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This is all bad enough conceptually, rhetorically and politically. But it’s also a lie, scientifically. To indicate, as the writers have, that it is the socialization of boys and men by men that is producing both a decrement in the personal mental health of males and females and a threat to the social fabric is not only to get the facts wrong, but to get them wrong in a manner that is directly antithetical to the truth.

What kind of families produce violent young men? Fatherless families

First, there is no scientific evidence that aggression, per se, is learned. Like fear, pain, hunger and thirst, rage is instinctual. The biological evidence for this is crystal clear and unshakeable (I would guide interested readers to Jaak Panksepp’s masterful Affective Neuroscience and to Jeffrey Gray’s Neuropsychology of Anxiety, which are the two best books ever written on the biology of motivation and emotion). Aggression in infants is noticeable and measurable in the early months of life, not least as a consequence of the analysis of facial emotion, a science which is well-developed, and which sheds substantive light on the putative inner life of as-of-yet speechless young children. There is substantive individual variation in aggression, but some general truths can be extracted: boys are more aggressive when young than girls, on average; some young boys are more aggressive than others; aggression peaks among young children around the age of two; most aggressive two-year olds have been properly socialized, so that their rage is under control, by the age of four. (Here are a couple of peer-reviewed papers I published with my colleagues. The first is heavily biological; the second concentrates more on developmental psychology). So the idea that aggression is learned is not only wrong, it’s backward. Aggression is easy. Civilized behaviour is difficult. It is the integration of aggression that is learned. And it is primarily men who teach it, particularly to aggressive boys. How do we know this?