General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: This killer that went on a rampage shooting [View all]Laelth
(32,017 posts)I used the admittedly hyperbolic term "vicious barbarian" to refer to men with higher-than-average levels of testosterone.
I hear your objection to stereotyping. The danger of stereotyping is that some individuals who are members of the stereotyped group will be exceptions to the stereotype, and, if the stereotype is damaging in some way, that those individuals will be unfairly punished for a stereotype that does not apply to those individuals at all. I understand that.
But, in the current context, I see no other way to understand this issue without some very broad conceptual frames. I am, after all, talking about men and women (and each of those fluid categories contains over 3.5 billion individuals). There are bound to be some exceptions, but that does not mean that we should abandon our search for patterns that might shed some light on this absolutely important (perhaps crucial) sociobiological construct that we call sex/gender.
-Laelth