The other day Zippy Catholic wrote:
The most primal power of men is violence. Therefore the besetting sins of incontinent men tend to be sins of violence primarily, and to involve sex only circumstantially/accidentally. A violent man will use violence to get sex that he desires, but he will also use violence to get other things that he desires: money, drugs, prestige, etc. This decreases as individual power decreases: the besetting sins of incontinent men with diminished capacity for violence will tend to be more effeminate or androgynous sins.
[…]
This is reflected in prison populations, which are mostly men, because our society is willing to punish crimes of violence but is not willing to punish crimes of sex.
This is, basically, what I believed for years and it is what I was taught. However, it is a false–but seductive–dichotomy which is not actually true. And is not actually reflected in prison populations; 66.7% of which are non-violent criminals and only 33.3% are.
Criminals Imprisoned for Crimes of Violence
| g | Homicide, Aggravated Assault, and Kidnapping Offenses | 5,596 | 3.20% |
| k | Robbery | 6,565 | 3.80% |
| l | Sex Offenses | 15,873 | 9.10% |
| m | Weapons, Explosives, Arson | 29,881 | 17.20% |
| 33.30% |
Criminals Imprisoned for Non-Violent Crimes
| a | Banking and Insurance, Counterfeit, Embezzlement | 517 | 0.30% |
| b | Burglary, Larceny, Property Offenses | 8,171 | 4.70% |
| c | Continuing Criminal Enterprise | 387 | 0.20% |
| d | Courts or Corrections | 802 | 0.50% |
| e | Drug Offenses | 80,585 | 46.30% |
| f | Extortion, Fraud, Bribery | 11,231 | 6.40% |
| h | Immigration | 13,227 | 7.60% |
| i | Miscellaneous | 1,305 | 0.70% |
| j | National Security | 68 | 0.00% |
| 66.70% |
In fact, the most primal power of men is the ability to produce work, and the besetting sin of incontinent men is avoidance of productive work. Here are the same stats grouped to reflect that.
Criminals Imprisoned for Unlawful Gain
| a | Banking and Insurance, Counterfeit, Embezzlement | 517 | 0.30% |
| b | Burglary, Larceny, Property Offenses | 8,171 | 4.70% |
| c | Continuing Criminal Enterprise | 387 | 0.20% |
| e | Drug Offenses | 80,585 | 46.30% |
| f | Extortion, Fraud, Bribery | 11,231 | 6.40% |
| h | Immigration | 13,227 | 7.60% |
| i | Miscellaneous | 1,305 | 0.70% |
| k | Robbery | 6,565 | 3.80% |
| 70.00% |
Criminals Imprisoned for Gainless Crimes
| d | Courts or Corrections | 802 | 0.50% |
| g | Homicide, Aggravated Assault, and Kidnapping Offenses | 5,596 | 3.20% |
| l | Sex Offenses | 15,873 | 9.10% |
| j | National Security | 68 | 0.00% |
| m | Weapons, Explosives, Arson | 29,881 | 17.20% |
| 30.00% |
It would be even more skewed than that if we could tease out from “gainless crimes” those crimes which were committed en route to unlawful gain; murder for hire, murder for drug turf control, assault for intimidation, kidnapping for ransom, sale of weapons or explosives, arson for fraud, prostitution, pimping, etc. The split is probably closer to 80/20 unlawful gain/gainless crime and possibly even 90/10.
What Zippy, tough-on-crime politicians, and my younger self were noticing was not “the most primal power of men”, but the most sensational. Violence can be scary to everyone, but it really scares the hell out of women. And the West is one giant gynecology office where every problem is a pussy problem.
Things that We have Heard and Known 
Zippy’s point was that men will use violence as a means to gain other things that they want, so these kinds of crimes serve Zippy’s point.
The statistics you cite also don’t separate the offense percentage by age or gender, and they only tell us what those inmates are convicted of; they don’t tell us anything about what else they may have done but for which they were not convicted. Drugs (by far the most significant portion of the “non-violent” crimes) is heavily associated with violent behavior.
In addition, in order for your replacement of “violence” with “producing work” into Zippy’s analogy, it would need to read “The most primal power of men is the ability to produce work, so the most besetting sins of incontinent men are sins of producing work; men will produce work in order to gain other things they want (sex, drugs, etc.),” which I don’t think makes much sense.
Correction to my comment above: they do separate by sex, but not by age (which Zippy admitted was a factor that lead to more effeminate sins from men).
@TimF
But most men–even among criminals–don’t. That’s the thing.
Age is irrelevant because the topic is the sex division of powers and sins. If you go the the Bureau of Prisons link above, you can click on “gender” and it will give you the percentages: 93.2% of prisoners are men, and 6.8% women. So even if we subtract all women (6.8%) from the non-violent category (which is probably wrong), it would still be that men are 59.9% of prisoners for non-violent crimes, and only 33.3% for violent.
Most drug crimes are non-violent, by far. Again: It’s the sensational ones (e.g., Mexican cartel activity) that grab our attention. Where I’m at, weed and meth are big. In the eastern heartlands, opiates are big. Yet we don’t have a huge increase in violent crime in either area. My guess is that you haven’t known any drug users, and haven’t looked at the data.
I do not propose a plug-in replacement for Zippy’s formula. It’s more like “Men have the power of work. Their besetting sin is sloth.”
If most of the criminals in the “drugs” category fall under the subset of “users” then why are they included in the “Unlawful gain” aspect of crime? How is it unlawful gain to use drugs? That’s what made me think of violence associated with drugs, because the unlawful gain comes from sellers and distributors, who are closer to the violence used by organized crime.
So is your analysis that the besetting sin of women is them using their most primal power, and the besetting sin of men not using their most primal power? I think that sloth is the besetting sin of effeminate incontinent men, but I’m not sure sloth is the besetting sin of really masculine men. Sloth might be the besetting sin of men in our society, because our society is emasculated.
@TimF
Most users don’t go to prison for using. They go to prison for selling; though admittedly smaller quantities. Anyways: Gain is gain. I may think gaining drugs is stupid, but it is gain.
No. There’ll be another post.
Yes.
Men and women are more different than that. It is probably some fragment of egalitarianism that lead my younger self to decide, “If men suffer/have mostly X, then women must suffer/have mostly Y.” I don’t think even our sins are equal.
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Cane,
I agree that men’s power is not all about violence and destruction (although I do think the feministas would like the general populace to believe so). Power can also be based on providing for a need. Men need things from women, but women need things from men too. I think the Manosphere, and people in general, doesn’t consider the positive aspects of power enough, because those are the aspects most neglected in modern society.
Thanks for doing the research and crunching the data.
@ Tim, Cane
Genesis 1:28 God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply (e.g. sex(, and fill the earth, and subdue it (e.g. dominion); and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the [al]sky and over every living thing that [am]moves on the earth.”
Genesis 2:15 Then the Lord God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it. (e.g. work) 16 The Lord God commanded the man, saying, “From any tree of the garden you may eat freely; 17 but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not [n]eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die.”
According to the Scriptures, power/dominion, sex, and work are there.
Albeit, dominion was commanded over the earth and the animals. This fits Cane’s point better.
Gents,
Cane says:
“I do not propose a plug-in replacement for Zippy’s formula. It’s more like ‘Men have the power of work. Their besetting sin is sloth’.”
I haven’t done the analysis (it would take a long time), but I think the Old Testament supports Cane’s point. Scriptures that condemn dishonest or unlawful gain are more numerous than scriptures that condemn violence. And, of the ones that condemn violence, most connect violence with dishonest or unlawful gain.
Again, I haven’t done the analysis, but Cane’s proposition seems correct.
@TimF
Zippy wrote what almost everyone believes: That violence is the besetting sin of men. The data does not support that.
As DS noted: Violence isn’t part of the general, overall, command to Adam. As Oscar noted: The OT is much less concerned with violence than it is with proper work.
And just look around you: How many physical fights have you witnessed at your job?
“Damn it, Bob! Where’s my TPS Report?” THWACK!
What about the grocery store check-out line?
“That’ll be $87.25, sir.”
“The hell it will. Taste my kung fu!
Personally, I’ve never seen it. I have been involved with some nearly physical altercations (usually involving blue collar union guys on the east coast), but it never actually came to blows. And once while I was a construction worker I almost started a fight when someone said, “Yeah well: Fuck Texas”.
Frankly, I’ve seen a lot more situations in my life where someone could have used a good ass-whoopin’ than I’ve seen them delivered.
Let’s not forget that women are often quite violent. Here’s a site that says, for example, that 71% of children killed by one parent are killed by the mother, and that 60% of the victims are boys.
Outside of motherhood women are violent on a pretty regular basis. They are always hitting. The trouble is our perception of things, because women can’t do as much work as men; so when they hit not much happens beyond perhaps a sting.
Violence is not a “besetting sin”[1] of men; especially when compared to women. It is just one more way in which we are more powerful than them.
There’s a quote from C.S. Lewis that I don’t have time to find. He writes that societies have organized themselves so that women are the mistresses of the homes because men are calmer at dealing with the outside world. I recall that he asks, if your dog bit your neighbor’s child, would you rather deal with the child’s father, or its mother?
Well, if violence is the besetting sin of men, wouldn’t we rather it the mother? Of course it is not.
Depends on the family. If it was my family, you’d want to deal with the mother.
Once some kid, back when my brother and I were middle schoolers kept doing the whole ding-dong-ditch thing at our house – ring the doorbell then run off. Pissed my dad off like nothing else.
The last time it happened my dad was nursing some sort of ankle injury – like it mattered. This time he hobbled out the front door, angry as everything, and started to chase the poor bastard. Must have been a site to behold. The kid, of course, outran him, but my father yelled down the street that he was going to call the police.
The site of a crazy middle-aged man going out to chase some young athletic kid on one foot with death in his eyes scared the kid so much he turned around and yelled his name. We recognized it, and ended up calling his parents – who were not happy.
Unfortunately the kid was a spoiled brat, and his behavior didn’t really change in the long run – but nobody dong-dong-ditched us again.
This post makes a really good point, and like most good points I read here, it conforms better to scripture than the conventional wisdom. Labor was the key task that God gave Adam, and it shows up again in the curse levied at the fall.
@Cane – I believe that quote comes from Chesterton in “Orthodoxy.”
@Ryder
Thanks.
And I found the quote. It’s a footnote from C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity.
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This might work as a critique of my post if women were not also lazy, greedy, etc. But my OP was about distinguishing primal capacities and associated sins of men vs women, not about aggregate statistics.
So I don’t think you are objecting to my actual point as much as you are making an entirely different one. My post is about characteristic sins of commission based on primal powers distinguishing the sexes. Moving to sins of omission isn’t an objection, it is a change of subject.
Even so, I am not certain it is correct that the besetting sin of omission of men is some combination of laziness/avarice. Cowardice seems to rank pretty high too.
@Zippy
I agree that I I did not object to the actual point of your post. That’s because I disagree with this premise (from your post):
especially the bolded bits. Aggregate crime statistics–records of actual commissioned sins–are important when identifying which sins beset, and are primary.
For example, I tend to think of poison as a weapon of women; that women tend to use poison in the commission of murder while men tend to use external tools. Perhaps that’s true: I don’t know. I haven’t done the research. What I do know is that if the data shows that women murder more with guns and knives than with poison, and that men poison more than they bludgeon, then I should re-examine my position that poison is a woman’s weapon.
I commented on your post at all because what you wrote reads as a Christian rationalization of the false idea of “Toxic Masculinity”. It’s a form of apex fallacy. In this case the apex is shocking violence. While the term Toxic Masculinity is recent, for centuries now the idea has been used to subvert husbands and fathers, and to goad women into rebellion.
I think we can make a pretty good case for that, too. It’s certainly in the running.
@Cane:
Then maybe you need to look closer at your own data and groupings:
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Nonsense. The violence of incontinent men is no more (or less) “toxic masculinity” than the sluttiness of incontinent women is “toxic femininity”. Each is a warped and distorted version of masculinity/femininity, respectively: the rational animal reduced to animal, appetite with primal powers.
The apex fallacy is stereotyping all men based on the supposed “alphas”, rendering the majority of the male population invisible. More generally the error is in stereotyping all men based on a subset of men.
But my post was never about all men to begin with, which is what seems to have sent you off the rails. It was about men who are (1) masculine, not effeminate, therefore distinctively men with primal masculine power; and (2) incontinent, not virtuous.
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