Charles: I think you start to make the refutation of Ed’s claim here, when you distinguish between facilitating and producing aggression. High testosterone levels do not produce aggression. They make higher levels of physical activity, more forceful and vigorous bodily actions possible. But a more forceful or vigorous physical action could be used to runaway faster, or climb a tree in escape faster. Testosterone’s action on a human is not to make them angry with a person; it does not make them form the goal of doing harm to a person. That has not been proven nor demonstrated by experiments.

The mindset to fight another _person_ does not come from testosterone. That comes from culture, especially class society culture. The mindset to hit a woman comes from male supremacist culture.

The original greater testosterone levels in human males were directed at fighting predators or hunting prey, that is other species, not members of our own species. Testosterone just provides more vigorous physical potential ; it does not designate what this vigorous activity is to be used in relation to.

What more testosterone does is facilitate fighting more fearcely , once the cultural mindset has been formed to fight someone at all.

Greater levels of testosterone are like bigger muscles. The bigger muscles don’t cause men to hit women. It is male supremacist ideology that causes men to take advantage of the bigger muscles or the greater levels of testosterone.

Thanks for the counter-chuckle! Nothing like Marxist prattle for a good laugh.

Comment by Ed — 2/22/2006 @ 4:20 pm

^^^^^
Don’t laugh Ed. That’s fairly close to the truth except the vegetarian part. We were _hunters_ and gatherers. Surely, you have heard that term. Hunting means meat eating.

Peace _within_ the species was very adaptive for the species. Doing a lot of killing and fighting within your own species is not very adaptive _for_ your species. That’s true of any species , and it held for humans for 200,000 years. See the inherent logic in that ? The original humans societies were too fragile to support wars between humans.

What the mean original businessmen did was introduce slavery, and the exploitation of other people – women at first – while they lived off the surpluses. Sad , not funny, but true.

Charles

Charles: And the female praying mantises who bite the heads off of the males right after they have sex ?

Charles

You’re funny, Ed.

We are not most animals. We are Homo sapiens sapiens (a name selected out of deep hubris). In fact, your account of the fighting-fucking caveman is a total myth and refuted by archeologcial and anthropological evidence. Fighting only became ubiquitous with the introduction of territorial disputes and class society, and then more often as a totally unbalanced form of plunder and bullying. This happened well AFTER we inherited our current genetic map.

This is a classic case of “naturalization,” the claim that a socially-constructed reality is “natural” (and therefore beyond our capacity to intervene, alas).

If someone broke into my home, and Sherry ran them back out the door with a chef’s knife, would she be displaying her “masculinity”? Please!

Evolutionary “breeding”?!?!

Thanks for the chuckle. Gotta go out to beat up the neighbors and kill a mastadon before I “mate” with the little lady.

Aaaaaarrrrgh!

Comment by Stan — 2/22/2006 @ 7:25 am

Ed

^^^^^^^
Chavez was elected several times. Bush stole two elections.

CB

^^^
CB: Then it seems to me that the term should be “compulsory hetero_gender_” , not “heter_sexuality_”.

A major meaning of “sex” refers to biology, the complementary biological classes of a species that are capable of biological reproduction through sexual actions.

“Gender” refers to the cultural/power/political categories masculine/feminine.

^^^^^

than it does with defining male and female social roles in a fused, complimentary-yet-unequal way; that the behavioral expectations associated with these roles are lingusitically marked as “masculinity” and “femininity”; that these gendered constellations of behavorial expectations are socialized from birth and therefore deeply embedded in each individual, both affectively and cognitively; that this socialization is powerfully and incessantly reinforced by cultural productions that reflect gender as a system of power AND and its reinforcing ideology; and that an ideology is an internally cohering set of symbols, meanings, and ideas that (1) is so widely accepted as to be considered axiomatic and beyond the scope of criticism, (2) and therefore is given the appearance of being “natural” (as in God-given or existing almost as a law of nature), and that (3) therefore both conceals and justifies existing social arrangements of power.

I’m not sure I’ll be here for long, on this thread, as discussions about current CRAPheads-in-charge are useful, but not my focus, personally-politically. I’m working on a new thread/entry, if Stan’ll have it, on the politics of (unnatural) sexuality, and the politics of what is popularly assumed to be a natural “orientation” called heterosexuality. There ain’t nothin’ natural about it. But more on that elsewhere.

My focus is on ending rape and racism, to put it simply. This requires deeply analysing what is currently called “sexuality” and “gender” and “race”, and de-naturalising these categories, exposing the raw and bloody politics beneath each. White supremacy, male supremacy, patriarchy, and CRAP, are the terms I find useful, as they are not terms that allow us to so easily extract behaviour from identities, nor institutions and ideologies of real suffering and harm.

People are their actions, among other aspects of their beings and doings. Good people doing bad things is a nice idea. My grandfather was a wonderful, beloved man who was also an incest perpetrator. The reality is we are all complex beings, capable of most things, good and bad, however we understand such terms. At issue is how each of us, and how we collectively, challenge and radically transform ourselves/our societies into beings and cultures which make rape and racism (and heterosexism and classism, of course, and ableism and ageism too) something contained solely in dusty books about past atrocities, or in outdated Wikipedia entries. The task, it seems to me, is to compost CRAP, sooner than later.

To Richard Leader: I was intrigued with some of your comments, and hope you do read Sex and War by Stan, as well as the text he recommended.

To Stan and Richard:
You may wish to see the good work of James W. Messerschmidt, two books of his in particular: Nine Lives, and Flesh & Blood. From the first book, see pages 10-12, in a section of that chapter called “Hegemonic, Subordinated, and Oppositional Masculinities.” I’ve only perused his books, but he certainly works hard to focus on how class, race, and gender create crime, including rape, and racist and anti-gay violence. His analysis is largely structural, his background is in criminology. See:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/102-4337204-6722534?url=index%3Dstripbooks%3Arelevance-above&field-keywords=james+messerschmidt&Go.x=19&Go.y=10&Go=Go

Stan, I noticed that R. Connell does the forward to Flesh and Blood.

I don’t tend to discuss “masculinities” much, as it has become “the” Men’s Studies word that seeks to make room for positive masculinities, as I think you note above, Richard. Notions of masculinity and femininity, however modified, still participate in (maintain) male supremacist heterosexism. Gender and race must end, period.

But we all must use the terms that most work for us, in respectful disagreement and in honest struggle, as we find our way out of this hell on Earth… and not by waiting to get out of this life and into some other, however it is imagined or understood (or known) by some religions. I am a radical Jew. I am alive now, more or less. I am not living to get to heaven. I am working to get heaven to Earth, as I work, each day, to first get out of bed. Depression disables me.

The world is wondrous but far too dreadful, far too systematically harmful, far too callous and cruel. Thanks to so many of you here, for giving hope: we cannot know when things will change, but here we know, at least, we are not alone in these struggles and perspectives–these efforts to end systematic harm.

Peace to all beings.

My take — at risk of being hotly accused of armchair psychologising should Ed return — is that he’s trying to Do The Right Thing. The closest analogy I can come up with is… how about the suburban affluent consumer who recycles his cans and has just bought a new Prius, and thinks that therefore he’s the shining green knight of environmental correctness… only to run into a team of deep ecologists who start telling him about his global footprint, factory farming and water resources, overpaving, GMO, longhaul cash cropping, and the environmental price tag of manufacturing and shipping that shiny new “green” toy in his driveway. He really thought he was doing good — and by contrast to millions of SUV-driving asshats out there, he was. But then along come these “unreasonable” radicals with their “utopian” notions telling him that all his effort is just a bandaid over a festering sore, and we need to dig waaaay deeper if we’re going to fix anything for the longer term. And needless to say, he gets cranky. Where’s the appreciation? where’s the props? and what the hell does it take to make these crazy people happy?

He has to, what, become a vegan and live in a tipi? Ah the hell with it, he snarls, and drives away in his Prius dismissing them as a bunch of anarcho-loonies.

This kind of confrontation goes on all the time between radicals and bandaiders. It’s just how things work, aI guess. Some folks think you can make slight adjustments to The System and it will slowly get better. Not surprisingly they tend to be folks who are more or less winning under the present scheme, and postponing the day of reckoning sounds pretty good to them.

Then there are people who either have nowt to lose, or have cast their lot with those who have nowt to lose — the poor of the earth, the prostituted girls, the raped women, the child soldiers, the illiterate, the dispossessed, those who die daily as the result of the logic that culminates in shiny new Priuses on our driveways — and to those people, there is no excuse for postponing that day of reckoning; on the contrary they want to Bring It On, settle the account, start shovelling the shit and clean the stables NOW before it gets any worse.

And they want to clean it but good, and make sure it won’t need doing again any time soon — fix it right. And that’s what I’d call the radical urge, a mania for deep and lasting housecleaning and account-settling, not just a swipe with a duster and juggling the books to keep things stumbling on a few years longer.

Between the gradualists and the radicals there is a world of difference, each group has its own optimism and its own pessimism. Mostly I guess we shuffle about uneasily between the two camps, trapped into doing daily what we know in our hearts is indefensible (buying goods of dubious provenance, squandering fossil energy, paying taxes to vile regimes, failing to “give all you have to the poor and follow me,” failing to throw our bodies onto the gears to stop the machine), but hoping that a better world really is possible.

And now I’m running out of steam…