A Cold War Fought by Women

[das_nut]

How aggressive is the human female? When the anthropologist Sarah B. Hrdy surveyed the research literature three decades ago, she concluded that “the competitive component in the nature of women remains anecdotal, intuitively sensed, but not confirmed by science.”

Science has come a long way since then, as Dr. Hrdy notes in her introduction to a recent issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society devoted entirely to the topic of female aggression. She credits the “stunning” amount of new evidence partly to better research techniques and partly to the entry of so many women into scientific fields once dominated by men.

The existence of female competition may seem obvious to anyone who has been in a high-school cafeteria or a singles bar, but analyzing it has been difficult because it tends be more subtle and indirect (and a lot less violent) than the male variety. Now that researchers have been looking more closely, they say that this “intrasexual competition” is the most important factor explaining the pressures that young women feel to meet standards of sexual conduct and physical appearance.

- New York Times.

This article mixes experimental data about women aggressiveness (showing it exists and what triggers it) with the hypothesis that it's Darwinian in nature. While I don't disagree with the hypothesis (it seems plausible enough) it would be interesting to try to devise an experiment to separate social conditioning from biological incentives. But I don't see how such an experiment would work.

 

[Second Summer]

I suppose you could study people less affected by western culture, and compare with westerners. That could help to identify at least some of the social conditioning.

 

[Freesia]

How many threads are you going to start today bashing women?

 

[Mischief]

In fairness to the OP, I don't perceive these threads as bashing women. There is certainly competitiveness among some women, as there is among some men. It just takes different forms.

 

[Freesia]

If a lot of the males here didnt revel in these sorts of threads, I would agree with you. But this isnt just random, believe me.

 

[beancounter]

If a lot of the males here didnt revel in these sorts of threads, I would agree with you. But this isnt just random, believe me.

A lot of the males? I don't think that's accurate.

 

[Clueless Git]

Am I the only one who saw the irony in that?

 

[das_nut]

How many threads are you going to start today bashing women?

How is an examination of the origins of such behaviors like ****-shaming a way to bash women?

Please do tell.

 

[nigel1]

Am I the only one who saw the irony in that?

No.

 

[Moll Flanders]

Humans are competitive although I think men are more overt and women are more subtle, in general, due to socialisation. I think it depends on the environment too as I went to an girls school and I have worked in mostly female dominated environments and I have definitely witnessed some very competitive behaviour.

 

[das_nut]

Humans are competitive although I think men are more overt and women are more subtle, in general, due to socialisation. I think it depends on the environment too as I went to an girls school and I have worked in mostly female dominated environments and I have definitely witnessed some very competitive behaviour.

The origins of it may not be socialization. Women, on average, are physically weaker than men. There's a lot of recorded physical violence in hunter-gatherer tribes. If that's typical of our prehistory, perhaps competing overtly was too dangerous for women, and women are biologically inclined to compete covertly.

I'm not sure if I believe that. As I said before, we tend to find all sorts of dubious biological reasonings for human behavior. Many of them have later been shown to be wrong.