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Violence

Violence—defined as intentional, aggressive, direct physical harm inflicted by one person on another—has long been associated with masculinity. While women can be violent, men have been the main perpetrators and victims of violence across history and cultures. While biologists have increasingly sought the biological and evolutionary roots of male violence, historians and social scientists—presupposing an evolutionary, biological basis for male proclivities toward violence—have addressed the role of society and culture in encouraging or restraining male violence. The damage caused by male violence has lent special urgency to the search for its patterns, its causes, and its historical, social, and cultural contexts.

Historical and Cultural Contexts

Historians have revealed distinctive patterns of male violence in the history of the European settlement of North America and, later, in the history of the United States. The historian David Courtwright has suggested that demographics play a primary role in these patterns. Most violence in the world is committed by young, unmarried men (from twelve to twenty-eight years old). Through much of American history, even into the twentieth century, population movement and settlement patterns meant that an unusually large proportion of the population, particularly in places such as the western frontier, consisted of young, unmarried men. The specific periods and regions that experienced this population pattern have seen higher rates of violence and disorder.

Historians and other social scientists have also grounded associations between masculinity and violence in specific social and cultural contexts. Historians specializing in southern and western history note that men who belong to cultures emphasizing honor as a component of manliness often tend to resort to violence to protect or restore their reputation. In the multiracial, multiethnic society of the United States, conditions of racism and other sorts of ethnocentrism or xenophobia (fear of the outsider) have produced instances of violence—sometimes by the men in power, who often view “alien” men as either unmanly or hypermasculine threats to social order, and sometimes by the men being oppressed or excluded, who consider protection of their communities and assertions of pride necessary duties of manhood. Alcohol and other drug consumption contribute to an inclination to commit violence, so male subcultures in which these practices are common have also historically witnessed an elevated incidence of violence. Religious-studies scholars have shown that religious beliefs sometimes help restrain violence, such as when a religion identifies peacefulness as a requirement of male spirituality. At other times, however, such as when male spirituality is associated with acts of “righteous anger,” religious beliefs can be used to legitimate violence.

Public Violence

The traditional association of manhood with the maintenance of public order (brought to colonial America by European colonizers) has led to the sorts of sanctioned, structural, institutional violence evident in slavery, the penal system, and state reactions to street demonstrations or striking workers. At the same time, longstanding associations in the United States between manhood and resistance to authority, and between masculine duty and public leadership, have prompted many men to organize sometimes violent public actions in pursuit of or defense of group interests against perceived concentrations of corrupt official power.

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