THE COST OF VIRILITY

“The Cost of Virility – What France Would Save If Men Behaved Like Women” is the first enlightening essay by French historian Lucile Peytavin – who is also a member of the Observatory on the Economic Emancipation of Women of the French Fondation des Femmes.

The essay, which deliberately and provocatively takes a financial angle, aims to determine the cost that French society pays because of toxic virility.

Lucile Peytavin starts from a simple observation based on the statistics issued by various French ministries and interministerial observatories between 2017 and 2020: in France, men represent 93.3% of the prison population, 86% of those charged with murder, 99% of perpetrators of rape, 84% of alleged perpetrators of fatal road accidents and 92% of students punished for harm to property or people at college.

Toxic virility behaviors are responsible for 7 billion of the 9.06 billion euros of the total budget of the French Justice system – including 3.5 billion of the 3.75 billion euros of the prison administration budget – and 8.6 billion of the 13.1 billion euros of the total budget of the police force.

Female violence, which is often described as unnatural, also obviously exists but in extremely limited proportions compared to male violence, to the point that the latter is often described as systemic.

Beyond the inestimable human cost caused by toxic virility, the financial cost to an entire nation is enormous.

Based on these statistics, Lucile Peytavin questions the historical origins of male violence.

As has already been said here, human violence only occurrs in the Neolithic period – when men and women settle down. With sedentarization comes a division of tasks that did not exist before since women hunted just as much as men in the Paleolithic and the sphere of hunting, of confrontation, becomes a male attribute in the Neolithic.

Also, but this is a personal theory, sedentarization presupposes the protection and transmission of newly acquired lands and – the secret of pregnancy and childbirth probably being discovered thanks to proximity to domesticated animals – it becomes important for a man to ensure that the heir is indeed his heir and not that of the neighbor. Hence a domination of the female body bearing life.

In the Neolithic, male violence is accompanied by a widening of inequalities between men and women, studies on bones revealing more systematic traces of violence on female skeletons.

This being said, Lucile Peytavin questions the causes of male violence. She quickly dismisses the so-called natural or biological causes:

testosterone – which is often put forward to justify male aggression – but whose level varies considerably depending on the individual and the periods of life and which women are also endowed with, knowing that no scientific study has ever correlated testosterone levels and aggression,
the supposedly different neuronal wiring of men and women. We now know that the higher functions (memory, intelligence, reasoning) do not experience any sexual differentiation even if it is perfectly recognized that each individual has their own functioning and that the neuronal plasticity of each person is the direct consequence of their family, cultural or educational socialization. Neuroscience shows that the intellectual abilities and behavior of men and women are not preprogrammed and that they evolve according to each person’s experiences,
women’s ability to give life. This capacity is not a decisive criterion since on the one hand many women do not give birth, on the other hand some women are violent with no link with parenthood and finally, the protection of offspring can precisely lead to violent acts.

In short, the justification of male violence by so-called natural or biological causes makes no sense in the current state of our scientific knowledge. Therefore, it must be admitted that this male violence has purely cultural foundations and draws its roots from the notion of virility.

Virility is defined by the French Le Grand Robert dictionary as “that which is specific to man“. There is no equivalent for women, because we are not talking about “masculinity” – which is defined by “of masculine character” – or “femininity”. To put it simply, virility is the very essence of hyper-masculinity.

The etymology of the word comes from the Sanskrit “vira“, which designates the hero. The underlying concept is strength (Ulysses will perhaps be the first mythological male hero not to use strength but intelligence, but that’s another story) and the evolution of the notion gradually proposes a distinction between strength and weakness, between man and woman. One is superior thanks to his strength, the other is a failed man who is weak.

We know that children learn to live in society according to the societal norms that those around them are able to propose and according to the culture in which they evolve.

However, the differentiated socialization and acculturation of little boys and little girls, of teenage boys and teenage girls perfectly reflect this imbalance that has existed for a long time, in which toxic virility flourishes.

Acculturation to violence through virility is done by education – itself stemming from culture – through gendered archetypes, whether it is short or long haircuts, so-called acceptable behaviors according to the child’s sex (calm and attentive versus action and acceptable anger), colors or toys (whose preponderant role is recognized by development experts).

Today, this acculturation to violence is still alive and is transcribed for example through the vocabulary used by adolescents: the insults “son of a bitch“, “asshole” or “faggot“, which always refer to the denigration of women and the supposedly weak people, are mainly used by young men. With demonstrations of strength, these insults participate in a rite of virility which allows young males to demonstrate their strength, meaning their physical strength.

To put it simply, it is still and always through education and culture that everything is played out. Lucile Peytavin’s essay is not intended to be against men, but rather against a system that allows men to be violent because it overvalues the notions of virility, strength and competition, whereas men themselves suffer from a system that asks them to be hyper-performative.

“You are not born a violent man, you become one”. Women and men suffer in very different ways from a toxic virility that corrupt our societies.

Wouldn’t it be in our best interest to revolutionize our cultural and educational models?