A few recent headlines:
Iraqi guards kill female suicide bomber
Female suicide bomber in Iraq kills 15, wounds 40
Suicide bomber kills 7 policemen in northern Iraq
Can you guess the gender of the third suicide bomber?
I spent a while as an anti-sexual and partner violence educator, and one of my favorite exercises to practice with people was something like this one, created by Jackson Katz. Essentially, you begin by having the group read a typical “educational” passage about violence against women—the kind of thing you’d read in your average newspaper, or even in old-school rape crisis center type educational programming. Then, once you’ve let that sink in, you start breaking down the language of the article. What becomes clear, as you do this, is the fact that a lot of statements about how we think about gender and violence are made in the things we don’t explicitly state. Most glaringly, the focus of such articles is almost exclusively on the victims of gender violence, who are explicitly stated to be primarily female. The gender of perpetrators, however, is not mentioned.
According to the Department of Justice, 88% of violent crime in the U.S. is committed by men. But as a society, we rarely talk about the prevalence of male violence, or how striking it is that gender, more than any other factor, is such a predictor of violent behavior. And we virtually never really discuss why men are so much more likely to commit acts of violence than women are. In my experience, if I manage to wrangle your average person into considering why this is the case, they’ll generally fall back on bogus pop science. Something to the effect of, “Testosterone makes them do it!”
In other words, “I have based a large part of my identity and sense of self-worth on my conformity to conventional gender roles. The suggestion that gender roles as they are constructed in a patriarchal culture is somehow flawed is deeply threatening to me. Therefore, I will attempt to use essentializing pseudo-science to convince you that feminist change is completely impossible, so you will stop saying these unsettling things that make me uncomfortable and suggest that by reinforcing traditional gender roles, I have unintentionally aided in the creation of great suffering.”
Denial. Not just river.
Anyway, believers in testosterone zombies aside, anyone paying attention can tell you that men are more likely to be violent largely because their violence is condoned and even encouraged as a normal aspect of male identity. The fact that, as the headlines above show, perpetrators of violent crime are assumed to be male unless stated otherwise shows just how normalized male violence is. Imagine how much we, as a culture, would be analyzing the socialization of girls if over the course of the past 10 years, 28 young women and no men had gone shooting up schools.
I’m often amazed at how invisible we make the identity of dominant groups in analyzing the behavior of their members, as opposed to the way we imagine that every member of a marginalized group is representative of the entire population of that group.
On a related note, it’s nice to see that we are actually hearing any news at all about Iraq, given that the networks are reducing their presence there, I suppose because news about the war doesn’t sell. We don’t want to hear about it. And what we are willing to hear is out-of-context information like these stories, where our identity as citizens of an imperialist invading country, and therefore co-creators of the hell Iraq has become, is conveniently erased. It’s just too uncomfortable to consider our part in the creation of so much suffering. I guess testosterone made us do it.