The End of Men and the Rise of Women

by Hanna Rosin

  Larissa Schuster stands in a new league of females who are remaking the lady poisoner archetype to fit with the upheaval in our modern domestic arrangements. She holds company with Ann Miller Kontz, a North Carolina chemist with GlaxoSmithKline convicted in 2005 of running arsenic through her husband’s IV, and Tianle Li, a New Jersey chemist at Bristol-Myers Squibb who was accused in 2011 of poisoning her estranged husband with thallium, a toxic metal that was banned in the 1970s. Their weapons are not household staples accessible to the average unhappy housewife, but chemicals available only to someone with an advanced professional degree and an impressive job at a biochemical or pharmaceutical company. (One blogger covering the Schuster case offered this advice to fellow men: “If you’re thinking of marrying a biochemist, think again.”) Their stories are anchored not in female oppression but rather in female success at infiltrating scientific fields that were once largely reserved for men. The old poison trope tapped into fears that women, resentful of being dominated, would use their domestic wiles to passively sneak in death. The new one taps into a fear that as they gain more power, women will use violence and their new specialized skills to get what they want. Singular and exotic though these cases may be, they raise the broader unsettling possibility that, with the turnover in modern gender roles, the escalation from competitiveness to aggression to violence that we are used to in men has started showing up in women as well.

  Why would aggression contain itself in women any more than it does in men? In men, we have long assumed that the lines of aggression are fluid. The same drive that leads one man to murder can cultivate in another a killer instinct on Wall Street. The flash of rage that leads to a street fight can also be tapped to make a risky entrepreneurial deal. Often the language we use is the same. Brett Steenbarger, who gives advice on how to succeed on Wall Street, tells traders to act like boxers. If you see your opponent hurt, he writes, “go for the kill.” Sometimes the destructive and productive forms of the drive can get mixed up in the same man. By the end of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, Patrick Bateman’s urges are running in all directions at once. In one scene, he sits in a trendy New York restaurant carrying on a conversation with his Wall Street colleagues about “how to use power effectively” while at the same time scanning the restaurant to see which of its patrons he can murder next.

  Bateman is demented, but entirely consistent with the origin myth of male dominance, in which the role played by each gender remains fairly rigid over the course of two hundred thousand years. The way anthropologists explain it, early man shared the same instinct as the elk who butted horns or the beetle who locked his jaws over those of his male competitors and crunched them to death. The bravest and most skilled fighter “would have earned the highest social status, and thus secured the most wives and offspring,” as Cambridge psychology professor Simon Baron-Cohen summarized it. In order to ensure the spreading of his seed he had to be brave, take risks, and relish competition. Occasionally men banded together in armies to defeat enemies and win over women from the enemy side. The woman, meanwhile, had to be choosy and cautious. She had to invest in her offspring and thus keep herself safe and avoid risks.

  Over the years, evolutionary psychologists have connected the rest of the dots these early patterns suggest. Such evolutionary origins “have important ramifications in the workplace,” argues law professor Kingsley Browne in his book Divided Labours: An Evolutionary View of Women at Work. Deep in their psyche, men are primed to achieve power and status; women are programmed to hang back.

  At the extremes, these assumptions bear out, at least at the moment. When it comes to the expression of rank physical aggression, men vastly outnumber women; global homicide statistics show that men account for about 80 percent of all murders. And women, unlike men, rarely murder strangers. Questionnaires and studies measuring hostile acts show that men remain more likely than women to hit or yell or deliver what they believe to be electric shocks. Neuroscientist Lise Eliot explains the crude logic of this phenomenon in Pink Brain, Blue Brain: “You can’t face down a fierce opponent if you’re distracted by how he might be feeling.”

  In The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, linguist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker attributes the historical decrease in violence partly to the feminization of culture. It’s not merely that men are vastly more likely to play violent games, vote for warlike policies, or commit violent crimes, or that women like to start pacifist organizations, he writes. What’s driving the change is a vast feminization of culture of the kind conservatives like to complain about, a swapping of the old manly codes of martial glory for a more feminine emphasis on justice and empathy. “We are all feminists now,” he writes, and quotes the declaration of Tsutomu Yamaguchi, a survivor of Hiroshima, that the only people who should run countries are breast-feeding mothers.

  As always, Pinker’s broad, sweeping truths are hard to argue with, except by thinking of counterexamples. (Was Margaret Thatcher a pacifist? Did Condoleezza Rice oppose the Iraq war? Did wars end after women got the vote? Is there anyone fiercer than an anonymous mommy blogger ranting about women who don’t want to breast-feed?) From a mile-high view, Pinker’s assertions seem mostly correct; yes, men are generally more violent, and yes, the decline of martial glory is likely connected to less warlike behavior in Western countries. But that perspective obscures all the changes taking place alongside the dramatic behaviors he focuses on—changes in women’s violence patterns that can shake up our notions about whether men are in fact the more “naturally” dominant sex.

  Anyway, there are simpler and just as convincing historical explanations for male aggression, as philosopher Jesse Prinz points out in his recent influential article in Psychology Today, “Why Are Men So Violent?” In hunter-gatherer societies, men depended on women to gather food. But once farming started, men, who had more upper body strength, did most of the work themselves. Men became the sole providers and women became economically dependent on them. This allowed men to eventually take over social and political institutions and keep women under their control. And once they had the power and resources, men had every incentive to fight hard to keep them.

  Which version is true we will obviously never know for sure. But we do know that lately, the man-as-elk narrative isn’t holding up so well. As researchers parse forms of aggression more subtle than throwing spears and killing people, sex differences become more elusive. More and more women seem to be cribbing “male” behaviors, and also inventing entirely new ways of being violent. As best-selling crime writer Patricia Cornwell recently mused to The New York Times, “The more women appropriate power, the more their behavior will mimic that of other powerful people.”

  AT THE START of the aughts, criminologists began to notice something curious in the crime trends. The great crime wave of the midnineties was finally coming to an end. Rates of all violent crimes were plummeting—that is, violent crime committed by men. In fact, rates of arrests overall for men, especially juveniles, were at an all-time low. But arrests for women were moving in the opposite direction. The share of women arrested for violent crimes rose from 11 percent in 1990 to 18 percent in 2008. The share of women arrested for property crimes rose from 25 percent in 1990 to 35 percent in 2008. Juvenile girls were showing remarkable increases. Between 1992 and 2003, arrests of girls for assault climbed an astonishing 40.9 percent, while for boys arrests climbed only 4.3 percent, according to FBI numbers. Women were by no means catching up to men, but they were fast closing the gap. In 1980, for example, the juvenile male arrest rate for simple assault was more than three times the female rate; by 2008, the male rate was less than twice the female rate.

  The increase in arrest rates was showing up in all ages of women. In fact, one of the curious anomalies in the statistics was the spike in violent crime among women over forty. In that age group, arrests for violent crimes was up 307 percent since the 1980s, arrests for property offenses were up 114 percent, and arrests for drug offense
s up 1,040 percent. Typically, younger women can be counted on to commit more violent crimes than women of an age to be their mothers. But in the latest cohort, that trend was reversed, with more middle-aged women getting arrested for violent crime and drug offenses than women under eighteen.

  The result was, for better or worse, an explosion of girls and women tied up with the criminal justice system. From 1985 to 2002, girls’ juvenile court cases increased by 92 percent, while boys’ court cases increased by 29 percent. During about the same period, the detention of girls increased by 98 percent, while the detention of boys rose by only 23 percent. The criminal justice system—and especially the juvenile system—long in the habit of treating girls with a lighter hand and a more forgiving patriarchal protectiveness, was enacting what some criminologists call “vengeful equity.” In the eyes of the law, girls were now viewed as having almost the same destructive potential as boys.

  Criminologists continue to fight about whether girls have become inherently more violent, or whether the culture has only come to treat them that way. The answer is unknowable, and in a sense it does not matter. As criminologists like to say, violence can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more authorities perceive girls as violent, the more they come to see themselves that way, and the cycle continues. Criminologist Melissa Sickmund calls the change over the last two decades “a subtle shift in people’s perception of the norm. How the police act and what people read in the paper or see on TV changes our expectation of how girls can behave. And the girls rise”—or maybe sink—“to those expectations.”

  With crime—and particularly the kind of crime that captures the public imagination—women are moving into new terrain. In the past, female crimes tended to be family affairs—husband stabbings or baby killings, for example. Often they were attached to a sympathetic backstory that could be seen through a feminist lens: a battered wife who attacks her abusive husband (Lorena Bobbitt), a woman with psychotic postpartum depression (Andrea Yates). But perhaps the most notorious lady killer of the last few years was Amy Bishop, the neuroscientist who shot six of her colleagues, killing three of them, at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Bishop did not fit any of the archetypes of a female killer. In fact, much like Larissa Schuster, she fit a familiar male one: She was a deranged loner committing an unprovoked, premeditated attack. Also like Schuster, her twisted internal logic justified violence as a way to protect her career ambitions. Each era gets the criminals it deserves. The 1930s had the swank Al Capone, the late 1960s had the cultish Charles Manson, and the 1980s had the excesses of Charles Keating. It’s possible that the early 2000s will choose for its age-defining criminal the killer career woman. “The uncomfortable fact is that for all her singularity,” wrote Sam Tanenhaus in The New York Times, “Dr. Bishop also provides an index to the evolved status of women in twenty-first-century America.”

  On a less lethal scale, women have stepped out to enter, even dominate, the public brawl. Perhaps the most infamous brawler of the last few years is Snooki, the squat little star of the reality show Jersey Shore. An episode isn’t complete until Snooki throws a drink in someone’s face or shoves someone over a table. In the MTV show Teen Mom, girl violence is at least as common as cooing over the babies. (Jenelle Evans, one of the stars of Teen Mom 2, was arrested after the website TMZ posted a video of her punching and attacking another girl.) A whole corner of YouTube could be devoted to women who go ballistic in fast-food restaurants. In 2010 the blond and comely, but drunk, Melodi Dushane of Toledo, Ohio, was arrested for punching two McDonald’s employees and smashing a drive-through window because she couldn’t get Chicken McNuggets before ten thirty A.M., which the security cameras captured on video. Another video, from a Denny’s in Chicopee, Massachusetts, shows a white woman and a black woman, both dressed for a night on the town, picking up a fight their dates had abandoned. And at a Burger King in Panama City, Florida, a girl in a bikini jumps over the counter to throw jabs at the cashier.

  When I asked Sickmund what typified the new style of female violence, she pointed me to a recent video of a group of African-American girls attacking a random middle-aged man at a Washington, DC, Metro stop. The girls walk up to the man one by one and push him, until he is stumbling down a long corridor. “I mean nothing to you!” he yells hysterically, his backpack slipping off his shoulder. But they keep coming at him, braids flying as they take punches. “What’s up? What’s up?” the girls taunt as some of their friends take pictures. There is no possible argument that the girls are provoked or victimized, or that anyone has the upper hand on them. I suppose there is some larger sociocultural argument to be made about class and race oppression and limited means of expression, but even that is a stretch. It’s three thirty on a Friday, school’s out, and the cats are toying with a mouse. If there is any relevant ethnography to apply, it’s in a 2010 book by Cindy Ness called Why Girls Fight, about inner-city violence. Ness is one of the few writers on the topic whose analysis does not exclusively invoke oppression and victimization. Violence for the girls, she argues, is a “source of pleasure, self-esteem, and cultural capital.” The girls in her study “enjoy physically dominating others and take pleasure in inflicting pain and emerging victorious.” As one girl she interviews puts it, “I know I don’t rule the world, but I can feel like I do, make you think I do.”

  In the summer of 2011 I visited a program near Fort Lauderdale, Florida, called PACE, or Practical Academic Cultural Education, which functions as an alternative to the criminal justice system for girls. Judges refer teenage girls to PACE when they see in them the seeds of delinquency—an emerging pattern of truancy, drug use or dealing, or physical violence. For a few years, the girls go to a PACE center instead of high school, attending counseling sessions as well as classes, and living by semi-restrictive rules. A dress code requires a polo shirt and slacks, and the girls have to sign out whenever they leave the building. PACE lives by the principle that girls in the system need to be treated differently from boys, and they set up what they call a “gender responsive” program. “The girls are generally misunderstood,” said director Aggie Pappas. “They’ve usually suffered some kind of trauma or victimization, and that drives their behavior. We give them a space to express themselves, to find their voice.” In a group session, I watched as the girls talked to counselors about what to do when their dads don’t trust them and lock them in the house, or their mom goes AWOL. They came from all parts of the area and were about equally divided between white, African-American, and Latino. At the time I visited, a group of the girls were doing a moving, if awkward, dance to Pink’s perfectly apt girl-power hit of the moment: “Pretty pretty please, don’t you ever ever feel, like you’re less than fuckin’ perfect . . .”

  The girls I spoke to seem to have absorbed the basic message of PACE that college is better than jail, and that talking about problems is better than hitting. But even the two model students the PACE staff allowed me to interview maintain a relationship with violence that is at best ambivalent. When they talk about fights they’ve won, they do it with unmistakable pride. Delores, a seventeen-year-old I spoke to, had Beyoncé’s eyes and a curvy figure hidden under a big brown sweatshirt. She also had a sweet, childish voice, which caused her no end of grief in her life, “because people think I’m soft.” As a result, Delores was always in a position of having to prove herself. She got into fights with cousins, girlfriends, boyfriends, even the cops. Of her last fight with her cousin Princess, she told me, “To be honest, and maybe it sounds sick and sad to you, but I got joy out of hitting her. It made me feel really good because now nobody thinks I’m scared of her. You know, people think all they have in the world is their respect. That’s the only thing worth fighting for.” This updated version of the old macho martial code is still very real to them, maybe the most real thing in their lives.

  Delores’s fifteen-year-old friend Christine was with us, and she was an entirely different type—white, cheerleader-peppy, and quick with the uplifting g
irlfriend-y phrases (“You can totally go to college!”)—but she had no trouble relating to Delores’s life philosophy. She, too, had gotten in trouble for fighting with a girl at school. A year later, she still watches a cell phone video of the fight, which someone posted on Facebook, and especially loves to replay the moment when the other girl screams, “Get off me! Get off me!”

  “I feel good because she really needed me to get off her!” says Christine. “And then my friends sent me all these messages: ‘Oh damn, you got that girl good,’ and ‘She’s never gonna show her face again.’ Stuff like that, and maybe it sounds sad, but that made me feel really good, too. I don’t think it’s just boys or girls. It’s everyone. If you lose, people will think you’re soft, and if you win, they will show respect.”

  When I asked if they ever got into fights with boys, they laughed. “Of course! We’re the only ones ever doing the fighting,” Christine said, and told me about the time she left a bruise on her boyfriend’s face when she threw a twenty-pound weight at him.

  WHAT LOOKS LIKE warped logic in one context can look like empowerment in another. A corollary to the recent increases in violence is the remarkable decrease in victimization of women. Women today are far less likely to get murdered, raped, assaulted, or robbed than at any time in recent history. A 2010 White House report on women and girls laid out the latest statistics straightforwardly, to the great irritation of many feminists. The rate of nonfatal violent victimization of women has declined drastically since the 1990s, the report said. In 1993 there were forty-three violent incidents for every thousand women; now there are eighteen. The rate of rape meanwhile declined by 60 percent since 1993, and has stayed steady at the lower rate throughout the decade. The most accurate measure of crime, the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey, shows that rape and other violence against women have declined sharply over the last thirty-five years, and especially in the last decade. In the last twelve years, girls and young women report plummeting rates of completed rape, assaults, attempts, and threats, and all other violent crimes.