A brilliant essay by David Barash on sex differences, violence..and well…life in general:
People are generally insensitive to whatever permeates their lives. So, if you were to ask someone to describe human violence, only rarely would you hear that it is overwhelmingly perpetrated by males. And yet, the truth is that if we could eliminate or even significantly reduce male violence, we would pretty much get rid of violence altogether. The maleness of violence is so overwhelming that it is rarely even noticed; it is the ocean in which we swim.
What might be called the “killing establishment” — soldiers, executioners, hunters, even slaughterhouse workers — is overwhelmingly male. Underworld killers such as violent gangs are also peopled largely by men. Whenever seemingly unprovoked and deadly shootings occur in homes and workplaces, men are typically the mass murderers. Nor is this imbalance limited to the United States: Whether in Kosovo, Rwanda, Cambodia, the Middle East, Guatemala, or Afghanistan, when people kill and maim other people, men are nearly always the culprits. And of course, the lethal operatives of Al Qaeda and its equivalent are reliably male, as are those sent to combat them.”
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