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Notes -
I've searched for it dozens of times, including opening up old laptops and pouring over their browser histories, but I can't find it.
"It" was a blog that a FtM (that's chick-to-dude) transitioner was keeping about their ... transition. It was well written, deeply personal, and absolutely without trans ideology talking points or vibes. It was a wonderful example of an honest seeming person without any sort of ideology-induced hangups. It was incredibly and (unfortunately) uniquely informative.
The author shares one story about either beginning or hitting a major increase in the hormone replacement process. He's excited that he's going to start feeling testosterone-y like all other dudes. The week this starts, he's driving to work in traffic and someone cuts him off. He reports that, all of a sudden, he has a full blown panic attack and has to pull over to try to calm down. Perhaps the hormone replacement process has a high variance early period? Maybe he jacked up the dosage? Hmm, concerning.
I should note here that the author writes about going to a trans support group in his city. They help each other with the process as the different members are at different stages.
The author relates how he shares this panic attack incident to his group. There's an odd silence and some chuckling from some of the FtM's further along. People share knowing looks. Finally, one of them pipes up and says, "Dude .... you got "guy angry" for the first time." In a wonderful moment of self-awareness, the author writes about how he (when he was a she) never came close to appreciating what true male rage felt like. Even when "she" was 10/10 steamin' mad for some reason, it never came close to .... How a dude feels in Tuesday morning traffic when some asshole cuts him off.
I hope this jogs the memory of someone else who can point to that blog. There was a lot of good knowledge in there.
Anyway - I apply a similar view on male versus female sexual drive. It's definitely a difference in kind. It's been highlighted hundreds of times that men watch porn and women read trashy novels that end up at a sexual encounter but with a lot of very cringey situational foreplay. The male fantasy is the act itself, the female fantasy is the journey to the act. It is, however, also a difference in degree. I believe women when they say they get "super duper horny." I believe that, in their own framework of horny intensity judgement, they are at 10/10 Would Fck Again. But how does this compare to a male arousal rubric? I submit that female "10/10 Would Fck Again" is near equivalent to "Popped a bone watching that new Shakira music video on mute while at the airport bar." I'm having a little bit of fun here, so please don't try to nuke me on the rough comparison.
None of this should be taken as a judgement in validity, value, or worthiness of either male/female anger/arousal. Any moron who tells a woman, "oh, you're just girl angry, it's not that big of a deal" deserves whatever kitchen implement is launched at his head. And any idiot who tells his date, "No, but, like, I really want to fuck" deserves his future session of sullen, very alone rage masturbation.
I've never read the blog you're referring to, but the story reminds me of a different story I heard in, IIRC, This American Life (possibly Radiolab instead) about a FTM transitioner talking about the effects experienced from HRT, which included having a surprisingly overwhelmingly strong sex drive compared to before and also becoming literally better at math. Of course, instead of the host exploring the implications of this in wider society with respect to trans-ness and males and females, he quickly shut that down with a joke about how the person had "set back feminism by 20 years" or something.
I'm also reminded of that one woman who committed suicide a few years ago IIRC, who had written a book about her experience dressing up as a man (no transition, just roleplaying for the book), where she seemed to come to some revelations about the difficulties of men's lives that were completely invisible to her before the experience.
What I find interesting is that, as best as I can tell, MTF trans people are more prominent than FTM ones, though I've heard that FTM is more common, driven primarily by young women and teenage girls (though I've also heard that accurate stats around this are very difficult to come by). And this kind of narrative about how transitioning from man to woman made them realize the unique difficulties that women go through that were invisible to them when they were a man seem much rarer. It's almost always the unique difficulties of being a trans woman that's emphasized, rather than having some epiphany about how the natal other half of the human population experience reality that got awakened to them.
There are multiple explanations for this, and I'd guess they all have some truth. The default, most likely explanation, is that I'm just seeing patterns where there is none. But that's no fun, so if we want to speculate, one reason is that FTM tend to get the more genuine male experience than MTF, because FTM can pass much more consistently than MTF. Another is that the troubles that women face in society as women are so emphasized that it's just common knowledge among men, while the mirror image isn't true. Yet another is that the types of people who transition MTF are very different types of people personality-wise than FTM, which leads to some asymmetry in what they notice about their new experience in their new gender identity. Another similar reason would be that the effectiveness of HRT to go from MTF is different and meaningfully less than the effectiveness to go from FTM, which results in the asymmetry.
Norah Vincent, Self-Made Man
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I haven't actually seen stats I trust, but the brief amount of looking I've done seems to suggest that there used to be more MTF, but that might not be true anymore, or is at least less true.
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Many years ago I read something fitting this description, but the entry that I read was explicitly discussing testosterone-fueled sex drive rather than anger, and the view being expressed was exactly as you've put it here. I'm pretty sure it was a blogspot thing, but whether or not it was the same author you were reading, I'm afraid I'm no help in pinning down the source.
Still appreciate the collective memory-jog.
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The anger story brought to mind a conversation I had with my partner.
Like apparently all women nowadays, my girlfriend is fascinated by true crime. She studied biochemistry and works in a lab, so she's especially interested in the forensic side of criminal investigation, particularly genetic genaeology which has certain similarities to the genetics work she does. I'm always hearing about the new cases Othram solved that week. Her parents think she should go into forensic science and they're dead right.
I've actually come to enjoy watching true crime documentaries with her, though I prefer ones that focus on the process of investigation (mystery plots are the most universally popular type of story).
But I have to confess I find them hard to watch sometimes. Not because I find the crimes too gruesome, but because inevitably hearing about the depravity and cruelty of some of the most evil criminals -- brutal rapists, killers of elderly people, child murderers, torturers, serial killers -- fills me with intense and uncontrollable rage and a desire to get medieval on some asses.
I wonder sometimes if the reason women are so interested in true crime, and men aren't as much, isn't something to do with women, but something to do with men. Perhaps for one segment of men, true crime is simply too real, too close to their own lives of organized crime or petty violence, to be an enjoyable escape. And then, for another group -- and I include myself in this one -- it is so morally outrageous to consider the gravity of the kind of lurid crimes that get discussed in the true crime community that they're filled not with curiosity but with rage. Women get to see crime as something foreign, not something they'd ever get involved in, and perhaps are spared the sort of great vengeance and furious anger that characterizes the male response to horrific acts. Perhaps this also goes to explain the gender difference in support for the death penalty.
It happened that we finished watching one of these documentaries, and I found it particularly enraging (a man abducted a woman at gunpoint and forced her to pretend to enjoy being raped by him on camera) and we were discussing the particulars of the case and how the police investigated the abduction. I mentioned that one of the big differences between feminists and conservatives on the issue of rape doesn't concern whether it's wrong or not (they both condemn it) but what society should do about it. Feminists are often focused on the needs of the victim -- believe all women, we need more social support, we need to reduce stigma, we need police to be more receptive to rape victims -- while conservatives who comment on the issue of rape often discuss it in terms of what needs to be done to punish the perpetrators: death penalty for forcible rape, longer prison sentences, harsher punishments.
And we realized at that moment why there was such a big disagreement between men and women about criminal justice. Women are concerned about victims, men about perpetrators. It's not that men lack compassion for victims of horrific crimes or that women lack a desire for penal justice, but rather that the emotional reactions of men and women and their subsequent actions reflect different priorities. And both, you might note, reflect the traditional social roles of men and women: men protecting the tribe from physical violence, women ensuring that all members of the tribe have their needs met.
Adding your thoughts about male anger into the mix offers a compelling explanation of how that process works, and perhaps why men experience such a strong emotional desire to exact punishment that women often don't seem to understand.
I'm pretty sure only a small fraction of true crime fandom is focused on organized crime. In fact, it's the one category of true crime that can probably count on more male than female interest, due to the recurring themes of honor, revenge, masculinity, the handing down of power from father to son etc.
With respect to petty violence, it's probably true that it isn't too close to the lives of many women, not even those in the underclass. Petty crime in general, on the other hand, surely is.
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Great post. A few underformed thoughts;
I think there's a direct line of similarity between your Victim/Perpetrator dichotomy and the oft lampooned "Men want to offer solutions to your problems / women just want to be heard and listened too about their problems."
I don't know if your Self-Awarewolf second paragraph was intentional. You recognize that your disgust with the brutality of some of these crimes triggers in you a desire to ... commit brutal crimes. The feeling isn't wrong. I'd say most emotionally healthy men who read about Dahmer, Bundy etc. probably have some similar thoughts. It's just an interesting pot-calling-the-kettle-black-while-looking-in-the-mirror situation.
I think there's also a difference in intuitive understanding of subjects here. Women emote so heavily with the True Crime victims because women intuitively understand sexualization. Most women can tell very specific stories about hitting puberty and then starting to get leering stares, "friendly" attention from male strangers etc. On the other hand, I believe men have an intuition in understanding physical violence. Let me reiterate I said understanding not desire for. A common ritual for adolescent boys is their first fight. From 16-24, a lot of a guy's free time is taken up with physical violence related subjects - being on a sports team, going to the gym, perhaps joining the military etc.
It would make sense, then, that the respective sexes 'default' to their intuition when faced with True Crime like scenarios. Women relate and emote to the other woman in the story and their sexualized victimization. Men tap into their male rage and physical violence reserves in a (vain) effort to go out and do something about it.
"It's not about the nail."
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A lot of women’s interest in True Crime is just good old fashioned female hybristophilia.
Reading or watching a show about men killing people is titillating for women like watching the aforementioned Shakira thot around in a music video is titillating for men. See, for example, women finding themselves attracted to Bill Hader after watching his eponymous character killing people in Barry, when they weren’t before.
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Or rather, different moral hazards.
Assuming a zero-sum competition for resources in a given tribe, men benefit when there is less competition for resources (and one less man will help with that), and women benefit when there is more competition (since that means they are themselves more in demand and can demand a larger share of the pie they didn't have to work for).
So we should expect swift and harsh punishment for ever more minor crimes from societies more dominated by men (which has lessened over the last 20,000+ years mainly because of revolutionary and consequential industry), and pathological bear-choosing (or at least publicly bear-curious) behavior from societies more dominated by women.
The wildcard in this is that competition for resources can be disrupted for myriad reasons, and is why boom times tend to have expansions in civil rights (there are so few men that broadening the definition of "them wronging you" and softer approaches to justice can't meaningfully be resisted by the average man, and things like white-knighting become rare because every man can get a woman provided they're useful), and why bust times see contractions (there are so many men that tightening the definition of "them wronging you" can't meaningfully be resisted by the average man, and things like white-knighting become common because not every man can get a woman and must appeal to them in other ways).
And as we proceed further into bust times men will increasingly adopt these stances, which are... mostly just a way to punish men ex post facto and remove them from the competition (and conservatives, in full agreement with the feminists because inside they are exactly the same, with personalities built to succeed in scarcity conditions, relish carrying that removal out for the above reasons). Boom times/man-shortages by contrast are marked by "obviously you have to compromise if you want to land a man", "a woman's duty", etc.
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+1 on the "Good post." It also brought to mind another video I watched recently. A woman who's a prison abolitionist, addressing critics who ask the "So what do you want to do about rapists and child molesters, then, just let them go free?" question.
She spoke at great length about her own horrific abuse, being raped by her best friend's stepfather, who also molested her best friend, and her experience of having to go through the court process, being torn apart by the defense attorney, being sneered at by the police, only to discover that her rapist's supposed 10-year-sentence was reduced to 5 without her being notified or consulted. And how the prison system would abuse him and make him worse, and how she was also revictimized and abused by the process, and never asked what she thought justice should look like, because it was all about "punishing" her abuser and not actually addressing the needs of the victim. What she wanted, she said, was for her abuser to acknowledge what he did and apologize, which he obviously would not do when it would amount to a confession and be used against him.
It was a very passionate and emotional argument. I could see her point of view.
And yet... the holes in her thinking were glaringly apparent. Did she really think that, absent the threat of punishment, the right sort of mediator would get her rapist to give her an apology sincere enough to make her feel better? And what if his other victims did want to see him behind bars? For all her cataloging of the horrors of the "carceral system," she never really did get around to answering the key question: what do we do with very bad people who will hurt other people again if not imprisoned? I imagine it's somethingsomethingmumblerestorativejustice, because they really do believe that rapists and child molesters are produced by "the system" and if the system weren't so terrible, we wouldn't have rapists and child molesters.
So, yeah - this was an extreme case, but very much "woman wanting the system to focus more on victims, less on perpetrators." Of course I know there are men in the prison abolition movement too, but I notice they tend to stress the racism angle more. (This woman did of course hit the "Prison especially victimizes marginalized communities" talking points.)
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Damn this was a good post. I like your thesis a lot, it makes sense but I had never considered it before. I almost hope you're wrong, because if you're right it is another sad testament to the dangers of ignoring Chesterton's Fence. It seems like a real sad statement about Western society if we took the social roles developed around the strong (though not inexorable) innate drives of the sexes, and then tore those social roles down without ever bothering to understand why they worked.
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