Are Women Equally Violent to Men?

In an attempt to cast men as the real victims, women are cast as equally violent

There is an ongoing gender war. Why is this happening? What is at stake, and what are the motivations?

Before getting into that, I want to highlight some findings that are interesting and provocative.

When studying different monarchs in European history, we find that Queens have started significantly more wars than Kings during their reign.

Another provocative finding is that when examining who initiates and carries out violence in a relationship, we find that women do this to an equal degree to men.

To many in the manosphere, traditional conservatives, redpillers and incels these to observations are treated as the smoking gun. It is their final proof that women are vile creatures and men are the real victims. Time to start rolling back evil feminism that has destroyed modern society and brought untold suffering to men and women.

Okay, yes, I am being sarcastic. So what is going on here? Is the research fake? If not, then shouldn't this totally change the narrative on feminism and the traditional depiction of men as abusers and women as helpless victims?

No.

Any narrative can be spun by cherry-picking and ignoring context. Let us look at Queens first.

Are female leaders more violent?

Historically, expanding territory was the goal of heads of states. Countries gained power and prestige mainly through expansion and holding more lands. This was before economic policy could markedly change the economic growth of a country.

The paper Queens by Oeindrila Dube and S.P. Harish writes the following on page 10:

We also find that queens gained greater territory in the course of their reigns

That is something the anti-feminists conveniently forget to mention. But if you are going to use this paper to argue women are more violent, then you would also have to acknowledge they are also more capable leaders. For what a monarch was supposed to do back in the day, they proved more effective.

In fact, the paper makes another important observation (page 9):

A second account of female rule and war participation builds on the importance of state capacity in warfare. Over the 16th-20th centuries, European wars were frequent and increasingly required extensive financing and military management.

This is rather crucial information. The number of wars a nation carried out historically was not dependent as much on how violent or aggressive the ruler was but rather their ability to finance wars. Generally, rulers would always want to start a war and gain more territory as long as they could afford it.

Under the rule of Queens, more important reforms enabling better ability to raise taxes and other income were enacted. This was in part possible because Queens could outsource many tasks to their husbands and thus get more time to concentrate on fewer tasks.

The opposite was generally not possible. Kings did not outsource part of ruling to their wives.

Game theory and Gender

Game Theory concerns itself with optimal strategies for different games. Games can be simplifications of real-world problems where different rational agents are competing in some way.

Why do I mention game theory in the context of gender and violence? Because it is easy to think that our actions are purely an outcome of our nature. But we can look at different social situations as creating different games with different optimal strategies:

A woman ruling in a patriarchal society where women typically cannot hold any power or influence, will have very different optimal strategies from a man ruling within a patriarchy or women ruling within something more similar to a matriarchy.

For instance, a woman in a man's world will be accused of being weak and soft and not capable of making the hard decisions. The result is that women in such a world must often overcompensate to demonstrate that they are not the weak leaders they are accused of being.

Consequently, one should see a difference in female leadership depending on whether society is very patriarchal or more matriarchal. I observe a clear distinction between Margaret Thatcher as an early female prime minister and Gro Harlem Brundtland in my native Norway who became Norway's first female prime minister in 1981.

Gro and Thatcher could not be more different. Thatcher did absolutely nothing for women. Quite the contrary, she undermined women. As recalled by journalist Jenni Murray:

She would, I knew, fix me with a piercing cold eye, bat aside concerns about part-time work, low pay, lack of childcare facilities, poverty in old age and sneer that the f-word (feminism) simply wasn't in her lexicon.

She led an all male cabinet. She let no woman get a chance, and she had a muscular foreign policy and was generally brutal domestically as well. She exemplifies the problem of analyzing the actions of female leadership. Thatcher was not in any shape or form a typical woman in terms of values and behavior. She was not called the Iron Lady for nothing.

But Thatchers behavior is not surprising given the environment she operated within. Thatcher worked her way through a deeply conservative, patriarchal political party. Gro Harlem Brundtland, on the other hand, rose to power within a political part which was still a socialist party when she gained power.

Remember, socialism from early on has tended to be feminist. A stark example of this is the female Kurdish fighters. Why would there be female fighters in such a patriarchal region of the world? Because the Kurdish resistance movement PKK was socialist. It is also one of the key difference between East and West Germany to this day. The East is more gender equal.

Albeit somewhat ironically, Gro took socialism out of the party program and never publicly described herself as a socialist, unlike earlier social democratic leaders.

Instead, Gro changed a party that used to be mainly about the working class and factories into a party with a strong emphasis on the environment and women's issues. Her entry into politics was the fight for women to decide whether to have an abortion or not themselves. Before that, a board of medical doctors decided. It was her experience sitting on one of these boards as a medical doctor that pushed her into politics.

Gro very much wanted to lift women up and brought numerous women into her government. I think that also caused a different style of leadership. She, to a larger degree, was governing with women. Thatcher, on the other hand, was governing with men. In game theory terms that create entirely different optimal strategies. That game Thatcher was playing requires far more muscular strategy while the game Gro was playing could rely on a far more feminine strategy.

Still, Gro was also a pioneer in a society where men held most power. She may not have been a Thatcher, but she was also a "tough cookie". She was no pushover. In other words even for a more feminist leader like Gro, there was a clear filtering that had happened. Only the stronger women could make it in a male dominated world. And if they were not strong, they had to learn to become strong.

I remember an interview with Hillary Clinton as she rose the ranks. She also learned very early that feminine traits like compassion, empathy, and agreeableness would be used against her. The male dominated environment she was in taught her that she had to be really tough to make it. But you cannot ever really make it as a woman in that regard. Consider all the accusations against Hillary for being a cold bitch. A man gets called a strong resolute leader while a woman gets called a cold bitch for expressing the same traits.

But do we have any research to test this hypothesis around female leadership? The Queens paper does point to some relevant research on page 5 and 6:

Koch and Fulton (2011) find that among democracies over 1970-2000, having a female executive is associated with higher defense spending and greater external conflict. In contrast, having a higher fraction of female legislators is associated with lower defense spending and less external conflict. Studies also suggest that female voters are less likely to support the use of force internationally, and greater gender equity and female leadership lead to lower rates of internal conflict.

I think these outcomes are what we would expect. Female leaders often stood alone in a patriarchal society and thus had to overcompensate to look strong. That is the game theory aspect. But the game changes when you get more women. The less patriarchal power structures are, the more women can express their true nature. That is why more female legislators cause lower defense spending and less external conflict.

We also see that female voters vote as you would expect. In other words, female leaders are not good representatives of female nature for two reasons:

1. They have to overcompensate to not look weak.

2. There is a filtering. Only the strongest and most masculine women could reach the top in a very male dominated world.

To conclude that Queens invade other nations more than Kings does not suggest women are more violent. And if it did, then one would also have had to accept that women were better than men at expanding territory. You cannot cherry-pick the stats you like.

Are women equally violent in relationships?

The idea that men and women are equally violent is a rather absurd claim. One can read e.g. that Wiki article on Violence against Women to get a sense of the massive scale.

It also goes against everything we know about biology and evolution. Why do two genders exist in the first place? What are the evolutionary benefits? Hunting big game is a very risky activity. If mothers hunted, there would be high chance that young children would lose their parents taking caring of them. So evolution came up with the brilliant strategy of having two genders with different optimizations:

1. Women are optimized to survive disease and starvation. Female behavior geared towards avoiding high risk and playing it safe to secure her survival.

2. Men are optimized for dangerous activities such as hunting.

There is not such thing as a free lunch. The optimization evolution did on men to make men better fighting machines makes men less resistant to disease and starvation. The latter is in part because men being both physically bigger and having bigger muscles, require a lot more food to survive than women.

Even at equal body mass, a woman would expend less energy to get the same work done as men. Men's bodies are optimized for max power rather than max efficiency.

This pattern is seen all through nature. Males are more violent and reckless, but males are the ones hunting and chasing away attackers. Females look after children and engage in safer food gathering.

But this is a simplification which can often be used by sexists to argue that women should just stay in the kitchen and raise children on the grounds that this is "natural". Nature is not that clear-cut. For instance, among lions it is the females which are the primary hunters. And they also watch their children, so what the hell do male lions do?

Male lions primarily guard territory against enemies. This actually makes some sense. Lions are big and powerful. Thus, a female lion can likely hunt without endangering herself too much. But she may have problems tackling stronger enemies. That is where the male lion comes in. I was recently watching a video of a lioness being attacked by hyenas. She struggled to hard to fend them off. But then suddenly a lion came rushing into action, and he threw those hyenas around like they were rag dolls.

Among wolves, the hunting is specialized. Female wolves hunt smaller and faster prey. Female wolves are faster than male wolves. Male wolves hunt larger game.

In fact, this is not that different from human society. It is a long-standing myth that women did not hunt at all. However, newer research shows women were actually very active hunters.

Their analysis revealed that regardless of maternal status, women hunted in 50 of these societies—or about 79 percent. And more than 70 percent of female hunting appeared to be intentional—rather than opportunistically killing animals while doing other activities, per the study. In societies where hunting was the most important activity for subsistence, women participated in hunting 100 percent of the time.

This makes sense. Hunting rabbits or making traps and similar would not be that dangerous. That is also what the research finds:

Women hunted small game in 46 percent of the studied societies and took down medium or large game in 48 percent of them. In 4 percent of societies, they hunted game of all sizes.

I would, however, caution that this study has gotten plenty of criticism. Thus, I think the case is overstated for women. The takeaway should not be that men and women are the same, but that "natural" gender roles are perhaps not as strong as often claimed.

If hunting in a pack it is safer. Women were more likely than men to hunt together. That is for instance, what female lions do. They hunt in packs. Male lions are more likely to hunt alone or in smaller groups.

In other words there are gender roles across the animal kingdom and within human society all through history. However, these gender roles are not nearly as sharp as conservative traditionalists want to convince you.

It then also stands to reason that women are capable of violence against each other and men. It makes sense to nuance the caricatures of gender built up in the past. The problem is when the manosphere and redpill community want to present it as if men and women are the same. It is very opportunistic. They are only willing to acknowledge equality between the sexes when it comes to negative traits. These are not the people who are going to argue that women can be equally capable as men in other venues of human society.

The reason I bring up our evolutionary past is that if a scientific paper is claiming men and women are equally violent, you should be skeptical. Too many will go "just look at the data, case closed." Raw data rarely tell the full story. There is no such thing as "the numbers speak for themselves."

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So let us look at some of these papers. I think this paper by Suzanne C. Swan and Laura J. Gambone is quite good: A Review of Research on Women’s Use of Violence With Male Intimate Partners. You can download the PDF here.

Before concluding that women are inherently as violent as men, you have to actually look at the details and consider the context. Here are many important factors to consider.

1. 75 percent of women used violence in self defense (Swan & Snow, 2003). See page 7.

2. Many women using violence do so to protect their children. (Browne, 1987; Morash, Bui, & Santiago, 2000)

3. The majority of women committing violence against their partner have childhood trauma involving physical, mental and sexual abuse. See page 9.

4. 69 percent of women committing violence suffer depression.

5. 86 to 92 percent of women who use violence were also victim of violence from their partner. (Temple et al.’s (2005) study and Swan et al.’s (2005) study). See page 5.

6. Men and women use violence for very different reasons. Women primarily use it situational, while men do it far more to control women.

Let us look at severity and context of violence to get a better understanding.

Severity and Reasons for Domestic Violence

To understand the problems in relationships between men and women, I have read many personal accounts and spoke with men and women directly about this. What I have noticed is that men are far more likely to try to micromanage and control women. They will set rules for what friends she can have. Where she can go and how she dresses.

I remember in particular one man that had really bought into the Redpill ideology and styled himself as an alpha male. I remember in our conversations that I told him "your girlfriend is not going to stay with a man acting like you." He brushed it away, telling me she liked a strong man and everything was perfect in their relationship.

Ironically, two weeks later, he was basically crying to me over his girlfriend leaving him. It was like lightening from a clear sky. He had not seen it coming at all. That is what is sad about countless guys that behave bad. They are so blissfully unaware of how bad they act that it becomes a shock to them when women had enough.

I didn't know him by full name so he could discuss his relationship with me without outing any person by name. He wanted my advice, so he showed me conversations they had by chat. It was apparent to me that he had acted like a real asshole. He had excessively controlled her. He had made demands around what friends she could see. How she should dress. I forget all the details now, but I remember pointing this out to him.

The tactic reminded me far too much of what abusers and pimps are known to do. They isolate their victims from everyone to gain control of them. Famous misogynist and sex trafficker and YouTube personality Andrew Tate charged money to train fellow men how to isolate women to gain control of them.

Ironically, when I told this man how similar his behavior was to scumbags like this, he was all shocked. In his mind, he had only done all this controlling for her own benefit. Misogynists have such low regard for women that they see them as a form of children who need to be controlled and managed for their own best interest.

I elaborated on this because it is a key reason why many women use violence. From page 4 of Suzanne C. Swan study:

In one study of 412 women who had committed partner violence, women reported being victims of coercive control 1.5 times more often than they perpetrated these behaviors (Swan et al., 2005).

While men use violence more to control their partners, women use violence more out of fear or defense. And this is important to understand. The most dangerous situation for a woman is not while in a relationship but after leaving it. Women who get murdered by their partner, usually get murdered after she has left or indicated that she will leave.

Who is the Real Victim?

I know a few men, personally, who have been victims of domestic abuse. All standup decent guys from what I know. They are also strong guys who are not easy pushovers. So my intention is not to diminish the domestic violence that men experience. These men need to be heard and taken serious.

My motive for this writing is more to push against manosphere narrative that tries to frame domestic violence as a problem that applies equally to men and women. That, however, would be a gross misrepresentation of reality. We can take men facing this problem more serious without needing to misrepresent reality.

It is still primarily women who get killed by their partners or hospitalized for sever violence. It is primarily women who are deeply afraid of their partners and afraid to leave the relationship.

Because men usually use violence as coercion leaving a violent husband or boyfriend is dangerous. Leaving a violent wife or girlfriend isn't. So why do men stay with a violent wife? Generally because it is someone they love and hope to be able to fix. Typically they are not genuinely afraid of their wife as they tend to be bigger and stronger. Men also have problems accepting themselves as victims. Thus for men getting out of violent relationships is much more about convincing them that they are a victim and they have to let it go. They are not going to fix the relationship.

The manosphere idea that men are the real victims is a hard sell when you look at women with experiences like this. Page 5 on Suzanne C. Swan study:

I’ve been beaten in my head with hammers, I had my ear drum busted, I had my nose busted, I been hit in the ribs with a bat, I’ve been thrown down cement stairs, I’ve got so many stitches in my face . . . when I started fighting back he know what happens now, they got these laws where you both fight you go to jail. So I got a jail record for assault—get this—I’m saying to myself God what is the justice in this.

While this is one example, it helps give a sense of what is behind the statistics that say around 90% of women arrested for domestic violence have experienced violence directed towards them by their partner.

Men are the ones using violence and threats to keep women in an abusive relationship. 70% of intimate partner homicides in the US occur when the woman is leaving her husband or boyfriend. Violent women, in contrast, don't kill their husband. It happens so rarely it is not picked up by the statistics. Thus, violent situations are typically something men can much more easily get out of than women can.

For people who work on domestic abuse of men, it can come across as offensive that I try to make the point that the situation is worse for women. From their perspective, I am trying to diminish or minimize the experience of men. That is absolutely not the intention.

You should be able to advocate for men's right without falsely representing the overall picture of domestic abuse.