It’s extremely weird to me that you do not consider aggression to be a masculine trait.
However there are many cultural differences in what is considered masculine, hence the problem. A lot of Asian cultures consider risk-taking to be anti-masculine, for instance.
Perhaps I do, the point is that we may define it differently, this is why I am trying to taboo it and focus on more concrete examples. In my vocab aggression is something assymetric—like picking a fight with a weaker, easily terrorized opponent, while picking opponents of roughly equal dangerousness (to prove something) is closer to competitiveness for me. Aggression wants to hurt, competition wants to challenge—although often through hurting.
I don’t see why you choose to define aggression in that way, unless it is just to support your point. At the risk of being too reliant on dictionary definitions, the various definitions of aggression that I’ve seen are “the practice of making assaults or attacks; offensive action in general” or “feelings of anger or antipathy resulting in hostile or violent behaviour; readiness to attack or confront.” Nothing there about the size or strength of the opponent.
These are victim-centric definitions. IMHO if you want to understand the motoves of the perp you need to see a clear difference between “intent to harm” vs. “intent to challenge”. Like, go back a few hundred years in history and you will see a huge, really huge difference of social opinion between challenging someone to a duel to death vs. just back-stabbing them.
It’s extremely weird to me that you do not consider aggression to be a masculine trait.
However there are many cultural differences in what is considered masculine, hence the problem. A lot of Asian cultures consider risk-taking to be anti-masculine, for instance.
Perhaps I do, the point is that we may define it differently, this is why I am trying to taboo it and focus on more concrete examples. In my vocab aggression is something assymetric—like picking a fight with a weaker, easily terrorized opponent, while picking opponents of roughly equal dangerousness (to prove something) is closer to competitiveness for me. Aggression wants to hurt, competition wants to challenge—although often through hurting.
I don’t see why you choose to define aggression in that way, unless it is just to support your point. At the risk of being too reliant on dictionary definitions, the various definitions of aggression that I’ve seen are “the practice of making assaults or attacks; offensive action in general” or “feelings of anger or antipathy resulting in hostile or violent behaviour; readiness to attack or confront.” Nothing there about the size or strength of the opponent.
These are victim-centric definitions. IMHO if you want to understand the motoves of the perp you need to see a clear difference between “intent to harm” vs. “intent to challenge”. Like, go back a few hundred years in history and you will see a huge, really huge difference of social opinion between challenging someone to a duel to death vs. just back-stabbing them.