Tanya Basu reports on findings by two academics with very little understanding of human nature and conflict, who are committed to doing academic back-flips to explain the reasons for European nations going to war more often under queens than kings.
“New York University scholars Oeindrila Dube and S.P. Harish analyzed 28 European queenly reigns from 1480 to 1913 and found a 27 percent increase in wars when a queen was in power, as compared to the reign of a king.”
Dube and Harish are doing important work. However, their line of inquiry is prejudicial, outwardly denying from the start that the war policies of kings and queens being different could not possibly have anything to do with gender differences, which, after all, in academia are not permitted to exist. As usual, a broader understanding of human behavior might have set the researchers off on a more balanced footing:
The higher level of aggression among modern women once given the vote, demonstrated by the fact that women have consistently voted for more government laws [proxy aggression] than have male voters.
The higher frequency of child abuse by women compared to men.
The higher level of aggression demonstrated by female slave owners toward their chattel when compared to that of male slave owners.
The higher level of aggression shown by tribeswomen of various cultures towards captured warriors.
The higher level of physical abuse by the dyke partner of lesbian couples compared to the male partner of traditional couples.
Any of these considerations might point the open-minded researcher toward the very logical fact that women—who are physically powerless to impose their will on men—when put into positions of lethal social power, are more likely to apply proxy force than are men, who have at least a history of the untidy complications of applied force in their own personal experience. Then again, for Dube and Harish to go against the current genderless orthodoxy would be like asking Galileo to propose that the sun did not revolve around the earth in opposition to Church orthodoxy.
Thank you, Hesther, for the link to this article.
