Woman

by Natalie Angier

  If you are or have ever been a girl, you know that the first job of being a girl is learning to survive in a group of girls. And girls in groups are not little Joni Mitchell tunes made particulate. Girls in groups are ... how shall we say it, what's the word that we persist in thinking has a penchant for boys? Aggressive. Of course they're aggressive. They're alive, aren't they? They're primates. They're social animals. So yes, girls may like to play with Barbie, but make the wrong move, sister, and ooh, ah, here's your own Dentist Barbie in the trash can, stripped, shorn, and with tooth-marks on her boobs.

  If you are or have ever been a girl, you know that girls are aggressive. This is news the way the Code of Hammurabi is news. Yet the girls in station break Candyland are never aggressive; in fact, they are getting gooier by the year. Nor are the girls who prance through the meadows of biological theory ever aggressive. No, they're prosocial. They're verbal, interactive, attentive, amiable. They're the friends you wish you could buy along with the Belchee Baby you saw on TV. Take, for example, a 1997 report that appeared in the journal Nature. Researchers from Britain described their studies of girls with Turner's syndrome, an unusual condition in which a girl has only one X chromosome rather than the two Xs found in most girls. The scientists began with the very intriguing observation that there are differences in social skills between Turner's girls depending on their chromosomal background. Normally a girl inherits one X chromosome from her mother, one from her father. A Turner's girl, who has but a single X chromosome, can receive it from either her mother or her father. What the scientists discovered, in their study of one hundred Turner's girls, was that those girls who had inherited their X chromosome from their fathers were more genial than those whose X had been bestowed by Mom. Daddy's girls tended to be friendly, socially adept, and well adjusted. The mother's lot were comparatively sullen, awkward, tongue-tied in company, prone to offensive or disruptive displays. All of which was fine and fascinating and offered a glimpse into the behavioral palette of Turner's syndrome, but the scientists went further. They extended their results to say something about the innateness of good behavior in girls—all girls. They proposed that the Turner's girls with the paternal X chromosome, the socially well-adjusted ones, were the girl-like girls, and those with the maternal X chromosome, the socially offensive or inept ones, carried a more boylike genotype. Their reasoning was serpentine and abstruse, but in the final analysis they spooned up a portrait of girls as genetically predisposed toward sociality, diplomacy, and affability. By their dubious hypothesis, the X chromosome carries a gene for social grace that is active in normal girls but is kept silent in normal boys, a sexually divergent pattern of expression with presumed evolutionary advantages to each. For males, an insensitivity to social niceties would in theory make it easier to be aggressive, to form dominance hierarchies, and to organize hunting parties and armies and bulldoze over any empathic fools standing in their way. For girls, having greater social skills could simplify the task of befriending other females, going along by getting along, and learning the craft of motherhood. "Little girls love to be little mothers," one of the researchers told me. "And women love to talk to other women. They have a flair for striking up social relationships with other women." Flair has an intrinsic sound to it, a touch of the chromosomal.

  I have taken the liberty of designating this gene SSEN-1, SSEN referring to the ingredients in the ancient recipe for girlness and the 1 tacked on as a preemptive acknowledgment that the creation of social grace is surely a complex enough operation that many other girl-specific SSEN genes will be unearthed if we wave our spangled fairy wands with sufficient tenderness.

  Forget for a moment that the study on which the florid and far-reaching speculations are based was limited to a population of one hundred children with a chromosomal anomaly, and that chromosomal anomalies are fraught with complexities and confounding factors of their own; and forget that the putative SSEN-1 gene is far from being identified or even proven to exist. What impresses me is the bleached and alien bearing of the generic girl who emerges from the report. The girl whose social aplomb and circle of friends are her birthrights. The motherette with the gift of gab. Where are the bossy girls, the morbid girls, the mean girls, the dreaming girls, the girls who are your best friend everlasting today and your Eve Harrington tomorrow? Where are the pyramid schemers, the social notaries who rank you A through Zed and you can't do a damned thing about it? Where are the hyena girls, the leopard girls, the coyote and the crow girls?

  Where are the living, seething, aggressive girls who are the only girls I've ever known?

  We don't talk much or hear much about aggression in girls and women, so we forget that it's there and has meaning. We associate aggressive behavior with males, and we get stuck on that note, and we can't talk or coo or screech our way past it. Scientists do it ritualistically. We all do it reflexively, even when we think we're wise and enlightened and past that tired old stereotype. Once, while watching a group of seagulls battling over a pile of old crackers on the beach, I observed that the older seagulls, the ones with dirty white plumage and the red spot of maturity on the beak, spent all their time trying to assert their dominance by peevishly pecking at the younger, brown-feathered seagulls, while the younger seagulls ignored their betters and devoted their efforts to gulping down food. As I watched, I assumed that all the birds in the skirmish were male, had to be male, for they were so aggressive, and I had the whole story worked out in my mind, the older males obsessed with status, the younger males defiant and opportunistic. Only later did I recall that male and female seagulls look alike—brown in youth, white in age—and I realized, shamefacedly, that many of the birds in the free-for-all must have been female, because females have to eat and a scavenger's life is a bitch.

  But let's not curse the knee for jerking. Our fixation on male aggression is not irrational. Among humans, male-type aggression can at times be as clear as a broken nose on your face. Men are overwhelmingly responsible for violent crime. They commit 90 percent of the murders, 80 percent of the muggings, nearly 100 percent of the rapes. Researchers who want to understand the basis of aggression must justify their curiosity on medical grounds; otherwise they'll have trouble getting grants. Male aggression is easily cast as a disease. Violence is a threat to public health. Men are more physically violent than women, and thus male aggression is of greater scientific concern than female aggression. Besides, we all know that women are much less aggressive than men and that girls are great friends, and if you, girl, beg to differ, we have ways to persuade you, starting with a mandatory bolus of kiddie TV.

  The problem with ignoring female aggression is that we who are aggressive, we girls and women and obligate primates, feel confused, as though something is missing in the equation, the interpretation of self and impulse. We're left to wander through the thickets of our profound ferocity, our roaring hungers and drives, and we're tossed in the playground to thrash it out among ourselves, girl to girl, knowing that we must prove ourselves and negotiate and strut and calibrate but seeing scant evidence of the struggle onscreen or in books or on biology's docket. We are left feeling like "error variants," in the words of one female scientist, wondering why we aren't nicer than we are, and why we want so much, and why we can't sit still.

  Yet even though we know something is missing from the bio-cultural, blond-wigged effigy of Woman, we're reluctant to explore the edges of our aggression. We don't want to be seen as aggressive or to think of ourselves as aggressive. Nobody likes aggressive people, of either sex. The people we call aggressive are the people we think of as pains in the ass, and we don't want them in our homes, our workplaces, or our heads. We have a monochromatic and wholly negative view of aggression, one that we've come to associate with wife batterers and crack addicts. It's fine to be assertive and determined; these are good, upstanding terms, and we like them, we busy global marketeers. But aggression is passé. Aggression is low. It's for losers, really. Aggression is what you resort to when you don'
t have genuine power.

  It's like I was trying to tell you. Aggression is for girls.

  Now is our chance. Aggression is unfashionable. It has been medicalized and demonized and tossed on the landfill of public opinion, and it is no longer seen as a desirable trait or the mark of a real man. We are free to salvage aggression and do with it as we please. We can rehabilitate it and recode it. We can share it. We can understand it in the context of our needs as girls and as women, and we can see when aggression is likely to appear and what form it will take. Aggressive behavior can be hostile and seek to wound, but it can also be creative and seek to engage. Psychologists routinely regard aggressive behavior as antisocial, but this is a disappointing, Panglossian view of life. Scratch the surface of many a seemingly innocent social behavior and you'll find aggression snickering underneath. Friendliness can be deeply aggressive, as anybody who has gotten a soliciting phone call at dinnertime can attest: "How ya doing tonight? Give me money." Or take the following exchange, which routinely occurs when a person receives a visitor to her home. The hostess offers the guest something to eat or drink. The guest refuses. On the face of it, the behavior of each player is amicable, the antithesis of aggressive. The hostess is generous for offering, and the guest is thoughtful for declining and thus sparing the hostess her trouble. Sometimes the transaction is indeed simple and sweet and devoid of subtext; the guest may just have finished dinner and have no desire for more comestibles. But think of the aggressive potential of the ritual, the power dynamic resonant within it. By offering food, the hostess signals that she knows she is in charge. It's her home, and her resources surround them. She is the one with something to give, and she wants to profit from her position of bounty. She wants to establish the relationship on her terms, to be seen as trustworthy, generous, and well stocked. She wants to secure an alliance, however temporary, with the guest, who, in accepting the gift, would be mildly beholden to the giver.

  By refusing the food, the visitor rejects the temporary position of confederate or subordinate, and in so doing sends the subtle message that she is in charge here; she is the one who can afford to forgo gifts and potential colluders. And the hostess may feel a touch of vexation at the refusal, may stiffen and decide, Okay, then, we won't be friends, state your business and let's get on with it. Not for nothing is a rejection of generosity sometimes likened to a slap in the face. Context sets the pitch for the aggressive kinetics of any social exchange, petting it into docility, fanning it into antagonism. To refuse food is generous if your hostess is an old friend who has kids and would just as soon not approach the event horizon of her kitchen. To refuse food if you are a boss who has dropped by your employee's home on the weekend is to give a despotic waggle of your red-dotted beak. You show up unexpectedly and shock the poor gal, and when she tries to equilibrate the relationship by offering you a beverage of your choice, you snub her. You're going to fire her, after all; it's she who will need the drink.

  Context and reformation can make even frank aggression look appealing. Lady Macbeth is everybody's favorite she-abomination, a ruthlessly ambitious woman who begs the spirits, "Unsex me here, and fill me from the crown to the toe topful of direst cruelty," who connives and manipulates her husband into killing King Duncan and then dunks her hands in the bloody aftermath. "Hostile, aggressive bitch" doesn't begin to cover this dame. Given a little shakeup of our preconceptions, though, Lady Macbeth can take on an air of tragic nobility. What if we imagine Lady Macbeth as a Nordic matriarch, defender of her clan? Pekka Niemela, a philosopher at Uppsala University in Finland, has suggested that Lady Macbeth was a Viking, a character much like the powerful women who populate the classic Norse epic the Orkneyinga Saga. Niemela points out that Macbeth is set in Scotland about A.D. 1000, when Scotland was more pagan than Christian, dominated by Viking culture. Cast as a Viking, Lady Macbeth loses none of her brutality but gains much of our sympathy. Viking women were expected to curry ferocity, to be thick of blood and galled of milk. Viking men were away on raids for months or years. Viking women were in charge of the fiefdoms back home, and they had considerable power to make decisions about life and death, war and peace. But they had little time for pomp and mead parties. The plundering class is ever at risk of being plundered, and there were no laws, no local sheriffs, no Royal Canadian Mounties to protect a Viking's property or person. The only insurance against threats from the outside was kin and clan. A weak clan could not attract allies. A weak clan could be exterminated in a single spasm of slaughter. A Viking woman didn't have the luxury of indifference to status. Macbeth could always hop aboard a ship and take his middling thanely title and milk of human kindness overseas. For his lady, moored on the Scottish highlands, nothing short of a queen's crown looked strong enough to shield the clan, and there was no way to gain that crown but with the point of a knife.

  Lady Macbeth is every actress's dream role, but we can be glad that we don't have to play the Norsewoman in everyday life. Our aggressions are more palatable, less indelible. Still, we have aggressions, our aggressions, and that we need them is what matters, and if we approach them without hostility or mental transvestism and search out their source and substrate, then we can forgive ourselves our woman's gall and blow a kiss to our friends.

  Which brings me to testosterone, so formidable by reputation that you can practically hear its carbon rings clanking. There is no way to think about the source of aggression without looking testosterone in its cocky little eye. Testosterone the conquering concept has swaggered among us too long to ignore as a trifle. We have heard and heard again that testosterone mediates aggressive behavior—somehow, in some way, we're not sure of the details, but nevertheless the hormone is surely a contender. Testosterone is linked to all those traits covered by the umbrella term aggression, such as the urge to dominate or attack another, to show off, to bluster, to leave heaps of dirty laundry in the middle of the floor. It makes leaders and it makes crooks, and if it can be hard to tell the difference between the two, well, that's testosterone for you—as subtle as a sledgehammer. Testosterone is said to start its maneuvers young, pre-young, to shape the brain of a developing fetus and dispose the brain toward domineering, reckless, ham-handed behavior later in life. Testosterone is to aggression what breasts are to buttocks: think of one, and the other inevitably pops to mind.

  Of course, lately we have all learned and been told that testosterone is not strictly a male hormone, that females have some too. But less of it, mind you, much, much less of it. The average levels of circulating testosterone among women fall between 20 and 70 nanograms per deciliter of blood. Half is made by the adrenal glands and half by the ovaries. Among men, 300 nanograms per deciliter is on the low side, and most men are in the 400-to-700-nanogram range—in other words, they have ten times the amount found in women, and nearly all of that plethora comes from the cells of the testes. So men have more testosterone. So we think men are more aggressive than women. And so we think that testosterone is partly if not largely to blame or to credit for the putative aggression asymmetry.

  We have also come up with a new creature called the high-T woman, whose testosterone quotient is on the upper end of the normal female range and who is more aggressive than the average woman, more dedicated to her career, more sexually assertive, less interested in children—a very little mother. This high-T woman is a biologically tinted attempt to explain why some women behave like error variants, but there is in fact scant evidence to support the existence of the high-T gal, or, more precisely, the gal whose forceful, edgy, ambitious style is the result of elevated testosterone concentrations. Testosterone has been accorded vast powers, as the libido hormone, the aggression hormone, the dominance hormone. But if women had to rely on their testosterone to get anything done in life, to feel erotic or angry or noncomatose, they'd be a pathetic lot. There's so little there there. Even a high-T woman, with her 70 nanograms per deciliter, would not make a sub-passable man. It has been proposed that because women have low levels of tes
tosterone, they are extremely sensitive to small variations and fluctuations of it. Can this be? Despite its reputation, testosterone is not a particularly active hormone; grain for grain, it is much less biologically potent than estradiol. Men appear to need great swells of it to subsist. Why should a woman be better equipped than a man to whip a feeble hormone into a source of behavioral power? The likely answer is, we aren't, and we don't need to be. We have paid a long and blind obeisance to testosterone the conquering concept, to the point where we assume it rules all rulers, male or female, present or wistful; but if we challenge the dominant paradigm and see how badly it fails us, we can begin to imagine a parallel universe, where the neural substrate of a Viking matriarch is not a booby prize but our birthright.

  Testosterone is said to work in two stages on the brain, the organizational stage and the activational stage. Organization happens prenatally, when the testes of a male fetus begin releasing testosterone, which supposedly shapes the brain in male-specific ways. Much later, during adolescence, activation occurs; testosterone levels rise in a young man and switch on all the male-specific patterns that were set in the womb, and we are given the raw material for Fortune 500 executives (all but 10 percent of whom are male) or very large bruisers named Arnold (Schwarzenegger) or Norman (Schwarzkopf).