The Darker Side of Winning: When Power Becomes a Pretext for Sexual Aggression
Monday, March 31, 2025
What happens when dominance meets detachment? Inside the minds of men who mistake victory for permission.
Imagine you’re a 21-year-old college guy.
You just crushed another dude in a competitive task.
You're flying high on the fumes of dominance.
Then someone asks, "Want to share a video with this woman you don’t know—one who’s clearly said she dislikes sexual content?"
Now pause.
Your answer, according to new research, might say a lot about who you are—and whether your idea of “winning” is less about success and more about control.
A recent experimental study in Aggressive Behavior (Hoffmann, Verona, & Hruza, 2024) reveals something disconcerting: heterosexual men with high levels of interpersonal-affective psychopathic traits—marked by emotional coldness, dominance, and a lack of empathy—were significantly more likely to engage in sexually aggressive behavior after winning a competition against another man.
That’s right. It wasn’t losing.
It wasn’t bruised ego or revenge. It was victory—sweet, power-drunk victory—that lit the fuse.
The Psychology of Power: When Winning Feels Like a Green Light
This study adds fresh oxygen to a smoldering debate between feminist and evolutionary psychologists.
Feminist scholars have long argued that sexual aggression is rooted in patriarchal dominance and power asymmetries (Brownmiller, 1975; Connell, 2005), while evolutionary theorists point to male competition and status hierarchies as biological drivers (Buss & Duntley, 2006).
This new study dares to say: both are right—and we need to talk about how they interact with personality.
Researchers at the University of South Florida created a scenario where male participants competed with one another in a cognitive task.
Half were randomly assigned to “win.”
Afterward, they were told they could send one of three videos to a female partner (actually a recorded confederate) who had previously expressed aversion to sexual content.
Those with high interpersonal-affective psychopathic traits who won were more likely to send her the sexually explicit clip—knowing full well she wouldn’t want it.
Let’s be clear: that’s not desire. That’s calculated domination.
Psychopathy in Two Flavors: Not All Bad Boys Are Built the Same
The research team relied on a well-validated psychopathy scale that distinguishes between two forms:
Interpersonal-Affective Traits – coldness, lack of empathy, dominance, calculated manipulation.
Impulsive-Antisocial Traits – poor self-control, recklessness, norm-violating behavior.
Both types are associated with sexual aggression in general (Knight & Sims-Knight, 2003), but only one—interpersonal-affective—interacted with the high-status win to amplify that aggression in this experiment. Winning didn’t influence the impulsive guys. It triggered the cold ones.
This aligns with earlier work by Verona and colleagues (Hoffmann & Verona, 2019; Verona, Sprague & Sadeh, 2022), who’ve shown that individuals high in psychopathic traits often use aggression not reactively, but strategically, to assert control and signal dominance.
In other words, for some men, winning doesn’t satisfy the ego—it sharpens the weapon.
Digital Flashpoints and Real-World Parallels
Let’s take a step back. Why should we care what a bunch of college guys do in a lab?
Because lab proxies like these increasingly mirror online behavior—unsolicited explicit images, harassment, and digital exhibitionism.
One study found that 41% of women aged 18–29 report receiving unwanted sexual content online (Pew Research Center, 2021). The motivations behind that behavior may be rooted not in horniness, but in hierarchy.
Psychopathy, it seems, is going digital—and dominance still sells. Especially when society rewards it.
When Masculinity Turns Predatory: Culture and the Conditions for Aggression
What makes this especially unnerving is that these behaviors weren’t fueled by rejection or humiliation.
They were acts of opportunistic aggression after a win.
This flips older theories that associated sexual aggression with feelings of inadequacy or status threat (Malamuth et al., 1995).
In fact, this research challenges long-standing assumptions in criminal justice and prevention efforts that focus on male fragility or emotional dysregulation as the cause.
Instead, it highlights what feminist sociologist Raewyn Connell (2005) called hegemonic masculinity—the socially idealized version of manhood that equates dominance with worth.
The danger isn’t just in the man who can’t take rejection—it’s in the man who believes his success entitles him to conquest.
The Path Forward: Empathy, Accountability, and Cultural Disruption
What can we do with findings like this?
The authors suggest interventions that target both the internal world of the aggressor and the external structures that support him. That means:
Promoting empathy and emotional literacy in men, especially those with dominant personality tendencies (Seidler et al., 2016).
Resisting cultural narratives that reward aggression, control, and emotional detachment.
Designing prevention programs that don’t just punish bad behavior, but deconstruct the power fantasies behind it.
It's not enough to teach “consent” as a checkbox. We have to ask: What does this man think sex is for?
Not All Winners Should Get the Girl
This study reminds us that not all sexual aggression is the product of frustration.
Sometimes it’s born in triumph. In dominance. In the giddy belief that power makes one untouchable.
And that belief, combined with a cold emotional core, may be one of the most dangerous traits in modern masculinity.
As with all complex human behavior, no single explanation suffices. But this research takes us a step closer to understanding one disturbing corner of the male psyche—where conquest is confused with connection, and victory becomes a license to violate.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Buss, D. M., & Duntley, J. D. (2006). The evolution of aggression. In M. Schaller, J. A. Simpson, & D. T. Kenrick (Eds.), Evolution and social psychology (pp. 263–285). Psychology Press.
Connell, R. W. (2005).Masculinities (2nd ed.). University of California Press.
Hoffmann, A. M., Verona, E., & Hruza, S. R. (2024) Effects of intermale status challenge and psychopathic traits on sexual aggression. Aggressive Behavior. https://doi.org/10.1002/ab.22199
Hoffmann, A. M., & Verona, E. (2019). Psychopathic traits and gendered aggression in college men: The role of dominance motives. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 34(22), 4721–4745. https://doi.org/10.1177/0886260517715025
Knight, R. A., & Sims-Knight, J. E. (2003). The developmental antecedents of sexual coercion against women: Testing alternative hypotheses with structural equation modeling. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 989(1), 72–85.
Pew Research Center. (2021). The state of online harassment. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/01/13/the-state-of-online-harassment/
Seidler, Z. E., Dawes, A. J., Rice, S. M., Oliffe, J. L., & Dhillon, H. M. (2016). The role of masculinity in men's help-seeking for depression: A systematic review. Clinical Psychology Review, 49, 106–118.
Verona, E., Sprague, J., & Sadeh, N. (2022). Trait dominance and the dynamics of aggression in competitive contexts. Aggressive Behavior, 48(1), 37–49.