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Staying alive: Evolution, culture and women's intra-sexual aggression

Campbell, Anne Staying alive: Evolution, culture and women's intra-sexual aggression.

Short Abstract:

Females' tendency to place a high value on protecting their own life enhanced their reproductive success in the environment of evolutionary adaptation because infant survival depended more upon maternal (rather than paternal) care and defence. The evolved mechanism by which the costs of aggression (and other forms of risk-taking) are weighted more heavily for females may be a lower threshold for fear in situations which pose a direct threat of bodily injury. Females' concern with personal survival also has implications for sex differences in dominance hierarchies because the risks associated with their formation in nonbonded exogamous females are not offset by increased reproductive success. Hence, among females, disputes do not carry with them implications for status as they do among males, but are chiefly connected with the acquisition and defence of scarce resources. Consequently, female competition is more likely to take the form of indirect aggression or low-level direct combat than among males. Under patriarchy, men have held the power to propagate images and attributions which are favourable to the continuance of their control. Women's aggression has been viewed as a gender-incongruent aberration or dismissed as evidence of irrationality. These cultural interpretations have "enhanced" evolutionarily based sex differences by a process of imposition which stigmatises the expression of aggression by females and causes women to offer exculpatory (rather than justificatory) accounts of their own aggression.

Long Abstract:

Females' tendency to place a high value on protecting their own life enhanced their reproductive success in the environment of evolutionary adaptation because infant survival depended more upon maternal (rather than paternal) care and defence. The evolved mechanism by which the costs of aggression (and other forms of risk-taking) are weighted more heavily for females may be a lower threshold for fear in situations which pose a direct threat of bodily injury. Females' concern with personal survival also has implications for sex differences in dominance hierarchies because the risks associated with their formation in nonbonded exogamous females are not offset by increased reproductive success. Hence, among females, disputes do not carry with them implications for status as they do among males, but are chiefly connected with the acquisition and defence of scarce resources. Consequently, female competition is more likely to take the form of indirect aggression or low-level direct combat than among males. Under patriarchy, men have held the power to propagate images and attributions which are favourable to the continuance of their control. Women's aggression has been viewed as a gender-incongruent aberration or dismissed as evidence of irrationality. These cultural interpretations have "enhanced" evolutionarily based sex differences by a process of imposition which stigmatises the expression of aggression by females and causes women to offer exculpatory (rather than justificatory) accounts of their own aggression.

Keywords:	female, aggression, violence, competition, sex differences
Subjects:	Biology: Ecology Biology: Evolution Biology: Behavioral Genetics Biology: Population Biology Biology: Sociobiology Psychology: Evolutionary Psychology Psychology: Social Psychology
ID code:	bbs00000440
Deposited by:	Anne C Campbell on 01 May 2001