It is useless for women to blame violence on men, and it would be futile for men to blame violence on women. Violence is built into both of us. When Margaret Thatcher constructed a nuclear navy, she was not behaving in a manner distinctly male, nor was she behaving in a manner distinctly female. She wasn’t even obeying a set of impulses that are uniquely human. Thatcher, like Rome’s Livia, was in the grip of passions we share with gorillas and baboons, passions implanted in the primordial layers of the triune brain.
