Atomic Nerds

Peter posts about this article about competition and backstabbing among women with a question- is it really true, are women really like this with each other?

The answer he received immediately and uniformly was “YES”. The article itself didn’t impress me much- it absolutely oozes with the attitude that anything that happened more than about fifteen years ago might as well have happened to cavemen- but the overall conclusion is that, yes, women are NOT all that sisterly with each other just because they’re women- rather the opposite, in fact. If anything the article’s blinkers regarding the actual history of women pre-feminism (they laughably assume that before Betty Friedan, women had no life whatsoever outside the home) make it far too optimistic- it isn’t being in business and it isn’t technology that makes women compete and hide claws and fangs behind a friendly smile, it’s always been this way.

As I posted last week, females in social species in general aren’t exactly pacifists either. While female heirarchies tend to be more stable than male, being frequently inherited* to a large degree, they still exist and are still critical to the females. When a conflict does arise beyond the point that can be handled with subtlety, it’s usually a very serious one and the grudge may last for life. There is relatively no reason for unrelated females to bond, although bonds within family are usually ironclad- all other females represent competition for male attention. Within a group of chimps or baboons, friendships are formed- between certain males and between males and females, but usually not so much between unrelated females. They have their literal sisters as well as their mothers and grandmothers to pick their lice- random monkey skanks need not apply. If anything, we could expect this pattern to be even more pronounced in a semi-monogamous species like humans- male attention and male devotion shoot up in value in direct correlation to the amount of intensive time and care the infants need. Having your female relatives around helps a lot, but the less likely you’ll be able to rely on mom, grandma, and auntie the more important the male’s undivided attention becomes.

I’ve emphasized that nurture matters as much as nature before, and if anything human cultures have only exacerbated this phenomenon. When it’s worked into the structure of a society that a woman’s worth is directly tied first to her ability to have children and second to her ability to get a good partner, then every single other woman that isn’t a relative- and even sometimes even if they are- becomes competition. Someone you can bitch about men and at eat ice cream with isn’t worth a fraction what a reasonably valuable man is in such an environment, and is essentially disposable- teenage girls tend to be the purest distillation of this phenomenon, as I’d wager there isn’t a woman in this reading audience that hasn’t been promptly ditched by a BFF the second a boyfriend entered the picture- or done the ditching herself. Obviously, girls and women do still form real friendships among themselves, but such friendships tend to form best and strongest when they’ve nothing to compete over and a LOT in each other to identify with.

In terms of socialization, girls are generally highly discouraged from early on in their social interactions not to show any overt signs of aggression or confrontation. While boys may be kept from actually kicking little Timmy’s face in for taking a toy, the general attitude is that boys will be boys and such aggression simply needs to be managed and channeled in a healthy fashion- not quashed altogether as tends to be the pattern with girls. (Other women who were tomboys as girls and constantly frustrated by this are nodding along with me about now.) Little girls still have plenty of aggression and as above plenty of reason to compete among themselves- but discouraged from toddlerhood on to actually SHOW it, instead of a straightforward expression it’s likely to find the most byzantine of expressions, usually focused on social shunning or humiliation. If you must express yourself strictly through socialization, destroying a disliked girl or woman’s social life is far more rewarding than breaking her nose. If the woman in question doesn’t do a fair amount of introspection on the subject and decide to rebel against this, what prevailed on the playground will certainly continue up through the office or church group or mommies in the playgroup- aggression and competition carefully masked by smiles and pseudo-sweet talk.

If anything, rather than blaming women entering professional fields for giving them another reason to compete with one another, the increased flow of women into such fields is probably the most realistic cultural hope for mitigating these patterns. Not only does it give women more options to achieve than just the quality of man she can get, it puts women in the type of setting where men have achieved bonding with unrelated men from the veldt to the battlefield to the boardroom- one where an alliance offers a chance at greater success rather than just a vulnerability to a rival. Backstabbing can pay in business, but choosing your allies carefully and working those connections can pay a lot more, and over a longer term.

*An interesting exception to the males-disperse males-compete pattern is the bonobo. Their females disperse at adolescence and they have more conflicts among females than male-dispersal primates- but they resolve their conflicts with sex more often than with violence. They’re also “dominant” in the same fashion as males are in other primate groups. More interestingly, they’ll happily bond with unrelated females as buddies the same way the males will in other species…

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