by Hanna Rosin
This decrease has happened even while the definition of rape has expanded to include acts that stop short of penetration—oral sex, for example—and circumstances in which the victim was too incapacitated (usually meaning too drunk) to give meaningful consent. The most dramatic declines are in assaults by an acquaintance or family member. “Women have a lot more ability to leave a terrible relationship,” says Melissa Sickmund. “They don’t have to stay until they get killed.” Adds criminologist Mike Males, “Girls have achieved a great deal more power. And that makes them a lot harder to victimize. People don’t admit these trends because there is a lot of discomfort, even among liberals, about girls succeeding so well. Girls are getting into the job market at higher rates, doing well financially, while boys are on a destructive decline. A lot of things are going right, and I think this really unhinges some people who are attached to a different story.”
A recent British study showed that women were three times more likely to be arrested for domestic violence, and far more likely to use a weapon. Since the United States passed mandatory arrest laws for domestic violence in the late 1990s, arrest rates for women have skyrocketed, and in some states reached 50 percent or more of all arrests. Domestic violence victim advocates are often incensed by this development and say women are being accidentally ensnared in a trap meant for abusive men. But the more nuanced explanation is that, just as with men, the aggression is fluid and exists along a continuum. Women these days are more likely to defend themselves or fight back, and sometimes they may be taking the first punch. One British study found that 40 percent of domestic violence victims were men.
Our attachment to the notion of women as vulnerable runs deeper than politics, of course. It’s hard to fathom that women’s new circumstance could shift something so fundamental as raw, physical power. In most movies and crime thrillers, women are still victims and the female aggressor is still an exotic anomaly. TV shows like Snapped on the Oxygen network, which does biopics of female criminals, still play on this expectation that female violence is a freak occurrence. “These shocking but true stories . . . prove that even the most unlikely suspects can be capable of murder,” the opening narration explains. We find it hard to let go of the old story about women, even when women are inflicting the worst kind of harm.
Since 2000, there have been well over a hundred suicide bombings carried out by women, in Russia, the Middle East, India, Sri Lanka, and other countries. When the Black Widows of Chechnya again exploded a bomb in the Russian subway in 2010, news stories described them in terms of a Greek tragedy, as women so burned up and denatured by personal loss that they set themselves to Medea-level violence as a form of revenge. One of the bombers was “emotionally distressed after her husband was murdered in what appeared to be a business dispute,” attorney Natalya V. Yevlapova told The New York Times. These girls, she said, “are just pushed into a corner.”
The media always describes the motives of these suicide bombers according to a few female-specific tropes: young and psychologically disturbed, revenge-seeking, or naive and under the sway of charismatic male influence. The first known female suicide bomber was a sixteen-year-old girl working with a Syrian resistance group who drove a truck into an Israeli convoy in Lebanon in 1985. News reports at first described her as pregnant, and then depressed, but it turns out that she was neither; the descriptions were only so much sentimental overlay.
“Women, we are told, become suicide bombers out of despair, mental illness, religiously mandated subordination to men, frustration with sexual inequality, and a host of other factors related specifically to their gender. Indeed, the only thing everyone can agree on is that there is something fundamentally different motivating men and women to become suicide attackers,” writes Lindsey O’Rourke, a doctoral student at the University of Chicago who did an exhaustive study of all the known female suicide bombers. “The only problem: There is precious little evidence of uniquely feminine motivations driving women’s attacks.” Like men, the women have a range of motivations. They may have lost a family member in an enemy’s previous attack, for example, but so have most male suicide bombers. In the broad view, the great majority—95 percent—carry out attacks as part of a military operation against an occupying force.
What motivates them is partly loyalty to a cause and some grievance, in about the same proportion as these factors motivate men. But their greatest motivation is something else entirely, O’Rourke concluded, something the girls at the PACE center might understand: They are remarkably effective. In her dissertation, O’Rourke discovered that the women’s attacks were almost twice as lethal as the attacks of men. A female suicide bomber is more likely to be successful, and kills 8.4 victims on average, as opposed to 5.3 killed by the average male suicide bomber. The women have the advantage of surprise, and societal norms often prevent security officers from searching them thoroughly. As British agencies discovered, women in traditional Muslim garb can hide twelve pounds of explosives under a chador.
IN THE MID-1990S, sociologists at Princeton conducted an experiment in the boundaries of female aggression. Two groups of college students, each a mixture of men and women, were given instructions on how to play a specially designed video game. They were told that an unseen opponent would drop bombs on their target for the first three rounds, and then they would be allowed to retaliate. In the first three rounds, an overwhelming number of bombs were dropped in order to provoke the players into feeling angry and frustrated. The researchers then measured how the subjects responded.
When they first came in, one group of subjects was asked to move close to the experimenter and to identify themselves by name. They each received large name tags and answered personal questions in front of the group, providing information about their families, where they came from, and what they liked to do. The interviewer wrote down the answers in large black letters, echoing back the gender of each subject in the process. When this group began playing the game, the experimenter came to check in on them. This group was what the research calls “individuated,” meaning actively reminded of who they actually were. The other half of the students were kept in the back of the room and told that they were not required to provide any information. They remained anonymous, and no experimenters stopped to check in on them during the game.
In the individuated group, the men dropped significantly more bombs on their opponents than the women did. In the anonymous group, men and women dropped the same number of bombs. “When the restrictions on aggression inherent in the female gender role were lifted,” concluded researchers Jenifer Lightdale and Deborah Prentice, “women behaved as aggressively as men.” (Although true to gender stereotype, the women rated themselves as worse at the game than the men did, and reported that they behaved less aggressively than they actually did.)
The study was crude in its very literal and narrow definition of violence—dropping (pretend) bombs. And the results were not necessarily unexpected. Earlier studies, including the famous Stanford Prison Experiment, showed that when people took on deindividuated “roles” they could carry out more violence than they would when unmasked. (Anyone who has watched kids in Darth Vader costumes can attest to that.) But in the context of gender, it took a very crude and straightforward study to raise an important point. Psychological studies have always shown that men and women have a similar threshold for anger, but that women suppress the anger while men express it. What if women were more free of social constraints? How far would they move along the aggression continuum? (It’s worth noting that later studies have replicated the video study’s finding in varied forms, including my favorite, the “hot sauce” study, where the subjects were asked to punish someone who had criticized their work by putting extra hot sauce on their crackers. When anonymous, the women larded it on!)
Studies have suggested that if the social acceptance for female aggression expanded, women would move in to fill the space. And this is exactly what seems to have happened. This is one of the areas where
the Bem Sex Role Inventory—the key gender role measure administered since the 1970s—comes in handy. On that measure, women have increasingly described themselves in traits that are traditionally considered masculine: ambitious, self-reliant, assertive. Between the 1970s and the late 1990s, men made few changes in their self-reporting, while women “increasingly reported masculine-stereotyped personality traits,” writes San Diego State psychology professor Jean Twenge in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Men’s sense of their own assertiveness has proved fairly rigid, while women’s seems to change according to the historical moment. In 2001, Twenge analyzed personality tests dating back to the 1930s to try to quantify how much women internalized cultural norms. It turned out that, true to the nature of Plastic Woman, their self-identity changed in perfect harmony with the times. High school and college women’s senses of their own assertiveness and dominance rose from 1931 to 1945, when women were first flooding the workplace. It dipped from 1946 to 1967, a period of great emphasis on domestic roles. It increased again from 1968 to 1993. Women’s scores have increased so much in recent years, writes Twenge, that there is virtually no measurable sex difference in assertiveness. Social change gets “internalized,” she argues, and shows up as a “personality trait.”
A 1999 analysis of 150 studies on risk-taking behaviors showed a similar result. Studies taken before 1980 show a greater gap in the gender difference in risk taking. Men still measure higher on such tendencies, but the gap is higher for risks such as driving and drug and alcohol use. In risk taking on, say, standard decision making, the gap has narrowed considerably. The risk-taking gap narrows even more among the younger cohorts, showing that either girls are getting braver or boys are getting more cautious in a risk-averse, highly protective society.
Increasingly, researchers are finding that qualities we thought of as innate are in fact context-specific, especially for women. To measure rates of competitiveness, anthropologist Uri Gneezy at the University of California, San Diego, compared two distinct societies: the Maasai in Tanzania, who have a patriarchal society, and the Khasi in India, a matrilineal society where families invest mainly in girls. In a ball competition, Maasai men opted to compete twice as much as the women, but in the Khasi, the results were nearly reversed and the women competed much more. At the very least, “it is not universally true that the average female in every society avoids competition more often than the average male in that society because we have discovered at least one setting in which this is not true,” writes Gneezy.
Stereotypes are slow to change, but in Western countries the culture is moving into a phase of “new, more conscious acceptance of female aggression,” argues Maud Lavin in the 2010 Push Comes to Shove: New Images of Aggressive Women. Much of the credit goes to Title IX and its encouragement of vast waves of high school and college girls to play sports. In 1971, about one in twenty-seven girls participated in sports; now that number is up to one in two. Early experience with sports competition allows girls to express behaviors once restricted to men, and also to find a way out of the usual female aggression bind. In sports, violence is not dangerous but orderly, neatly divided into halves and quarters, and part of a larger team goal.
In her essay “Throwing Like a Girl,” philosopher Iris Marion Young argues that the early-life failure of girls to use their bodies in lateral space or to throw their whole weight behind physical tasks limits their imagination and sense of potential for themselves. By contrast, the experience of physical competence “ripples through everyday life” and, multiplied by tens of thousands, “causes a behavioral transformation on a mass societal level,” writes Lavin. In her book, Lavin traces the evolution of girl sports movies from the prettified territory of gymnastics, cheerleading, and ice-skating to the more brutal soccer and boxing worlds depicted in Bend It Like Beckham, Girlfight, and Million Dollar Baby, which ends in the dismal euthanizing of the boxer played by Hilary Swank.
Slowly pop culture is tuning in to the new wave of female violence. In Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer, the traditional political wife is rewritten as a cold-blooded killer at the heart of an evil conspiracy. In her video for the song “Telephone,” Lady Gaga, with her infallible radar for the cultural edge, rewrites Thelma & Louise as a story not about elusive female empowerment but about sheer, ruthless power. Instead of killing themselves, she and her girlfriend (played by Beyoncé) kill a bad boyfriend and random others in a homicidal spree and then escape in their yellow pickup truck, Gaga bragging, “We did it, Honey B.” Sometimes women take over the roles of men for sheer novelty value. The role of the career assassin Salt in the spy thriller of that name was written for a man but given to Angelina Jolie. Here she is entirely plausible as the reluctant professional killer without a personal life. Hanna, directed by Joe Wright, rewrites the male violence trope from its origins. Saoirse Ronan plays a girl raised in the wilderness by her father to be a hunter rather than a nurturer/gatherer. The movie is imbued with myth and fairy tale, and when Hanna ends up in a tutu one night at a concert with a boy, instead of giving her prince a kiss she wrestles him to the ground and nearly chokes him to death.
In teenage books and movies, the mean girl over the last decade has replaced the boy bully as the bane of high school existence. In her latest evolution she goes beyond psychological torture into more lethal territory. Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games, Lisbeth Salander in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and Maximum Ride from the popular James Patterson young adult series of the same name represent an entirely novel kind of girl heroine, damaged but highly effective killers exacting revenge on a demented patriarchy. The new version of boy hero meanwhile is a remarkable wimp, a small bundle of Woody Allen–style neuroses. In many of the popular books and movies for boys these days—Diary of a Wimpy Kid, How to Train Your Dragon, Alvin Ho, Nerds—the hero ekes out just enough courage to stumble into a (sort of) happy ending.
For some people the rise in female violence must come as a great disappointment. Many of us hold out the hope that there is a utopia in our future run by women, that power does not in fact corrupt equally. But that vision of a female utopia has always had an air of condescension behind it. The most distinctive trait of women is not necessarily that they are kinder or gentler or will do anything to protect their young. As Twenge discovered, it’s that they tend to respond to social cues and bend their personalities to fit in what the times allow.
Women have so far dominated the workforce partly with a traditionally feminine set of traits—social skills, caretaking, and cooperative behavior. But this constellation has only gotten them so far. Now they are realizing that to make it to the very top they will need to play a slightly different game. The greatest barrier to women reaching for the most powerful jobs these days is a set of unspoken assumptions: that women are not competitive, dominant, or hungry enough to make it. But they are breaking through even that last barrier, with the force of the Lady Gagas, Katniss Everdeens, and schoolgirls with cleats and bruises.
THE TOP
NICE-ISH GIRLS GET THE CORNER OFFICE
This is how problems are solved in the workplace of the future: Marissa Mayer, who is the highest-ranking woman at Google, had a bad feeling that one of her top directors, Katy, was going to quit. Katy was hardworking and well liked, but Mayer was picking up rumblings of burnout and resentment. Mayer did not like losing women executives—there were too few to begin with at Google. She figured it was obvious what was causing the strain. Katy was a “soccer mom” of three children, including a set of twins. As the leader of her Google team, she had to participate in a one A.M. call to Bangalore every night. Mayer assumed that with young children at home who did not necessarily sleep through the night, the one A.M. calls were putting Katy over the edge. So she decided to do an intervention.
Mayer called Katy in and explained what she calls her “finding your rhythm” philosophy, which is not an alternative form of birth control but Mayer’s home-brewed remedy for burnout. What causes burnout
, Mayer believes, is not working too hard. People, she believes, “can work arbitrarily hard for an arbitrary amount of time.” But they will become resentful if work makes them miss the things that are really important to them. The key to sustaining dedication and loyalty is having an employee identify what he or she absolutely cannot tolerate missing, and then having the employer accommodate that. She asked Katy to think about it and come back in a month.
Mayer, it turns out, was wrong about the one A.M. phone calls. Katy loved her job and she loved her team and she didn’t mind staying up late to help out. What was bothering Katy was something entirely different. Often, Katy confessed, she showed up late at her children’s events because a meeting went overly long, for no important reason other than meetings tend to go long. And she hated having her children watch her walk in late. For Mayer, this was a no-brainer. She instituted a Katy-tailored rule. If Katy had told her earlier that she had to leave at four to get to a soccer game, then Mayer would make sure Katy could leave at four. Even if there was only five minutes left to a meeting, even if Google cofounder Sergey Brin himself was midsentence and expecting an answer from Katy, Mayer would say “Katy’s gotta go,” and Katy would walk out the door and answer the questions later by e-mail after the kids were in bed.
