Death and sex reminders make men lenient toward male violence against women

Evidence

Do reminders of death increase aggression against women? To find out, we asked American male college students to write first about their own deaths, and then about a time when they experienced intense lust for a woman. Then they had to pretend that they were judges who were meting out punishment in a court case in which a man brutally assaulted his girlfriend. When the young men were reminded of both death and their own lust, they recommended especially light sentences for the abusive boyfriend. — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core, 610

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to earlier chapters on the death-denial motive and terror management theory’s experiment methodology. — connects to: Attitudes toward women’s flesh track how seriously men take their own death and destiny. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 364
• SEED: Angle for an essay: how slasher-film tropes pairing sex with death encode a terror-management psychology that normalizes violence against women.

Related

• Male violence against women partly stems from resentment of their own bodily arousal (similarity 0.84)
• Mortality reminders make men denigrate sexually provocative women (similarity 0.82)
• Attitudes toward women’s flesh track how seriously men take their own death and destiny. (similarity 0.82)
• Death thoughts and physical sexuality suppress each other in a reciprocal loop (similarity 0.82)
• Death reminders increase people’s desire to have children (similarity 0.80)
• Death-awareness drives humans to cling to cultural worldviews and self-esteem (similarity 0.79)