Myth: violence is a male trait

Men use direct physical violence more often. That is a fact. Turning that into “violence is a male trait” is the sleight of hand.

UNODC data show that roughly 90% of people brought into formal contact with police as suspects in intentional homicide worldwide in 2021 were male. A major meta-analysis of aggression in real-world settings also found a consistent male advantage in direct aggression, especially physical aggression.¹²

But a count of blows answers only who hit. It does not tell us who created the conflict, built the coalition, attacked a reputation, pushed somebody else toward force, or — just as important — what rules stopped the physically stronger person from hitting in the first place.

Male strength is not simply released. It is trained to stop

The strength gap appears early and widens sharply through adolescence. A meta-analysis of 169 studies across 45 countries found that girls’ average grip strength was about 90% of boys’ between ages 3 and 10, but about 65% by age 16.³

At the same time, boys engage in more rough-and-tumble play, compete in larger peer groups, and encounter clearer dominance hierarchies. A major review of childhood and adolescent peer relations describes exactly that package: more rough physical play, more direct competition, and larger groups with more clearly defined rank among boys.⁴

That is not merely practice at hitting. Rough play only works while both participants still experience it as play. Force has to be calibrated. The other person’s reaction has to be read. Losing has to be tolerated. The encounter has to stop before competition becomes injury. In an observational study of 85 children aged 2–6, frequent father-child rough-and-tumble play was associated with more physical aggression specifically when fathers were less effective at maintaining dominance and boundaries during play. The authors explicitly discuss rough-and-tumble play as a possible setting for learning aggression regulation.⁵

By adolescence, the cost of a mistake rises with strength. Male socialization therefore contains more than permission to compete. It contains a repeated demand not to cross the line. Fight for position if necessary. Do not turn every contest into destruction of the opponent.

Hierarchy does not only suppress conflict. It can end it

Male groups are more willing to make status competition explicit — and therefore more able to acknowledge its result explicitly.

Joyce Benenson and Helen Abadzi review male competition as more public and contest-based. Men engage more in direct status contests, but those contests are commonly ritualized, and men more readily accept status differentials inside a group once they have been established.⁶

That is the half of the story erased by the phrase “men are more aggressive.” Visible competition can be a way to contain conflict, not spread it through every relationship in the group.

Male relationships can also survive direct competition surprisingly well. In an experiment with same-sex friends, male friends spent more time than female friends in affiliative physical contact and close proximity around a competition. The authors interpret this as evidence that such contact helps repair male alliances when interests collide. The same paper reviews earlier findings in which men reported faster reconciliation after conflict, while competition more often damaged women’s same-sex relationships.⁷

Compete, establish rank, stop, and keep cooperating. That is a social skill too. Male hierarchy does not abolish aggression. It gives aggression borders.

This is where patriarchy enters the argument

In this project’s model, patriarchy is not a license for a man to use force. It binds greater force to greater responsibility.

A man with strength and no brakes is not a patriarch. He is a danger to his family and his group. Other men, family authority, military discipline, sporting rules, and law exist partly to stop him.

Male culture is full of institutions that simultaneously permit force and bind it: competition instead of a fight to the death, hierarchy instead of permanent war among equals, a captain and referee instead of private vengeance, a duty to protect instead of a blank permission to attack.

When anti-patriarchal rhetoric treats constraints on female behavior as oppression while continuing to expect men to be safe, restrained, and responsible, it creates a convenient asymmetry. Male brakes are treated as natural and automatic. Female constraints are treated as suspect simply because they are constraints.

Remove male authority while preserving male responsibility and you have not abolished the patriarchal bargain. You have kept its duties and discarded its rules.

Female competition does not disappear. It changes weapons

Women have less average physical capacity to impose an outcome by direct force. Competition itself does not vanish.

Tracy Vaillancourt’s review describes recurrent forms of female indirect aggression: reputation damage, sexual rumors, criticism of appearance, and social exclusion. These tactics can injure a rival without a direct physical contest.⁸

Across four studies, Benenson and colleagues found that females were more willing to exclude a temporary ally, reported more experiences of social exclusion, detected exclusion cues faster, and showed a stronger physiological response to exclusion threat.⁹

The same tension appears at work. In one correlational study and three experiments, women viewed direct competition with same-sex coworkers less favorably than men did, and competition damaged their relationships more. The authors connect this to a female peer culture that values harmony and the appearance of equality, whereas explicit ranking is more integral to male peer culture.¹⁰

Make overt hierarchy socially unacceptable and the struggle for influence does not disappear. It moves into reputation, alliances, proximity to the center of the group, and exclusion of rivals. Everyone remains formally equal. The politics continues.

Remove men and the struggle remains

A women’s prison is not a model of women in general. It is still a useful test of one simple claim: does removing men make an all-female environment gentle by itself?

In prisons in England and Wales, during the 12 months to March 2026, female establishments recorded 352 prisoner-on-prisoner assaults per 1,000 prisoners, compared with 240 in male establishments. The overall assault rate was 660 per 1,000 in female establishments and 342 in male establishments. Serious prisoner-on-prisoner assaults did not vanish either: 31 per 1,000 in female establishments versus 29 in male establishments.¹¹

That is especially striking given the lower average physical strength of women. Biology alone — “men are stronger, therefore men are the violent sex” — cannot explain the whole social pattern.

A separate mixed-methods study of informal status in three women’s prison units and one men’s unit found another difference. Negative status nominations were largely absent in the men’s unit. In the women’s units, high-status women could receive both many positive and many negative nominations: status depended more strongly on who was doing the judging. Narratives of maternal “caregivers” and manipulative “bullies” appeared only in the women’s units.¹²

That is a small institutional comparison, not a law of nature. It still illustrates the mechanism well: status can operate not simply as a ladder but as a network of loyalties, hostility, and coalitions.

Closed female religious communities do not automatically become sisterhoods either. Contemporary research on women’s monastic communities describes psychological and spiritual abuse, misuse of authority, exclusion, and structures of control inside formal hierarchies.¹³

The fighter and the conflict promoter can be different actors

Researchers studying wild vervet monkeys observed a simple incentive system during intergroup fights. Females groomed males that had taken part in the previous bout and aggressed males that had stayed out. After either reward or punishment, those males participated more in later bouts. Females used these incentives particularly when valuable food resources were at stake.¹⁴

This is a primate study, not a ready-made theory of human war. Its logical value is exact: the visible fighter and the actor creating the incentive to fight can be different individuals.

Counting who landed the blow does not automatically tell us who wanted the fight.

A woman in power does not automatically mean less war

If war were simply an extension of male temperament, female rule should reliably produce more peaceful states.

Oeindrila Dube and S. P. Harish examined 193 reigns across 18 European polities from 1480 to 1913. In their main instrumental-variable estimates, polities ruled by queens were 39 percentage points more likely to be involved in war in a given year than polities ruled by kings. Unmarried queens were more likely to be attacked than unmarried kings; married queens were more likely to participate as attackers than married kings.¹⁵

That does not establish that women are more aggressive than men. It destroys a different shortcut: the sex of the soldier is not the sex of the war. Orders, interests, alliances, and decisions about conflict do not sit only with the person physically charging into battle.

Severe female violence is not a fantasy either

A study of 94,146 filicide arrests in the United States over 32 years does not support the claim that mothers kill infants far more often than fathers. In those data, fathers were as likely as mothers to kill infants, although victims of mothers tended to be younger overall.¹⁶

Child sexual abuse is not symmetrical either. In a representative German study, female perpetrators were involved in about 9.9% of reported child sexual-abuse cases. That is a minority, but the authors also concluded that female perpetration is insufficiently recognized, particularly where the victim is male.¹⁷

Count aggression all the way through

Men hit more, injure more severely, and kill far more often. Greater physical force makes male violence more dangerous — which is precisely why male force has to be more heavily disciplined.

But if aggression is counted only at the final punch, the measurement is preloaded to see men. Reputation attacks, exclusion, coalition pressure, relational coercion, incitement, and the use of somebody else’s force disappear from the account.

The male world is not free of cruelty. It has simply developed many explicit ways to constrain a strong man with another man, a rule, and a hierarchy. Female competition exists too, but it can operate without an open fist and without an openly acknowledged rank.

The useful question is not “which sex is cruel?” Ask who started the conflict, who applied pressure, who built the coalition, who established the rules, who crossed the boundary, who used force, and who induced somebody else to use it.

Men land the blow more often. It does not follow that men invented violence. And it certainly does not follow that a society becomes peaceful when men are removed from it.

Sources

1. UNODC, Global Study on Homicide 2023, 2023.
2. John Archer, Sex Differences in Aggression in Real-World Settings: A Meta-Analytic Review, Review of General Psychology, 2004.
3. James L. Nuzzo, Sex Differences in Grip Strength From Birth to Age 16: A Meta-Analysis, European Journal of Sport Science, 2025.
4. Amanda J. Rose, Karen D. Rudolph, A Review of Sex Differences in Peer Relationship Processes, Psychological Bulletin, 2006.
5. Joseph L. Flanders et al., Rough-and-Tumble Play and the Regulation of Aggression, Aggressive Behavior, 2009.
6. Joyce F. Benenson, Helen Abadzi, Contest versus scramble competition: sex differences in the quest for status, Current Opinion in Psychology, 2020.
7. Joyce F. Benenson et al., Competition Elicits more Physical Affiliation between Male than Female Friends, Scientific Reports, 2018.
8. Tracy Vaillancourt, Do human females use indirect aggression as an intrasexual competition strategy?, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 2013.
9. Joyce F. Benenson et al., Social Exclusion: More Important to Human Females Than Males, PLOS ONE, 2013.
10. Sun Young Lee, Selin Kesebir, Madan M. Pillutla, Gender differences in response to competition with same-gender coworkers, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2016.
11. Ministry of Justice, England and Wales, Safety in Custody Statistics: Assaults and Self-harm to March 2026, 2026.
12. Derek A. Kreager et al., In the eye of the beholder: Meaning and structure of informal status in women’s and men’s prisons, Criminology, 2021.
13. Isabelle Jonveaux, L’abus ordinaire dans les communautés monastiques féminines : une approche structurelle transnationale, Studies in Religion / Sciences Religieuses, 2025; Katarzyna Banc, Monika Gut-Winiarska, Jacek Winiarski, Relationship Management in Closed Structures, 2025.
14. T. Jean Marie Arseneau-Robar et al., Female monkeys use both the carrot and the stick to promote male participation in intergroup fights, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 2016.
15. Oeindrila Dube, S. P. Harish, Queens, Journal of Political Economy, 2020.
16. Timothy B. Mariano et al., Toward a more holistic understanding of filicide: a multidisciplinary analysis of 32 years of U.S. arrest data, Forensic Science International, 2014.
17. Jelena Gerke et al., Female-Perpetrated Child Sexual Abuse: Prevalence Rates in Germany, Journal of Child Sexual Abuse, 2020.