ABSTRACT
Most crime, especially violent crime, is committed by men, who also participate disproportionately in other forms of antisocial behaviour. Social and economic structures organized around commodity capitalism and the systematic domination by men of women and other men, technically known as patriarchy. The original invitation requested a text on justice and women. The statistical association between crime and masculinity is of the order that in many other fields would have attracted concentrated attention and epidemiologists. Hegemonic masculinity helps to shape unequal political and social relations, a relationship often elided in academic commentaries, which tend to focus separately on class or gender or ethnicity as axes of social differentiation. Justice is not about forms of divided masculinity/femininity, or about hegemonic masculinity and subordinated femininity. It is, or should be, about the right of all human beings to safe, healthy, peaceful, free and respected lives on a planet that is itself not under threat from harmful human behaviour.
