtually all personnel knew about UN policies surrounding SEA,” and that “the great majority of personnel do get trained.” More and better training proved no more effective than “no-go areas,” or making UN military and police wear uniforms with name tags, or hotlines for local women to use to report violations. Exercise equipment in barracks was imported to provide temporary and partial release of pent-up sexual energy among the troops.12
Assessments were issued beginning with the landmark 2005 “Comprehensive Strategy” report by Prince Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein of Jordan, who at the time was adviser to the secretary-general on sexual exploitation and abuse. The report condemned such abuses and called for dramatically new procedures to eradicate the problem on UN peacekeeping missions around the world. Yet a culture of impunity continued to prevail. A primary cause of SEA proved to be underlying beliefs about male biology among UN officials, a boys-will-be-boys mentality with regard to men’s elemental need for sexual release, even if this means violently exploiting women, girls, and boys, members of the very populations the peacekeepers were charged with protecting. The proposed solutions to the problem gleaned from interviews in Haiti and Lebanon fell into two categories: the first involving tours of duty and the hydraulic model, the second involving leaves and the safety-valve theory.13
As in all militarily volatile situations, in Haiti and Lebanon the length of time that soldiers and police were assigned to a UN mission was regulated and monitored. Commanding officers spoke in particular of the challenges for young male soldiers in their twenties being away from home in a foreign country for the first time. Some also drew a direct connection between length of tour and sexual exploitation. In the words of Daniel Morales, a police commander from Chile, “If you put men in a situation where they are not going to have sex for three months, that is a challenge, but not insurmountable. If you extend this to six months, well, that is far more difficult. Beyond this point they become unmanageable.”14
One solution in the Chilean and Peruvian contingents was to make it possible for men to call home, including through Skype, nearly every day. The hope was less that the men’s suppressed sexual drive would be relieved by talking to their wives and girlfriends back home than that talking to family would intensify guilty feelings if the men were tempted to have sex with local women. Peacekeeper men had their sexual needs, the logic ran; they could not be expected to endure celibacy forever. The longer the men were prevented from finding release for their sexual needs, the more the pressure would keep building. It was only reflexes at play when the men at some point sought an outlet before they exploded from sexual privation and denial of their sexual selves.
In Haiti, peacekeepers on leave were sent to the Dominican Republic because on the same island there were sex workers. What happened in the DR stayed in the DR and was not of interest to UN peacekeeping officials, much less considered to be their legal responsibility. In Lebanon, peacekeepers were shipped off for R&R to another country, such as Cyprus. The goal was simply to get them out of the southern zone in Lebanon where the UN contingents were based. In that case, what happened with peacekeepers on leave in Cyprus stayed in Cyprus. The Dominican Republic and Cyprus each played the role of safety valve for the UN peacekeepers. If and when the United Nations’ male troops couldn’t take the sexual stress any longer, they had somewhere to let off “steam” where it would not as directly affect the UN missions.
Concerns about men’s biology directly influenced military tour and leave policies. Warrior masculinities have always been at the core of sexual exploitation and abuse in the UN peacekeeping forces and cannot be simply trained out or cordoned off. A code of physical endurance and conquest is at the heart of warrior masculinities, and carries with it the ethos of male privilege and prerogative that warriors deserve the spoils of war, which regularly include the bodies of civilian women. But it’s more than a problem of armed men abusing their power. There is good evidence that more civilians than soldiers or police are responsible for SEA in many missions where the problem has been documented. This evidence implies something far more sinister than what happens to young men when they are given guns and unleashed in foreign lands. It was not warrior masculinities that were causing sexual exploitation and abuse, but any kind of masculinity—and for civilian personnel, the greater freedom and impunity they enjoyed: in Haiti, at least, civilians were allowed far more latitude in terms of mobility and supervision than peacekeeper soldiers and police.
These UN civilian employees do not generally carry weapons, so the abuse was not simply a matter of armed intimidation. Civilian personnel were, on average, older than the soldiers, so it was also not just a question of young men and their hormones. Masculine privilege and male entitlement among the peacekeepers, bolstered by commonsense beliefs about men’s sexual needs, explain the problem far better than theories about soldiers who go bad or simply mothers who are so desperate for funds that they offer their daughters’ bodies for sale.
“Suppose rape is rooted in a feature of human nature,” writes psychologist Steven Pinker, “such as that men want sex across a wider range of circumstances than women do. It is also a feature of human nature, just as deeply rooted in our evolution, that women want control over when and with whom they have sex.” Just because it’s a feature of human nature, Pinker cautions, doesn’t make it right. But it does make it natural in an evolutionary sense. Belittling environmentalists and others who idealize nature—people who believe “that anything we have inherited from this Eden is healthy and proper”—Pinker also criticizes the lack of sophistication of anyone who thinks “a claim that aggression or rape is ‘natural,’ in the sense of having been favored by evolution, is tantamount to saying that it is good.” Isn’t the world full of natural, beautiful, and necessary predators, such as wolves, bears, and sharks?15
For evolutionary psychologists and the behavioral geneticists who are their allies, rape is the touchstone case they use to promote the idea that key aspects of gender and sexuality are just too hardwired to ignore. Unless you understand the brutal, biological roots of male violence that takes the form of rape, which is found in all human societies and in species spread across the animal kingdom, they declare, you cannot effectively prevent rape. Everyone would agree that unless you understand the causes of rape you cannot stop it, and that if you get the causes wrong you will not only not solve the problem but make it worse. Rarely does scholarship matter more for public policy.16
“Nowhere else in modern intellectual life is the denial of human nature more passionately insisted upon, and nowhere else is the alternative more deeply misunderstood,” writes Pinker. He adds, “Clarifying these issues, I believe, would go a long way toward reconciling three ideals that have needlessly been put into conflict: women’s rights, a biologically informed understanding of human nature, and common sense.” Especially, he might have added, if you’re concerned about women’s rights, you need to pay attention to the biological influences, drives, controls, and restrictions that govern who rapes whom, why, and when. Yet to call rape a feature of human nature makes no more sense than to say that opposing rape is a feature of human nature—it tells us nothing in itself, but it uncritically implies that something dangerous is permanently lodged in “male nature” that can harm others. Anthropologist Emily Martin’s succinct response to the major study that inspired Pinker is apropos: “Protestations to the contrary, their account actually amounts to an incitement to rape.”17
Pinker may be able to find rape in every society and historical period. But the tremendous variation of rates of rape is not a factor of biology. Why in 2014 were rates of reported rape in Alaska 79.7 for every 100,000 people, while in New Jersey the rate that same year was 11.7, according to FBI crime statistics? Presumably the biology of Alaskan males does not differ markedly from that of the men of New Jersey. When he does compare societies, Pinker suggests that greater freedom for women and independence from men could be spelling the threat of more danger, including with rape. “The targeting of sexist attitudes does not seem to be a particularly promising avenue for reducing rape,” he says, yet his broad claims are not backed by evidence, as would be required to use his framework to explain that women of Alaska are 6.8 times as independent as women in New Jersey.18
The same variation that is found in the United States is also found when comparing rape in countries and regions across the globe as well as throughout history. Anthropologist Peggy Sanday writes about rape cross-culturally that, “To say that at least some men rape in all societies and to use this fact to make generalizations about the natural history of rape and the biological bases for sexual coercion obfuscates the dramatic cultural differences between a rape-free society… and a rape-prone society.” A prime example of the latter, she believes, is the United States. Such variation leads to a question: If rape is so natural to the males of our species, why is it far less prevalent in some places than in others, and why does the incidence of rape instead correlate so closely with other social markers, such as gender equality?19
“Rape represents the breakdown of the normal social controls on male sexuality,” reports neuroscientist Joe Herbert. Social controls in this scenario are all that can stop rape, and undoubtedly most of the people who lay rape at the feet of nature are pessimistic about ridding rape from human societies altogether. As historian Joanna Bourke persuasively shows, if we try to trace rape back to universal biological roots, this will result not only in public policies designed to control, cordon, and quarantine men, but also the decision to literally castrate them. Indeed, chemical and surgical castration is advocated and practiced, including in the United States, as a strategy to prevent rape. If the penis is out of control, the reasoning goes, then the male genitals must be punished. “Invasive procedures like sterilization, castration and lobotomy assumed that rape arose primarily as a result of uncontrollable sexual urges” on the part of men, Bourke notes.20
Leaving aside Pinker’s intemperate views—“Rapists tend to be losers and nobodies,” he says, “while presumably the main beneficiaries of the patriarchy are the rich and powerful”—debate about rape and normal men has run the gamut for decades among feminists and activists. Some have held that all men are basically beneficiaries of rape, while others have gone so far as to call all men potential rapists. Both the all-men-as-beneficiaries and the all-men-as-potential-rapists arguments mingle too easily with notions of biological destiny. The Alaska–New Jersey rape rate comparison is pertinent: instead of looking to biology, or to the claim that rapists are poor, uneducated men who can’t find another way to have sex, we need to grasp that rape is caused by inequality and by the desire and ability of people, nearly always male, to sexually impose their violent power and will over others.21
Men’s bodies are no more in thrall to disobedient impulses than women’s. Men’s bodies are no more in need of collective disciplining than women’s. Men’s bodies are biologically no more or less choosy, coy, or capricious than women’s. Rape is not explained best by who gets erections. Men are not more enslaved by some rapacious nature, although if you listened to some theorists, expert and non-expert alike, you might believe they are. Men rape young women, men rape old women, men rape children, men rape men, men rape in peacetime, men rape in wartime, men rape in cities, men rape in rural areas. Although there are blatant and pervasive patterns—rapists are men—it is possible not to leap into believing it all has something to do with inherent maleness and male bodies.
If rape is biologically driven, and men can’t help themselves, then who can stop them? Perhaps we could agree that “society must act against men’s sexual assaults against women.” But to say society must act is to say little, to depersonalize responsibility. Who is this “society”? If you think men can’t help themselves, the single logical conclusion is that only women can stop men. And, following from this, if women don’t stop men, they are in part responsible for what happens and can be blamed for not preventing rape. Of course, if they are thought to be helpless in the face of male sexual assault, women can only hope to be rescued by other men who don’t assault. As Laura Kipnis writes, “policies and codes that bolster traditional femininity—which has always favored stories about female endangerment over stories about female agency—are the last thing in the world that’s going to reduce sexual assault.” Either way, men as a group are implicated in rape overall and men who rape are let off the hook.22
In order for rape to be considered natural, it must be true of all men, or human males, as the evolutionary psychologists like to call them, in all times and places. Variation spells problems. But not always. Because it turns out, according to the rape-is-natural folks, that “males of a lower socioeconomic status are more likely to rape.” We’ve heard this before. This particular version is explained in a simple fashion: poorer men have a harder time getting anyone to have sex with them, and to compensate, because they have to follow their natural male sexual urges and find something to ejaculate into, they rape. If women are available, they are most often raped. If not, as in prison, then other men are raped. It all boils down to a “mate-deprivation hypothesis.”23
To call something like rape by men natural and genetic (hidden in the barely controllable XY chromosomal combination) means that you cannot really stop rape at its source. You can only try to limit the damage male rapists can do to the rest of the population. Look again at variation: human males do or don’t rape (to the extent we know it), and they do or don’t think about rape, and do or don’t want to rape (same qualification). If the range of thinking and doing among men is infinite, if we can tell little to nothing about whether a man will rape simply because we know he is a human male, then nature is surely taking a back seat to other factors. Here we have another reason why it is beyond the pale to label as rape what males of other species, like mallard ducks, do in a far less flexible manner, in attacks that are almost identical in nature, carried out by a significant number of the species population, and appear to be nearly unvarying.24
The only good thing to come out of rape culture in the United States has been news coverage exposing it: the sexual assaults of entitled men—from boardrooms to elite college dormitories—make it clear that men of wealth and power can exploit male privilege just as much as men from every other social sector. It’s also reassuring that the problem has come to be called rape culture, because that name helps to guard against a presumption that rape is natural to the males of the human and other species. But even when we read about rape culture, we need to be wary of some of the underlying assumptions that can be reinforced about the naturalness of rape, and how more men would if they could.
Do you remember this news item in one or another incarnation from 2015?
“Nearly one-third of college men admit they might rape a woman if they could get away with it, a new study on campus sexual assaults claims. Of those men, however, far fewer will admit this if the word rape is actually used during the course of questioning.”
“Close to 1-in-3 collegiate males admitted in a recent study they would force a woman to sexual intercourse, but many would not consider that rape.”
“According to one study of male students at the University of North Dakota, 1 in 3 men would rape a woman if they could get away with it.”
“Nearly a third of college men in the US admit they would have ‘intentions to force a woman to sexual intercourse’ if nobody would ever know and there would not be any consequences, a shocking new study has found.”
“Nearly one in three college men admit they might rape a woman if they knew no one would find out and they wouldn’t face any consequences, according to a new study by researchers at the University of North Dakota.”25
Here are the facts:
Three researchers—Sarah Edwards, Kathryn Bradshaw, and Verlin Hinsz, two from the University of North Dakota and one from North Dakota State University—published a paper in 2014 in the journal Violence and Gender. Their paper was titled “Denying Rape but Endorsing Forceful Intercourse: Exploring Differences Among Responders.” The topic was excellent and the methods seemed appropriate for the seventy-three male students who completed a survey, attended a debriefing, and completed all the other parts of the study. All the young men were over eighteen; over 90 percent of them were white; all identified as heterosexual; and all claimed prior sexual experiences.
Go back and read the news items: “1 in 3 men would rape a woman if they could get away with it…”; “nearly one in three college men admit…”; “close to 1-in-3 collegiate males…”
In other words, these providential seventy-three young men ended up standing in for the entire male population. Not just in North Dakota. Not just on college campuses. Not just in the world today, but in all history. The researchers themselves were far more modest in their claims. But enough of the popular press ran mock-shock articles that it’s worth asking why. Reading these news accounts, you could be impressed by the new scientific evidence that rape is what a lot of men want to do, especially if it’s not called rape: more men will rape if they can be assured of no future negative repercussions. If there is threat of punishment, stigma, and shame, numbers of rapes will be kept lower than they would “naturally” be.
Certainly, press outlets want readers and will often stoop to fudging the truth and sensationalizing the news. More than that, however, there were underlying assumptions these news items could mine and exploit. Saying one in three men would rape if they could get away with it tapped into preexisting beliefs; many people believe that regardless of class, or region, or race, a lot of men want to rape women. Sure, they called it rape culture. But the news coverage made rape culture awfully like male culture, and male culture dovetailed awfully easily into underlying beliefs that more men would if they could. The problem with picking up on a tiny study from North Dakota and turning it into screaming headlines read by millions of people goes beyond lax editing standards: it spreads confusion about men. Who gains in this instance is actually not easy to determine.
Rape is not just any bad thing, and debate about why rapes occur has become ground zero for the range of views and experiences with gender and violence overall in our societies. The science of rape, or rather, the scientists of rape, tell us that rape is natural in some preordained way. That is the only way to explain, they say, that rape is found everywhere and always in history. Why men rape is a central question of our time, however, and we have to get it right.
Even though numbers around rape are notoriously hard to come by, what numbers exist are by general consensus underestimates by an order of magnitude. In the United States, according to a Centers for Disease Control study from 2011, one in five women and one in seventy-one men will be raped at some point in their lives. Moreover, 46.4 percent of lesbians, 74.9 percent of bisexual women, and 43.3 percent of heterosexual women reported sexual violence other than rape during their lifetimes. One in four girls and one in six boys in the United States will be sexually abused before they turn eighteen years old.26
Rape culture is not unique to the United States. Rape is found in every region of the planet, and accounts of rape are among the earliest in human records. But rape culture is stronger in some societies than others. One of the foremost scholars of rape, Peggy Sanday, explicitly links the incidence of rape to the “overall position of women” in a society. In places where women have significantly more power and authority, rape cultures are weaker. In places where interpersonal violence and male dominance (in governing, business, and culture, for example) are more pronounced, rape cultures are stronger. Sensationalist news accounts that only partially digest and present the findings of scholarly studies can too easily grab readers’ attention because of preexisting beliefs, which then does more harm than good in limiting rather than fostering complex conversations about maleness and masculinity.27
It was 1970 in the United States, and the Vietnam War was raging. So were massive social movements around black liberation and women’s rights. Richard Nixon was president, and the majority of citizens not only favored the war effort, but strongly opposed the upsurge of demands from a significant but definitely outnumbered contingent of protesters of all stripes. The line of demarcation between Republicans and Democrats, conservative and progressive politics, was not as clear as it might later become. Though the Republicans had a more consistent record of opposing women’s rights and feminism, the Democrats were all over the place, a chaotic political umbrella concealing incompatible viewpoints, strategies, and programs. The Democratic Party presidential candidate in 1968, incumbent vice president Hubert H. Humphrey, defeated the progressive wing of the party represented by Eugene McCarthy to become the nominee before getting a drubbing by Nixon in November.28
In July 1970, Humphrey’s personal physician, Dr. Edgar F. Berman, used his bully pulpit as a man of medicine and science to warn his fellow Democrats against the folly of choosing women as leaders for the party or the nation. Dr. Berman was a retired Maryland surgeon, a member of the Democratic Party’s Committee on National Priorities, and a newspaper columnist. His rationale was squarely biological as he ticked off possible dangerous scenarios: a “menopausal woman president who had to make the decision of the Bay of Pigs”; a bank president “making a loan under these raging hormonal influences at that particular period”; and a “slightly pregnant female pilot” making a difficult landing.29
Berman’s thoughts on the high rates of alcoholism, obesity, and heart disease among male CEOs and politicians, to say nothing of Woodrow Wilson’s stroke, Dwight D. Eisenhower’s heart attack and ileitis, John F. Kennedy’s Addison’s disease and back problems, or Lyndon Johnson’s gallbladder operation, all while in office, were not shared at the time. And there is no way he could have predicted the effect of Jimmy Carter’s excruciating hemorrhoids on the Iran hostage crisis.
In case anyone thinks that men declaring women incapacitated from leadership on account of menstruation debilitation is a thing of the distant past, an obsolete relic of a bygone era, recall the infamous words of Donald J. Trump when he explained why a female television anchor had asked him tough questions: “She gets out there and she starts asking me all sorts of ridiculous questions, and you could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her… wherever.” Why else? This was forty-five years after Berman cautioned his Democratic colleagues against admitting women to the top ranks of the party. Many were outraged at Trump’s flagrant sexism, but why? His logic was consistent with widely held ideas about women and their cycles.
What is supposedly inevitable in women, their animal natures, is exactly what makes them ineligible for office, in this view. Men’s animality, on the other hand, is what makes them the right kind of raw material for political leadership and state-sanctioned forms of violence. But really, in both cases we are dealing with moral evaluations, not biological facts.30
Or take another case of violence: What if I walk up to you on the street and shoot you dead? Most observers would agree this would be homicide, justifiable or not. But what if I am the president of the United States and I send you to fight, and you kill for your country? Does that make me a murderer? Or an accessory to murder?
When officials of the United Nations use the term “intentional homicide,” they are distinguishing different kinds of killing, and specifically excluding what they call war- and conflict-related killings as “socio-political violence.” These can include hate crimes, which are products of social prejudice. Whether “gender-based killing,” based on sexual orientation and gender identity, should be considered intentional homicide or sociopolitical violence remains a bone of contention.31
The issue is more than the loophole distinction between killing and murder. What is it like to grow up as a man in El Salvador or South Sudan or the Philippines in an era of society-wide armed conflict waged by militaries, paramilitaries, and civilians? For that matter, what does it mean to grow up as a man in the United States in the first part of the twenty-first century, at a time when the country invaded and occupied and waged endless wars in the Middle East, when its armed forces were stationed at a thousand military bases stretched across the globe, and when torture was officially sanctioned for use against designated enemies? What impact did foreign incursions, combat, conquest, and overall hawkishness have on boys as they grew into men?32
We have become too accustomed to linking certain kinds of violence with men’s physiological capacities, to thinking that men are more prone to aggression of all sorts than women. When violence is on a small scale, interpersonal and domestic, it is widely deplored. However, when violence is used by the leaders of nations in wars they say are in defense of freedom, democracy, and national sovereignty, then suddenly violence becomes authorized and applauded. In the United States we are only too familiar with rationalizations of state-sanctioned violence. But it is worth noting another aspect of how we think about different kinds of male-initiated violence—in particular, the symbolic distinction between prohibited and honorable violence: When men commit “bad” violence we are more likely to hear of links to their bodily compulsions (maleness, race, mental capacity, economic status). Justifications for “good” violence, on the other hand, are invariably tied to “higher faculties,” cerebral functions said to manifest especially among male leaders. Then again, some do not have higher faculties:
“I did try and fuck her. She was married.”
“I moved on her like a bitch.”
“I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”
“Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”33
That this is the future president of the United States speaking each line has been remarked upon and decried repeatedly. The most shocking aspect of these violent threats against women is not that Donald Trump once said these things. Or that, despite listening to this wanton bragging about sexual assaults, tens of millions of women in the United States voted for him anyway. Or that none of it seemed to matter: even after boasting about physically attacking women, Trump still got elected. We’re not talking simply about people who unashamedly countenance violence against women. There were plenty of Trump supporters who oppose those kinds of attitudes and actions. They could nonetheless vote for Trump because they were willing to overlook his sinful behavior and were able to rationalize those words and deeds as unfortunate consequences of being a male leader. There was, in other words, complicity in the acquiescence, and that collusion was rooted in bedrock beliefs about men and women and violence.
A button popular in the 2016 US presidential campaign read, “VOTE TRUMP: Finally someone WITH BALLS.” The real-world consequences of such unsubstantiated claims are painful. Trump was elected not despite his repeated remarks championing sexual assaults on women, but because of them. He was chosen to lead because tens of millions of people in the United States believed that boys will be boys and that those who disagree should get with the program. In this view, the sins of Trump are simply those of untethered masculinity in its original form.
While by no means exclusive to men in power, blatant misogyny among elites can shed light on the more pervasive problems linking men, power, and essentialist thinking. Focusing briefly on China, for example, by the 2010s, earlier rhetoric about the goal of gender equality in that country had all but disappeared from most government proclamations. But that didn’t mean that it was absent in leadership discussions. Political guidance seemingly unrelated to men, women, and gender in recent years has been raised by China’s leaders in a remarkably gendered fashion.
In 2012, the same year he became the secretary general of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping gave an internal talk to party leaders that was soon dubbed the New Southern Tour speech. In this talk, later released for the general edification of 89 million cadres, the secretary general insisted that the economic and financial reforms throughout the country must continue, and must be led by the Communist Party, but that the leadership of the party should effect these societal reforms without reforming the party itself out of existence. In particular, he cautioned the Chinese leaders that they should learn from and guard against mistakes made earlier in the Soviet Union during its period of broad reform. One of the central headaches facing Xi was how to maintain the leadership of the party in a Chinese capitalist market economy and society that had experienced one major reform after another in the previous decade.
Xi’s talk concluded with a pithy provocation meant to drive home his point that the Chinese could not afford to follow in the reformist footsteps of their erstwhile brethren: “In the end, nobody [in the Soviet Party] was man enough to come out and resist.” Not that no one was brave enough, or skilled enough, or clever enough, or determined enough. No one was man enough. Around this same time, another Chinese leader, Major General Luo Yuan, complained about the moral decline of China’s (male) youth, criticizing them for growing soft when they needed to toughen up. As he put it, “masculinity and strength” were the magic bullets that could put Chinese society back on track.34
Injunctions from China’s president to be more manly are not that different—in meaning or effect—from Donald Trump glorifying sexual assault. The 2016 US election was an assertion of male privilege and of the impunity to be enjoyed by powerful men who committed sexual assaults against women. Tens of millions of people heard Trump’s statements and appreciated them for their deliberate excess. Of all the vicious aspects of Trump’s pussy-grabbing comments, we should worry most about blandly accepting the idea of powerful men doing what all men wish they could in an almost effortless, depressingly banal, and supposedly authentic pursuit of man’s primal needs and pleasures.