Kiss up, kick down

[kpete]

'Angry white men': the sociologist who studied Trump's base before Trump
Michael Kimmel, one of the world’s foremost experts on masculinity, examines its role in men’s adherence to – and departure from – far-right movements


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Let me give you two examples. The first: how come men use a biological argument when they are angry and they beat up someone smaller or older than they are or they beat their wives – yet they don’t beat their bosses?

I mean, my boss would likely piss me off more than my wife would, right? Why don’t I beat him up? Because you have to feel like you have permission. You have to believe that the target of your violence is “legitimate”.

There is a famous experiment by a primatologist at Stanford. He takes five monkeys and measures their testosterone. Then he puts the five monkeys in a cage. The monkeys immediately establish a hierarchy of violence – number one beats number two, number two beats number three, number three beats number four, number four beats number five.

Of course, number one has the highest testosterone, and so on.

So the experiment is: he takes monkey three out of the cage and he shoots him up with testosterone, off the scale, and puts him back in. What do you think happens?

When I tell this story my students always guess that he immediately becomes number-one monkey. But that’s not true. What happens is that when he goes back in the cage he still avoids monkeys number one and two – but he beats the shit out of numbers four and five. So what any reasonable biological researcher would conclude is that testosterone does not cause aggression, it enables it. The target of the violence must already be seen as legitimate. You have a biological argument and a sociological argument. So the answer to your question is that it is never either/or. It is always both. Always.



MORE:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/27/michael-kimmel-masculinity-far-right-angry-white-men?utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=GU+Today+USA+-+Collections+2017&utm_term=215212&subid=21638726&CMP=GT_US_collection

[dalton99a]

1. Which is why it's a waste of time to think Deplorables will turn on Monkey #1.

[Blaukraut]

2. Fascinating and it explains so much about why white men never seem to want to beat on the elite