Equal capacity for violence? Yes.
Equal capacity for violence in a specific cultural context? No.
Let say you wrote a AI that detected if a person talks negative about a other person in order to make themselves look (or feel) better. We run this AI over a messenger network with true identities. Will men or women be tagged proportional more often?
An other example, let count the number of bullying victim in schools and number of people who are guilty of committing bullying. Will it be boys or girls that are found guilty more often?
A person who wields a gun is more like male because people who own and wield guns in this culture is male. If the person were a poisoner, statistics will say it is a woman. Why? Culture.
What research on violence say is that violence is defined by culture, and if the violence we highlight is those typical of male culture then that is the kind of violence we see. For a very long time researcher did not even consider that female-female competition existed among animals because the only form of competition researcher know of was defined in term of male-male competition. It was only in recent decades that they realized that, in contrast to previous theories, females do compete with each other that mirror the violence seen in males. It just happens to be very different form of violence, although the consequences were often just as deadly as male-male competition.
I would consider that verbal bullying, school bullying perhaps even poisoning are not as violent as brutally killing or maiming people on the spot, sexual assault, and so on, which are more male oriented in general.
Let's say we take the cultural argument at face value. If the capacity for violence is identical, why did we come to have a culture that fears men more or highlights male violence? Why were researchers blind to female-female competition in the first place? The explanation is that the violence in question has a dimension of brutality and assertiveness towards challenges that goes beyond just classifying it as male or female and leaving it at that in a cultural relativist sense. If it were completely equal, it would have been very unlikely that we would have assigned such lopsided values to these types of violence since no tradition or cultural expectation is completely divorced from material reality.
Question like those is why researchers goes to animal observations. Easier to make conclusions without introducing too much cultural assumptions.
In the jungle people find a dead young female baboon. She is apparently dead from starvation, so we hastily conclude it was natural causes. The researcher however who observed the flock gives a different explanation. The young female was healthy just a few weeks ago, but after joining the flock she got continuously bitten and scratched by other females whenever she went to eat or tried to sleep. After weeks of constant stress, lack of sleep and food she died.
In contrast we might find a dead young male baboon clearly beaten to death. They joined the same flock recently and after a large fight over dominance the young male acquired injuries and died. Which of the two cases displayed more capacity for violence, brutality or aggressiveness? Is a brawl better or worse than cold calculated murder?
> why did we come to have a culture that fears men
Very good question. One likely answer is that we have a culture that reward men who commit violence in the right context. Why do men get rewarded for violence? There are many contradicting theories and books on that subject. Are humans inherently violent or peaceful? Is society holding back the savage beast or is cooperation the human default behavior? A lot of questions, a lot of research, a lot of theories.
If you want to dig down into those question there are good books and other sources on it. The stanford Human Behavioral Biology lecture serie on youtube is a good start (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PL848F2368C...). The same researcher has also a book called Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, which focus a fair bit on aggression and violence. There is War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage, which also has a counter-argument book which name is currently evading me.
I must confess, I don't have a definite answer to your questions. Thank you for the recommendations, I enjoy this topic very much and have heard good things about this researcher so I will check those out.
Let say you wrote a AI that detected if a person talks negative about a other person in order to make themselves look (or feel) better. We run this AI over a messenger network with true identities. Will men or women be tagged proportional more often?
An other example, let count the number of bullying victim in schools and number of people who are guilty of committing bullying. Will it be boys or girls that are found guilty more often?
A person who wields a gun is more like male because people who own and wield guns in this culture is male. If the person were a poisoner, statistics will say it is a woman. Why? Culture.
What research on violence say is that violence is defined by culture, and if the violence we highlight is those typical of male culture then that is the kind of violence we see. For a very long time researcher did not even consider that female-female competition existed among animals because the only form of competition researcher know of was defined in term of male-male competition. It was only in recent decades that they realized that, in contrast to previous theories, females do compete with each other that mirror the violence seen in males. It just happens to be very different form of violence, although the consequences were often just as deadly as male-male competition.