by Rory Miller
This is why women rarely train in martial arts and when they do they tend to pick classes with low contact. Toby Beck (Duchess Elina of the SCA) wrote about it. I have used her information to plan tactical operations and to really help teach female officers. Link here.
http://forums.uechi-ryu.com/viewtopic.php?p=27215&sid=f4a748e1c9f45f08fe553d76dd725f61
The most important biological difference is in adrenaline reactions.
When something bad happens, men get a big spike of adrenaline and other stress hormones that quickly fades. Women have a much slower build up, the peak never gets quite as high and it tapers off slowly.
In personal relationships, where you see this most often is in arguments. I have an argument with my wife. I'm getting loud, she's clearly wrong but she's being infuriatingly reasonable and I finally get so angry, after just a minute or two, that I stomp out, slamming the door and go for a walk. A couple minutes later it's pretty clear that she was right. I decide I might as well go back and apologize now... and I walk in just as she is getting to full fury.
To a man, since I got mad early and got over it quickly, she looks irrational. She wasn't mad when I thought it would be appropriate and was mad when I was over it. It actually has nothing to do with thought or rationality, that is just timing on adrenaline. (It's really a bunch of hormones and neurotransmitters, I use adrenaline for shorthand).
You see this in defensive shootings, where a man will usually fire around two shots as soon as he is aware of the intruder and a women will retreat and retreat and retreat and then empty the weapon.
This is valuable and one of the reasons why I loved working with a female partner. Early in the encounter when a guy is going into his fight or flight mode, the woman can still think, plan and even do fine motor skill things like, oh, aiming. Her memory and senses in a quick encounter will be clearer.
What gets misinterpreted a lot is that after a very tense encounter (when the guy is going into his sleepy or sometimes horny mode) the woman has a tendency to burst into tears. It's just adrenaline burning off, but often neither the man nor the woman are aware of it and think it is an emotional issue. (Not sure how it will affect your readers and your writing, but be careful with yourself to distinguish between hormones and emotions.)
Because the guy has his adrenaline timed to what is often the most violent part of the encounter, the things that might be misinterpreted as emotion are hidden by action. He'll probably get the shakes afterwards, they both will. But since hers will last longer no one seems to notice that they started later as well, and she was fine when he started shaking.
Evolutionarily, you can see why this works. Child-bearing women are the primary resource in a marginal hunter-gatherer society. If a handful of the younger men fight, even if the predator is too formidable to stop, it buys women and children time to get to safety. That time, if the predator breaks through, probably coincides with the female adrenaline peak.
One more evolutionary thing for the fantasy writers. The math doesn't work on female warrior societies, not unless they have a huge surplus of resources and people. Not because women can't fight. Trust me, in a lot of ways men are far less dangerous in a fight than women. It's because of children.
Let's say there are two tribes, all adults, each has ten men and ten women. Tribe A has its women do the fighting, tribe B has men fight. They get in a dispute. The battle ends in a draw and each loses four warriors. Both tribes now have 16 members, A has six women and ten men; B six men and ten women. The next year, assuming peace and war doesn't break out during pregnancies, all of the women can potentially have a baby. Tribe A now has 22 members, 9 of them female (potential warriors). Tribe B has 26 members, 11 of them potentially warriors. As this goes on, A will eventually whittle down and lose. Unless total destruction of the tribe was the alternative, women have been too valuable to risk in combat for most of human history.
This doesn't mean that such a society couldn't or hasn't existed, but there are reasons why it couldn't last without some extraordinary edge... and it will take some real deep motivation for a group to risk it, knowing how dangerous it would be. (Another side note-- in history and even in wilderness societies today people knew the world was dangerous on a gut level we have largely forgotten today. The people--tribal and colonial both-- that I met in Ecuador were not "living at one with nature' they were frankly scared to death of the forest and the river.)
Sending young, fit males to fight also doesn't take them out of the gene pool and does serves a purpose. From my current WiP:
Once upon a time, one of your ancestors was sitting on the savannah with about fifteen other men, women and children. He had a stick and was poking under a log hoping to find some ant eggs when Thog ran out of the brush, screaming. Thog was running as fast as he could for the biggest tree nearby.
Your ancestor ran too. Probably. There’s a reason emotions are contagious.
Wugga, widely regarded as the snottiest of the tribe decided it wouldn’t be ‘cool’ to run and looked to see what Thog was running from. So the lion killed him first.
MarMar and Roro, young males in the tribe, grabbed sticks and ran towards whatever Thog was running from. They were widely regarded as not very smart but sometimes useful members of the tribe. If they didn’t die, they were definitely going to get laid out of it.
That’s important, because without either stupid snotty people or stupid aggressive people, the math is bad. Men run and climb faster than women who run and climb faster than children. Without a few sacrificial males, the women and children die. So dies the tribe and eventually the species.
The stupid brave get breeding rights (hasn’t changed much through rescuing princess and the modern action-adventure movie, has it?) because we will need more stupidly brave people later…
Look at the small percentage of modern soldiers who actually die in combat. It's been almost nine years since the first Special Ops groups went boots-on-ground in Afghanistan. In nine years combining Afghanistan and Iraq we have lost less people than we have in single days in WWI, WWII or the Civil War, despite huge advances in technology and fighting an urban insurgency, one of the potentially nastiest forms of warfare. (And I believe in one particular month in Vietnam we lost more troops to accident and disease than we have lost entirely in Gulf War II, but that's from memory.)
Even WWII, with 40-50 million killed, barely made a blip on the population growth charts. The 'baby boom' caught up nicely. Had a high percentage of those 40-50 million been women, it would have been a very different story as far as population growth.
These factors combine to make some cultural differences between men and women concerning violence. Because women weren't immersed in play violence as children and don't have the biologically driven 'monkey dance' programmed, they also don't have many of the subconscious rules that men have about fighting. When a woman goes physical, she is there to hurt you. IME, women go for eyes and try to cut (especially faces for some reason) far more than men do. They will often ignore the surrender signals that a man will respect.
Often, when a man goes physical, it is all about dominance and pride. When a women goes physical it is all about either stopping the threat or hurting him. There is a stage some women get to that can seem sadistic. Happens in men, too, but usually with less intensity and is somewhat less common. To put it another way, even an enraged man usually stops when the victim is dead. An enraged woman doesn't. (Careful... these are all generalities. Use them as they work for you.)
Hitting after death is not sadism, exactly, especially sadism in the modern recreational sense of the word. But it is horrifying, both to witness and to clean up after. It has more to do with the lack of social conditioning with and to violence. When guys are learning it can be fun to pummel each other, they also learn when it is appropriate to stop. Women tend not to learn this. Combined with the longer adrenaline curve, females can go into a longer, more brutal "dancing on the torn and twisted corpse" stage than males have the en
durance for.
It's not making sure the bad guy won't come after her, it's not that conscious. A lot of people, not just women, when it would be appropriate to make that conscious decision run headlong into their social programming. It is really hard to kill in cold blood and that can be a really hard decision to live with afterwards, even in war.
Women in the Violence Professions
It seems that lots of Americans feel that if we/they/me/Group X are only nice enough, everyone will like them/us. If we are accommodating, we will make people happy and comfortable and we will be liked. Women, in particular, are often taught that this is THE preferred strategy for fitting in and getting along.
There are a lot of cultures and subcultures that admire strength and courage, and that involves going head to head with problems and disagreements. Being too nice reads as obsequious and untrustworthy in those cultures.
In law enforcement, there is a dynamic with new female officers where they can feel harassed and marginalized. There are some instances where misogyny is in play, but that is relatively rare. It is actually a dynamic that guys who played competitive team sports have dealt with for much of their lives but women, even if they were top competitors, haven't experienced. Because they haven't experienced it, they have no idea how to act.
Cops believe (with a lot of justification) that a ‘pleaser’ personality stands a much higher chance of getting killed on the streets than anyone (and I mean anyone) else. When someone comes in with a pleaser personality, the veteran cops, especially the FTOs (Field Training Officers) push and they push. Not necessarily to get the person to quit (and this is the part that men learn in locker rooms and women don't) but to get them to fight. Not to get someone else to fight for them (filing formal complaints and lawsuits) but to stand up, get in their faces and set boundaries.
I was one of them. Everything changed the day after I got in a shouting match with my sergeant in the lieutenant's office, something to the effect of, "That's bullshit! I don't care if I'm on probation. I won't do something stupid just because you tell me to!" It was actually a lot more colorful than that. I thought, for a short time, that I had reached my limit and lashed out. I wasn’t even in the vicinity of my limit and I did not at the time, like many people, know the difference between ‘lashing out’ and simply standing up. That’s something you must learn in order to thrive in a dangerous profession.
If the rookie never once stands up and tells his training officers to pound sand, the rookie doesn't have the confidence to do the job well... and can't even do it safely. It's a big responsibility to put someone out on the streets who you believe will die.
I've had success with explaining this dynamic to women rookies. I don't think it's a matter of gender as much as experience. Some rookies, male or female, literally can't grasp that what the FTO wants is an argument with some righteous indignation and anger. Once it's explained, they see it. Not all can do it, of course. Sometimes the conditioning is too deep.
Female officers need different and extra training and they will never get it officially. Because of current labor law and practice, everyone going through the academy must be treated the same. Our need to pretend that everyone is equal turns a blind eye to the fact that everyone is different.
There are a lot of the problems that you imagine-- criminals, especially sexual predators, try to intimidate female officers. Many of the more violent subcultures in America have serious sexism issues as well and taking an order from a woman is almost always met with defiance...and if the female officer shows cultural sensitivity and calls for a male officer to handle members of this subculture other criminals see her as weak and she can't do her job. If she tries to handle it herself it will be dangerous, but if she doesn't the criminals won't respect her and will push her continuously.
Some officers (male and female, but any officer who isn't used to conflict and violence and those are more often female or upper-middle class male) are so afraid of losing control that they become little martinets, trying to badger and bully.
But probably the hardest thing and the one that women especially need special specific training for is how to function in a paramiltary, testosterone-drenched, extremely political and violence-driven field. (I don't consider any of those things negatives, by the way. Except maybe the politics, but even there I understand the need.)
When you are dealing with large numbers (my deputies were routinely working at ratios of 75 to 1, locked into the dorms in direct contact with the inmates) of violent people, the field is violence-driven and a big dose of testosterone and a good, clear organization contribute hugely to handling things safely. And all of this is new to most women.
They think people are being cold and unfriendly where a guy would know that they were waiting to see how he would handle stress. If someone is easily offended by words, it's not about being crude or sexist or Neanderthals-- guys believe that people who freak out over words will panic over actions. "Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me." People who believe that words really hurt haven't had bones broken yet.
A good female officer doesn't try to act like a male officer. There is a distinctive style to staying both feminine and in charge. The best are awesome at it. But because the academy classes are taught together, there won't be a class on "Feminine Power Dynamics in Law Enforcement" and there really should be.
One of the common mistakes women make is trying to act like one of the boys, trying to be cruder than the guys are. As a TL (Team Leader) I liked the energy that women brought to the team. The guys would be a little more polite and clear-headed.
We expected women to be morally superior in a way and we wanted them to want us to live up to being our best, chivalrous selves. When a woman tried to be cruder, she didn't do it well (just like in any society, cross gender there are lots of different subtle rules about what is appropriate and where and when) and it also tarnished that ideal.
Remember that most of the people that get involved in these career paths are something of idealists.
One of the expectations is that women will have to really work to go hands on and fight. When a woman is ruthless and determined and unafraid (or fakes it) it really impresses men...and when they do fight women tend to be more clear-headed and controlled than men, and that's very impressive. Remember that the clear-headed calm is because adrenaline curves are different. That has two side effects in that a woman usually must force herself to fight as an act of will and she gets the adrenaline affects after it is all over which can include shakes, crying, horniness or all three. Guys often interpret especially the crying as a hormonal weakness, fear, or "inability to deal". That's not what's going on. Most women take great pains to hide this phase. So do men. Much of the time many feel the after-effects of adrenaline as shakes or nausea, but I have seen one man, a big, tough experienced cop after a very intense few seconds say to me, “Sarge, I feel like I want to puke and I’m going to cry. Is this normal?” Yeah. That’s perfectly normal.
Another factor is that violent places can get really sexually charged. One of the common side-effects of violence and danger is an incredible urge for sex. Biologists have even joked about the “Four F’s” of survival stress: Fight, Flight, Freeze and Fuck.
The best women operators are strictly off limits. Very few women can engage in sex without emotional issues (even as basic as 'will he talk?' and 'what will the others think?') and even those that can, the men don't believe that these issues aren't coming up. It gets into a nasty cess pit of rumors and innuendo. It can tear a team apart, especially a team that is doing well enough to incite jealousy with the rest of the organization.
Like the best male operators, the best female operators have good relationships outside the team. And that can bring in another dynamic because some guys cannot handle a woman with a more macho reputation or job description. Unless the guy is strong, he will have ego issues.
Staying feminine and in charge is difficult. Very, very few do it well. Far
too often the idea of a powerful female is a bitch. The two most powerful (by acknowledged rank) women I know in my field worked hard to be not-feminine and have resulting health issues, largely related to weight.
The most respected are healthy, with the special beauty that comes with that, extraordinary athletes and absolutely (in front of everyone) fearless. They have proven their competency and maintain the feminine largely by the games they don't play. When the guys get obnoxious, they just raise an eyebrow and you feel like you told a dirty joke in front of your mom. It's a mix of a medieval lady archetype, a mom, and someone you really, really wouldn't want to mess with it.
A lot of good women operators don't try for rank. They are both satisfied to be accepted at the operator level and disgusted with how other women have advanced their careers. That's not a woman thing. Many of the people who achieve high rank in dangerous jobs sucked at the job. They were bad at it, it scared them, and so they worked and connived to move up in rank because the higher you are the farther away from the danger.
A woman who has worked hard as an operator has a huge disadvantage in the political field (integrity is valued highly in the operator ranks because these are people you rely on to keep you alive; career expediency is valued, sometimes even over lives, in the administrative ranks.) She also, often, doesn't want to be associated with the women who have made rank, and she will automatically be lumped in with them...and every last one of them will hate her and try to destroy her career.