The same is true of Aboriginal women in Australia. Victoria Burbank observed 174 fights in one community and found that women started nearly half. When women were physically injured in fights, their aggressors were women about half the time. Noting that “Western theories, metaphors and stereotypes of female aggression and victimization frame our understanding” but do not speak universal truth, Burbank asked the women how they saw their behavior. They viewed it as natural. Aggression was “the expected, if not inevitable, outcome of anger,” for both men and women, and wasn’t seen as socially deviant.
Anthropologist Maria Lepowsky studied aggressive strategies on the island of Vanatinai, near New Guinea, where men and women are held to be equal in economic, political, marital, and sexual relations. “Males and females experience equally strong emotions of envy, jealousy, frustrated desire and rage,” she observed. “There is no perception that a man’s feelings of anger are stronger than a woman’s.” But equality in itself doesn’t make women physically violent. In that particular culture, both sexes are expected to curtail verbal and physical aggression. Instead, they may use sorcery or witchcraft, and indeed that is the most prevalent form of violence on the island. Lepowsky only witnessed five incidents of physical violence in ten years of field research. Four of the fights were instigated by women; two of their victims were sexual rivals.
Every now and then, when scholars in criminology and sociology concede the possibility of female aggression, they hasten to add that women only engage in “expressive” aggression, which means giving vent impulsively to bottled-up feelings. Women do not, these scholars maintain, engage in “instrumental” aggression, the kind that is cool and calculating. By maintaining this distinction between impulsive and strategic violence, the basic paradigm of female virtue holds. But if the distinction is accurate, what are we to make of the women who have hunted and fought battles—with no less ferocity than men—in societies throughout history: in, for example, Libya, Anatolia, Bulgaria, Greece, Armenia, Russia, Celtic England, and northern Scotland? That Western historians have exhibited an almost universal tendency to ignore such women does not, in itself, render them freaks of nature. The British writer Antonia Fraser notes that several powerful female rulers have mysteriously disappeared from history books. We have heard of Cleopatra, more as femme fatale than as the shrewd queen she was, but not of her contemporaries: Dynamis of Bosphorus, who starved her husband to death, assumed control of his kingdom, and conquered adjoining regions; or Artemisia, a queen who conducted a brilliant military campaign against the Greeks. Amid the forgotten warriors there do remain some legends: Joan of Arc; Catherine the Great of Russia; Elizabeth I of England; the great Celtic Queen Boadicea; Lucrezia Borgia; Catherine de Médicis; the Nazi leader Irma Grese, sadistic administrator of a female concentration camp; Madam Mao of China’s Gang of Four; and Sarah Kyolaba, soldier-wife of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin.
None of these women were strangers to cruel governance or instrumental aggression. Were they anomalous because they were operating at the top of the political hierarchy, using violence to survive in a masculine world? Not really. Ordinary women have proven to be just as militaristic, supporting the continuance of war, shaming men who would dodge the draft, screaming for blood in a mob, fighting alongside their brothers and sons when they could, acting as snipers, as fighter pilots, as guerrilla soldiers and terrorists. At the height of international terrorism in the 1970s, there were 204 active female terrorists throughout the world, participating directly in 41.6 percent of maimings and 22.5 percent of assassinations. Amid the apocalyptic atrocities in Rwanda in 1995, women all over the country were wielding machetes and lobbing grenades. In fact, one of the largest massacres of Tutsis was allegedly led by Rwanda’s minister for women and family affairs, Pauline Nyiramasuhuko. Another massacre was allegedly overseen by the Rwandan minister of justice, Agnes Ntamabyariro. Survivors of slaughter at Rwanda’s Kabuye Hill described a former police officer, heavily pregnant, “on her knees, shooting into us.” Across the world, militia groups arming themselves in America’s northern forests and western deserts count women in their ranks just as surely as women now train in the army. As the scholar Carol Tavris has written, “I have no illusions that women, if drafted in large numbers into the military, will transform that institution; without question the military will transform them.”
If women in myriad cultures are capable of direct physical aggression, both expressively and instrumentally, why are Western women perceived, collectively, as angels in their houses, capable only of caring, nurturance, and submission? Are they constructed of a different fiber? Softer and more pliant than other women on the planet? Or might it be that they dwell in a culture that has, traditionally, shaped their aggression in an entirely different way than men’s? Shaped differently and named differently, not as violence, with all the force, intentionality, and power implied in that term, but something else?
The history of Western women is a history of subterranean narratives. Through the centuries, we have fulfilled our ambitions and expressed our bids for power in a manner concealed from men. We were taught to bury the secret of our strength, and we did. Intellectual women adopted male pseudonyms; political women advised in the bed chamber; angry women let go the fists they’d made as tomboys and unleashed their wit instead. Excavating the sites of our history, feminist academicians and writers have traced the routes of these subterranean courses—discovering the female names behind the “Anon.” signature in poetry and unearthing the reality of how households and castles were run. But they have been considerably less keen to delve into the violence we’ve done.
Of 314 studies on human aggression published by 1974, only 8 percent focused on women or girls. That basic orientation—still evident in biocriminological research—only began to change in aggression studies in the 1980s. A female-focused field started to grow, populated mainly by anthropologists and social psychologists, who studied what became of those preschool girls who were initially just as aggressive as their brothers. “In our view,” noted the psychologists Claudia Frey and Siegfried Hoppe-Graff, “the empirical evidence might be more decisive when the question ‘Is there a higher rate of aggression in boys than in girls’ is substituted by the more precise question: ‘Do girls and boys differ in specific types of aggression?’ “Posing the question this way, what the scholars discovered was that, as soon as girls hone their verbal and social skills, at around ten or eleven, they become aggressors of a different kind. They abandon physical aggression, even though their prepubescent hormones are still no different than boys’, and adopt a new set of tactics: they bully, they name call, they set up and frame fellow kids. They become masters of indirection.
Indirect aggression, as the Finnish psychologist Kaj Björkqvist defines it, is “a kind of social manipulation: the aggressor manipulates others to attack the victim, or, by other means, makes use of the social structure in order to harm the target person, without being personally involved in the attack.” Anyone who has seen an eight-year-old girl smoothly set another child up for undeserved punishment knows what this means. “The more able the aggressor is at staying out of reach of the opponent, and at assessing the opponent’s retaliation resources, the better (s)he will be at avoiding counter-attack, and minimizing risks.”
When Kaj Björkqvist and his colleagues looked at female aggressive styles during adolescence, they asked girls what they did to express anger or compete with their rivals, and the girls offered strategies like “gossiping, exchanging nasty notes, trying to win others to one’s side, and excluding from groups.” These were the basic power plays, the objective of which was to gain currency or dominance within the social milieu. A survey of one’s own friends adds color to the picture. Anne, a Torontonian now in her thirties, was at the receiving end of girls’ aggression in ninth grade, when she found herself to be the object of a classwide “hate club,” with its own coded hand signal and password. The club had been formed by girls who felt threatened by An
ne’s precocious sexual allure. The club members recruited the boys in the class, and Anne was officially “hated.” This was in the late 1970s, around the time that Stephen King’s novel Carrie came out and introduced the world to gothic cruelty in teenaged girls. In a 1993 survey of Ontario high school girls, the community psychologist Fred Mathews put the following question to them: Defining violence as broadly as they wished, who were they most afraid of? Overwhelmingly, they responded, “Other girls.”
Ask women what they did in childhood to disrupt the status quo—engaging in subversion—while their brothers, for instance, were running around stealing hubcaps, blowing up frogs, or throwing eggs at the neighbors, and their answers also reveal ingenious forms of indirect aggression. “My father was an obsessive-compulsive type,” says Karen, a twenty-four-year-old from Seattle. “Everything had to be in its place. So I spent a lot of time fucking with his head, moving his stuff around, scratching his car with a penknife, so that if he asked me if I’d driven the car, I could honestly say no, just driving him nuts.” Shelly, a twenty-nine-year-old actress, ruined the confidence of her little brother once, by telling him that, although he thought he was eight years old, he was actually twelve. He was retarded. His parents hadn’t wanted him to know.
What qualitative measure do we possess in our culture to understand injurious behavior that isn’t masculine in style? Would Shelly’s “retarded” brother have suffered more if she’d struck him on the head? Would Allison’s father have been more damaged if she’d crashed his car instead of tormenting him psychologically? Would Anne—to whom relationships were everything—have hurt worse if she’d been made to participate in a frat house haze? Because we have developed a male-centered measure of aggression, we have blinded ourselves to the ways in which girls develop and utilize power. At the same time, we have negated a whole class of injuries—both in scholarly research and political rhetoric—in a manner that is completely counterintuitive: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.” Never, that is, if they fly from the lips of a girl.
Anthropologist Ilsa Glazer developed an interest in modes of female aggression when she was working in Zambia and noticed that female political leaders there tended to scapegoat rather than support young educated women. Later, in Israel, she studied interfemale aggression on the kibbutz and found similar tactics at work. Namely, women of higher status used gossip and inside “knowledge” to keep other women out of the game. Could these tactics be described as injurious? Glazer next went to Palestine, where twenty to forty women are murdered each year by their brothers or fathers to “defend family honor.” She discovered that other women acted as instigators and collaborators in these murders by setting loose the gossip that spurred accusation and compelled men to respond. Although this is “violence against women,” in that men suffer no commensurate fate, it is equally “violence by women against women,” mediated by a particular value structure. Among North American youth gangs, girls will instigate conflicts by making comments or spreading rumors that oblige their boyfriends to fight. “When I was a leader of a gang,” one boy told researchers in Toronto, “my girlfriend went around and picked fights.… girls can be badmouthing people because they know that their boyfriends would, whatever, pull a gun, shoot the guy, whatever.”
On Bellona, in the Solomon Islands, where the division between the sexes is highly patriarchal, women rarely bloody their own hands through physical aggression. Instead, they “hire assassins,” according to the Danish psychologist Rolf Kushel. They target other women through “hair pulling,” bringing their victim down to the ground and disfiguring her beauty with fingernail rakes, which is “felt [to be] a serious humiliation.” They displace their aggression onto young children, in particular a child highly valued by the target. They commit or threaten to commit suicide, which has serious repercussions from the community for the men who drove them to it. And, because shame and honor are intensely felt on Bellona, they use “mocking songs” to ridicule a person, an extremely potent kind of attack. As with gossip, “the composer would be known only to a few people.” The aggressor remains hidden; but the injury is felt. Gossip, as Ilsa Glazer observed, is the “power of the weak.” It is not an insignificant power. The fundamental mistake that feminism has made is to equate political weakness with moral innocence.
Men for their part persist in dismissing female aggression as trivial or hapless, amounting to nothing but tongue wagging and cat fights. But there are sound reasons why women use gossip and exclusion as weaponry, and these have to do with the currency of power women trade in. Women in patriarchal societies inhabit a relational universe. Their basic sense of security is tied to their ability to forge relationships—with men, who quite literally feed them, and with their children, through whom they can impress themselves upon the world. The British crime theorist Colin Wilson dismissed any prospect of female aggression on this very basis: “It seems unlikely that female crime will ever become a serious social problem,” he wrote in 1973. “The reason is obvious: woman’s basic instinct is for a home and security, and it is unlikely she’ll do anything to jeopardize that security.” Yet violence is often a bid for security, when something of profound value is threatened. That something may be as psychologically inchoate as selfhood, or as concrete as four walls and a roof. Whatever women’s “basic instincts” are, relationalism does not, in itself, render them gentler. What it does do is alter the purpose and method of their aggression. Men may flamboyantly display force to promote and defend status in the public realm, but women as surely need their own aggressive strategies to defend, maintain, and control their intimate relations, not just to “defend their cubs,” which is the sentimental view, but to defend their aspirations, their identity, and their place on the stage.
In 1950, the psychologist Otto Pollak argued that Western women’s crime probably did approach the level of men’s but that “the criminality of women is largely masked criminality.” He argued that “the lack of social equality between the sexes has led to a cultural distribution of roles which forces women in many cases into the part of instigator rather than … performer of an overt act.” Modern criminologists denounce Pollak for having been sexist, which he was. But the essence of his insight is correct.
This was precisely the method employed by Toni Cato Riggs. In the autumn of 1991, her brother Michael, the shooter, went to trial for the murder of his brother-in-law, was convicted on his own confession, and was sentenced to life in prison. But U.S. District Court Judge Vesta Svenson had already dropped all charges against Toni Cato Riggs, ruling that Antonio Shelby’s testimony against her was hearsay and that Michael’s confession was inadmissible on the grounds of the Fifth Amendment—the right to avoid self-incrimination. She could not be directly connected to the crime. So she collected Riggs’s insurance money, returned to college, and disappeared from view.
What is clearly discomfiting about indirect strategies of aggression is that they bestow upon women ignoble traits: hysteria, duplicitousness, manipulation, cunning. At least, we think, a male villain is straightforward. His aggression mirrors that which is valiant in other arenas, such as in war. Female aggressive strategies are never valorous, for they are by necessity underhanded, and partly because of that, they run completely counter to the way women want to view themselves. We cringe when we hear a man deriding our sex as sneaky and two-faced. As a result, our inclination is to deny the intention as well as the strategy—to adamantly insist on the absence of feminine malice. We tend to be far more comfortable talking about a different form of female aggression, one that doesn’t appear antisocial or malicious, and that is the direction of violence against the self.
Female self-destruction harks back to one of the Western tradition’s first heroines, Queen Alcestis, celebrated by both Homer and Euripides as the virtuous and beautiful queen who volunteered to die in place of her husband, King Admetus. By self-destructing to promote the career of her man, Alcestis won the esteem of generations of
male scribes. Shakespeare’s romantic heroine, Ophelia, gained her currency by flinging herself into a river and drowning. The outlaw heroines Thelma and Louise in Hollywood’s 1991 film hurled themselves into a canyon. Self-destructive heroines are far more memorable within our culture than female warriors, and they teach white Western women that the most acceptable and admirable way to take a last stand in defense of their worth is to turn against themselves.
New England psychologist Dusty Miller treats an array of self-injuring patients who were sexually abused as children and need to vent their unresolved rage. She calls their behavior “trauma reenactment syndrome.” Men who have been traumatized, Miller says, “are socialized to act aggressively and to fight back.” But the sort of white, middle-class women that Miller sometimes treats have been taught to be “feminine” about their feelings. Being “hurt or humiliated is far more socially acceptable.” So they cut, they starve, they drink, they shoot drugs, they attempt suicide, they throw up. Although Miller characterizes this behavior as a syndrome, what women are doing is no less aggressive than punching walls or picking a fight. The violence is equally willful, the consequences equally drastic for family and community, and the motive arises from a similar place. One of Miller’s patients wrote in her journal: “Today a doctor humiliated a patient. I wanted to grab his head and pound it against the bed rail until he bled. I wanted to rip him to shreds.” But she didn’t. She force fed herself and then just as forcibly vomited. One woman who had cut her arms and wrists with razor blades in college called it “incredibly satisfying,” because it “opened a pressure valve.” Self-mutilation has been described as tattooing one’s rage on one’s skin—bringing blood to the surface to make the wounds plain.
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