A fairly in depth article, through I do find a major issue that recurs is that they use the same definition of aggression and violence for both men and women, and then use that to eliminate or minimize the existence of female aggression.
Like: "We tamed ourselves by weeding out bullies and domineering males throughout our evolutionary history. Humans organized egalitarian societies, and any male that violated this too much was subsequently the victim of a targeted killing."
Women competing with with other women using dominance behavior like bullying is a very common behavior, and I doubt there is a parent with a teenage daughter or teacher who has not observed this. We can also see this in apes, with female to female dominance behavior being one if not the biggest causes of death for female baboons. To continue with animal observations, male baboons have a different form of dominance behavior, and their behavior also result in dead baboons. Female aggression is about depriving the lower ranked females of food, water, sleep and grooming (together with some amount of bites and scratches), while male aggression is primarily about major injuries sustained during fights. If we define the latter as the single definition of aggression and dominance then the other form becomes invisible to us.
Going down further in the article, they define power as access to and control of resources. Not access to and control of people. This in order to say that women don’t have a strong craving for power because "obtaining power entails the risk of being disliked, and, unlike status, power has few social payoffs". It uses an exclusively male definition for power.
Here (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237101081_Female_Do...') is a study done on dominance behavior in female vs male hierarchies. It basically fully invalidates most of this article's claims on male vs female behavior in terms of dominance. It does not seem to use a male-centric definition of dominance.
I am not all against this article. It is a fairly in-depth description of the topic and an interesting read. I would however advise to consider some of the terminology and definitions to be a bit limited, and occasionally leading the reader into misconceptions by trying to use a single definition for both men and women.
> Like: "We tamed ourselves by weeding out bullies and domineering males throughout our evolutionary history. Humans organized egalitarian societies, and any male that violated this too much was subsequently the victim of a targeted killing."
This quote is horribly wrong anyway. Human history, even before agriculture and industrialization, is filled with tribal wars. Maybe it would be more right to say that the aggressive bullies have historically had an outlet for their aggression: killing the aggressive bullies of other tribes. If aggressiveness were absolutely useless personality trait in past societies, it would have been weeded out by the evolution a long time ago.
bit is so incredibly wrong. Status differences can be seen in any social creature, and humans are no different. History is absolutely overflowing with slavery, wars and various more-or-less official class systems like organized nobility or priesthoods.
Do note that the article talks about a point in time way before the agricultural revolution.
I winced a little on that part too, but he does give the caveat later that women and children weren't equal to men at all, which means that "egalitarian societies" means "something like 30% of the tribe was somewhat egalitarian" which really isn't saying much.
I also winced when later in the article there is what I consider to be an enormous leap of logic, when stating that a child staring at two puppets being rewarded differently means the child yearns for equality.
I've got to say that the older I get, the more effort it takes me not to dismiss social science commentary unless backed up with strong evidence. There is just so much bullshit.
>I winced a little on that part too, but he does give the caveat later that women and children weren't equal to men at all, which means that "egalitarian societies" means "something like 30% of the tribe was somewhat egalitarian" which really isn't saying much
Athenian democracy was far worse: ~15% of the population was hereditary uncitizens (metics) with almost no rights, ~40% were slaves with zero rights, women and children from citizen families had very limited rights of their own, so the Athenian democracy was really democracy for the ~12% of the population who were adult citizen males.
Think you are confusing aggression inside the tribe versus towards other tribes. A tribe would not care at all about targeting bullies in other tribes. A tribe would weed out internal bullies, or overly aggressive behavior, to promote cooperation in large groups.
But, as you hint at, you still need aggression for war. War for defense and to fight for resources.
So the evolution drive within the tribe, was to reduce aggression/bulling, but also to keep aggressive tendencies enough to fight other tribes. We still need defense, so need to keep aggression, but for a tribe to succeed, need to control aggression internal to the tribe, to drive cooperation. Hence, probably why aggression has not been weeded out completely, there are still cases where it was needed. And as the definition of 'tribe' changes, someone's perception of in group, out group, can flip the switch on 'this is war'.
Sorry, one edit.
And as all tribes grew egalitarian, all tribes would find reduced need for aggression. And think we need a scale for aggression, sure egalitarian societies still had plenty of wars, but humans were still a less aggressive animal than a band of chimps.
Did they? I'm more inclined to agree with WJW. These "egalitarian tribes" do not seem to be the conclusion one reaches from an unbiased reading of the historical record.
Think it is a matter of the sliding scale of what we are calling aggression. There are less wars and killing now, there is a clear downward trend in the historical record.
A clear downward trend since when? 1945? I'm not sure you can paint history before then as a clear downward trend in wars and killing. (If you've got data, feel free to point to it.)
It's a funny one, because it depends on how you count. In terms of frequency of wars, we seem to be on a downwards trends, with some historical polities (say such as Rome) engaging in war pretty much constantly.
In terms of absolute casualty numbers, the trend seems to be mostly reversed. That's mostly due to the deadliness of modern weaponry as well as the increased state capacity of the combatants.
On the third hand, casualty numbers as a percentage of total population are probably still down, mostly driven by the very large population growth.
> A tribe would weed out internal bullies, or overly aggressive behavior, to promote cooperation in large groups.
No they wouldn't. If a tribe needs bullies that can be targeted against outgroups... well, how does one even become a bully?
Bullies need practice. It's a skill like any other. Maybe every great once in awhile some natural is born that needs no practice. Too rare to count on.
No, you let your own children grow up bullies. You let the bullies have the marginal people in your group (when's the last time you heard of a school bully picking on the football players and cheerleaders?). Then you can keep a reserve of bullies, in case you ever need them.
It's plainly obvious this happens. I'm always a little surprised that everyone is so blind to it. Sure, it's instinctive and not deliberate, but still.
Not quite. Bullies can be weeded out in a number of ways that don't take aggression in the form of fighting. Don't Inuit do it by simply withdrawing group support and the bully starves?
Often individuals can't survive on their own, so if they become ostracized by the group they die off, either starve, get picked off by wild animals, etc....
So the behavior that remains viable is to be aggressive to external groups, but better not alienate the in-group.
No mention of social proof either. Social proof affects both males and females, but females are considerably more likely to be swayed by it. This is why so many people observe superficially counterintuitive effects like getting more attention from women when already in the company of an attractive one.
This is also why teen girls are so prone to ostracism. A higher status girl risks her own status by hanging out with an ostracized girl.
That’s not to say we don’t see the same patterns among males, they are just less pronounced.
This is delusional anyway. We're by far the most unegalitarian of all animal species besides maybe things like ants. We have individuals that command entire countries worth of resources and armies to go with.
Yes, women are vicious fighters but use different, and arguably more potent, weapons. A fist-fight with a man might leave you wounded and bleeding for a few days. A woman will leave you ostracized from your friends and family, possibly ending your career, for the rest of your life, often leading to your depression and suicide.
Society (especially now) will approves of a woman's destruction of her target, seeing it as a positive example of "female empowerment", independent of any other fact of the case other than gender. In other words, there is social pressure that encourages females to become domineering bullies. At the same time, causal misandry encourages this false idea that women are somehow excluded from a wide variety of the worst of human behavior, the same behaviors that are actively encouraged in women! This is in addition to the fact that women's anger, violence, sexual assault (especially against children), is very real and, I believe, wildly under-reported.
>Yes, women are vicious fighters but use different, and arguably more potent, weapons. A fist-fight with a man might leave you wounded and bleeding for a few days.
I cannot agree with this. Bodily harm was far far worse than being picked on.
You use an extreme case for the women, but a near harmless case for a man? What if you get your skull smashed in and have a brain injury forever? (I saw that happen). What if your face gets smashed and plastic surgery can't fix it?(seen that one too) Not to mention becoming a paraplegic. (or death)
I'll take a chance at ostracization over being afraid for my life.
Based on your name, it seems those are great examples of selection bias. If you were a divorce lawyer that primarily worked with men, I'm sure you'd have more examples of the other side.
Intuitively, most people seem to think that bodily harm is worse that psychological harm. In practice, extreme isolation has shown to be exceptional potent form of torture, and it not uncommon for prisoners to self starve and trade bodily harm in exchange of ending psychological harm. People in general undervalue the threat of psychological harm. We all know how physical pain feel like from cutting a finger or scraping a knee. Most of us don't know however how it feels to be social isolated unless we experience it first hand.
We can also seen in the animal kingdom how physiological harm often lead to bodily harm. A common tactic in female to female aggression is to induce miscarriage through stress. It is similar outcome as physical harm. It just that researcher until fairly recent (~50 years) attributed those thing to nature rather than to violence. A dead female baboon must be dead because the jungle is a dangerous place, while a dead male baboon is obviously dead because he got beaten to death.
What about being tortured and raped by a man who enjoys your torture and wants to extend it for as long as he can? I'm sure it's happened within a mile of you sometime over the past week.
imo, the main difference between female violence and male violence is that female violence happens in an environment where on average, 75% of people are stronger than you, and 40% of people are so dominant over you physically that a fair fight would be suicide. Male violence is done by people who are stronger than 75% of people, and are dominant over 40% of those so strictly that they have no physical fear at all of them. The reason violence gets normed as male violence is because of how easy it is for males to practice it, not because there's a special type of girl violence. Throw weak men in a prison with strong men, and the weak men will turn to female violence to survive.
Deep psychological trauma can be viewed as a form of brain injury.
It's honestly hard to compare emotional and physical trauma.
You'll heal from a black eye in a few weeks, a broken bone in a few months, whereas I've personally had some emotional baggage that took me literally 17 years + extensive journaling, meditation and psychedelic use to heal, which shows that some emotional scars can take a very long time to mend.
On the flip side, yeah, an injury like a stroke, or getting an eye poked out is permanent, while it's very possible in the modern world to find a new social circle after having been ostracised from an old one.
It's also perhaps useful to note that in the modern world, one type of trauma can lead to another - getting beat up can lead to some emotional trauma that lasts much longer than the physical injuries, being socially isolated can lead to destructive behaviours like drug/alcohol abuse and self-harm...
> It's honestly hard to compare emotional and physical trauma.
(as a message to the whole tree of comments, not just you)
It's also unnecessary to compare, it's not a competition. They're both trauma because damage has been done, they both scale from benign and playful[1] to horrifically destructive[2]. The worse it's enacted the worse it is, regardless of who did it and regardless of who did worse to the other gender.
[1]: eg: expressions during sex, or teases during flirting
> A woman will leave you ostracized from your friends and family, possibly ending your career, for the rest of your life, often leading to your depression and suicide.
And a man wouldn't ? I haven't checked but I bet anti social behavior, narcissism and psychopathy is higher in males than females.
Like: "We tamed ourselves by weeding out bullies and domineering males throughout our evolutionary history. Humans organized egalitarian societies, and any male that violated this too much was subsequently the victim of a targeted killing."
Women competing with with other women using dominance behavior like bullying is a very common behavior, and I doubt there is a parent with a teenage daughter or teacher who has not observed this. We can also see this in apes, with female to female dominance behavior being one if not the biggest causes of death for female baboons. To continue with animal observations, male baboons have a different form of dominance behavior, and their behavior also result in dead baboons. Female aggression is about depriving the lower ranked females of food, water, sleep and grooming (together with some amount of bites and scratches), while male aggression is primarily about major injuries sustained during fights. If we define the latter as the single definition of aggression and dominance then the other form becomes invisible to us.
Going down further in the article, they define power as access to and control of resources. Not access to and control of people. This in order to say that women don’t have a strong craving for power because "obtaining power entails the risk of being disliked, and, unlike status, power has few social payoffs". It uses an exclusively male definition for power.
Here (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237101081_Female_Do...') is a study done on dominance behavior in female vs male hierarchies. It basically fully invalidates most of this article's claims on male vs female behavior in terms of dominance. It does not seem to use a male-centric definition of dominance.
I am not all against this article. It is a fairly in-depth description of the topic and an interesting read. I would however advise to consider some of the terminology and definitions to be a bit limited, and occasionally leading the reader into misconceptions by trying to use a single definition for both men and women.