Men's Constructive Hazing

So I'm recently thinking about men and violence, and yes I just finished Jim Mattis' book on leadership. I shake my head in guessing the number of people who still think 'military intelligence' is an oxymoron. I don't recall where I read an excellent passage on how men in dangerous professions tend to haze newbs, but I immediately recognized the sense of it. It reminded me of my own fraternity initiation which included a significant amount of a black cultural angle. Which in as few words as possible can be summarized "If you can survive our terror, then you can survive what the white man has in store for you." We leave that for another day. Today I am answering the question:

Q: What are things men have to go through that women either do not understand or have empathy for?

A: I think women don’t generally understand violent hazing and competition in a non-abstract way. They are generally quick to assert that all violence is stupid and accept that they will not have to make use of it for any reason. They don’t have to live and compete in masculine hierarchies that establish rational violence that controls irrational violence, and generally expect to be protected from such environments.

It is my experience that there are particular ways that men fight and there are particular ways that women fight. I don’t want to get overly deep into that, but I think the following illustration is apt.

Boys playing soccer encounter a flagrant foul. The two involved immediately face off and blows are exchanged. After some period, other boys will break up the fight. Every one of them will know who won the fight. They are both ejected from the game. In the next game, the boys play fair and the incident is forgotten.

Girls playing soccer encounter a flagrant foul. The two involved face off but no blows are exchanged. Only the original offender is ejected from the game according to those rules. But the sting of the encounter remains. In the next game, the offended girl or one of her friends will foul the original offender for what happened in the prior game.

So what I’m saying is that in all conflict there is a direct application of social game rules and a higher meta application of unwritten rules. The higher meta application of unwritten rules includes unregulated violence and that is considered fair and the ultimate adjudication. It is male.

It’s not fair to say that women don’t understand or have empathy for this because they are very aware of its operation. They simply don’t participate in it in anywhere near the proportion that men do. But they expect men to and they will seek to reward heroes over bullies in the same way men do. I am saying they don’t necessarily understand how those lines of combat are drawn and evaluated the way that men do, from experience.

I think this comes to play in contemporary society often over questions of respect and conflict resolution or ‘anger management’. The simplest way for me to describe it is in terms of the lack of patience men will tend to have over endless negotiation and bickering back and forth in futile attempts to have nobody hurt or making everyone safe from conflict even when it is clear that there are irreconcilable differences in play.

In my personal experience I have observed how my daughters will debate questions endlessly and sometimes bring up old questions that should have been settled years ago. That ‘mean girls’ vibe of pulling back old scabs. I tell them, “Why don’t you just slap box?” They never do of course. It’s just the way they argue. Fathers and sons will resolve this at some point with a credible threat or actual use of violence. Women will argue and non-violently fight with their mothers for their entire lives.

I don’t have a theory as to why this is other than to say that it is evolutionary and that such behaviors are observable and recognizable in other mammals as well. Females nest and arrange for the conflict free home, and will pick over the details endlessly. Males hunt and having won a conflict to the death will plop down the meal anywhere, end of story.

In that context of nature vs nurture, I say it’s both, but evolution has a much deeper influence - millions of years vs a few years of graduate studies and social conditioning.

We could debate this endlessly, or you and I can take it outside.