this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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Well, men are also most of the victims of serious crime and do most of all dangerous jobs. These are all consequences of taking more risks.
Really? No one?
It doesn't take a genius to realize that, it takes a fool, because it's not necessarily true. It may make them less aggressive, but what else would happen? You're giving an easy answer to an extremely hard problem.
YES, there are many people thinking about this. What about we make society less toxic first, for example? But I commend you for posting an actual unpopular opinion.
That's true. I don't see what it has to do with my argument, though. I'm pretty sure that testosterone increases risk-tolerance, and that's part of why it correlates with aggression. Are you suggesting that men have elevated risk-tolerance for reasons other than testosterone, and that risk-tolerance is responsible for aggression instead of testosterone? Or are you saying that risk-taking is important so it's worth keeping men the way they are even if it causes most serious crime?
Most people see violent crime as a problem, but few see it as a problem with men. When people discuss crime, I never hear them frame the problem as "there's something causing men to commit 10 times as much rape and murder as women: what is it and how do we stop it?" Even feminists who talk about male violence generally don't frame it that way.
No empirical data can lead us to accept something as "necessarily true," but it stretches credulity to think that castration would reduce aggression in pretty much every kind of male mammal we try it on except humans and further that the most aggressive humans coincidentally have elevated testosterone levels. I don't think that you actually believe that, since you said:
I specifically listed the other effects I could think of. If you think something else bad might happen, just say what it is. If your objection is that we should be cautious because there might be unexpected effects... well sure, that's true, but it's also a general-purpose objection to any suggestion to change anything ever. You can't really have any interesting opinions if you accept that reasoning.
I'm in favor of that. But I think there's a limit to how much you can improve society via culture alone. You could probably design a culture where people would be a lot less selfish than they are today, for example. But I don't think you could get people to never be selfish at all, because some amount of selfishness is part of human nature. I think the same is true for aggression, and that the minimum amount of aggression you could get from people is in large part of function of testosterone levels.
Furthermore, "make society less toxic" is a goal, not a policy. A policy to reduce violence by making society less toxic could be something like teaching children to play cooperative games instead of competitive ones. That would probably have a small effect in a few decades. But I think chemically castrating men would have a bigger effect in a shorter amount of time than just about any other policy you could think of, and those effects would be in addition to anything else you did.
You're proposing an extremely harmful measure to remediate a problem that men cause without citing that we're also the main victims of said problem. You're framing it as if we only cause suffering and do not experience it.
Risk-taking is one example of effect of testosterone other than violence. It does not justify serious crime, it shows that if you get rid of testosterone you also get rid of other caracteristics.
Telling that a group very concerned with gender equality don't frame it that way, isn't it? Reasonable people will never suggest that racialized groups should learn western European values by norm to solve their high criminality rate.
Again, it doesn't. People are orders of magnitude more complex than any other animal and, even then, we haven't castrated that many animals. You're thinking of domesticated animals, and we've done a lot of other things to remove undesired traits in them, like selective breeding. Do you think that eugenics is a reasonable solution to violence amongst men too?
So we already have a much more reasonable, though still very unethical, measure: bring down testosterone levels of violent individuals so that they're closer to the average. Miles ahead and still in the same line of thought.
I don't have an specific effect in mind and your examples are bad. Let's quickly analyze the third one:
Is solving hormone-caused impotence that straight-forward? What are the side effect of using Viagra? For how long can you take Viagra and how frequently?
I don't think we could enumerate the problems that would arise from screwing with people's endocrine systems. The issue isn't that solutions also bring problems, the issue is that your "solution" brings so many problems that it is very hard to believe that you actually want to solve anything.
Yeah, sure, and castrating men is a "policy".
Wow, and the things you can think of are so spectacular, while you can't even spot your own prejudices. Your "fax and logic" facade does not fool anyone other than yourself that you want to help society instead of externalizing your prejudices.