A Reflection on Biology, Sex, Gender, and Behavior

Sex - male or female; gender - feminine or masculine. Personality, behavior, attitudes; who are we, who am I? Are sex role expectations negative? What is so horrendous about a given society having sex or gender role expectations? Many of those socially constructed expectations are quite different across cultures and societies. Even within the social strata of one respective society they may be quite diverse. Is behavior merely the end result of our socialization processes, conformity, and control and thus, the by-product of our own social structures? Why is the mean personality traits stereotypically ascribed to women and femininity empirically valid, logical, and reflect reality more so than it does not? There is a great divide in the sociological and psychological world over what truly influences human primate behavior which directly trickles down into other disciplines who have adherents to old paradigms they do not wish to give up on. 

I purport that biology is what influences behavior and creates those sex and gender specific stereotypes. Why are women so much more passive than men, more expressive emotionally; and why do women form stronger social bonds much earlier than men do? Is the alleged socialization the causal variable? Is it the differences in socialization between males and females? If one truly believes this theoretical framework then how does one explain how there are no significant changes to some of these "stereotypical" feminine traits across cultures and societies? If personality and behaviors are the result of social conditioning then we would get drastically different results from studying females from differing cultures, but we don't. Women from isolated native populations in South American have similar personality traits which can be viewed empirically in women from the United States, Great Britain or Morocco. How can this be so? 

            

Women naturally have higher levels of oxytocin and serotonin so females are more passive and expressive emotionally. It's why females form stronger social bonds with other humans and pets. Testosterone; however, has been found to counteract the effects of oxytocin which is partly why men - generally speaking - are much less likely to be generous and trusting and more likely to react aggressively or be hostile. It also explains why men have a much harder time forming strong social bonds with other people (Emerson & McKinney, 2010; Lau & Haug, 2012; Pollack, 2013; White, 1999; Zack, 2012). 

            

Morality and ethics concern judgments of behavior as right or wrong, good or bad and we use this to assign social values to behaviors and personality. Males can be seen doing the same types of behavior all across the globe irrespective of their societies ideology or the social values we place on behaviors. Males have been responsible for the vast majority of all violent crime everywhere on the planet since crime statistics have been recorded even where that respective society openly devalues those behaviors (e.g. sex crimes). Maybe there is a balance between absolutism and relativism since there are multicultural truths that affect moral  perceptions, however, we cannot palliate the overwhelming data that shows sex crimes are almost entirely a male phenomenon (Hinman, 1998).

            

Even in the United States males are responsible for 99% of forcible rapes while 91% of their victims are women (Greenfield, 2012). So, it’s not just a third world problem, it’s a male problem. “Probably the most egregious violation of women’s rights, however, occurs in conjunction with practices such as human trafficking and the use of sexual violence against women as a deliberate policy in conflict situations” (Reveron & Norris, 2011, p. 56). Who is doing all of these horrendous crimes? Males. Even when we look to the third world community we see it's males that are intentionally exploiting children in the labor market where they treated as slaves or indentured servants instead of as children. The informal economy includes things such as child prostitution, illegal human organ market and child soldiers. Workers are exploited, women and children are exploited and it’s revolting (Davis, 2006). The myth of informality is the attempt by people in academia to invalidate the problems associated with economic informality by attacking and devaluing the data created by previous researchers looking into this area of interest. It’s called a, “…myth inspired by wishful thinking…” (Davis 2006, p. 179).

            

We can theorize on why women do not account for more rapes and crimes cross culturally, but that in and of itself cannot negate the harrowing data regarding rape statistics. It is a male problem, “in Rwanda, up to half a million women were raped during the 1994 genocide” (Reveron & Norris, 2011, p. 56). Here the lack of self-control happens when the dominant societies formal and informal social controls are no longer sufficient to constrain anti-social or deviant behaviors thus, I suspect that when they [males] have the opportunity to act out on their natural biological imperatives that were previously constrained by society that they will, in fact, do it. In every single war or conflict the we have men raping women in large numbers all through known history. Like I previously stated, it is a male problem, not a "gender" or socially constructed issue. It's a biological problem associated with being a male and needs to be addressed as such.

            

Genetics seems to influence personality traits that may impact ethical decision making including differences as to whether a person is introverted or extroverted, neurotic. stable, incurious, agreeable, antagonistic, etc (Pinker, 2002; Wilson, 1993; Shermer, 2004; Zak, 2012). When people suffer physical trauma to their brain altering their brain structures, changing chemical compositions, their personalities change but it seems people from the social sciences outright ignore this interesting segue into the discussion about how sex hormones impact behavior and decision making in order to keep the validity of their paradigm. Males and females have drastically different amounts of sex hormones which have significant impact on brain development structurally.

            

Maybe if we finally address the biological influences in behavior and personality traits we can start to really find plausible solutions to those negative behaviors and personality traits such as males violent, aggressive nature, “For many human beings in the world the most serious threat to their daily lives and physical safety arises not from cultural extremism but from common criminal violence…”( Reveron & Mahoney-Harris,2011, p. 43). Who are the people most responsible for this common criminal violence around the world? Males.

        

There needs to be more academic research that looks at how brain structure development, sex hormones and the impact genes, heredity and genetic variation in human primates impacts behavior and personality traits which affects the role of mental functions in individual and social behavior that are underlying the cognitive functions of the human primate condition. It is fundamentally important to look at biological influences in various areas of sociology, psychology and criminology especially when it involves individual attributes, traits and behaviors such as what we in criminal justice study: crime.  One major implicit assumption in sociological discourse is that human primates are the same at birth and thus differences are the end result of socialization and one's respective position in the social hierarchy. From my own perspective I have noticed that the absence of explicit discussion on biological influences in criminal justice, criminology and sociology is due to the respective disciplines' theoretical emphasis on a group's social-structural position while engaging in a type of reasoning defect by asserting that since there is an unavailability of reliable measures of relevant biological influences it's therefore not relevant hence, an appeal to ignorance which is a false dichotomy. 

            

Maybe justice is a biologically adaptive trait (Walsh, 2000). Maybe the notion of justice is emotional rather than rational and is the result of natural selection because those who cannot navigate society are just not optimally adapted for survival in a societies manifestation of consensual norms, but that is a discussion for a whole other blog.

 References

Davis, M. (2006). Planet of Slums. New York, NY: Verso Publishing.

Emerson, T., & McKinney, J. (2010). Importance of religious beliefs to ethical attitudes in business. Journal of Religious and Business Ethics. 1(2): 1-15.

Greenfield, L. (2012). Sex Offenses and Offenders. Bureau of Justice Statistics, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. BiblioGOV.

Lau, L., & Haug, J. (2011). The impact of sex, college, major, and student classification on students perception of ethics. Mustang Journal of Business Ethics. 1: 92-105.

Pinker, S. (2002). The blank slate: The modern denial of human behavior. New York, NY: Viking Publishing.

Pollack, J.M. (2013). Ethical Decisions and Dilemmas in Criminal Justice. Belmon, CA: Wadesworth.

Reveron, D.S. and Mahoney-Norris, K.A. (2011). Human security in a borderless world. Boulder, CO: Westview press.

Shermer, M. (2004). The science of good and evil: Why people cheat, gossip, care, share, and follow the golden rule. New York, NY: Times Books, Holt and Company.

 

Walsh, A. (2000). Evolutionary Psychology and the origins of justice. Justice Quarterly, 17(4): 841-864.

Wilson, J.Q. (1993). The moral sense. New York, NY: Free Press.

White, R. (1999). Are women more ethical? Recent findings on the effects of gender on moral development. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory. 9: 459-472.

Zak, P.J. (2012). The Moral Molecule. New York: Dutton.