No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us

by Rachel Louise Snyder

But why? Why did men believe this? Sinclair understands, of course, the arguments about human evolution, how we must kill to survive (to eat, he means). He’s willing to believe that maybe at some point, far back in human history, men had some kind of predisposition toward violence in order to feed their families. But no longer, not today, and not for many hundreds of years. Beyond this history, he rejects the notion that violence is inherent to the male species, that men are somehow born to fight. For starters, we no longer need such violence to survive; instead, what we need now is to “intimate,” as he puts it. And in this, men have no belief system, because men are taught violence, but they are not taught intimacy. “Violence is a skill that we all had to learn just to stay with the pack growing up,” he said. “The trouble is, it doesn’t work for intimacy. That’s a whole different set of skills.”