If Women Are Catty Bitches, It's Not About Gender. It's About Power.
LatestI don’t know about us, science. I like you a lot, especially when you’re shedding light on the dark underbelly of our existence. But you’re also just people, you know? And sometimes you come at things weird. Like this study that says women are catty because we evolved indirect aggression to compete but with a low cost of injury to ourselves. And that we do this to take out our sexual rivals because we are hardwired to hate anyone younger or prettier. Oh science. There, there. It’ll be all right.
Here is the basic info, via LiveScience:
Though both men and women use such indirect aggression in relationships, women use backbiting to demoralize competition and take sexual rivals out of the picture, one researcher argues in a review article detailed today (Oct. 27) in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.
“Women do compete, and they can compete quite fiercely with one another,” said Tracy Vaillancourt, the paper’s author and a psychology professor at the University of Ottawa in Canada. “The form it typically takes is indirect aggression, because it has a low cost: The person [making the attack] doesn’t get injured. Oftentimes, the person’s motives aren’t detected, and yet it still inflicts harm against the person they’re aggressing against.”
In the past, the piece goes on to say, women needed other women to raise children. So when a woman took out a rival, it could really hurt that woman, and her offspring’s, survival chances. For this reason, the researcher insists, women have to be “exquisitely attuned to such slights.”
The result? Once you’ve been withered by a rival, you’re now too fucking depressed to saunter out in the sexual marketplace. Which is a good thing, because by now, the dude you wanted doesn’t find you as attractive anyway, especially if the girl who said you were a dirty skank is really hot herself.
This ABC News piece turns a more critical eye:
Kim Wallen, a psychologist at Emory University, said he had reviewed the analysis and is skeptical of Vaillancourt’s views.
“Her work comes across as more opinion than review,” he said. “She cites no empirical data to back up her claims.”
Wallen said that Vaillancourt does not use a single statistic to support her theory and that many her references are also highly speculative.
Vaillancourt counters that the research is clear: Women are biologically programmed to perceive women who are younger, prettier or more desirable to potential mates as threats. To diffuse a threatening rival, women tend to employ passive aggressive behaviors. So rather than lift a finger, a woman will wound her opponent with contemptuous glances, unkind words and petty remarks. Men, on the other hand, seem programmed to use direct aggression techniques like shouting and physical violence to defend their social turf, Vaillancourt said.
So, trapped in a war of gender essentialism, he will grunt and strike, and she will insult and glare. Sounds like a match made in cave heaven. (Actually, prehistoric families are a lot more egalitarian than we like to think.)
Why do we always want to start from these places? We see a terrible act of human gargoyleness, and we want to confirm that this is in our DNA. Maybe it is, but maybe it’s also like carrying genes for certain disease: Whether or not it’s ever activated depends on whether it’s given an environment in which to flourish.