aus New York Times, 19. 11. 2013
A Cold War fought by Women
By
JOHN TIERNEY
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.
The old doubts about female competitiveness derived partly from an evolutionary analysis of the reproductive odds in ancient polygynous
societies in which some men were left single because dominant males had
multiple wives. So men had to compete to have a chance of reproducing,
whereas virtually all women were assured of it.
One of these outfits worn in
Dr. Tracy Vaillancourt's study on female aggression provoked a sort of
"mean girl" form of indirect aggression. The other attracted little
notice at all.
But even in those societies, women were not passive trophies for
victorious males. They had their own incentives to compete with one
another for more desirable partners and more resources for their
children. And now that most people live in monogamous societies, most
women face the same odds as men. In fact, they face tougher odds in some
places, like the many college campuses with more women than men.
To see how female students react to a rival, researchers brought pairs
of them into a laboratory at McMaster University for what was ostensibly
a discussion about female friendships. But the real experiment began
when another young woman entered the room asking where to find one of
the researchers.
This woman had been chosen by the researchers, Tracy Vaillancourt
and Aanchal Sharma, because she “embodied qualities considered
attractive from an evolutionary perspective,” meaning a “low
waist-to-hip ratio, clear skin, large breasts.” Sometimes, she wore a
T-shirt and jeans, other times a tightfitting, low-cut blouse and short
skirt.
They stared at her, looked her up and down, rolled their eyes and
sometimes showed outright anger. One asked her in disgust, “What the
[expletive] is that?”
Most of the aggression, though, happened after she left the room. Then
the students laughed about her and impugned her motives. One student
suggested that she dressed that way in order to have sex with a
professor. Another said that her breasts “were about to pop out.”
The results of the experiment jibe with evidence that this “mean girl”
form of indirect aggression is used more by adolescents and young women
than by older women, who have less incentive to handicap rivals once
they marry. Other studies have shown that the more attractive an
adolescent girl or woman is, the more likely she is to become a target for indirect aggression from her female peers.
“Women are indeed very capable of aggressing against others, especially
women they perceive as rivals,” said Dr. Vaillancourt, now a
psychologist at the University of Ottawa. “The research also shows that
suppression of female sexuality is by women, not necessarily by men.”
Stigmatizing female promiscuity — a.k.a. slut-shaming — has often been
blamed on men, who have a Darwinian incentive to discourage their
spouses from straying. But they also have a Darwinian incentive to
encourage other women to be promiscuous. Dr. Vaillancourt said the
experiment and other research suggest the stigma is enforced mainly by women.
“Sex is coveted by men,” she said. “Accordingly, women limit access as a
way of maintaining advantage in the negotiation of this resource. Women
who make sex too readily available compromise the power-holding
position of the group, which is why many women are particularly
intolerant of women who are, or seem to be, promiscuous.”
Indirect aggression can take a psychological toll on women who are
ostracized or feel pressured to meet impossible standards, like the
vogue of thin bodies in many modern societies. Studies have shown that
women’s ideal body shape is to be thinner than average — and thinner
than what men consider the ideal shape to be. This pressure is
frequently blamed on the ultrathin female role models featured in
magazines and on television, but Christopher J. Ferguson and other
researchers say that it’s mainly the result of competition with their peers, not media images.
“To a large degree the media reflects trends that are going on in society, not creates them,” said Dr. Ferguson, a psychologist at Stetson University. He found that women’s dissatisfaction with their bodies did not correlate with what they watched on television
at home. Nor were they influenced by TV programs shown in laboratory
experiments: Watching the svelte actresses on “Scrubs” induced no more
feelings of inferiority than watching the not-so-svelte star of
“Roseanne.”
But he found that women were more likely to feel worse when they
compared themselves with peers in their own social circles, or even if
they were in a room with a thin stranger, like the assistant to Dr.
Ferguson who ran an experiment
with female college students. When she wore makeup and sleek business
attire, the students were less satisfied with their own bodies than when
she wore baggy sweats and no makeup. And they felt still worse when
there was an attractive man in the room with her.
“Sexual competition among females seems to increase due to circumstances
that tend to be particularly common in affluent societies,” Dr.
Ferguson said.
In traditional villages, people married at an early age to someone
nearby, but young men and women in modern societies are free to postpone
marriage as they search long and far for better options. The result is
more competition because there are so many more rivals — and there’s no
longer any scientific doubt that both sexes are in to win it.
Nota.
Frauen gehen ganz anders miteinander um, weißgott. Ein Glück nur, dass sie nicht überall den Ton angeben.
JE