{"id":23026,"date":"2013-11-20T07:53:38","date_gmt":"2013-11-20T12:53:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=23026"},"modified":"2013-11-20T07:53:38","modified_gmt":"2013-11-20T12:53:38","slug":"the-psychology-of-female-aggression","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/11\/20\/the-psychology-of-female-aggression\/","title":{"rendered":"The psychology of female aggression"},"content":{"rendered":"

Christopher Taylor linked to this New York Times<\/em> article by John Tierney<\/a> about a recent issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society<\/em> which was devoted to the study of female aggression:<\/p>\n

The existence of female competition may seem obvious to anyone who has been in a high-school cafeteria or a singles bar, but analyzing it has been difficult because it tends be more subtle and indirect (and a lot less violent) than the male variety. Now that researchers have been looking more closely, they say that this \u201cintrasexual competition\u201d is the most important factor explaining the pressures that young women feel to meet standards of sexual conduct and physical appearance. <\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Stigmatizing female promiscuity \u2014 a.k.a. slut-shaming \u2014 has often been blamed on men, who have a Darwinian incentive to discourage their spouses from straying. But they also have a Darwinian incentive to encourage other women to be promiscuous. Dr. Vaillancourt said the experiment and other research suggest the stigma is enforced mainly by women<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cSex is coveted by men,\u201d she said. \u201cAccordingly, women limit access as a way of maintaining advantage in the negotiation of this resource. Women who make sex too readily available compromise the power-holding position of the group, which is why many women are particularly intolerant of women who are, or seem to be, promiscuous.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indirect aggression can take a psychological toll on women who are ostracized or feel pressured to meet impossible standards, like the vogue of thin bodies in many modern societies. Studies have shown that women\u2019s ideal body shape is to be thinner than average \u2014 and thinner than what men consider the ideal shape to be. This pressure is frequently blamed on the ultrathin female role models featured in magazines and on television, but Christopher J. Ferguson and other researchers say that it\u2019s mainly the result of competition with their peers, not media images<\/a>. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Christopher Taylor linked to this New York Times article by John Tierney about a recent issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society which was devoted to the study of female aggression: The existence of female competition may seem obvious to anyone who has been in a high-school cafeteria or a singles bar, but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[209,139,513,255,43],"class_list":["post-23026","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science","tag-anthropology","tag-psychology","tag-research","tag-sexuality","tag-women"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5Zo","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23026","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23026"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23026\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23027,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23026\/revisions\/23027"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23026"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}