Woman

by Natalie Angier

  In short, we don't know how serotonin plays into aggression or depression or, for that matter, why drugs like Prozac often are accompanied by side effects such as a craving for carbohydrates and an indifference to sex. If serotonin is the "civilizing" neurotransmitter, maybe too much of it can be as suffocating as too little, making you feel as though you're sitting in a French drawing room, surrounded by Fragonard murals, a powdered wig on your head.

  We don't understand the endocrinology, the neuroanatomy, or the biochemistry of aggression. We know it when we feel it, though, and sometimes it feels nasty, and sometimes it feels quite good.

  15. SPIKING THE PUNCH

  IN DEFENSE OF FEMALE AGGRESSION

  THIS STUDY has been done many times. If you take a group of babies or young toddlers and dress them in nondescript, non-sex-specific clothes—yellow is always a good color!—and make sure that their haircuts don't give them away, and if you put them in a room with a lot of adults watching, the adults will not be able to sex the children accurately. The adults will try, based on the behaviors of each child, but they will be right no more often than they would be if they flipped a coin. This has been shown again and again, but still we don't believe it. We think we can tell a boy or a girl by the child's behavior, specifically by its level of aggressiveness. If you show a person a videotape of a crying baby and tell her the baby is a boy, the observer will describe the baby as looking angry; if you tell the person the baby is a girl, she will say the child is scared or miserable.

  I am at a party with my daughter, who is sixteen months old. A boy who is almost eighteen months comes into the room and takes a toy away from my daughter. I say something humorous to her about how she's got to watch out for those older kids, they'll always try to push you around. And the boy's mother says, It's also because he's a boy. That's what happens at this age, she says. The boys become very boyish. A little while later, a girl who is almost eighteen months old takes my daughter's cup of milk away from her. The mother of the other girl doesn't say, It's because she's a girl, she's becoming girlish. Of course she doesn't say that; it would make no sense, would it? An older girl taking a cup away from a younger girl has nothing to do with the girlness of either party. But taking the toy away is viewed as inherent to the older boy's boyness.

  I felt very aggressive about the whole thing; alas, not being a toddler, I couldn't go and kick anybody in the kneecap. Which is the sort of thing that toddlers do, whatever their sex. They kick, they hit, they scream, they throw objects around, they act like pills past their expiration date. And we adults put up with it, and we subscribe to the myth of the helpless, innocent child, and it's a good thing we do and that children are cute, because otherwise we might well see the truth: that our children are born with astonishing powers, and with brains that seem by default to counsel aggression.

  "Young children are like animals," says Kaj Björkqvist, of Turku Akademi University in Finland. "Before they have language, they have their bodies. And through their bodies they can be aggressive, and so that is what they do, that is how they are. They are physically aggressive—boys, girls, all of them." Björkqvist studies female aggression. He has done cross-cultural comparisons of children in Europe, North America, the Middle East, and Asia. Everywhere he has found that young children are physically aggressive, and that before the age of three, there are no significant differences between girl aggression and boy aggression.

  We grow into our sex-specific aggressions. We own the code of aggression from birth, and we perfect its idiom through experience and experimentation. Now I must do something artificial and divide aggression into two basic categories, "bad" aggression and "good" aggression. Earlier I said that context determines whether we see a behavior as good aggression or bad aggression and that even Lady Macbeth looks swell in Nordic gear. But for the sake of examining how female aggression evolves and what its multitudinous sources and expressions may be, it helps to do as researchers do and distinguish between the malign and the resolute. Henri Parens, a child psychiatrist at the Medical College of Pennsylvania, calls the two phyla of aggression "hostile aggression," which is "generated by excessive unpleasure and motivates fantasies and acts of anger, hostility and hate," and "nondestructive aggression," which is "inborn and fuels assertive and goal achieving behaviors." In the infant and toddler, the two aggressions are one, and they are of the reactive nervous system—anger, hate, assertiveness, whatever it takes, or whatever can be done, to maintain momentum and attract the attention of the parent, the intermediary between self and no self.

  With the awakening of the mind, the child learns to channel aggressive impulses and to calculate and compare actions and responses. Children begin to learn the meaning of hurting another. A baby kicks you in the mouth and doesn't know she hurts you. By the age of two or three, a girl knows she can hurt other beings, and hurt them badly, and with that knowledge the distinctions between malign and resolute aggression become meaningful. The mainstream model posits that aggression is a public health crisis. Mainstream studies of female aggression focus on hostile aggression, the aggression aimed to hurt, with foreknowledge, with malice.

  When the mind comes into its own and the child starts speaking fluently, purposefully, adults become less tolerant of physical aggression. Today, in most cultures, acceptance of physical aggression declines as the child gets older; by the time a person reaches puberty, the tendency to use physical force to wrest a desired object or behavior from another is considered frankly pathological. This is true for both sexes, but particularly for girls. Physical aggression is discouraged in girls in manifold and aggressive ways. Not only are they instructed against offensive fighting; they are rarely instructed in defensive fighting. Girls don't learn how to throw a punch. Humor is another form of aggression, and until recently humor has been used to squelch the very notion of a warrior female. Just the thought of a girl-fight, and people snicker and rub their hands with glee. Cat fight! Scratching, screeching, pulling hair, and falling on butt with skirt hiked in the air! Happily, the smirky parody of girl-fights has gotten a bit paunchy and dated of late, and instead we've been treated to images of GI Janes and bodiced Xenas wielding swords and Klingon women with brickbat fists, though whether the mass media's revisionist fighting female has been driven by attitudinal change or by the need to jolt a bored and distracted audience is unclear.

  Whatever the media moment may be, girls still do not often engage in physical fights. The older children get, the less physically aggressive they become—though not always, and not everywhere—but the dropoff rate for the use of physical aggression in girls is much sharper than it is for boys. At least in the developed West, by the time girls and boys are in third grade, boys are about three times as likely as girls to kick or strike at somebody who makes them mad. What then do girls do with that aggressiveness, which in the bliss of preverbalism could speak through hands and feet? It does not go away. It finds a new voice. It finds words. Girls learn to talk hornet talk. Mastering curse words and barbed insults is an essential task of childhood. Girls also learn to use their faces as weapons. Expressions like sticking out your tongue or rolling your eyes or curling your lip all seem funny to adults, but studies show that they aren't funny to children, and that they can be effective in conveying anger and dislike or in ostracizing an undesirable. Aggression researchers initially thought that girls had the edge over boys in verbal aggression and that they were more likely than boys to belittle their peers with words and facial flexions, but a series of Finnish studies of eight- and eleven-year-olds suggested otherwise. The researchers sought to determine how children responded when they were angry. They asked the children to describe themselves and their reactions to being roused to rage; they asked teachers and parents to describe how the children reacted in conflict; and they asked children to talk about each other, to rate each other's rileability and behaviors in a squall. The scientists found that boys and girls were equally likely to use verbal aggression against their cohorts, to call t
hem nasty names to their faces, to yell, to mock, to try to make the despised ones look stupid. And so boys kick and fight more than girls do, and the sexes argue and chide in equal amounts. We might then conclude, So boys are more aggressive, for they shout with their mouths and on occasion with their bodies, while the girls keep their fists to themselves.

  There are other ways in which rage emerges among girls, though, ways that are roughly girl-specific. A girl who is angry often responds by stalking off, turning away, snubbing the offender, pretending she doesn't exist. She withdraws, visibly so, aggressively so. You can almost hear the thwapping of her sulk. Among eleven-year-olds, girls are three times more likely than boys to express their anger in the form of a flamboyant snub. In addition, girls at this age, more than boys, engage in a style of aggression called indirect aggression.

  I'll admit up front that I dislike this form of aggression, and that to mention it is to reinforce clichés about female treachery and female conniving. Yet it is an aggression that we gals know, because we grew up as girls and we saw it and struggled against it and hated it and did it ourselves. Indirect aggression is anonymous aggression. It is backbiting, gossiping, spreading vicious rumors. It is seeking to rally others against the despised but then denying the plot when confronted. The use of indirect aggression increases over time, not just because girls don't generally use their fists to make their point, but because the effectiveness of indirect aggression is tied to the fluency of a person's social intelligence; the more sophisticated the person, the cleverer her use of the dorsal blade. In this sense, then, a girl's supposed head start over boys in verbal fluency may give her an edge in applying an indirect form of aggression. But the advantage, such as it is, doesn't last, for males catch up, and by the time we reach adulthood we have all become political animals, and men and women are, according to a number of studies, equally likely to express their aggression covertly. Despite rumors to the contrary, systematic eavesdroppings have revealed that men and women gossip an equal amount about their friends, families, colleagues, and celebrities. Adults of both sexes go to great lengths to express their antipathy toward one another indirectly, in ways that mask their hostile intent while still getting the jab done. For example, a person might repeatedly interrupt an opponent during an office meeting, or criticize the antagonist's work, rather than attacking his or her character—even though the source of the aggressor's ire has nothing to do with the quality of the opponent's performance.

  Indirect aggression is not pretty, nor is it much admired. To the contrary, it is universally condemned. When children and adults are asked to describe their feelings about the various methods of expressing anger, backstabbing behavior ranks at the bottom, below a good swift kick to the crotch. Yet there it is, with us, among us, not exclusively female by any means, but a recognizable hazard of girlhood. Part of the blame lies with the myth of the goo-girl, for the more girls are counseled against direct forms of aggression and the more geniality of temperament is prized, the greater is the likelihood that the tart girls will resort to hidden machinations to get what they want. In cultures where girls are allowed to be girls, to speak up and out, they are in fact more verbally, directly aggressive and less indirectly aggressive than in cultures where girls and women are expected to be demure. In Poland, for example, a good smart mouth is considered a female asset, and girls there rag each other and pull no punches and report feeling relatively little threat of intragroup skullduggery. Among female Zapotec Indians in Mexico, who are exceedingly subordinate to men, indirect aggression prevails. Among the Vanatinai of Papua New Guinea, one of the most egalitarian and least stratified societies known to anthropologists, women speak and move as freely as they please, and they sometimes use their fists and feet to demonstrate their wrath, and there is no evidence of a feminine edge in covert operations.

  Another reason that girls may resort to indirect aggression is that they feel such extraordinary aggression toward their friends—lashing, tumbling, ever-replenishing aggression. Girl friendships are fierce and dangerous. The expression "I'll be your best friend" is not exclusively a girl phrase, but girls use it a lot. They know how powerful the words are, how significant the offer is. Girls who become good friends feel a compulsion to define the friendship, to stamp it and name it, and they are inclined to rank a close friend as a best friend, with the result that they often have many best friends. They think about their friends on a daily basis and try to figure out where a particular friend fits that day in their cosmology of friendships. Is the girl her best friend today, or a provisional best friend, pending the resolution of a minor technicality, a small bit of friction encountered the day before? The girl may want to view a particular girl as her best friend, but she worries how her previous best friend will take it—as a betrayal or as a potential benefit, a bringing in of a new source of strength to the pair. Girls fall in love with each other and feel an intimacy for each other that is hard for them to describe or understand.

  When girls are in groups, they form coalitions of best friends, two against two, or two in edgy harmony with two. A girl in a group of girls who doesn't feel that she has a specific ally feels at risk, threatened, frightened. If a girl who is already incorporated into the group decides to take on a newcomer, to sponsor her, the resident girl takes on a weighty responsibility, for the newcomer will view her as (for the moment) her best friend, her only friend, the guardian of her oxygen mask.

  When girls have a falling-out, they fall like Alice down the tunnel, convinced that it will never end, that they will never be friends again. The Finnish studies of aggression among girls found that girls hold grudges against each other much longer than boys do. "Girls tend to form dyadic relationships, with very deep psychological expectations from their best friends," Björkqvist said. "Because their expectations are high, they feel deeply betrayed when the friendship falls apart. They become as antagonistic afterwards as they had been bonded before." If a girl feels betrayed by a friend, she will try to think of ways to get revenge in kind, to truly hurt her friend, as she has been hurt. Fighting physically is an unsatisfactory form of punishing the terrible traitor. It is over too quickly. To express anger might work if the betrayer accepts the anger and responds to it with respect. But if she doesn't acknowledge her friend's anger or sense of betrayal, if she refuses to apologize or admit to any wrongdoing, or if she goes further, walking away or mocking or snubbing her friend, at that point a girl may aim to hurt with the most piercing and persistent tools for the job, the psychological tools of indirect, vengeful aggression, with the object of destroying the girl's position, her peace of mind, her right to be. Indirect aggression is akin to a voodoo hex, an anonymous but obsessive act in which the antagonist's soul, more than her body, must be got at, must be penetrated, must be nullified.

  The intensities of childhood friendships, dyads, coalitions, and jihads subside with age, but sometimes just barely. Women remain, through much of their lives, unsettled about other women. We feel drawn and repelled, desirous of a connection and at the same time aggressive toward those who register on our radar screen. We want undying, infinite friendship, we want a Thelma, we want a Louise; but there can be no second act to Thelma & Louise, because to sustain that undying friendship required the women to die. When they proved themselves willing to forsake all else for the sake of each other, they were in a quandary. What could they do for each other, after all? There were just two of them, and there was a world arrayed against them, a world of men; and though they were stronger together in one sense, the sense of themselves, than they had been individually, they were also weakened in their unimpeachable dyad. They couldn't provide each other with everything—with money, home, security, physical gratification—but as great friends they were positioned, deliberately, heavy-handedly so, as a menace to the world of men, the workaday, home-a-day world. And because the world of men is the world, the women had nowhere to go but into the Grand Canyon, the grandest vagina on earth. Great female friendships often are pr
esented as threats to the prevailing order, and to the females themselves. In the gorgeous movie Heavenly Creatures, Pauline and Juliet are great friends, inseparable fifteen-year-old girls, united in their mutual, isolating imaginative genius. They have to kill the mother of one of them to keep their friendship alive. Sisters united are tainted black and bloody. Goneril and Regan were united, and Machiavellian, and set in opposition to the patriarch Lear, and they were unnatural in their unity, with their pestilent and covert aggression. The stepsisters of Cinderella sought with unity of purpose to sabotage the most natural of dyads, Cinderella and the prince, and in their effort to prevail they were willing to shed blood and foot sections, to trim back their oversized feet to fit the glass slipper.

  Women bond with other women, and yet our strongest aggressions and our most frightening hostilities may be directed against other women. We hear about the war between the sexes, but surprisingly few of our aggressive impulses are aimed against men, the putative adversaries in that war. We don't consider men our competitors, even now, in the market free-for-all, when they often are. It is so much easier to feel competitive with another woman, to feel our nerves twitch with anxiety and hyperatten-tiveness when another woman enters our visual field. We dress women in fairy white, we dress them in mafia black. We want them around us. We want to be alone among men.