Masculinity and violence

95% of homicides on the planet are committed by men (UN, 2013), 93.2% of people in prison are men (WPL, University of London, 2018), 75% of suicides are carried out by men (600,000 each year)… These are examples that reflect an objective reality that indicates that “violence is a man's thing”.

However, despite this evidence, the response of an androcentric society has been aimed at diverting the gaze from reality to hide the role of men in violence. And it has done so with two opposing arguments, on the one hand, affirming that violence is multi-causal, and on the other, reducing violence to the weight of biology under the influence of testosterone.

And it is striking, because when talking about the role of men in literary creation or in great works of art, nobody says that creativity, writing or painting are multi-causal behaviors. On the contrary, it is understood that the wide and varied “masculine condition” provides for that and much more, and it is rejected that there has been a bias in literary criticism, nor any discrimination against women so that they do not appear in large museums and catalogs. Everything obeys, it is said, to that greater masculine capacity.

With this type of argument and reasoning, what machismo is trying to do is make the will of men disappear in the use of violence, and in the creation of the appropriate circumstances for its use. In this way, they leave men as if they were leaves floating in the gale of events so that they then fall into violence as a consequence of the elements of that multi-causality, not of their will. It would be like saying that the decision of a person to go to a restaurant with a Michelin star and order their favorite dish, instead of being the product of the will and decision of the person who makes it, is the consequence of the process of swallowing, digestion, absorption. and metabolism. No one denies that all these processes intervene when someone eats food, be it in a fancy restaurant or a fast-food restaurant, but the decision to go to one place or another and order one dish or another depends on the will.

With the violence that men exert and star in, they act in a similar way; On the one hand, it is fragmented between the different elements that intervene in behavior (biological, psychological, environmental ...) and, on the other, it hides between the processes that are part of neurophysiology or the context, so that will disappears and everything remains as a kind of determinism in some men, or as a consequence of a scenario that hides intentionality.

But the data are clear and the reality is very clear: men are the protagonists of violence in any of its forms and throughout the entire planet, and they exercise it against other men and against women. The analysis must start from this objective fact to advance in the study of the rest of the elements that influence a multi-causal behavior, such as violence, not to get lost in the theoretical circumstances.

University of Granada starts a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) Free where this reality of violence and the role of men is analyzed and makes integrating biological theories on violence at different levels (genetic, humoral, neurological, psychological, psychiatric ...), and environmentalist theories focused on social and cultural elements that influence the contexts where people who resort to violence operate.

But violence is also analyzed as behavior, not only as a result, and all the elements that give it meaning as part of a decision made from a certain position and aimed at achieving specific objectives, not as a kind of loss of control or accident, as it is so frequently presented.

In this sense, the concept of “rational violence” developed by Maxim and Whitehead reflects the voluntary and interesting construction of violent behaviors, which can be facilitated by different factors and elements of any of the two large groups discussed, the biologist and the environmentalist. The course also analyzes this instrumentality and "utility" of violence, and how its result fits into a social system that integrates the "benefits of violence" in the very circuits of society. There is no economy, no market, or own finances to channel the large sums of money that are obtained through criminal violence, everything is integrated into the same androcentric system led by men at a formal level, and in which it is mainly men who understand that violence is a valid resource to solve problems and conflicts, and thereby obtain benefits of different kinds.

This congruence between the androcentric model of society and the individual behavior of men who resort to violence to obtain benefits and solve their problems is related to the references established by culture to organize coexistence and articulate relationships within it, thus as with the definition of a masculine identity in which violence is presented as a resource that reinforces the idea of ​​man and virility.

In this sense, the MOOC affects this construction of male identity, and how this double reference, violence, and identity, is responsible for a specific form of violence, such as that directed against women and girls through multiple expressions.

The course ends with a study on the elements capable of changing this reality through the transformation of masculinity, that is, the idea of ​​a man who sees violence as a valid option to solve problems and, at the same time, feel more man, both for the personal sensation and the perception of recognition by the rest of the people, especially other men, who are part of the same society and culture. The transformation must be cultural, but it must be done by the people who are part of society, hence the importance of individual positioning.

The MOOC has been very well received nationally and internationally, and at the time of writing this article, more than 3,400 people had already enrolled.