THE ANIMAL WITHIN: THE FEMALE OF THE SPECIES

Most men are not physically violent. However, the deadliest killers of other human beings on earth are men, not women. Male violence poses a serious threat to human survival and stability. It is, therefore, the recurring, often glorified, subject of literature, cinema, and learned treatises. Because male aggression is both so visible and so deadly, it tends to obscure our view of female violence and aggression, which is more often subtle, less visible, but chronic. Female-female violence has, erroneously, been deemed unimportant because it is unlikely to result in someone's immediate death or serious physical injury.

Male aggression is spectacular, terrifying. Male soldiers enter a village and shoot everyone in sight. Male pilots bomb an entire city from a plane. Male soldiers torture, massacre, and imprison enemy men and systematically rape and gang-rape the enemy's women and children. Individual men dominate others by force and through intimidation. Men, not women, are responsible for ninety percent of the violent crimes in our society. Finally, no more than ten percent of all living men own and control most of the world's resources, thereby condemning all others to lives of poverty and struggle. In comparison, female aggression is barely visible. What can mere women do that is as violent as this?

Women ardently collaborate in the maintenance of this culture. They create homes for such men and socialize children to become — or to marry — similarly successful men. Only the rare woman resists doing so.

British evolutionary psychologist Anne Campbell, who is now affiliated with Durham University, and University of Texas psychologists David H. Buss and Joshua Duntley agree that women sustain and help to reproduce patriarchy, by systematically choosing men with more resources and by "favorfing] sons over daughters." Buss and Dundey argue that female "co-involvement" was crucial in the creation of patriarchy, since women's evolutionary "preferences [for 'Alpha' mates] thus established an important set of ground rules for men's intra-sexual competition." Buss and Dundey contend that "neither men nor women are united with members of their own sex," but, rather, in the main compete with others of their own sex.

Indeed the primary targets of women's aggression, hostility, violence, and cruelty are other women. As most women know, a woman can make life hell, on a moment-by-moment basis, for any other woman whom she envies, fears, or with whom she must compete for resources. For example, older women and all-female cliques tend to bully girls and women into submission; cliques shun any woman whom they view as prettier, smarter, sexually freer, or "different."

Female rivalries tend to support, not disrupt, the status quo. Thus, in order to survive or to improve their own lot, most women, like men, collude in the subordination of women as a class.

In addition to exercising brute economic and physical force, I believe that women psychologically tame girls and other women into conformity by threatening to withdraw their considerable capacity for emotional intimacy from any girl or woman whose growth or change of circumstance threatens the status quo. In a sense, women maternally enchant — then terrorize or "turn" upon each other. Fairy tales are fraught with just such Fairy Godmothers and Evil Stepmothers, and should be understood as a history of embattled female relationships and other sudden reversals of blissful, dyadic fortune.

Scientists have only recently begun to study what has been termed "indirect aggression." Female indirect aggression can be very painful psychologically, socially, and economically. Such aggression is both verbal and nonverbal and includes reputation-wrecking gossip and shunning, which may lead to social "death" and, in some cultures, to real death as well.

Because it is so widespread, male aggression is seen as natural; even when it assumes violent and criminal proportions, it is not necessarily regarded as pathological. Most women, on the other hand, do not engage in male-like aggression. When they do, their behavior is deemed unnatural and therefore pathological — even if what a woman has done is kill in order to save her own life. Women who physically fight other women — or men — are viewed as having "no class."

Female-female aggression has been less studied, less discussed, and less recognized than male aggression. Perhaps, in a society that values men over women, what women do to each other is simply deemed less important by both men and women. Similarly, in a society that values beige-colored people, what people of other colors do to each other is viewed as less important.

In 1987, University of Western Australia anthropologist Victoria K Burbank published a study of female aggression in 137 societies: in Asia, India, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, South America, the Caribbean, and among native-Indian tribes in North America. The data she used had been gathered by social scientists over a period of more than a hundred years. Burbank looked only at cases in which women initiated the aggression and where the aggression took place in the context of the home or neighborhood. Burbank found that women engaged in physical, verbal, and indirect aggression "around the world." Women "shriek, scream, scold, revile, and insult their (mainly) female opponents." For example, in 1870 Aymara women were observed "venting their anger" by "kicking apart the clay cooking stoves of their rivals." In 1895 Kashmiri women were described as "famous for their vocabulary of abuse." In 1931 Ona women were observed having "word duels that lasted for several hours." In 1964 a Kapauku woman who was in a dispute with her husband and co-wife was described as "destroying her [rival's] house, uproot[ing] part of the garden, and wreck [ing] the fence." And, in 1974, the data described how a "Ute woman may kill her rival's horse."

Burbank writes that one of the "most striking findings of this survey is that women are by far the most common targets of female aggression. Women are targets in 124, or ninety-one percent of the 137 societies; whereas men are targets (of female aggression) in seventy-four, or fifty-four percent of the 137 societies. Women targeted mainly co-wives, sexual rivals, a wife and 'the other woman,' and women whose relationships are not specified."

Because we do not expect women to be physically aggressive and because both men and women view aggressive behavior in women with great alarm, people tend to view women's aggression as more emotionally and physically out of control than even the deadliest male aggression. To some extent, studies suggest that men are in control when...