A close friend has a seven-year-old granddaughter in the first grade who is being bullied by two girls in her class. The reason for the bullying appears to be that the bullies are upset another classmate wants to be friends with the granddaughter instead of them.
The bullying is in the nature of social isolation, gossip, and teasing.
Toxic femininity.
A study appearing in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience reported that:
Compared to our knowledge of men’s aggression, relatively little is known about women’s aggression. Indeed, aggression and violence are usually considered male problems. There is some truth to this assumption. Globally, men are more violent than women. However, women frequently engage in other forms of aggressive behavior. Research consistently reports that women use indirect aggression to an equivalent or greater extent than men. Indirect aggression occurs when someone harms another while masking the aggressive intent.
Specific examples of indirect aggression include spreading false rumors, gossiping, excluding others from a social group, making insinuations without direct accusation, and criticizing others’ appearance or personality. Girls’ use of indirect aggression exceeds boys’ from age 11 onward.
This difference persists into adulthood; compared to men, adult women use more indirect forms of aggression across various areas of life. A large cross-cultural survey of female aggression across 317 societies found that female aggression was mostly indirect and rarely inflicted physical injury. Thus, in the real world, aggression is common in women and girls, but the form it takes is largely indirect compared to men’s aggression…
At my 40th high school reunion, us guys watched in amusement our female classmates’ behavior.
A group of the women would be talking together amicably. One would leave, and as soon as she was gone, the others would talk about her.
Toxic femininity.
Another thing we observed was how long the women held grudges. Some were still pissed at others about stolen boyfriends in middle school, four decades earlier.
A cruel example of toxic femininity is how some women denigrate others who choose marriage and children over a career.
According to psychologist, author, and media commentator Jordan Peterson, women are being lied to, by other women, about career vs motherhood.
This lie is fostered by ‘Women’s Studies’ programs in colleges. Many of these programs focus on ‘male dominance’. But that obsession appears to be based on a fantasy view of history.
Of particular note in the research cited above about female aggression is this conclusion “Girls’ use of indirect aggression exceeds boys’ from age 11 onward… The difference persists into adulthood.”
But what happens when female indirect aggression becomes violent?
At a point in my prosecutorial career when ‘domestic violence’ (DV) became a focus of police and prosecutors, I began keeping my own informal stats of DV incidents. I broke those stats down by gender, involvement with drugs/alcohol, and how often social media was a contributing factor (frequently, it seems).
My informal conclusion is that instances of DV where men are the aggressors account for about one-third of cases, as do women aggressors (1/3), and mutual combat between the genders (1/3).
Those same informal stats reflected higher incidents of DV between lesbian partners than between male same-sex partners.
My informal conclusion is consistent with formal ones. The same Frontiers in Neuroscience article I quoted above reported:
Some studies using data from the criminal justice system (e.g., police reports, pretrial information and victim statements) of [DV] offenders highlight commonalities regarding the use of [DV] in women and men. These studies reported that defendants of both genders are equally likely to engage in harassing behavior (e.g., trespassing and stalking), and to have been physically abusive by punching, hitting, slapping, or stabbing. Findings from these forensic studies suggest women are equally likely to use severe forms of violence as men and to severely injure their partners.
A new study suggests combining the female predisposition for aggression with the effect of testosterone results in toxic femininity literally on steroids.
This study is the first to demonstrate that women react more aggressively in response to provocation when their testosterone level is high than when their testosterone is low, suggesting that testosterone plays an important role in the regulation of women’s aggressive behavior following social provocation…
According to the American Psychiatric Association, gender dysphoria (confusion about gender) refers to “psychological stress”. By clinical definition, then, a woman having gender dysphoria is psychologically stressed.
It seems to me that before society embraces the idea of providing psychologically stressed women with testosterone to “transition” to being men, more study of the consequences of testosterone on toxic femininity needs to be undertaken. It’s not an issue of culture or politics… it’s biochemistry.
I don’t watch much TV but enjoy nature shows about lions. On the African Savanna, male lions are bigger, stronger, and capable of greater violence than the females. But the females are consistently more aggressive and exhibit violence toward males far more often than vice versa.
Among human females, what starts as bullying among seven-year-old girls can become more serious, and potentially dangerous as females get older.
Toxic femininity needs to be recognized as a problem for society.
Gary Beatty lives between Florida and Pagosa Springs. He retired after 30 years as a prosecutor for the State of Florida, has a doctorate in law, is Board Certified in Criminal Trial law by the Florida Supreme Court, and is now a law professor.