Over on the Men’s Rights subreddit, mgriff2k4 is angry that the picture to the right here showed up on his computer screen. Sorry, make that fucking angry. “Did this really just fucking pop up on my news feed?” he asks in the title of his post, adding in a comment: “sorry about the word “fucking” but im really pissed off about this.”
Why is he angry? Presumably, he assumes the statistic is untrue, and that it unfairly paints men as evil murderers.
Luckily, in this Age of the Internet it is trivially easy to find out whether statistics like this are true. It involves something called “Google.” mgriff2k4 did not bother to avail himself of this easy-to-use research tool.
But I did. In less than 5 minutes, I confirmed that this factoid is indeed true, at least according to the most recent figures on gender and homicide found on the Department of Justice’s web site, drawn from FBI data covering the years from 1976-2005. According to the FBI, 30% of women who are murdered are murdered by “intimates.” Roughly 20% are killed by husbands or ex-husbands; 10% by boyfriends or girlfriends. (In the overwhelming majority of cases the murderers are boyfriends, not girlfriends; men are ten times more likely to commit murder than women.)
While four times as many men are murdered than women, only 5% of murdered men are killed by “intimates.” Men kill women more than twice as often as women kill men. Women suffer far more serious injuries from domestic violence than men do; so it is not altogether unexpected that they are also far more likely to be murdered by intimates.
If you want to see what this means on a human level, I suggest you take a look at the excellent if depressing web site Domestic Violence Crime Watch, which links to stories in which men are the perpetrators, and in which men are the victims. There are far more of those in the former category than in the latter.
I should note that (as of this writing) one commenter in the thread also found his way to the DOJ site, and noted that men were more likely to be killed by strangers or acquaintances. But he didn’t bother to tell mkgriff2k4 that the sign in the picture was in fact accurate.
David, aren’t you on vacation?! You better be relaxing a bit, bud!! 🙂
Just running the numbers there, that means for every 2 men killed by ‘intimates,’ 3 women suffer the same fate. Significant difference there.
(My reasoning: 4X as many men killed as women, so 5 per 100 man deaths is 5×4=20 per 100 woman deaths.)
Wouldn’t that mean that for every 1 man kiled by an intimate, 5 women are killed?
Anyway, I wish MRAs could distinguish between “gendered violence is a problem” and “men are all bad people and should feel bad.”
The MRA logic in that thread (as with so many others) seems to pretty much boil down to:
“There’s one good gender and one bad gender. Feminists say men are the bad one! But they’re wrong because it’s the other way around!”
Maybe he’s just angry at the statistic cos it’s a bad thing in general?
One stat that has been crystal clear since the 1970’s is that the more services provided for at risk populations, the fewer domestic murders occur. The incidence of both men and women killing their intimates has fallen since domestic violence has been identified as an issue and programs have been enacted to help people get out of the situation. The incidence of women killing their intimates in particular has dropped precipitously. The facts on this issue are clear — if people have the ability to identify the problem and escape their circumstance, the less likely they are to kill their spouse.
Years ago I used to watch America’s Most Wanted and was amazed at the number of women killed by their romantic partners. Heck, just watch the regular news. So why are men more likely to murder their partners? Can it be blamed on testosterone by itself, or is there more to it?
” Can it be blamed on testosterone by itself, or is there more to it?”
It’s cos women are whiny bitches and/or sluts. Have MRAs taught you nothing?
Ruby, the answer is : there is more to it. I’ll let more qualified people answer in details if they want, but this obvious fact need to be stated: people are more than their biology.
Well, shit, since human beings are hormone-operated automatons, I’m sure that testosterone is literally The Murder Hormone.
Either that or we live in a society that tells men they must defend their masculinity at all costs, and then declares:
These things are masculine:
-Being physically strong and brave
-Having a submissive female partner
-Winning arguments and getting your way
And these things are emasculating:
-Expressing, talking about, or even thinking about your emotions
-Having a partner leave you and/or defy your wishes
-Graciously accepting that you’ve lost a dispute
It’s an obvious recipe for disaster no matter what hormones you’ve got going.
While blaming testosterone itself is just silly, at the end of the day everything we do is controlled by chemicals and electrical impulses in the brain.
Technically, yes, but those chemicals and electrical impulses don’t act in a vacuum. They’re influenced by culture and media and peers.
“Technically, yes, but those chemicals and electrical impulses don’t act in a vacuum. They’re influenced by culture and media and peers.”
Also true. But then there would be no such thing as thinking for oneself. I’m curious as to how malleable the brain actually is.
There is no discovered mechanism for thinking truly original thoughts. According to the level of current understanding, brains are bound by causality–everything you think and do is a product of the chemicals in your brain plus the sensory inputs to your brain.
(Note that does not mean “only the chemicals in your brain,” which is where Ruby-style pop-psych tends to fall down. Obviously inputs matter or cultural differences wouldn’t even exist.)
Personally I feel like I make voluntary decisions, but I can’t say whether that’s merely an illusion, or due to some not-yet-understood physical phenomenon, or a truly metaphysical phenomenon.
Wow, just, wow. I really hadn’t clicked through to read these tools before today. David, I don’t know how you do it day in and day out.
Cliff: Where are you getting 1 per 5 from?
5 out of every hundred men killed are killed by an intimate; 30 out of every 100 women killed, same.
400 men are killed for every hundred women, so 20 men killed by an intimate per hundred women killed compared to 30 women per hundred.
Any obvious mistakes there?
(I’m doing a maths degree, so any such mistakes will be a) embarassing and b) important for me to be shown…)
MorkaisChosen – Whoops, I think I misunderstood your parenthetical. I worked it out again, and yes, you’re right. :p
(I’m a film major, so… you know.)
“Personally I feel like I make voluntary decisions, but I can’t say whether that’s merely an illusion, or due to some not-yet-understood physical phenomenon, or a truly metaphysical phenomenon.”
I read somewhere that neurologists were doing a test to see what happened in the brain while making a decision. They discovered that the brain makes a decision before the person is consciously aware of it.
Sorry, I get a lil gushy over brain science >.>
Now define “consciously aware.” :p
I can believe the brain makes a decision before the person announces it, and perhaps even before they say they recall making the decision, but “consciously aware” is one of those things I don’t think we really have a handle on scientifically.
From what I here…We have limited free will because of our self awareness and the fact that our enviroment changes our brain…for instance brain cells die and are replaced…Honestly, I hope we have a little bit free will or that is just depressing:(
I think free will is really an unanswered, possibly unanswerable question.
Whether brains are affected by culture, however, is an extremely answered question.
Even if having on average more testosterone of women makes men more violent than women (which I’m not going to dismiss, but I don’t think is proved either way*) we know that culture and social structures influence crimes, and that effect is really strong (look at America’s crime rate vs. many other developed countries). So even if men are doomed to be more violent than women on average**, they certainly aren’t doomed to be as violent as they are now.
* Like Cliff Pervocracy said, we (and the rest of the world) as a patriarchy have a lot of socialization going on that makes violence from men way too acceptable, and I think that is going to screw up the studies on the matter. Personally, I feel like our biology gives us a standard set of responses and abilities, and social circumstances decide which we end up using.
**Whether it is biological or social, I doubt this will change anytime soon.
Oh very much so! The Social Psychology course I took had studes that showed that peoples actions and attitudes are very much shaped by situations and culture,
Ruby–that’s stupid, Testostrone has nothing to do with violence.
That particular study, if I recall correctly, had participants pressing a button, with the timing of the button press being the “decision”, and found that the impulse was sent to the muscles before the bits of the brain they were defining as making the conscious decision lit up.
It’s a very limited definition of “decision” and I’d love to see the experiment repeated with, say, a choice of buttons, because we already know that our bodies can handle motions we’ve already decided to make without much conscious input. I don’t decide to take each individual step and when and where to aim my foot. I decide to walk, and once I’m going my legs look after themselves. But it seems a bit of a reach to argue that, since I’m not aware of tripping before I automatically act to retrieve my balance, I didn’t decide to walk.