TRIGGER WARNING: Exposing a global 'rape academy' where men encourage one another to drug and assault their wives

[NNadir]

35. Much of the modern effort to explore the presumed behavioral differences between men and women...

...has focused on molecular biology, which has a place, and is certainly superior in some ways to the thousands of years of religious and other cultural musings on the subject.

This said, I have some profound limits on how much biological reductionism I am willing to accept.

Often - and it is a great stain on American history in particular - these reductionist ideas translate into sexism (and does so more than we think in both directions) into the related biases of racism, for example, the often evoked and odious efforts to attach skin color to intelligence, or even humanity.

Men do commit more murders, among other acts of violence, than women. This is a fact. To the extent it is cultural, having been raised as a man and traveled in the circle of men, I cannot be unaware. We are raised to be aggressors, culturally.

It is also well known however that behavior does have a biochemical basis. I was surprised and struck when my oldest son was born of how many gestures and expressions my son shared with my father, who died years before my son was born.

I am not here to announce that testosterone has no behavioral effects but I note that testosterone in part of the metabolic cycle pathway of estrogen, as I noted in one part of my career.

Being a man, and having been raised as one, I am well aware of the cultural impetus for men to behave badly and to objectify women.

When I first met my wife she was, in the way our culture often measures women, very beautiful and I would be a liar if I claimed I didn't notice that. In the circle of male science nerds in which I traveled there was a lot of commentary about her, well before she and I became lovers - and some as is often the case in male culture certainly bordered on lewd. In fact even after I married her - when we got past her looks to the true source of her beauty which had nothing to do with appearance - men sometimes made off color remarks about her appearance that were offensive to me, but which I shrugged off because some battles are not worth fighting. There is a limit, of course, to such tolerance and I know what it is.

My sons, I am proud to say, are indifferent to looks when they fall in love. They fall in love with intellect and spirit. I very much like the women who are their lovers. Oddly it is my sister-in-law and not me or my wife who remarks on their less the model like looks. Go figure.

All this said, my wife has made me well aware, from the history of her youth, that the threat of rape, owing to her appearance was very real. She had some close calls. It was real even after we married.

It is, regrettably, also an issue with respect to racism and homophobia that people make assumptions about your tolerance for horrible views based on your biological race and sex and sexuality. I hear things based on assumptions about me because I'm a white heterosexual male that are racist and homophobic. I wish I could say that I confront these cases with outrage, but sometimes I just walk away with buried disgust.

It is not possible to draw too firm a line between culture and biology as to declare causation of behavior. All human beings struggle to be just that, human beings, and we all do so in the dance of our biochemistry, a mysterious and often beautiful signature of being.

We can say that the men described in the awful things evoked in the OP are evil and disgusting. This type of behavior is unique, almost exclusively, to being male to be sure although there are instances of sexual violence, often psychological as opposed to physical, among women.

What the ultimate cause of the evil of these awful people may be unknowable but none of that precludes a man from understanding the disgust these acts evoke. I get it, but clearly there are men who don't.

We live in times that make men like Epstein, "Prince" Andrew, and the orange pedophile possible. I suspect culture, more than biology is the root cause.

Don't worry. I'm aware you're nowhere near being a bigot. It is true that the Y chromosome is often degenerate beyond its molecular biology in which, yes, it is a withered little thing as chromosomes go.

To channel and paraphrase Frank Zappa in another context, I'm not a woman, but there are times I wish I could say I wasn't a man.

Thank you for your kind words.