Are Men More Violent than Women
or Did They Get Stuck with the Job?

Let’s start with some numbers:

· 2,200 mass shootings in America, as of September 2025, averaging seven per day.

· 45,222 people lives lost to firearms in 2024.

· 98% of mass shooters are male.

· Two thirds of guns in the U.S. are owned by men.

· 2,500 children killed by guns in 2022. Guns are the leading cause of deaths in children in the US. Children of color were 18 times more likely to get killed.

· Men are 86% more likely to be killed by guns than women. When women are killed, it’s more often by their male partner.

· There are 30 wars going on in the world right now. All of them are between or within countries with male heads of state.

With these numbers, it’s easy to draw the conclusion that men are more violent than women. But maybe that isn’t really true. Maybe men just got stuck with the job. And maybe they’ve been programmed for that job ever since. And that means that just maybe they can find a better job and save themselves and the planet too.

Hear me out, guys.

Back when we lived in tribes, it’s easy to imagine how the tribes might fight over scarcities of land and water. It’s also easy to imagine that if a village were invaded by another tribe, the men would tell their pregnant or nursing wives to go hide with the children while they picked up whatever weapons they could find to defend their family. That is the noble, valiant, protective male spirit.

But a tribe only needed to get beat up once to decide to prepare for the next time, to make more weapons, to train their brothers and sons, to take more time and money away from their homestead and community, and put it into defense. Because if you don’t survive, what else is there?

And one fight only had to escalate to another before the weapons got larger and more lethal, before those trainings and their militaristic mindset took over everything, instituting a top-down, power-over form of leadership. Men who went off to war for months or years at a time couldn’t afford to miss their wife and children. They couldn’t afford to be scared of losing their limbs or their life. That would endanger the mission. That wasn’t manly.

The rules in the military were to follow the leader without question. Obedience was key.

Fast forward to today.

How many of you men were given soldiers and tanks to play with as children? How many found your most precious moments with your Dad talking about hunting? How many of you feared that you weren’t going to be man enough if you weren’t tough, that truly caring about others was feminine and weak?

How many of you watched TV shows where guns made people submit, or where the good guy shoots the bad guy, rather than redeem him?

How many movies fuse masculinity with violence? Where the sexy guy with the pretty girl stood with a rifle or handgun?

 Now I know that the majority of men today would never pick up a gun and shoot someone. I know the majority of you really care about this world, and will even fight for what you believe.

But fighting isn’t the way anymore. It’s the old, tired, us versus them, I’m right and you’re wrong, that just doesn’t work anymore.  Until we de-couple masculinity with violence, we will never have peace. Our children will never be safe. There will always be wars.

We love your valiant, protective spirit. But it’s time now to redefine what it means to protect. It’s time to protect our lands from exploitation, to protect our democracy from authoritarianism, and to protect our children from guns.

You can do it, guys. You can create a manhood that is dynamic and sexy without violence and domination. You can walk out of violent movies, you can demand a new story, or create one yourself. You can be spiritual warriors, warriors of love.

The women can’t do it for you. We’re too busy cleaning up after the fight, finding the food, tending to the injured, trying to figure out how to make ends meet.

But we can love you for your noble spirit. We can love you for doing what’s right, for not falling into the obedience of a soldier, but for standing up for the noble values that will lead us into the future.

You can make your masculinity sacred and holy once again.

Anodea Juditith is a member of the FMM Advisory Board.  See more of her work at her substack.