Looking at it biologically, men have an instinct to be driven by status, particularly at a young age. Your teens and twenties is driven by a desire to establish a reputation for yourself that will make you an attractive prospect to women. When men have few legitimate means to boost their status (they come from a place with no jobs, they didn't do well enough at school to go to university, etc), some will resort to illegitimate ones. In addition to seeking social status, men are also hardwired to protect what social status they have from threats, and lower status men are likely to have what little status they have threatened more easily, hence the fact that violent criminals don't just tend to be men, they tend to be men from poorer backgrounds.

This is easily shown by the fact that polygamous societies are typically more violent and more unstable. If high status men can have four wives, then there is going to be far more competition to establish status from the men at the bottom who have none, and therefore far more violent crime.

Ah. The Status Instinct.

There have to be many theses in that thing.

Keep It Real wrote:Did you notice how the last few posts in this thread from 2014 were of you and I arguing? There was a (brief) time where we got along for a few months IIRC around a year ago...before that "stupid c***" meltdown. Unfortunately I doubt we'll ever be there again, which is sad, I guess.

Stick to the topic.

Fallible wrote:

patriksveti wrote:I never said at any point that the differences are greater than similarities. We are all homo sapiens. But there are people who deny the existence of ANY differences. One of which is the difference in incarceration tendencies. Similar to pregnancy tendencies....

I've never met anyone who thinks there are no differences between the sexes. Who are these people?

Died in the wool Marxists acknowledged biological differences between the sexes, but insisted they are distinctions without any differences. At least the ones who understood what Chucky meant with the first three sentences of his sixth thesis on Feuerbach:

Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence. But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual.

In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.

I met quite a few people during the 1970s who agreed with that.

I've met plenty of people who claim sex is just one big long continuum with no such thing as male and female. They live on Twitter.

There are definitely people who claim there are no specific differentiating characteristics between the sexes. They think people with congenital defects and developmental disorders prove this.

Hermit, my comment was from over 5 years ago.

Fallible wrote:Hermit, my comment was from over 5 years ago.

And I replied to it now. Is that problematic?

Yes, for me. The whole discussion was completely forgotten by me, and I wouldn’t even care to stand by what I said over 5 years ago in a handful of dashed off replies with no research.

Fallible wrote:Yes, for me. The whole discussion was completely forgotten by me, and I wouldn’t even care to stand by what I said over 5 years ago in a handful of dashed off replies with no research.

Sorry to hear that.

Rachel Bronwyn wrote:I've met plenty of people who claim sex is just one big long continuum with no such thing as male and female.

Show offs.

Rachel Bronwyn wrote:I've met plenty of people who claim sex is just one big long continuum with no such thing as male and female. They live on Twitter.

There are definitely people who claim there are no specific differentiating characteristics between the sexes. They think people with congenital defects and developmental disorders prove this.

Whether something is a "defect" or a "disorder" already takes the view that there's something bad about it.

Finding four-leaf clover in a field of three-leave-clover: Is it a defect, a disorder or a lucky occurrence?

Saying that sex is a continuum (I'd rather say it is a combination of multiple different continuums) is not to say that there are not big clusters of individuals that one can label "male" or "female".

Just like saying the the spectrum of light is a continuum, that doesn't mean that there is not difference between red and yellow roses. But some cultures know more or less colour names than other cultures.

In general, adolescent and young adult males are stupid and dangergous. Brains haven't fully developed or something. Maybe they're just assholes. Anyway, best to stay away from packs of them, particularly around the bus terminal late at night.

NineBerry wrote:

Rachel Bronwyn wrote:I've met plenty of people who claim sex is just one big long continuum with no such thing as male and female. They live on Twitter.

There are definitely people who claim there are no specific differentiating characteristics between the sexes. They think people with congenital defects and developmental disorders prove this.

Whether something is a "defect" or a "disorder" already takes the view that there's something bad about it.

And that's all very nice but it's hippie dippy and not relevant to anything empirical.

Lots of people with DSDs do have profound disabilities of sex and reproduction. Others don't. They still came to be intersex via abnormal development.

A woman I babysat as a kid has a daughter with Down's. They wouldn't change her for the world and insist it's actually a gift, not a defect, because DS is correlated with higher levels of happiness than in the general population. That's terrific. I'm thrilled for them and her.

It's still a genetic disorder.

Finding four-leaf clover in a field of three-leave-clover: Is it a defect, a disorder or a lucky occurrence?

Both if you consider it lucky.

Saying that sex is a continuum (I'd rather say it is a combination of multiple different continuums) is not to say that there are not big clusters of individuals that one can label "male" or "female".

Just like saying the the spectrum of light is a continuum, that doesn't mean that there is not difference between red and yellow roses. But some cultures know more or less colour names than other cultures.

Yet there are still only two sex classes. There are LOTS of classes of colour.

The spectrum of light actually is a continuum in which exactly where one colour ends and another begins isn't identifiable. Sex isn't. Traits associated with sex which people mistakenly refer to as sex vary across a continuum (that's still explicitly bimodal.) Actual sex does not.

Mammals have potential to produce one gamete or the other based on how the genes they possess get expressed. That's all sex is. This is even apparent on people who never develop gonads. Just look at their DNA. It's even apparent in infertile people with conditions of mixed gonadal tissue. Some of them are XX with ova and sperm producing tissue. They're infertile but only one tissue has potential to ever function given medical advances. These people are hard to sex. They're still male, not a combination or a third sex. The vast majority of intersex people are very easy to sex and none of them exist outside of male or female. Hermaphroditisms don't exist in humans.

We don't exist on a spectrum, sexwise. Expression of traits does and it still pretty obviously consists of two groups. The fact some DSDs aren't problematic and some people with them are very happy, which is terrific and should be respected, not tinkered with while they're children, doesn't change that they result from abnormal development. Socially, DSDs are whatever the people with them make of them. Medically, they're disorders of development, not normal variation in human sex. Everyone with a DSD is still male or female and they still only have the potential to ever produce one gamete and perform one reproductive role, even if they're infertile. Human sex isn't that exciting.

I'm intersex. I'm female. I'm beyond tired of people telling me I'm unique, sexwise. No. I'm female. What's fortunate is my DSD isn't severe nor do I have profound sexual or reproductive problems (though I've had bumps along the road not having had to deal with would have been nice.) Lots of intersex people are disabled by their conditions. None of us belong to a third sex class.

Yet people still think DSD means I had a dick at some point because they were told sex exists on a spectrum and testes and penises can pop up anywhere on it. OMG NO! I'M FEMALE. FUCK.

After reading through this thread, I've come to the conclusion that wimmin are more clever at not being caught. Hence the lower prison population.

Cunning vixens, right? RIGHT?

All crimes have 3 things in common, as investigators on TV shows often say.
Means, motive, opportunity.

Men have the means more often, young men often have the speed and strength to give them the confidence for violent crime. Female muggers and rapists just aren't a thing really, are they?

Men have the motive more often, both society and ego pressure them to achieve and become significant in ways that are seen as less important for women.

Men THINK they have the opportunity more often, because the young male mind is disproportionally geared towards risk taking and thrill seeking, compared to everyone else in society. Insurance companies know this quite well. I don't know how many other factors come into it, but Testosterone certainly plays a part in this.

zulumoose wrote:Men have the means more often, young men often have the speed and strength to give them the confidence for violent crime. Female muggers and rapists just aren't a thing really, are they?

Here are some figures from America:

2011 arrest data from the FBI:

Males constituted 98.9% of those arrested for forcible rape
Males constituted 87.9% of those arrested for robbery
Males constituted 85.0% of those arrested for burglary
Males constituted 83.0% of those arrested for arson.
Males constituted 81.7% of those arrested for vandalism.
Males constituted 81.5% of those arrested for motor-vehicle theft.
Males constituted 79.7% of those arrested for offenses against family and children.
Males constituted 77.8% of those arrested for aggravated assault
Males constituted 58.7% of those arrested for fraud.
Males constituted 57.3% of those arrested for larceny-theft.
Males constituted 51.3% of those arrested for embezzlement.

So white collar crime is a bit more even, which would support your this part of your hypothesis, but then things like arson and vandalism are still much higher for men, despite not obviously involving any sort of physical advantage.

One factor with crimes motivated by money is that there is often an option for women to make money quickly that isn't as readily available to most men. It's said that one of the main reasons that you see far more men on the streets that women is that women are typically more able to get someone to put a roof over their heads in exchange for sex. Similarly, while a young lad who wants some quick money might be tempted to break into someone's house, a women of the same age might be far more likely to do a few escorting jobs. While technically a young man could probably do the same thing, it's not without massive risk to his social status. And if we look at the figures in America again, you find that 70% of prostitution-related arrests are of women, and only 30% men. But that doesn't even reveal the full facts, because 20% are actually male pimps and brothel-owners, with only 10% being male prostitutes.

Men define what is a crime, imprison more men and so increase the number of available females for themselves. Now numberwang geeks remove the crimes of passion/trouble at the mill, the discalulics at odds with a impossible economic model, and so on....wouldn't be such a large disparity.

Society defines what constitutes crime; I suggest.