Violent men

It’s popular today to blame high rates of male aggression on the patriarchy and its social codes. Those codes, the theory goes, prompt men and women alike to teach boys, but not girls, that emotions and weakness are bad and that stoicism and aggression are good.

Here, for example, is how the American Psychological Association put the theory in “Harmful Masculinity and Violence,” a newsletter that has circulated widely since its release in 2018. “Primary gender-role socialisation aims to uphold patriarchal codes by requiring men to achieve dominant and aggressive behaviours. The concept of gender roles is not cast as a biological phenomenon, but rather as a psychological and socially constructed set of ideas that are malleable.”

Matthew Gutmann, professor of anthropology at Brown University and the author of the 2019 book , agrees. He says that new research that is “just now reaching the general public” shows there is “little relation between testosterone (T) and aggression (except at very high or very low levels).” This, along with his interpretations of other scientific literature, has convinced him that biology, and testosterone in particular, is not where explanations of male violence are to be found: “If you believe that T says something meaningful about how men act and think, you’re fooling yourself. Men behave the way they do because culture allows it, not because biology