So You're Into Kinky Sex. That Doesn't Make You Evil.

When it comes to evil, Julia Shaw wants us to reconsider our preconceptions. What is evil? How do we know it when we see it? In her new book, Evil: The Science Behind Humanity’s Dark Side (out tomorrow), the writer and lecturer examines what science can tell us about evil—from murder to cyber-bullying to “deviant” sex. In this interview, we discuss why men are more likely to kill, how BDSM sex is more popular than people realize, and why evil is worth our reconsideration.

Why evil? Why write a book about it? Why is it worth studying?

I think evil is the single most important we could study and talk about. I think as soon as we’ve labeled something “evil,” we’ve considered it so bad that it’s beyond understanding. That is harmful to us, in trying to prevent terribly things from happening. It’s othering and dehumanizing to people. In order to talk about things that are really important and meaningful in the world, we need to have a much better and informed conversation around this thing we call “evil.”

Let’s start with the evil that men do. In one chapter you examine the psychology of murder, and you mention that men are much more likely to commit murder. What does that tell us about men and murder?

It comes as no surprise to people that men are more often than women committing murder, but the proportion is crazy. If you look at how many men commit murder versus commit other kinds of violence, the difference is astronomical. The problem is that it’s easy to look at that and say, “Well, men must be somehow different from women in this way.” What we tend to point at as society, if you will—we tend to point at things like testosterone.

That’s actually really problematic, because testosterone doesn’t make anyone do anything. Testosterone is a hormone. We have to be careful not to say, “Well, because testosterone is linked to aggression, and aggression is linked to violence, and violence is linked to murder, it’s obvious that women (with lower testosterone) aren’t going to murder.”

That’s an incorrect assumption. It also alleviates the burden of individual choice. We should all be very conscious of how we behave, and we all have free will.

On the other hand, I think it does a disservice to men, because it doesn’t examine the broader social climate in which we raise them. We accept that men aren’t socialized to be empathetic and to engage in what we consider more feminine traits, such as acting in considerate ways rather than being aggressive. From the day that little boys are born, they socialize differently from little girls, and I think one lasting consequence of that difference is a hostility to other genders—to humans.

You cite some evolutionary psychologists who argue that “men, not women, have evolved bodies and minds designed to kill.” But you’re pointing away from that kind of thinking, and more toward examining socialization. Can you say more about the differences in how men and women are socialized?

The example I talk about in my book, when I first realized how differently little boys and little girls are socialized, I was at a birthday party. There was a pile of presents for my friend, a girl. She was waiting patiently—as little girls are supposed to do—waiting patiently on the couch to be told it was OK to open her presents. In runs her brother, who just starts tearing open the presents. And the family’s laughing! While my friend is crying on the couch.

That’s effectively chalked up to “boys being little boys.” I think if that was a little girl who’d done that, she would have been stopped and told, “You can’t do that. You need to be more inhibited. You need to control your impulses.”

That kind of socialization is ultimately quite harmful to everybody. But particularly to the boys—and of course to girls if the boys end up being violent toward girls. Though if you look at the statistics, most men are violent toward other men. Overall men are losing; there are effectively only downsides.

And I think every man knows that. Everyone knows that they are able to control themselves and to say otherwise is completely absurd, frankly.

So this idea that there are innate gender differences that can skew the differences in violence statistics is wrong and incredibly harmful.

Interestingly, you cite studies showing that men and women imagine committing murder in roughly equal proportions. (One study found 73 percent of men and 66 percent admitted to having ever had a murder fantasy; another found that 79 percent of men and 58 percent of women said they had.)

It’s really important to me, in this book and in my research, to show that a lot of us have, if you will, this darkness inside of us, and that a lot of us have thoughts that seem really troubling, some of which we probably should work on and change.

But some of them are surprisingly—maybe actually adaptive. According to research, most people have murder fantasies at some point. Both men and women have them. Maybe it’s directed at a really bad boss. A former spouse or an ex-lover is a classic example. Or a parent you really don’t get along with.

Most of us, of course, don’t go through with it. But these are very prevalent fantasies, and there’s an evolutionary psychologist who argued that it’s perhaps actually adaptive to have these types of fantasies.

The argument is that if we take a hypothetical scenario and we get to act it out in our fantasy, we can get all the way to end and realized the consequences of that behavior. In the end, our decision-making comes to the conclusion, “Oh, I don’t want that. I don’t want those terrible consequences.” And then you don’t act on it.

So as with so many taboo issues, it’s really important for us to engage in moral and ethical hypotheticals. We need to think about the consequences of our behavior and how we can understand our morality. The only way we get to do that is if we have these fantasies.

We’ve been talking a lot about socialization. I want to bring in technology, and talk about how new technologies shape our socializations. You suggest it’s something of a double-edged sword.

On the one hand, technology can connect us—especially people who are interested in niche things, who can be connected in ways that were never possible before. That’s empowering to a lot of people.

But we also know technology can create echo chambers, situations where we can ratchet ourselves up, especially with those niche negative beliefs. Racist beliefs, for example; we’re more likely to find someone online who shares those beliefs, and that can make us feel validated in those opinions. We feel stronger, and we feel justified in having these opinions.

That, of course, is problematic in the sense that it allows quite violent and negative subcultures to flourish, as well as some of the more positive subcultures.

In terms of what technology does to us, there’s certainly the aspect that having your phone in your hand for many hours of the day, and being able to post online without having to talk to human beings—that disinhibits us, makes us more likely to become trolls.

It also makes interaction with human beings a two-dimensional experience. It makes it really easy to dehumanize someone; it makes it really easy to forget that there are real human beings on the other side of the keyboard. And that allows us to be more negative or more mean than we might otherwise be.

The last factor is that if you are looking to cause trouble, or if you are looking for victims, the internet is full of humans, some of whom are quite easily going to be victims. It’s easy to find people to target online; even easier than in person, because you have such a huge number of people all in the same place.

And there’s a real overlap between what you were saying earlier about male socialization—toxic masculinity—and the often very male-dominated spaces of the internet.

Sure. Being a woman online is a simultaneously empowering and frightening experience. The amount of times you get insanely violent and sexist and sexually violent comments online can really break your heart.

Why do people do these things? When I picture people who are saying hateful things, I don’t usually see it as a personal attack on the person being commented on. I think it comes from a place of loneliness and of not feeling heard. With sexism in particular it can be easy to say things online that you’d never say out loud in any other context because there’s this anonymity and a lack of impulse control. You have direct access to the internet, so a lot more can come out.

Of course, it can destroy people’s lives, ultimately. And so that doesn’t let you off the hook that there are these other factors; ultimately you bear personal responsibility for what you post on the internet.

So they say don’t post online anything you wouldn’t say to someone’s face, and also post online anything you wouldn’t want read aloud in a courtroom. Those are two easy rules to be better online citizens.

In one chapter you take up the idea of “sexual deviance,” arguing that research shows so-called “normal” sex lives are much more varied than we typically acknowledge.

I think the link between “evil” and sex is fascinating. For so long it’s been a facet of religiosity that certain types of sex acts were consider immoral. Today we have this interesting relationship with sex and our own sexuality; we often assume that when we’re not having missionary, heteronormative sex, we must be somehow acting deviantly.

That’s especially true when we engage in things like BDSM—bondage, dominance, or masochism in the bedroom. It’s easy to feel bad about ourselves when we engage in this kind of behavior, because we feel like we’re doing something wrong.

But when you look at the statistics, about half of people in various studies engage in BDSM-related activities. So at what point does this no longer count as deviance, and is just a normal part of sexuality? I think with BDSM it’s hard to argue that it’s very niche. It depends on the degree, of course, but if Fifty Shades of Grey has taught us anything, it’s that it’s more prevalent than we thought.

If you look at other fetishes people can be into, people often feel really alone in their desires. But the numbers are probably higher than you think for most of these fetishes.

This doesn’t come as any surprise to anyone who watches porn online. There’s some pretty weird stuff out there—even if you’re not looking for it, you can stumble upon it and go, “Huh, this is a thing people are into.”

So there’s tremendous power and freedom in the internet in the way it lets us explore these fetishes and find people to engage in them with us. At the same time, we need to be conscious consumers of porn, making sure there’s consent involved and that it’s created in an ethically sound way.

But the internet may also make certain kinds of behavior seem more normal than they actually are. I think zoophilia, for instance; I feel like the amount of zoophilia-related porn is actually disproportionate to the number of people who are interested in sex with animals. So in some cases the internet can skew our perception of what’s normal. But overall I think it’s probably good that people can feel less alone and be themselves online.

That kind of goes to the main message of the book—destigmatizing things that get labeled as “evil” so we never have to talk about them.

We need to talk in an informed away about things that we label “evil.” We need to make sure that we don’t end conversations by bringing in the “e” word; that instead we try to actually figure out what we’re talking about. It’s really tempting, and it’s really easy, and it’s really easy to call people evil. I think we should stop that, and instead recognize that no matter what a person has done, they’re still a human being. If we forget that, that’s when we become capable of inflicting great harm ourselves. Effectively if you label someone evil, that’s when you become capable of, if you will, evil.

Interview edited for length and clarity.

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