It depends. There's a practical and mechanical difference between one group being more liked than average, and one group being more disliked than average. Even though the situations can be equivalent in a purely logical sense, the nature of the difference changes
If there are two groups (and in addition they are roughly equal size) those are entirely interchangeable as there is no logical "standard" to compare to except eachother
(Speaking only to the "liked more than average" and "disliked more than average", not the general opposition of preferred vs dis-preferred.)
Imagine if there are 200 people, 100 of category A and 100 of category B. It's possible for members of category A to be simultaneously "liked more than average" and "disliked more than average". If 20 A's are liked and 20 A's are disliked, while only 10 B's are liked and 10 B's are disliked, then A's are liked 33% more than average and disliked 33% more than average.
Yes, but that will either cancel out to the average in group B matching the total average, or it won't, meaning the average of B is significantly different from the total average.
The question is "what does liked more than average mean?"
I think it's more naturally interpreted as a frequency question ('given a random A, how likely is it that I would say "I like this person"?') rather than an average/sum question ('what is the total likability of all members of A minus the total dislikability of all members of A?')
Consider the following thought experiment: a world with similar sexual dynamics as ours, but where women and men have equal physical strength and capacity for violence. In this case, although the traits would be defined as relative between the each of the two groups, the lack of a specific asymmetry in this case changes the dynamic completely. Whereas in our world, the difference of capacity introduces an asymmetric dimension that influences the relative mix of reactions each gender has towards the other.
The fact that men are specifically feared for some imbalance, whereas women are specifically valued for others, makes it not exactly interchangeable even if the standards only exist in a relative sense. In the hypothetical world, men (and perhaps women) would place extra value on women due to the way sexual desire and attraction works, but men would be seen more neutrally (or with disinterest rather than fear) than in our situation.
In our world women and men has equal capacity for violence. Time and time again we see researchers come to this conclusion. How we view violence is colored by our culture and views about gender roles, and thus gender and violence get mixed up. The same problem occurs with race. White and black people obviously have equal capacity for violence, but black men (and women) are more feared by white people. In the past people would use genetics and race theory to explain this, but today we know to avoid those traps in our thinking.
I understand the argument you are going for, and agree that we must obviously consider the role of culture, but it's not plausible to claim that the capacity for violence is equal. The comparison with ethnicity is flawed because in the case of gender you have clear physical differences, the most notable of which being that the majority of women would have much difficulty physically overcoming the majority of men in life or death situations, barring superior tactics or weaponry. If, say, the propensity of each gender towards violence was identical, this mere fact would already provide a culturally significant imbalance.
I'm not sure what research you are pointing towards, but I sincerely doubt that the propensity for violence is identical, either. Consider the following scenario: a person points a gun to your head and tells you to pick a person at random either amongst all of the women or amongst all of the men (let's sidestep the question of gender neutrality for the sake of the argument) If the person you pick has an aggressive and violent psychological profile, you are shot. Which gender would you pick in this situation to maximize your survival? Would you sincerely rely on your intuition about equal capacity for violence in this case?
Equal capacity for violence? Yes.
Equal capacity for violence in a specific cultural context? No.
Let say you wrote a AI that detected if a person talks negative about a other person in order to make themselves look (or feel) better. We run this AI over a messenger network with true identities. Will men or women be tagged proportional more often?
An other example, let count the number of bullying victim in schools and number of people who are guilty of committing bullying. Will it be boys or girls that are found guilty more often?
A person who wields a gun is more like male because people who own and wield guns in this culture is male. If the person were a poisoner, statistics will say it is a woman. Why? Culture.
What research on violence say is that violence is defined by culture, and if the violence we highlight is those typical of male culture then that is the kind of violence we see. For a very long time researcher did not even consider that female-female competition existed among animals because the only form of competition researcher know of was defined in term of male-male competition. It was only in recent decades that they realized that, in contrast to previous theories, females do compete with each other that mirror the violence seen in males. It just happens to be very different form of violence, although the consequences were often just as deadly as male-male competition.
I would consider that verbal bullying, school bullying perhaps even poisoning are not as violent as brutally killing or maiming people on the spot, sexual assault, and so on, which are more male oriented in general.
Let's say we take the cultural argument at face value. If the capacity for violence is identical, why did we come to have a culture that fears men more or highlights male violence? Why were researchers blind to female-female competition in the first place? The explanation is that the violence in question has a dimension of brutality and assertiveness towards challenges that goes beyond just classifying it as male or female and leaving it at that in a cultural relativist sense. If it were completely equal, it would have been very unlikely that we would have assigned such lopsided values to these types of violence since no tradition or cultural expectation is completely divorced from material reality.
Question like those is why researchers goes to animal observations. Easier to make conclusions without introducing too much cultural assumptions.
In the jungle people find a dead young female baboon. She is apparently dead from starvation, so we hastily conclude it was natural causes. The researcher however who observed the flock gives a different explanation. The young female was healthy just a few weeks ago, but after joining the flock she got continuously bitten and scratched by other females whenever she went to eat or tried to sleep. After weeks of constant stress, lack of sleep and food she died.
In contrast we might find a dead young male baboon clearly beaten to death. They joined the same flock recently and after a large fight over dominance the young male acquired injuries and died. Which of the two cases displayed more capacity for violence, brutality or aggressiveness? Is a brawl better or worse than cold calculated murder?
> why did we come to have a culture that fears men
Very good question. One likely answer is that we have a culture that reward men who commit violence in the right context. Why do men get rewarded for violence? There are many contradicting theories and books on that subject. Are humans inherently violent or peaceful? Is society holding back the savage beast or is cooperation the human default behavior? A lot of questions, a lot of research, a lot of theories.
If you want to dig down into those question there are good books and other sources on it. The stanford Human Behavioral Biology lecture serie on youtube is a good start (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PL848F2368C...). The same researcher has also a book called Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, which focus a fair bit on aggression and violence. There is War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage, which also has a counter-argument book which name is currently evading me.
I must confess, I don't have a definite answer to your questions. Thank you for the recommendations, I enjoy this topic very much and have heard good things about this researcher so I will check those out.
Disagree. Biologically, men are bigger, stronger, and more aggressive.
This is also true for basically all large social mammals (cats, dogs, deer, ...), and seems to be a consequence of the fact that female parental investment is greater than male parental investment. In situations like seahorses where the male paternal investment is greater than the female, it is the females that are bigger, stronger and more aggressive.
Size, strength and aggression are directly related to capacity for violence. Men are bigger, stronger and more aggressive, and therefore have a higher capacity for violence. This is why we separate men and women for e.g. boxing or MMA.
You mention dogs. Which one is more likely to fights among themselves, owning two females or two males?
An other easy question. Let have two human households, one where two men live together and one where two women live together. Which one is more likely to have domestic violence?
Based on biologically, those two should have a very clear and simple answer. The actually answer is that two female dogs are more likely to fight than two male dogs, and in human households, both of them has statistically identical rates of domestic violence.
