Books Discussed in This Review Essay

Belkin, Aaron. Reference Belkin2012. Bring Me Men: Military Masculinity and the Benign Façade of American Empire. New York: Columbia University Press.

Evangelista, Matthew. Reference Evangelista2011. Gender, Nationalism, and War: Conflict on the Movie Screen. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Hudson, Valerie M., Bonnie Baliff-Spannvill, Mary Caprioli, and Chad F. Emmett. Reference Hudson, Baliff-Spannvill, Caprioli and Emmett2012. Sex and World Peace. New York: Columbia University Press.

Townes, Ann E. Reference Townes2010. Women and States: Norms and Hierarchies in International Society. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Several important recent books that examine the role of gender, sex, and sexuality in international relations, and their role in security, reveal the implicit but often profound ontological, theoretical, and methodological similarities but also discrepancies and divergences within feminist international relations. These differing perspectives have often advanced in neglect, if not ignorance, of each other, sometimes hindering the field's capacity to expand in synthetic ways that speak not only to other subfields within political science, but also to the broader interdisciplinary academic community interested in both women's studies and issues of war. This process threatens to isolate and render irrelevant large swaths of feminist literature whose engagement could, and should, prove crucial to the development of a more accurate, realistic, sophisticated, and modern approach to the study of conflict. Greater theoretical consensus and cohesion could offer critical insights for the broader community of international relations scholars into the role that gender plays in spawning and sustaining processes of violence.

Most studies that employ a feminist approach to the study of political science use the issue of gender as an independent variable that is then used to help explain some important dependent variable, such as the role of militarism and violence in perpetuating conflict and war.Footnote ¹ These arguments and approaches remain significant and indeed form the basis of the majority of the following discussion, but for the record, they do not need to constitute the entire universe of gender studies. Topics revolving around sex and gender can just as easily serve as dependent variables because many institutions and structures in international relations profoundly affect the lives and rights of woman, children, and sexual minorities. Work such as Hudson and colleagues' book Sex and World Peace interrogate the role of institutions in shaping the differential kinds of opportunities that are available to men and women, and how such opportunities in turn affect prospects for violence in the societies they inhabit.Footnote ² Studies that treat gender-related factors as dependent variables can elucidate some of the macro institutional social and political structures that instantiate sexual discrimination, such as restrictions in family law surrounding custody and inheritance. But they can also serve to uncover some of the microfoundational bases of such prejudice as well, noting how social norms and individual choices over such things as medical care or resource distribution can influence aggregate outcomes.

This review essay examines the role of gender in generating and perpetuating violence and aggression, both in theory and practice. In the manner of such essays, I highlight several books in service of my larger argument about sex differences in aggression, and the importance of that recognition for our understanding of the origins and maintenance of violence more broadly. In so doing, I make four central claims. First, in many studies involving the role of sex and gender in violence, specific causal models tend to remain underspecified. In seeking to further explicate these patterns, feminist authors have tended to privilege narrative, experiential, and other forms of qualitative analysis as providing the most authentic sources.Footnote ³ Although these approaches absolutely offer credible evidence, other forms of analysis can also offer a window into our understanding of the treatment of women around the globe and thus merit equal consideration for the credible evidence such studies offer.Footnote ⁴ Indeed, methodological debates over the relative merit of qualitative versus quantitative data have fractured the feminist discussion in counterproductive ways that have hampered their ability to move forward as a unified force in political science, notably unlike practitioners of methods such as rational choice, where significant progress was made by consensus around such methodological issues.

Second, a divergence in fundamental assumptions regarding the ontological basis of sex differences implicitly permeates and shatters this literature. Specifically, some scholars argue that sex differences result from processes of socialization and learning; this might occur, for example, when the specialization of labor is divided beginning in childhood as girls are expected to help their mothers with housework whereas boys help their fathers in the yard.Footnote ⁵ Other scholars emphasize how profound and meaningful biological differences in reproductive capabilities and strategies lead to significant and predictable downstream effects on a wide variety of seemingly unrelated aspects of decision making and social behavior.Footnote ⁶

Third, arguments that men and women are more or less likely to fight appear too simplistic; rather, it is worth considering that men and women may possess different motivations for fighting, and fight under different circumstances and for different reasons. Finally, systematic differences in the variant psychologies of men and women regarding the relative merit of offense and defense exert predictable consequences for public opinion surrounding the conduct of war in particular. I provide examples of these divergent perspectives and present a synthetic integration for how such views might be reconciled to create a more unified research agenda that might engage related interdisciplinary efforts in more meaningful, productive, and substantive ways.

Rather than engaging in subdisciplinary debates, I believe that the critical insights generated by feminist insights deserve wider public debate, far beyond even the discipline of political science, much less the subfield of international relations, or the sub-subfield of feminist international relations theory. These arguments regarding the relative role and place of men and women, and how dominance and affiliation is established and sustained between them, whether through violence or otherwise, can and should engage psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists, economists, and the wider interested intellectual public because the ramifications affect all of us, in the home, workplace, and wider world, whether or not we choose to recognize or acknowledge their endemic infiltration into our lives.

Recent debates over the epidemic of sexual assault within the US military, and the divergent and contentious alternatives put forward in the US Congress by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) for disciplining and thus hopefully reducing if not eliminating their occurrence, provide only one particularly horrific example of the myriad and destructive ways in which gender and violence intersect and interact in large-scale public policies. The recent vibrant national discussion over Sandberg's recent book, Lean In, taken by many in a too simplistic interpretation as a blame-the-victim approach to the lack of women in positions of prominence, provides another example.Footnote ⁷ Slaughter's “Why Women Still Can't Have It All” argument about the importance of providing political and social structures that support women to compete effectively with men in the workplace, despite still bearing a disproportionate share of the caretaking and householding duties, points to the continuing and enduring disparities and inherent trade-offs between the productive and reproductive goals of men and women.Footnote ⁸ These claims similarly reflect only the most recent incarnation of debates that date at least to de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, but that also found a second powerful resurrection in public discourse with the publication of Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. Footnote ⁹

Reviewed Contributions to Feminist Political Science

In some ways, recent research examining gender and violence builds on established classics in feminist political science, including those books and articles that essentially created the field, such as Tickner's Gender in International Relations and, most notably Enloe's Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Relations, which provocatively linked personal choices to international outcomes, interrogating established notions of “masculinity” and “femininity” in the process.Footnote ¹⁰ In attempting to advance this research agenda, more recent work aims to subsume the understandings established in these earlier works and extend them to further explore the links between gender, sexuality, and significant international outcomes such as militarism, war, and the growth of empire or economic decline.Footnote ¹¹ Belkin and Evangelista, in particular, draw on important theoretical insights originally offered by Enloe by indicting the notion of military masculinization, and showing how the deification of this concept actually serves to perpetuate rather than prevent violence. Support for this argument can be found in other domains as well. Goldstein, for example, also makes the argument, based on his extensive review of the literature, that the symbolic feminization of men, through such acts as homosexual rape, castration, or public rape of women in front of men who can do nothing to stop it, often constitutes an important element of psychological warfare between belligerents.Footnote ¹² Importantly, however, these works also reveal differences in the presumed and preferred role of women in society. Even more tellingly, these books present quite disparate views in the meaning and role of women in militarism and violence.

The body of research reflected in these more recent books and articles offers important contributions to our understanding of the links between sex and sexuality on the one hand and outcomes related to militarization and violence on the other hand. Belkin's book Bring Me Men examines the way in which ideas of gender and military masculinization, as well as notions of a warrior identity providing the quintessential construction of masculinity, remain intimately connected to the growth of American empire since 1898. Belkin suggests that the warrior identity literally embodies contradictions within its own representation, not only between ostensible dichotomies such as masculine/feminine and weak/strong, but also between victor/victim, clean/dirty, and dominant/subjugated. For example, weapons are cleaned using a variety of toxic chemicals whose disposal is harmful for the environment; thus, one thing (guns) are cleaned at the literal expense of making something else (the environment) more filthy. The inherent privileging of one relatively more masculine value at the expense of a relatively more femininely constructed one provides just one simple demonstration of the way that embedded contradictions are rendered manifest.

By revealing the inherent opposition in these constructs, Belkin reveals how many of these contradictions are hidden in plain sight. As another example, Belkin argues that scapegoating represents an inherent aspect of military culture by offering an excluded outgroup who can then be blamed for any weakness or contamination that might come to harm the larger group, or can be used to explain any failure or loss. In an argument reminiscent of Hartz's depiction of how the tyranny of unanimity surrounding liberalism leads to interpreting the alien as unintelligible abroad and simultaneous scapegoating of the alien at home,Footnote ¹³ Belkin claims that the rejection of the underside of American empire depends in large part on the ability to scapegoat minority groups such as gays within military culture both at home and abroad. It is easy to see how such arguments can be extended to similar scapegoating of larger constituencies at home such as immigrants or the poor as well.

Belkin theorizes that military masculinity instills authority, and this—in concert with the need to provide an easy resolution to the gender confusion implicit in notions of military masculinity that privilege the alienation of intimacy from sexuality—inculcates widespread obedience and conformity in its wake. Indeed, in the most direct illustration of the function such socialization serves, men who do not have family ties at home are simply more likely to find it easier to fight longer, harder, and with fewer distractions wherever they are sent. As long as their primary emotional needs are comprehensively fulfilled by their brethren, and their sexual needs can be bought and paid for by the system of prostitution that follows them,Footnote ¹⁴ this division between sexuality and intimacy serves the larger purposes of military effectiveness, even if it does not serve individual soldiers well in their attempts to transition back to civilian life. Belkin suggests that beliefs in the value of masculinity that infuse military culture depend on the rejection of any form of weakness, which then becomes intimately associated with notions of femininity, which are assumed to exist in diametrical opposition to the military masculine ideal.

Artistic expressions of this dichotomy speak volumes about its cultural ubiquity. Stanley Kubrick provides the most brilliant illustration of the perversion of such values in his film Full Metal Jacket, where the intricate association between sexuality and violence reaches its apex in the realistic depiction of men in boot camp being required to give girls' names to their rifles. Yet in the end, the entire unit is literally pinned down, and some members are assassinated, by a tiny female sniper. Kubrick's genius becomes evident in the penultimate scene in which, reminiscent of an adolescent male “circle jerk,” the one character (nicknamed Joker) depicted as representing the duality of man (because of his peace sign and “born to kill” logo) achieves union between his dichotomous impulses by unloading his rifle into the sniper in a mercy killing. Having assiduously avoided murder before this moment, Joker literally bursts his kill cherry in an act of compassion and vengeance, demonstrating the necessity of recognizing and acknowledging both masculine and feminine impetuses and contributions if peace is to be achieved.

In Belkin's book, the false dichotomies military establishments endorse between the masculine and the feminine create double binds and contradictions that unite glorified images of strong military men with the unquestioned expansion of American empire abroad. In his view, military masculinization both emerges out of these contradictions in a democracy-seeking empire, but also serves to perpetuate the political and social power of the United States at home and abroad. The unquestioned value of masculinity in American society is evident in many ways both subtle and profound, including the obsession with personal possession of assault-level firearms, but it reaches its crescendo in military forms, which makes it difficult to challenge activities designed to advance American empire abroad without seeming weak and unpatriotic. Thus, the inherent contradictions required for the pursuit of empire also make it difficult to challenge such activities without seeming to embrace a weakness rejected by the dominant military culture. In revealing the dynamics resulting from the rejection of the feminine in military ethos, Belkin reveals the intimate connections between constructions of gender and masculinity in personal relations and the hierarchies of power that create and sustain empire on the international stage.

Evangelista's book, Gender, Nationalism, and War, presents a quite consistent vision of how threats to the role of masculine identity contribute not only to economic declineFootnote ¹⁵ but also operate to increase misogynist violence within the context of wars of nationalism in particular. In this way, Evangelista, like Belkin, ties the perpetuation of violence to threats posed against traditional roles of masculinity. In an argument built in part on Enloe's exploration in “All the Men Are in the Militia, All the Women are Victims,”Footnote ¹⁶ Evangelista discusses how gender becomes central in nationalist or ethnic violence when men feel humiliated because bad economic conditions do not allow them to fulfill their expected social roles as family providers. Simultaneously, men also resent the relative improvement in female education and employment prospects that can put men at increased economic disadvantage, particularly in bad times, although women still tend to remain subjugated in these conflicts. When such men are unable to attract women because they cannot meet such established societal standards of masculinity, such as providing for their family by having a good job, they become prime recruiting material for nationalist militias that allow them to demonstrate an alternative, military, form of social prowess. Although such a role can allow men to gain status and money, and possibly even wives, it also places them at increased risk for substance abuse and suicide, problems that plague veterans returning from America's current military conflicts as well.

Evangelista motivates his study from insights generated by Woolf's Three Guineas, where she posits an intertwined relationship between gender, nationalism, and war, topics his book investigates in detail, using the illustrations provided by films to examine the deep historical, political, and psychosexual aspects of several different kinds of conflicts.Footnote ¹⁷ Woolf may have famously claimed that as a woman she had no country, but Evangelista probes whether or not this notion remains true for women in various conflicts.

Evangelista analyzes movies to explore the depiction of these relationships within the context of nationalist and ethnic conflicts in Algeria, Yugoslavia, Chechnya, and Quebec, each of which represents a different kind of conflict. In each case, Evangelista provides a detailed historical and political examination, highlighting the role of women. In this way, the book ironically emerges as less focused on the movies, but instead comes across as an imaginative work of international relations that explores various aspects of the role of women in conflict and happens to use a detailed analysis of representative films to illustrate its key theoretical claims. Contrasting the following films with the hyper-masculine depiction offered in High Noon, Evangelista examines how different kinds of conflict may engage women in different ways. In the Algerian case, The Battle of Algiers portrays the struggle of the local population against French colonial influence and control. Evangelista uses Pretty Village, Pretty Flame to explore the ethnic civil war in Yugoslavia, highlighting the role that sexual and domestic violence played in this conflict. The ongoing strife between Russians and Chechens is illustrated with a variety of movies, including Prisoner of the Mountains, Checkpoint, House of Fools, and Aleksandra to depict the stereotypes that infiltrate battles of secession. In Prisoner of the Mountains, for instance, there are competing narratives between a young woman in love with her captor and a mother trying to save her son. (The prevalent cultural myth of a knight in shining armor on a white horse derives from the history of men who engaged, and still engage, in bride capture by sweeping in on the common breed of white horse in Central Asia to rape and kidnap young women.) Finally, Evangelista uses No to portray the nationalist sentiments endemic in the Quebecois fight for national sovereignty in Canada.

Although all the cases Evangelista presents are instructive, his examination of The Battle of Algiers is especially evocative. By looking at how men in the FLN (the nationalist paramilitary group that led the war for Algerian independence from France) dressed in women's clothing and were hidden by women in wells, he analyzes how the subjective experience of humiliation in men can exert intergenerational effects, as their sons seek to redeem their sense of potency by taking out their frustrations on women. Evangelista raises the specter of violence among women, as well as against women, showing that women can serve as perpetrators of violence as well as its victims, emphasizing important work beginning to reveal these occurrences being undertaken by Wood,Footnote ¹⁸ Cohen,Footnote ¹⁹ and others. Evangelista's discussion of the Algerian conflict provides only one example of how the question of why and when women fight remains pivotal for consideration as women gain more political power throughout the developed world. In other words, the empirical record does not demonstrate that women are necessarily more peaceful simply because they are women. Women may fight for different reasons, and using perhaps different weapons than men, including spurring men to fight on their behalf, but that does not mean that under sufficient conditions of provocation, women will not fight and kill, particularly to save themselves or their children.

Townes in Women and States takes a different tack, analyzing the contribution of gender to the hierarchy of states through the prism of international norms. Townes argues that such norms help create and sustain particular standards of behavior, including ideas of how women should be treated, which also serve to simultaneously rank states in a hierarchical social structure. Thus, states wanting to improve their stature in the international realm learn that they must enhance the position of women in their society if they hope to improve their own international status rankings. In this view, the dispersion of social ideas that takes place as lower-status states seek to model high-status states by empowering women helps accounts for the rapidity with which human rights for women have spread around the globe since 1945 when former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt fought hard to embody the rights of women in the original United Nations convention. Such arguments are reminiscent of the constructivist arguments about the diffusion of other sorts of international norms around science and technology, the rules of war, and definitions of development put forward by Finnemore,Footnote ²⁰ although her arguments were not feminist in nature. From Townes's perspective, states that work to improve the rights of women may not be authentically devoted to such efforts, but rather pursue the empowerment of women in service of another goal that they believe this pursuit facilitates, namely an improvement in their own status.

Indeed, the empirical record for the positive association between the treatment and status of women and state security informs and supports the case that the development and privileging of a norm that explicitly supports women can enhance peace and prosperity for all.Footnote ²¹ For example, several studies have shown that states with greater gender equality are less likely to become involved in interstate disputes, and less likely to rely on violence to settle their conflicts.Footnote ²² Further work shows that states with gender inequality, ethnic inequality, and human rights abuses are not only more likely to engage in militarized interstate disputes such as war, but also to be the aggressors in those conflicts, and they were more likely to rely on force when involved in them.Footnote ²³ Further support for this argument can be found in Hudson and colleagues' work as well.

Greater domestic gender equality also appears to equate to fewer incidences of civil war,Footnote ²⁴ although gender conflicts can also perpetuate civil wars when women become symbols, targets, or proxies for men fighting such conflicts.Footnote ²⁵ Indeed, several domestic factors seem to interact and reciprocally influence the relationship between domestic security, the treatment of women, and international conflict. Marshall and Ramsey suggest that violence institutionalizes discrimination and inhibits gender equality.Footnote ²⁶ Regan and Paskeviciute argue that women's involvement in the political process predicts the likelihood of states engaging in interstate disputes.Footnote ²⁷ They also posit that nations with low fertility rates, used as a proxy for the status of women in society because it demonstrates that women have more control over their reproduction, do not fight each other.

However, Townes's argument overturns the more traditional assumptions in international relations that do not link the status of women to the status of states. This purported association thereby assumes an implicit feminist value about the importance of women's role in state relations that alone demonstrates how far the field has come from a time when an independent role for women was elided. However, it also subtly endorses the argument raised by Belkin and Evangelista that posits that gender hierarchies work to sustain masculine notions of power to the exclusion of alternative, more feminine constructs, from another perspective. Belkin and Evangelista show how artificially supported and maintained notions of male power can perpetuate violence because the empirical literature seems to suggest that greater gender equality makes conflict less likely on the international scene. The arguments positing the primacy of male influence suggest that such dominance inevitably undermines the more holistic and humane manifestations of influence more commonly, although perhaps erroneously, attributed to the influence of women. Such arguments leak to the extent the female influence appears less pacific than these authors suggest, a point I will return to in my discussion of Cohen's work.

In Sex and World Peace Hudson and colleagues take a large stride in linking these larger important outcomes in international politics, such as security, to the treatment of women at the individual level. In this way, their argument locates the course of many outcomes of enduring interest in international relations, including security, prosperity, democratization, health, and welfare, to the status and treatment of women in society. The book begins by identifying important aspects of female life that remain invisible in traditional treatments of security in international relations, including the enormous amount of unpaid caring labor on which even seemingly capitalist economies depend (a critical point in Slaughter's critique of Sandberg's argument as well), the commodification of women, how notions of shame and honor affect the quality of female life in societies that glorify such concepts, and how patrilocality makes women's lives more insecure.

The book then identifies three central so-called wounds experienced by women: lack of physical integrity; inequitable practices in family law by sex; and lack of parity in governance. Lack of physical integrity in their understanding extends far beyond the simple threat of death in war, and encompasses prevalent and endemic threats to female security around the globe, including female genital mutilation, maternal malnutrition and mortality, and control over reproduction. This might include such issues as adequate birth control in refugee camps, a current problem in many of the Syrian camps along the Turkish border. Inequitable practices in family law most often favor men in the areas of consent to marriage, inheritance, divorce and custody laws, and polygyny. Finally, lack of parity in governance examines the many ways in which women may be excluded from governance to the detriment of all.

Using the womanstats database Hudson and colleagues created,Footnote ²⁸ they provide maps to show the prevalence of these practices and others, such as polygyny, around the globe. In addition, they demonstrate that the best predictor of state peacefulness is not democracy or wealth, but the level of physical security women enjoy in a given society.Footnote ²⁹

This volume connects microlevel incidents of violence against women, as instantiated in inequity in family law, polygyny, and imbalanced sex ratios, to macrolevel occurrences such as conflict and war. In this way, the authors highlight the way in which legal institutions in particular serve to promulgate and perpetuate patterns of violence within the family and larger society. They argue that the true clash of civilizations does not take place between east and west, Christian and Muslim, as Huntington argued,Footnote ³⁰ but rather occurs in the chasm between men and women,Footnote ³¹ and how the discrepancy between attitudes, desires, expectations, responsibilities, and opportunities plays out on the world stage.

Employing a feminist evolutionary theory drawing on arguments from both political sociology and various subfields of psychology to link the microfoundations of male dominance in the home and state-level aggression, Hudson and colleagues locate the origins of state-level violence in individual relational dynamics.Footnote ³² If children learn that violence and aggression become the default mode of conflict resolution in the home, they come to see and understand it as a reasonable form of action in the wider world as well. By highlighting these macro-micro-level links, the authors offer a critical insight showing how those processes that individuals witness in the family become replicated, modeled, and mimicked in the larger global environment.Footnote ³³ This recognition is crucial not only because it locates individual developmental experience to explain aggregate international outcomes; it also provides an important theoretical link identifying the origins of the mechanisms individuals use to establish and sustain hierarchies of dominance in international relations to the use of violence within the family. This learning then generalizes to other domains throughout life, unconsciously but pervasively aligning dominance in the family to power between states through the threat or use of violence to maintain control over any group constructed as a weaker “other.” This argument remains consistent with that put forward by Belkin, whereby the justification for American empire is supported by the coercion required to contain the inherent juxtaposition of gender and suppression of women within the masculinized military model. The implicit and ubiquitous nature of these patterns, in turn, provides unquestioned justification for the growth of empire.

Finally, although the work appears in articles and not yet in book form, I think that Cohen's original interrogations of the role of female perpetrators in conflict settings merits brief comment. Using an original data set she collected, Cohen examines the role of women in facilitating and participating in rape, using cross-national data but looking specifically at the case of Sierra Leone. She shows convincingly that the rate of rape is not tied to gender inequality. Because most of the instances of rape she examines involve groups, Cohen argues that rape takes place as a part of combat socialization that bonds the perpetrators together, and that this bond creates cohesion that enhances performance. Obviously, such actions raise all kinds of concerns for broader issues of interest in international relations, including problems related to public health, the intergenerational transfer of violence, and prospects for reconciliation after conflict. Several scholars have suggested alternative explanations for the role of rape in war, but few aside from WoodFootnote ³⁴ and CohenFootnote ³⁵ have examined the role of women in perpetuating such acts. These analyses are important for highlighting the critical need to investigate the implicit assumptions often informing the literature on gender and conflict, or gender and public opinion that presupposes that women are inherently more peaceful than men. Although this may be true in some circumstances, such as women's willingness to endorse the use of force in public opinion surveys, it may not necessarily hold true under conditions characterized by more immediate kinds of threats.

Methodological Divergences and Theoretical Underspecification

These books and articles, like much of the work in feminist political science, not only present different views of the role and contribution of women, or notions of the feminine, in the construction and perpetuation of violence, but they also support their arguments on the basis of different methodologies, thereby revealing an implicit but fundamental divergence in the nature of feminist research.Footnote ³⁶ Much of the early feminist literature, and the majority of the current wider literature in this area, leverages qualitative, experiential, narrative, and observational data to locate and analyze the telling revelations that separate male from female perspectives. This representation itself both reveals and recreates hierarchies of exclusion and power within the academy while simultaneously indicting such processes in international relations. Feminists often relegate quantitative work to the realm of male influence and experience, even considering it false consciousness in succumbing to male methods of power, thereby surrendering powerful methods and models that could be leveraged to further substantiate the arguments made by feminist analysis regarding inequities in outcome by sex. Hudson and colleaguesFootnote ³⁷ and CohenFootnote ³⁸ provide a refreshing antidote to this tendency in their efforts, which utilize extensive cross-national data to inform their arguments and summaries. Like Townes and Kinsella,Footnote ³⁹ they examine the role of institutions, particularly legal organizations, in perpetuating such patterns of power imbalance within particular societies.

More significantly, however, these books provide powerful observations and illustrations of the links between gender and violence, but the basis of these links often remains theoretically underspecified. The reason rests, as least in part, on uninterrogated notions about the origins of sex differences, insufficient investigation of the differing motives for violence and aggression between men and women, and the differing forms of coalitional psychology that undergird these tendencies. Some important considerations may help provide avenues to enlighten future theoretical specification regarding divergences in assumptions regarding: the ontological basis of sex differences; differences in what motivates men and women to fight; and important sex-based consequences of variant psychologies for offense and defense. None of these arguments are intended to invalidate the important claims, empirical findings, and arguments of the authors reviewed in this article. Nor are they intended as any kind of authoritative consensus moving forward. Rather, they represent my observations about significant lacuna in the literature whose further investigation I believe is both warranted and may lead to greater theoretical cohesion in future examinations.

Sex Differences in the Psychology of Offense Versus DefenseFootnote ⁵⁰

The argued sex difference in motivation for fighting also points to a fundamental divergence in the psychology of offense versus the psychology of defense that has important ramifications and implications for sex differences in support of such campaigns. When a group is threatened, perhaps by invasion, a psychology of defense is engaged, whereby both men and women will align in support of military response to protect territory, material resources, and family members. In some cases, women may fight; in others, they may encourage men to fight on their behalf. This motivation aligns with what Evangelista argued about female involvement in nationalist campaigns, as well as Belkin's subtle linkage between military masculinization—the sublimation of intimacy and the growth of empire. In these threats, men and women work together to defend and protect the resources and values they hold dear, and consider vital to their survival and the welfare of the next generation. In such fights, everyone participates and any benefits that derive from a successful enterprise, such as safety and security, are shared equally by all.

However, in an offensive campaign, an entirely different psychology dominates. Such campaigns are not typically considered essential to survival. Although those who engage in such offensive actions may benefit by possibly obtaining increased access to particular resources, including booty, war brides, or increased status at home, those who stay home may not benefit as greatly, and thus may not be as motivated to pay the price for others to gain enhanced access to excludable goods. In such campaigns, although threat to life and limb may be differentially borne by particular men, they are also the ones who are most likely to obtain differential benefit from such activities. Thus, in offensive campaigns, male and female support may predictably diverge, where men, particularly unmarried men from poor backgrounds, with fewer prospects, will prove much more likely to engage in such campaigns. By the same logic, postreproductive-age women with young sons will prove most likely to resist such efforts, fearing for their sons' safety, and thus their own legacy, in the midst of such militarized campaigns.

This divergence in the psychology of offense and defense points not only to predictable sex differences in type and level of support but also illuminates one of the reasons that leaders may be motivated to misrepresent offensive wars as defensive in nature. By pointing to imminent threats in this way, creative leaders can overcome endemic problems of labor recruitment to military service, and enroll otherwise reluctant women to support military activity they might otherwise oppose. This phenomenon illustrates how those who might be more prone to fear might have lower thresholds for interpreting offense as defense, encouraging greater support for military activity among those who feel more physically vulnerable.

This differential psychology in offense versus defense mirrors the nature of sexual dimorphism in coalitionary psychology as well, and in fact may reflect it in origin. Men possess a coalitionary psychology that privileges group behavior—examples of this predilection abound and can be seen in everything from sports teams to combat. Indeed, combat likely shaped these dynamics over evolutionary time, given the high death rates that appear evident in such communities before the onset of militarized conflict.Footnote ⁵¹ Women on the other hand tend to prefer dyadic interactions of deep emotional engagement, likely because such practices helped with establishing bonds with children, potentiating children's cognitive and emotional development, and with mothers and sisters who helped with child care.

In short, men tend to be more autonomous and independent and women tend to be more interdependent.Footnote ⁵² A reflection of this dynamic can be seen in mating behaviors, where important new work demonstrates that men and women obtain self-worth in relationships from fundamentally different sources: men seek social standing and women seek companionship,Footnote ⁵³ highlighting that the relative audiences for relationship status differ by sex.