Opening the book…
Psychologists define aggression as behavior meant to harm someone who does not want to be harmed. Intent matters here. An accidental collision is not aggression, and a dentist's drill is not either. Violence is aggression intended to do serious physical harm. A whispered rumor and a broken jaw are both aggressions, but only one is violence. We will consider specific forms of gendered violence in later sections.
Aggression does take more than one form, however. Physical aggression uses the body or a weapon. Verbal aggression, on the other hand, uses words (e.g., yelling, mockery, threats, or insults). Cutting across both, direct aggression confronts the target openly, while indirect or relational aggression works through the social world, by rumor, exclusion, and the wrecking of reputations. Think Regina George energy. Aggression can also be sorted by motive. Hostile aggression is impulsive and driven by anger, a shove thrown in the heat of an argument, while instrumental aggression is a calculated means to an end, like mugging someone to steal possessions or spreading a rumor about a coworker to get their promotion.
Whether men or women are "more aggressive" depends entirely on which form we mean. For physical forms, boys are reliably more aggressive than girls across childhood and adolescence (Card et al., 2008), and of course this continues into adulthood. The gap is widest for the most extreme and violent acts, narrower for milder shoves and scuffles. Note that as you may expect from our emotion chapter (8), men and women may feel anger at similar levels (Ma-Kellams & Wu, 2020), but what varies is what they are socialized to do with it. Fischer and Evers (2011) found that how directly people show anger tracks social context and the gender expectations attached to it. In traditional relationship settings, where a woman's anger carries a higher social cost, women suppressed their anger more and men expressed it more directly. In more egalitarian settings, that difference faded. For relational aggression the gap basically disappears. A meta-analysis of 148 studies found a medium difference favoring boys in direct aggression (d = 0.61), and it was wider for physical aggression (d = 0.73) than for verbal (d = 0.38). Indirect aggression told a different story: girls scored a hair higher, but the effect size was so small (d = −0.06) as to be practically meaningless. A more recent meta-analysis found no average gender difference in relational aggression at all (Card et al., 2008; Casper et al., 2020). Girls and women engage in relational aggression at roughly the same rate as boys and men, so the common belief that it is a distinctly female behavior does not hold up.
Online Aggression
Much aggression has moved onto screens, and online the gender pattern looks a bit like the schoolyard. Overall, boys are slightly more likely to cyberbully, though girls do so more in early adolescence and boys pull ahead in later adolescence, while girls report somewhat higher rates of being victimized (Barlett & Coyne, 2014). A great deal of it is relational aggression. Boys and men run coordinated pile-ons, share humiliating screenshots, and dox targets. Online gaming is a clear case. Women who play report high rates of harassment, from sexual comments to rape jokes and threats, so much that many hide their gender or avoid voice chat altogether, the kind of thing a woman who unmutes her mic in a Call of Duty lobby learns to expect (Fox & Tang, 2017; Zhou & Peterson, 2025). The men most likely to harass women in games score higher on the same traits that predict street harassment (hostile sexism and social dominance orientation; Tang & Fox, 2016). Men aim it at each other too, and when they do it is often masculinity being policed. Such harassment, much of it homophobic and/or transphobic, punishes any man who seems insufficiently tough (Ballard & Welch, 2017; Brenner-Levoy, 2023). Wherever it happens, being cyberbullied is linked to higher rates of depression, anxiety, and suicidal thinking, much like offline bullying (Zsila et al., 2022).
Harassment in Public Spaces
Some gendered aggression is so routine that people don’t often lump it in with aggression. Street harassment occurs in everyday situations, like when a woman passes a construction site and hears the comments, or a stranger will not stop "complimenting" her and turns hostile when she keeps walking. Street harassment runs on the same status logic as precarious manhood. Men who say they have catcalled women score higher on hostile sexism (the openly antagonistic side of ambivalent sexism, first introduced in chapter 5). They also score higher on how masculine they consider themselves to be, and on social dominance orientation (also covered in chapter 5) than men who do not engage in catcalling (Walton & Pedersen, 2022). Street harassment, then, operates as a form of social control, treating public space as men's territory and treating women in it as objects to be evaluated and consumed. Women describe a running background hum of vigilance and a set of small adjustments, which route to take, what to wear, whether to keep the headphones out, that decrease where they feel free to go. Because some of these encounters escalate, a comment from a stranger is received as a threat and not a compliment (Almanza Avendaño et al., 2022).
The experience of public harassment also intersects with body size and gender presentation. Fat women face harassment that polices both their gender and their body size, part of the cultural implication that their bodies do not belong in public space (Mohr et al., 2025; see the discussion of hyper(in)visibility and objectification in Chapter 5). Queer and gender-nonconforming people are targeted in public for noticeably breaking gender rules. A masculine-presenting woman, a feminine-presenting man, or a visibly nonbinary person can draw stares, slurs, and worse simply for being perceived as gender-nonconforming (Miller & Grollman, 2015). Finally, for trans women the danger runs well past harassment into lethal violence, which is where we turn next.
Section Key Terms
This page titled 10.3: What Counts as Aggression was last modified on Fri, 11 Sep 2026 19:01:11 GMT and is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Rochelle Burnaford.
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