Wednesday 6 June 2018

Ends and Odds: The Ravings of An Old Man by Dave Jaffe. Why Do Men Kill? Chapter Nine. Part Two

   Why Do Men Kill by Dave Jaffe. Part Two.




         So why are some men so much more violent than women and ready to kill, maim and fight?
     "It's a matter of socialization," says Andrea, a philosopher who has researched and taught this subject. "Men are socialized to be violent. Women aren't."
   Andrea points out that women can aggressive with men and with each other. "Women can be very exclusionary and say things that put other women down." Andrea once ran a therapy group with people who'd been sexually abused in their youth. She found out that some men in the group had been sexually abused by their mothers.
     "Women can be aggressive," she says. Statistics also show that women do join armies and can learn to kill. Yet most of the killing that goes on to-day is done by men. Susan Pinker in her book 'The Sexual Paradox' seems to conclude that men are basically more violent than women. In other words, males may be socialized to be more violent than women. Still, males will be more violent whether they are taught to be or not.
     Yet whoever's right or wrong on this issue, men remain the violent sex. So professor Henry Higgins may have known how to teach proper grammatical English. Yet he was wrong on one main point: Men should be more like women when it comes to violence. Then the world would be a much better, less violent place.   
     A lot more people would be alive instead of lying in graveyards at a too early age.
     Finally one last point. Men do most of the killing in Canada. Yet they kill far more men than women. Just about every year over 600 Canadians are killed. Three quarters of these victims are men who are killed by other men. Female victims of homicide account for one in four murdered people.
     In a recent coloumn in 'The Globe and Mail' Elizabeth Renzetti pointed out that many women are killed by men  every year. This is true and no one should dismiss any victim of homicide. Yet the biggest victims of homicide by far in Canada are men, not women.