Refining Social Theory and Practice with Critical Attention to Normalized and Institutionalized Violence Against Men
I’ve been reading Frans de Waal’s forthcoming book, “Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist,” as I’m supposed to interview the author later this month, if all goes well. What de Waal wrote in the book’s eighth chapter – titled, “Violence: Rape, Murder, and the Dogs of War” – got me thinking. What follows is an exploration of some themes from the chapter and an argument for applying a nuanced understanding of existing and historical reality, along with attention to what society might typically endeavor to ignore or forget, to social theory and practice aimed at transforming and improving human traditions and institutions.
According to de Waal, one aspect of human society that is “gender-biased” is physical violence.1 Men overwhelmingly commit it, and although this doesn’t seem to be discussed as much, men are also disproportionately on the receiving end of it. de Waal cites a Justice Department survey from the turn of the millennium that found 3.2 million men and 1.9 million women are physically assaulted annually.2
de Waal devotes time in the chapter to discussing the prevalence of violence initiated by men against other men as well as the preponderance of violence committed by and against non-human primate males. Violence perpetrated by male chimpanzees against other male chimps, readers learn, more often than otherwise entails “emasculation by ripping off a rival’s scrotum.”3 The author even opens chapter eight by returning to a grisly anecdote from the beginning of the book. He began the book by mentioning an attack on a male chimp named Luit, and he picked up that story at the start of the eighth chapter, noting that a veterinarian tranquilized the badly beaten primate and operated on him, only for the vet and de Waal, who was on hand, to find out just how severely Luit’s fellow chimps had attacked him. “Luit’s testicles were gone! They had disappeared from the scrotal sac even though the holes in the skin seemed small,”4 de Waal wrote, “Keepers later located them in the straw on the cage floor where the fight had taken place.” The vet concluded Luit’s testicles had been, “Squeezed out,”5 de Waal remembered.
He proceeds to reference Jane Goodall’s shocking discovery of chimp “warfare” published in 1979.6 In a revealing section of autobiographical self-disclosure, explaining how his psychological response to the mutilation of the aforementioned chimpanzee, Luit, prompted him to focus on the oft-forgotten cooperative and compassionate behaviors of primates, de Waal wrote:
Luit was killed one year after Goodall’s report. It shocked us because, at the time, we thought that only strangers would damage each other like this. Now we know better. The incident deeply affected me and my career. I decided then and there to devote my work to discovering what permits primates to live together. This was my emotional way of coping with an incident that had given me nightmares. I became a specialist in the way primates make peace after fights, cooperate, empathize, and even display a sense of fairness. Instead of despairing at the levels of aggression apes are capable of, my main interest became the ways they overcome these tendencies. Most of the time primates get along, including chimpanzees. Even though I never close my eyes to violence, and I realize how common it is under certain circumstances, it holds zero appeal for me. I am baffled by its glorification in movies and video games featuring gratuitous bloodshed.7
We should underscore the norm he alluded to. That is, chimps, males included, get along the majority of the time. So do human beings, for that matter. We sometimes forget that, likely due to just how surprisingly bloodthirsty they, and we, have been known to become.
Representations and Related Ways of Conceptualizing Violence
de Waal’s befuddlement regarding the glorification violence on screens now resonates with me in certain respects, though I didn’t always react the same way, and I still think it’s important to note media representations of violence do not necessarily equate to endorsement or glorification of violence. Allow me to dig in at first by way of anecdotes. I watched a lot of Bruce Lee movies as an adolescent. Enter the Dragon (1973) was probably my favorite film when I was 13 or 14. Like other young teenage boys, I imagine, I found the combat enthralling. I still find it more engrossing than gun fights. And while his style of filmmaking isn’t what I gravitate to most, I can to some extent nevertheless also appreciate what someone like Quentin Tarantino has done throughout his career, incorporating gratuitous violence into a cinematic art form.
Moreover, film critic Pauline Kael put forward a defense of violence in film in her review of Bonnie and Clyde (1967), which I still find persuasive. In her essay, Kael suggested “it is the violence without sadism” in Arthur Penn’s rendition of the story about that Depression-era outlaw power couple that helps throw “the audience off balance,” eliciting the sort of effect and affect associated with transformative art. She stressed the shock engendered by such seeming innocence capable of such brutality, which contrasts with the calculated cruelty on display in old James Cagney gangster films or seen now in all the true-crime depictions of serial killers. Kael goes on to write that people probably should feel uncomfortable about on-screen violence, but that discomfort shouldn’t be an argument against a film. Part of the point of a movie like Bonnie and Clyde, Kael claimed, “is to rub our noses” in the violence, “to make us pay our dues for laughing,” as she put it. In that piece, Kael took to task the self-proclaimed “guardians of morality” who see film as designed to serve the purpose of “a giant all-purpose commercial for the American way of life,” to set examples for “good,” correct behavior, which tends to imply behavior that reproduces commercialism and valorizes existing institutions, inuring them to criticism and transformation. Sure, art can be commercialized and still be profound, but not if it functions solely or even primarily in the way Kael criticized. As her review underlined, film as art and social criticism, can reveal what we as people aren’t capable of doing. It can show “that killers are not a different breed but are us without the insight or understanding or self-control that works of art strengthen” (emphasis mine); art can sensitize us, she claimed.
Of course, art and media texts almost most certainly have the potential to desensitize us to violence too. I think this became more apparent to me as I got older. The decline in muscle mass, strength and aerobic capacity most people experience in their thirties might have had something to do with it. Diminution in physical capacity, along with the hopefully greater ability and inclination to mitigate, resolve, avoid and de-escalate unnecessary conflict, have me far less enthusiastic about experiencing or seeing violence overall. A few years back, after Scorsese’s The Irishman (2019) debuted on Netflix, I recall wanting to pause the movie early on during the scene showing Robert De Niro’s character brutalizing a butcher who disciplined his daughter. I finished the movie later, but for whatever reason, the violence was too raw and almost too much for me to watch at that particular moment. That’s not a knock on the film. Any creative outlet capable of producing such a response exudes a power worth reckoning with – a power that can also prompt us to unpack psychological predispositions, personal hang-ups and sociocultural problems we might otherwise sweep under the rug. Indeed, while representations of violence in film can certainly glorify carnage, they can also interrogate and encourage viewer interrogation of our propensity for and even vicarious enjoyment of violent behaviors, real or fictionalized.
With that in mind, let me circle back to the main subject of this essay. In an online class I taught in early 2021 for a local university, focusing on Martin Scorsese’s work, I recall a student, a young woman, commenting that it’s never OK for a man to hit a woman. The comment came after we watched The Color of Money (1986), a film starring Tom Cruise, Paul Newman and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio. Coincidentally, I can’t avoid mentioning, Scorsese, Mastrantonio and I all share a birthday (November 17). Mastrantonio and I also both grew up in the Midwest and attended the University of Illinois, as did Roger Ebert, who authored a book about Scorsese and his films containing a review of that 1986 film we read in the course. The comments the student made after watching a scene in which Newman’s character grab’s Carmen, the character played by Mastrantonio, are more or less accepted doctrine in our culture, and understandably so. I was taught that too. The principle reflects recognition of widespread differences in size and strength between males and females – a common dynamic and differential among primates, de Waal’s writing makes clear. Perhaps it also reflects recognition of sex-influenced, gender-related exhibitions of (sometimes violent) aggression witnessed more frequently and with more injurious and lethal results among males.
But it’s notable that there is no comparable adage advising people not to hit men, as if violence against those identified as or even self-identifying as men is and ought to be socially acceptable. I’m not referring here to arenas of sport wherein that violence can be channeled and somewhat controlled under consensual and indeed often enjoyable conditions. And I’ll admit that I’m not even sure I think the double standard intended to protect those generally less genetically endowed so as to prevail in physical altercations should be dispensed with; I do, however, think we have work to do when it comes to examining ubiquitous taken-for-granted presuppositions that can reinforce the notion harm to select human beings based on sex or gender (or most anything else) is legitimate or tolerable. The critique put forward by feminists focused on violence against women and the growing public condemnation of violence against transgender persons incorporate that critical insight. Likewise, I’m suggesting we should apply the same standard for valuing human life to those oft-neglected areas in which males/men bear the brunt of harm too, if we’re serious about transforming society in such a way that enables every individual and humanity as a whole to live freer and fuller lives.
Still, I share de Waal’s overarching sentiments, and his shift in emphasis toward the cooperative behaviors of primates without erasing real acts of violence is one that we humans might benefit from. The anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin called for a similar shift in perspective in relation to human history and social theory more than a century ago. Kropotkin claimed
nearly all historical documents bear the same character; they deal with breaches of peace, not with peace itself. So that the best-intentioned historian unconsciously draws a distorted picture of the times he endeavours to depict; and, to restore the real proportion between conflict and union, we are now bound to enter into a minute analysis of thousands of small facts and faint indications accidentally preserved in the relics of the past; to interpret them with the aid of comparative ethnology; and, after having heard so much about what used to divide men, to reconstruct stone by stone the institutions which used to unite them.8
Picking up on that paragraph in their introduction to the new PM Press edition of Kropotkin’s “Mutual Aid,” David Graeber and Andrej Grubačić advocated integration of approaches that attend to both domination – we can include consideration of violence committed by and against human beings as part of that trajectory – and to our cooperative behaviors. To bring them together “would mean to understand how even capitalism is ultimately founded on communism (‘mutual aid’), even if it’s a communism it does not acknowledge; how communism is not an abstract, distant ideal, impossible to maintain, but a lived practical reality we all engage in daily, to different degrees, and that even factories could not operate without it–even if much of it operates on the sly, between the cracks, or shifts, or informally, or in what’s not said, or entirely subversively.” Social theorists have too often “stubbornly dismissed pretty much anything suggestive of generosity, cooperation, or altruism as a bourgeois illusion,” they lamented. “Conflict and egoistic calculation proved to be more interesting than ‘union.’” The approach de Waal has taken grounded in primatological research echoes the focus Graeber and Grubačić claimed would behoove social theorists who think about human relations and forms of organization – an approach that avoids normalizing and naturalizing violence over and above empathy, altruism and mutual aid.
In an earlier work, Graeber, who died in 2020, also questioned the fetishization of violence and its equation with profundity among his colleagues while simultaneously stressing the looming threats and uses of violence to uphold institutions that maintain relations in which forms of human subordination and experiences of alienating lack of input into decisions are common. As Graeber wrote in the essay, “Dead Zones of the Imagination: An Essay on Structural Stupidity,” violence enables “arbitrary decisions,” and thus allows for avoidance of “the kind of debate, clarification, and renegotiation typical of more egalitarian social relations,”9 despite the tendency among his fellow anthropologists to emphasize “the ways that acts of violence are meaningful and communicative–even the ways that they can resembles [sic] poetry.”10 While violence, Graeber added, is no doubt communicative, like every human action – and I’d add that representations of violence in art and media can, in addition to the glorification de Waal mentioned, also present us with an array of meaning – what also appears salient
about violence is that it is perhaps the only form of human action that holds out even the possibility of having social effects without being communicative. To be more precise: violence may well be the only way it is possible for one human being to do something which will have relatively predictable effects on the actions of a person about whom they understand nothing. In pretty much any other way in which you might try to influence another’s actions, you must at least have some idea about who you think they are, who they think you are, what they might want out of the situation, their aversions and proclivities, and so forth. Hit them over the head hard enough, and all of this becomes irrelevant.11
From there Graeber goes on to emphasize “the balance of forces,”12 or lack thereof, between or among people involved. Equally matched actors in potentially violent contests often want to know what their opponents are thinking and feeling in order to effectively counter their strategies. I’d add that those engaged in self-defense or ‘violence from below’ often need to uncover and contribute to that knowledge too. Although Graeber didn’t highlight this, the repressive institutions of the nation-state have a well-documented tradition of trying to understand resistance movements via infiltration. The FBI’s COINTELPRO operation, which from the mid-1950s until at least the early 1970s (illegally) targeted domestic organizations like the Black Panther Party – operations including collusion with the Chicago Police Department to drug and murder the sleeping chairman of the Illinois chapter of the BPP, Fred Hampton, in December 1969 – attests to that. Nonetheless, as many who have studied or participated in movements and organizations geared toward social change know rather well, those subversive efforts do not always prioritize understanding of persons or communities the state (or aligned corporate or financial power) surveils or attempts to disrupt. Graeber’s theory helps explain in part why a surprising level of stupidity can accompany the monopoly on violence generally perceived as legitimate. When one side has a serious institutionalized advantage and the other side or group or groups are systematically disadvantaged in turn, as with cases of structural violence characterized by enduring disparities backed up in the end by the threat and use of harm, Graeber contends this invariably results in “extreme lopsided structures of imaginative identification.”13 He cites gender relations as historical evidence.
For example, in American situation comedies of the 1950s, there was a constant staple: jokes about the impossibility of understanding women. The jokes (told, of course, by men) always represented women’s logic as fundamentally alien and incomprehensible. ‘You have to love them,’ the message always seemed to run, ‘but who can really understand how these creatures think?’ One never had the impression the women in question had any trouble understanding men. The reason is obvious. Women had no choice but to understand men. In America, the fifties were the heyday of a certain ideal of the one-income patriarchal family, and among the more affluent, the ideal was often achieved. Women with no access to their own income or resources obviously had no choice but to spend a great deal of time and energy understanding what their menfolk thought was going on.14
Graeber’s borrowing from and use of feminist theory, indicative above, reveals arrangements and repercussions associated with violence, including the aforementioned points about representations of violence, structural violence, the different expectations in emotional and interpretive labor that violence usually promotes, and the gendered consequences stemming from all that. But what I want to also suggest here is that any praxis geared toward human freedom, liberation and mutual support, could also benefit from some of the nuanced insights de Waal’s work either has to offer or can help elucidate.
In the book cited before, de Waal notes how, like in other primates, violence is gendered among humans, with “striking similar” figures for both humans and chimps.15 “Of the world’s nearly half a million homicides in 2012, men were the [victims] in 79 percent of the cases. Men were also the most common perpetrators, with a murder rate nearly four times as high as that of women.”16 The 2019 edition of the “Global Study on Crime” released by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime corroborates the earlier finding and states that men make up almost 80 percent of homicide victims worldwide.
Men as Victims of Violence in War
According to de Waal, war has functioned historically as a “neutralizer of male privilege.”17 And as he explains, class or socioeconomic position further affect whatever privilege one might have or refer to.
Male privilege has always been most pronounced in the upper echelons of society. In the lower classes, men and women are equally exploited, mistreated, and impoverished. Had I been born fifty years earlier in a working-class family, my story would have been different. The outlook for poor boys was dismal. Being born male meant having a high chance of being drafted into the army and ending up riddled with bullets on some muddy battlefield. In the Middle Ages, death would have come by arrow, sword, or lance. Throughout history, the destiny of millions of young men has been an undignified and premature exit from life.18
My dad, who died in early 2019, fought in the US war on Vietnam in the late 1960s. He survived the war. But years later he still showed signs of what might now be diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Without a doubt war left an indelible impact on his psyche and subsequent interpersonal relations. Although he was proud of his service and believed it was necessary for him (he enlisted, in the Marines), and he didn’t talk a lot about it, he had no shortage of criticism for that war, and it assuredly left psycho-emotional scars from which it’s probably impossible to fully recover.
The price young men – most often teenagers, barely old enough not to be considered boys, like my dad was when he went to war – have paid for aggressive militarism is seldom recognized in ways that do not glorify war or heroicize those unfairly tasked with killing, destroying and trying their damnedest to avoid and help keep their countrymen from being killed or maimed in violent conflict. As de Waal notes and other sources document, war takes the lives of far more men than women.19
“The killing of women,” de Waal added, “doesn’t come nearly as easily to us as the killing of men.”20 He references results of an experiment, published in 2016, in which nine out of 10 British and American subjects of both genders said that, if pressed, they would prefer to throw a man rather than a woman onto the tracks of an ongoing train, with one stated reason being the conscious valuing of women (and children) over men.21
Beyond and arguably worse than death in some cases, the severe toll of injury,22 disfigurement and physical and mental illness that results from war have also predominantly (though not exclusively) been absorbed by men, if also meted out and orchestrated, at least most often, by men too.
“In modern times, we tend to forget this sad and distressing history of maleness,” de Waal wrote. “Every boy could be called upon to make the ultimate sacrifice. Objection was not only ‘unmanly’ but a criminal offense. And power was always in the hands of older men. U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt once put it succinctly: ‘War is young men dying and old men talking.’”23 In addition to the gendered and class dimensions alluded to above, age has also influenced who decides to send others to theaters defined by omnipresent and ever-looming violence. de Waal added that “the cynical (and Darwinian) perspective of older men” throughout history has taken women as “assets to be kept near and safe, whereas young men can be sent off to perish in distant lands for questionable causes. They are expendable.24 It would’ve been and is still mostly unthinkable for a nation-state to “march one or two hundred thousand women to probable slaughter by the enemy. But young men were deemed of little value.”25
Apropos that tradition of deeming men more expendable in war, journalist Juan González recently asked the Ukraine director for Nonviolence International, Andre Kamenshikov, about the Ukrainian government decree preventing men between the ages of 18 and 60 from leaving the country as Russia wages war on the nation. González raised the issue as to whether men also should be permitted to seek refuge from the fighting. The issue underscores the continuance of an ideological norm that values the health and safety of men less than women during wartime.
In some significantly institutionalized ways, it’s still more socially acceptable for men to receive punishment, suffer and die. That’s another claim liberatory theory and practice could better account for and address today. Just as feminist praxis seeks to free women from the shackles of patriarchal institutions that make their lives harder and deny them agency equal to that of men,26 a praxis aimed at creating more robust conditions of human freedom and flourishing tout court probably must contend with the devaluation of men’s lives in the realm of institutionalized violence, the culturally reflexive tendency to treat at least some men as disposable, and the forcibly punitive manner in which men are far more frequently controlled vis-à-vis women. The Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann, whom political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote about in her book about the banality of evil, even predicted, as de Waal noted, that ordering Nazi men to kill Jewish women would drive the former insane.27 Notably, the Nazis genocidal system relied heavily on gas chambers wherein murder could be made a bit more invisible. Death on the battlefield, permanent injuries acquired in combat, the stigma surrounding the testimony of male suffering, as well as a dominant ideology that celebrates a warrior ethic and takes for granted the legitimacy of militarism (equating stoic participation with courage) all seem to function to turn our attention away from the harm so many men have endured due to our warring tendencies.
Men as Victims of Imprisonment and Rape
In addition to military conflict, the criminal punishment system in the US is also case in point. It renders much of the harm internal to it largely invisible, locked away inside hellholes known for reproducing immense misery and premature death. According to a report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics published in April 2020, there were 1,309,900 total male prisoners and 104,200 total female prisoners in 2018. That means men were incarcerated at a rate slightly more than 12.5 times that of women, though we can keep in mind those categories are assigned to individuals who don’t always identify or experience the world in accord with that categorization. Nevertheless, the differences remain pronounced, and to frame it roughly, men make up a bit more than 90 percent of the total incarcerated population in the US, even as the incarceration rate of women has for years been increasing more rapidly than the incarceration rate of men, and even as women prisoners appear to be treated more harshly than men across the country. But that statistically documented harsher treatment is based on analysis of data from states (and carceral facilities) that formally track discipline by gender.
There’s all sorts of physical retaliation that takes place in jails and prisons that goes undocumented and underreported. In the research I did to write a piece about conditions, treatment and resistance inside Riverside County jails, multiple sources suggested, without always explicitly stating, that women on the inside are subjected to more neglect and mistreatment than men on a number fronts, but they also intimated men are subject to more and far worse physical violence and abuse. Similarly, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) has a sordid and documented history of staging “gladiator fights,” encouraging members of rival gangs and individuals with animus toward other individuals to physically harm one another. Those orchestrated attacks appear to almost exclusively take place in men’s prisons.
Now, several years back, my sister spent some two years total, off and on, in jails and prisons. In no way do I want to diminish the suffering of women prisoners or minimize the importance of what they face. Rather, as someone opposed to the identification of justice with and the practice of incarcerating human beings, I think it behooves us to obtain and grapple with a clear picture of the carceral context, which still ensnares and dehumanizes many more men than it does women on the inside.28
The prison-industrial complex also affects incidences of rape, which we tend to think of as overwhelmingly victimizing women. Several years ago, the Ear Hustle podcast presented listeners with the voice and story of Curtis Roberts, a man about my height (5’2”) who was incarcerated and at one point raped in San Quentin State Prison in California. Curtis and I corresponded prior to his release following the dissemination of that attention-garnering podcast episode. His story reminded people about the reality of rape in prison.
In “The Female Thing,” contrarian feminist Laura Kipnis reminded readers about the reality of rape in prison as well, and wrote that
rape does remain ‘a threat which is disproportionately leveled against women as a class,’ as [Ann J. Cahill, author of the 2001 book, ‘Rethinking Rape’] puts it. Or does it? It may come as a surprise to hear that as many men as women are probably raped every year in the United States, and possibly more. Okay, most of these men are incarcerated at the time–but it’s still rape. Obviously the circumstances make precise numbers impossible to pin down, though so are precise data on nonprison rape. The figures on male prison rape look something like this: the U.S. prison population now exceeds an astounding 2.2 million, of which roughly 93 percent are men. According to studies by Human Rights Watch, a conservative estimate is that 20 percent of all inmates are sexually assaulted or forced into unwanted sex, and at least 7 percent are raped. Prison advocacy groups put the rape rate closer to 10 percent.29
Kipnis acknowledges the impossibility of a side-by-side comparison of figures for non-incarcerated and incarcerated rape rates owing to difficult and spotty documentation (especially among the latter), but she concludes that “clearly male rape is an entrenched feature of the American social fabric,”30 albeit one society dismisses as less worthy of concern given where it occurs. Women prisoners, as Kipnis notes, and transgender prisoners we can add, are ostensibly even more vulnerable to rape behind bars, but again they comprise a significantly smaller segment of the incarcerated population, so more men are incontrovertibly subject to sexual victimization in carceral facilities. “The general view of male prison rape seems to be that it isn’t comparable to what women experience, or at least it doesn’t matter in the same way,” Kipnis wrote, “because … it happened in prison.”31 As anyone who’s engaged with popular culture can likely confirm, male prison rape is
often the subject of nervous hilarity on late-night talk shows and in stand-up comedy of the male-sexual-anxiety gender: get stopped for running a red light an next thing you know, you’ve made a new best friend. Just don’t bend over in the shower, dude! Maybe prison rape is a more jocular subject than nonprison rape because those affected are mostly criminals and thus deserve it–criminals who also tend to be minorities (60 percent) and members of the underclass, possibly tacitly adding to the indifference, or the potential for humor.32
First, I think the indifference Kipnis points to can be observed culturally and ought to be subject to critical examination; however, I would caution us from condemning comedy, even that which might be interpreted as callous on the surface because, as Kipnis suggested elsewhere, not all jokes are intended to be taken literally, and sometimes humor tacitly or indirectly conveys the exact opposite of what’s explicitly denoted. Her point still stands. Kipnis also appropriately referenced disparities in criminalization based on race and class in the text quoted above. Those disparities have a lot to do with what communities are most heavily policed and targeted and who has (and who lacks) the economic as well as sociocultural capital to leverage in legal contexts. According to the BJS report referenced above, Black males circa 2018 were incarcerated at 5.8 times the rate of white males, while Black females were incarcerated at 1.8 times the rate of white females. In relation to the aforementioned, Tommy Curry, a professor of philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and proponent of Black Male Studies, has criticized assumptions about the generalization of patriarchal violence and has highlighted how scholarship systematically ignores both the reality and Black male experience of sexual assault and rape, reinforcing stereotypes of Black males – boys as well as men – as the perpetrators, never the victims, of sexual violence.33
In the eighth chapter of his recently authored book on gender differences, de Waal discusses rape. I won’t repeat all that he wrote here, as I encourage readers to go through the text themselves when it becomes available so as to get the full picture he paints. Suffice it to note now that he challenges some misconceptions about “forced copulation,” the preferred term for what amounts to rape among non-human animals.34 He also disputes the argument made by Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer in their 2002 book, “A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion” – an argument that, in de Waal’s view, biologizes the disturbing behavior as an evolutionary strategy of adaptation and sees it as a hardwired mechanism enabling men to reproduce their genes when a lack of consent would otherwise foreclose that possibility.35 “For years,” de Waal also reminds us, “the FBI defined rape as “carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will. This rather wishy-washy definition, however, suggests that only women can be raped.”36 It’s another example of institutionalized eliding of violence against males. We should qualify, though, as de Waal did, by adding that as of 2013, “the FBI definition of rape specifies penetration of either the vagina or the anus without consent.”37 Notably, however, de Waal claims that if you apply the current definition to behaviors in the greater animal kingdom, “forced copulation” is rather uncommon among non-human species and “exceedingly rare among chimpanzees.”38 The author added that though he must have seen “over a thousand couplings in captive chimpanzees,” he never witnessed “sex against a female’s will,”39 which runs counter to the persistent image of male chimps destroying each other and taking whatever they want from females whether or not the latter object.
Ideas for Refining Social Theory and Practice
Drawing on various sources, including repeated reference to that relevant chapter from de Waal’s forthcoming book, I hope to have foregrounded frequently forgotten nuances and considerations indispensable to all the social theory, movements and organizations geared toward ongoing human emancipation and to the liberating transformation of our institutions and potentials. In so doing, I hope to have shown that at least some of the most violent and pervasive institutions in existence (e.g. war, prison) disproportionately brutalize men in ways we can better reckon with, without, I hope, minimizing the direct and structural violence meted out against women in far too many contexts. Attentiveness to these sometimes uncomfortable and ideology-undermining realities is necessary if improvement of theory and practice are worthwhile goals. I contend some of these considerations can at minimum inform strategies and tactics to be used in demonstration and defense against artificially naturalized practices and ways of relating responsible for so much unnecessary human harm.
To wit, de Waal wrote that the far-reaching attitudes regarding the acceptability of systematically harming men but not women in certain public contexts affords women the opportunity to protect more people. “Thus,” he added, “in the summer of 2020 hundreds of mothers formed a human barricade in Portland, Oregon. They mobilized to defend demonstrators from armed federal officers, who had turned up to suppress protests in the city. The Wall of Moms—dressed in yellow shirts and mostly white—linked arms in front of the protesters, chanting ‘Feds stay clear! Moms are here!’” Many of us who were lucky enough to be loved by our mothers – my mom died in July 2021, so this hits home – are well aware that their love can be so deep and vast it tends toward self-sacrifice.
We would be remiss not to simultaneously account for and to try to address higher incidence of violence between the sexes in humans compared to other hominids, which de Waal suggests likely has something to do with human couples often cohabiting in relative isolation, in family arrangements that “facilitate male control and abuse, differing strikingly from the free-moving lifestyle of other primates.”40 de Waal offers evidence that the stronger the prevailing network among females, “the more male sexual harassment” – and, he indicates elsewhere, the more physical violence generally – “is being curbed.”41 Collective defense of females against males is buoyed by consistent interaction, like females living and traveling together. “The female orangutan, who has absolutely no backing,” de Waal explained, “is in a perilous situation compared to the female bonobo, who has a first-rate support alliance.”42 Bonobo females band together, which helps account for their matriarchal orientation and surely helps explain why there is no recorded incidence of lethal violence among wild bonobos,43 those primates with which we share so much of our DNA.
Specific strategy would best be refined in future work. But based on what we’ve explored so far, it seems reasonable to locate promise in building, strengthening and supporting movements that afford and cultivate communal networks among women, elevating their needs and concerns, as well as the needs and concerns of those who do not identify with either polarity in a gender binary. But not only that. The fecundity of that promise and of those movements could be predicated upon concurrent work to dispel harmful assumptions and concerted efforts to reconfigure or abolish institutions that, in the main and methodically, harm men. Social movements might be enhanced any number of ways, but refined focus in the realms of gender relations and sexual politics along those lines, might be one way to transcend the quagmire of present-day ‘culture wars’ while revitalizing struggles to liberate and uplift humanity – and perhaps the other primates de Waal studies, along with the rest of the non-human natural world while we’re at it.
Endnotes
1. Frans de Waal, Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2022), 174-175.
2. de Waal, Different, 175. See also the Justice Department’s “Full Report of the Prevalence, Incidence, and Consequences of Violence Against Women,” published in 2000, authored by Patricia Tjaden and Nancy Thoennes, and cited by de Waal.
3. de Waal, Different, 176.
4. de Waal, Different, 174.
5. Quoted in de Waal, Different, 174.
6. de Waal, Different, 177; Jane Goodall, “Life and Death at Gombe,” National Geographic 155 (1979): 592-621. I also enjoyed the documentary Jane (2017), which features footage of Goodall discussing her novel and initially horrifying findings.
7. de Waal, Different, 178.
8. Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: An Illuminated Factor of Evolution (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2021), 109.
9. David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2015), 66.
10. Graeber, The Utopia of Rules, 67.
11. Graeber, The Utopia of Rules, 67-68.
12. Graeber, The Utopia of Rules, 68.
13. Graeber, The Utopia of Rules, 69.
14. Ibid.
15. de Waal, Different, 178.
16. de Waal, Different, 178. See also this ‘Homicide and Gender” report from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime published in 2015 and cited by de Waal.
17. de Waal, Different, 178.
18. de Waal, Different, 179.
19. de Waal, Different, 180; Joshua Goldstein, War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Adam Jones, “Gender and genocide in Rwanda,” Journal of Genocide Research 4 (2002): 65-94.
20. de Waal, Different, 180.
21. Ibid. See also Oriel FedlmanHall, “Moral Chivalry: Gender and Harm Sensitivity Predict Costly Altruism,” Social Psychological and Personality Science 7 (2016): 542-51.
22. For some discussion of the severe toll war exacts not only in terms of loss of life, but also and some would contend far more harshly in terms of the bodily pain, dismemberment, paralysis, loss of function, mutilation, disability and ongoing suffering it inflicts, see this conversation between Sebastian Junger, a journalist who’s reported from war-ravaged conflict zones, and physician-turned-public-pedagogue Peter Attia, from the latter’s podcast.
23. de Waal, Different, 179.
24. de Waal, Different, 180.
25. e Waal, Different, 179.
26. The sex-based and gender-related differences de Waal details in his book provide some reason to believe expectations of totally equal agency in all arenas of life might not be desirable or even possible, though I do not take that to mean we should accept as ineluctable and immutable relations among us that fail to offer everyone meaningful say in decisions, policies and practices affecting them roughly in proportion to the extent they are affected, to borrow a precept from the tradition of participatory democracy. But I acknowledge it’s possible there are circumscribed social and personal spheres in which natural endowments and even some socially valued (though, one would hope, never imposed or over-generalized) attributes might enable women to exercise more agency than men, some wherein men might exercise more agency than women, and others in which gender non-conforming persons exercise more agency than cisgender individuals, provided none of the aforementioned modes of agency imply relations of control, coercion or submission to other’s authority when it comes to crucial aspects of one’s personal or community life.
27. de Waal, Different, 180.
28. The role women play in maintaining familial and community relations on the outside when men they love and care for are incarcerated, and the frequency with which women visit and care for incarcerated persons, should not be discounted either.
29. Laura Kipnis, The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006), 136
30. Kipnis, The Female Thing, 137.
31. Ibid.
32. Kipnis, The Female Thing, 137-138.
33. Curry has explored this phenomenon as well as similar issues related to academic and intellectual neglect of Black male victimization in cases of interpersonal and domestic violence. See Tommy Curry, The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2017).
34. de Waal, Different, 183.
35. de Waal, Different, 183-184.
36. de Waal, Different, 183.
37. Ibid. See also the 2013 “Rape addendum” to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting, cited by de Waal.
38. de Waal, Different, 183.
39. Ibid.
40. de Waal, Different, 175.
41. de Waal, Different, 194.
42. de Waal, Different, 194.
43. I noted this in a previous essay for Waywards, drawing on de Waal’s earlier work. I also confirmed it recently in an interview with a primatologist who studies bonobos.