Woman: An Intimate Geography (48 page)

Read Woman: An Intimate Geography Online

Authors: Natalie Angier

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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

 

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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 and 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 presented 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

 

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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 hyperattentiveness 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.
Men say they envy women the depth of their friendships, their ability to emote with and engage each other. Men are also stunned when they see the ferocity of a failed friendship between women, the staggering thickness of the anger and bile. "Picking a fight can actually be a way for men to relate to one another, check each other out, and take a first step toward friendship," Frans de Waal wrote in
Good Natured
. "This bonding function is alien to most women, who see confrontation as causing rifts." It's not because we are nice and want to make nicer. Women know, from their experience and from their harrowing girlhood, that rifts often are hard to heal, and can last, and can consume them.
The fierceness of female friendships and the unease with which we regard other women are in my view related phenomena, and are the legacy of dissonance between our ancient primate and our neohominid selves and of our inherent strategic plasticity, the desire to keep all options open. Other females are a potential source of strength, and other females can destroy us. Or flip it around, as the English salonist Elizabeth Holland did, when she wrote at the turn of the nineteenth century, "As nobody can do more mischief to a woman than a woman,

 

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so perhaps one might reverse the maxim and say nobody can do more good."
In our primal primate brain, the world is gynocentric. The great majority of primate species live in social groups, and the core of those groups is female. The overwhelming rule of thumb is that females stay in their natal homes throughout their lives and males disperse at adolescence, so as to prevent inbreeding. This is true for macaques, howler monkeys, lemurs, patas monkeys, vervet monkeys, capuchins, squirrel monkeys, most baboons, and on and on. Outside males petition a group to gain entry, and the females permit them or forbid them citizenship. Females do not want a surplus of males around them, because males as a rule are underemployed, having little to do with care of the offspring, and they are easily bored and prone to picking fights with each other. Moreover, males often harass females. It's a common reproductive strategy. They want to mate with females and prevent them from consorting with other males, and so they harangue fertile females, roughing them up, pushing them around, trying in any way possible to circumscribe their activity. Females get tired of that perpetual harassment, and the best way to prevent the problem is to limit the number of resident males in the first place. Among rhesus macaques, for example, the group ratio of adult females to adult males is about six to one; among howler monkeys, there may be as many as ten females for every resident male. Bachelor monkeys prowl around the periphery, seeking vacancies, opportunities, and signs of local disarray.
Female primates are used to being surrounded by females, then, and they count on females to keep their world familiar and bearable. In species where females remain in their birth group, they depend on their close female kin to protect them from the aggressiveness of other females, who may be either unrelated or more distantly related. In a given group, the various members of the matrilines compete with one another and squabble over food, sexual behavior, or the excessive interest that females take in one another's young. The cohabiting females have their hierarchies, and when coalitions of female kin are rallied to a cause, the cause is generally to prove a point to the females of a vying matriline.
Even so, the disparate matrilineal strands will join in common cause

 

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to thwart the aggressiveness of males. "In species in which females normally remain in their natal groups, female-female coalitions typically involve close kin and are usually directed against females and juveniles from other matrilines," the primatologist Barbara Smuts has written. "In striking contrast, when the target is an adult male, females often form coalitions with females to whom they are not closely related. Such coalitions can mobilize very quickly in response to male aggression, since any females nearby can be recruited." In pigtailed macaques, patas monkeys, chacma baboons, olive baboons, blue monkeys, vervet monkeys, and again on and on, female alliances form with the dark speed of a thundercloud. Females gang up on males when they attack, herd, or frighten females. Females turn on a male who solicits sex from an obviously unwilling female. Swiftest of all are the unions that form when a male threatens or appears to threaten an infant.
The benefits of female solidarity are significant enough that in some cases when it is the young female who leaves her birthplace and must seek acceptance elsewhere, females aggressively, irrepressibly petition the friendship of the females in their newly adopted residence. This is true for cottontop, tamarins, for example, among whom new female immigrants devote themselves tirelessly to the care of the resident females' young. And it is famously, brazenly true for bonobos, the Venusian apes. Females disperse at adolescence and must make their way in the world without the support of their mothers, sisters, and aunts. They must ingratiate themselves with a group of unrelated, mostly female apes. They ingratiate themselves with grooming and with sex. They pet the fur of resident females and pick out fleas. They rub their prominent genitals against the presiding genitals. If the local females reciprocate, the solicitor can stay. If they reject her, she must go elsewhere and find other pelts to pick and other pelvises to rub. In their sexually reinforced bondage, female bonobos gain an extraordinary degree of strength. They recapitulate the power of natality, of living within the matriline, and perhaps outdo it. The threat of infanticide by marauding males is a source of relentless anxiety to the females of many species lions, langurs, rodents, seals, common chimpanzees. Nobody has ever seen a case of male infanticide among bonobos. The bonobo sisterhood is an artifice, constructed among nonrelatives without the mortar of genetic kinship and thus in need of perpetual behavioral

 

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reinforcement the making nice, the making lewd, proving and proving again that we're all friends, we're all in this together. Vigilance becomes habit, and vigilance keeps the male fangs at bay.
Not all female primates are beholden to other females. Among common chimpanzees, females spend much of the day out on their own, scrounging for food, accompanied only by their dependent young. They don't forage with other adult females the way most monkeys do, and the way bonobos do. Chimpanzee dispersion patterns are variable. If a female is the daughter of a powerful female, she can stay in her natal group and derive the benefits of living near her kin. If she is the daughter of a low-status female, she generally must leave at puberty and find her way into another group, a band of strangers, and she must do so without the benefit of bonobo bonding rituals. When a female chimpanzee immigrates into a new group, she works hard to establish her reputation. She challenges resident females by grunting and hee-hawing at them, flapping her arms, making aggressive faces, or, on occasion, striking at them, pushing them, pinching. The period of settling in is brief, and after a few weeks the new female has her slot, her standing in the hierarchy, and it doesn't change much over time. Her relationship with other females is attenuated. They may come to her aid if she's attacked by a male, or they may not; female chimpanzees are under much greater threat of male coercion and harassment than many female primates are. But her nonkin female peers won't bother her either, and that's a comfort. And if she was able to prove herself a Viking maiden at the outset and was able to rise to a position of high status in her adopted gynocracy, her daughters will be allowed to stay in the troop, and she'll have launched a matriline, and that, at least, will keep her heritage strong.
We humans have within us a polychromatic phylogeny, a series of possible pasts. In the distant background are creatures like the Old World monkeys, for whom a gynocentric society of competitive but coexisting matrilines is the norm. Closer to the fore is the anthropoid past. Genetically, we are equidistant to bonobos and chimpanzees, and they are both our nearest living kin. We diverged from the bonobo-chimpanzee line about six million years ago, and we don't know if the common ancestor of the three of us great apes was more bonobo or more chimpanzee in its style and social structure. Among chimpanzees,

 

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