{"id":72182,"date":"2013-11-30T14:00:42","date_gmt":"2013-11-30T19:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=72182"},"modified":"2013-11-29T14:15:25","modified_gmt":"2013-11-29T19:15:25","slug":"science-bitches","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/daily-astrology\/science-bitches\/","title":{"rendered":"Science, Bitches!"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Maria Padhila<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Science has proven that I am an irredeemable, hard-wired bitch. It feels so good to have an excuse.<\/p>\n

Recent news of results of a research study<\/a> were quickly pounced on and extrapolated into irrefutable scientific evidence that women are bitchy to each other and basically mean girls at heart, so all the bad stuff that happens to us — say, at work — is our own fault.<\/p>\n

\"Poly
Poly Paradise at Burning Man. Photo by Eric.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

We tear each other down, you see. That settles that whole income inequity thing right there, so bye.<\/p>\n

Just kidding. I still have some bitching to do. <\/p>\n

The university study put a group of women in a room to complete a task. As they were working, a young woman came into the room and asked about the whereabouts of the professor. The women thought the way they were doing the project was what was being studied, but actually researchers were studying their reaction to the woman coming into the room. She was dressed either in khakis and a t-shirt or in a short skirt, leather boots and a tight, cleavage-revealing pink shirt. Here\u2019s how The New York Times<\/em> described what happened:<\/p>\n

In jeans, she attracted little notice and no negative comments from the students, whose reactions were being secretly recorded during the encounter and after the woman left the room. But when she wore the other outfit, virtually all the students reacted with hostility.<\/p>\n

They stared at her, looked her up and down, rolled their eyes and sometimes showed outright anger. One asked her in disgust, \u201cWhat the [expletive] is that?\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Most of the aggression, though, happened after she left the room. Then the students laughed about her and impugned her motives. One student suggested that she dressed that way in order to have sex with a professor. Another said that her breasts \u201cwere about to pop out.\u201d<\/p>\n

The results of the experiment jibe with evidence that this \u201cmean girl\u201d form of indirect aggression is used more by adolescents and young women than by older women, who have less incentive to handicap rivals once they marry. Other studies have shown that the more attractive an adolescent girl or woman is, the more likely she is to become a target for indirect aggression from her female peers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The study was one of several into female aggression and competition that formed an entire issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: Biological Science<\/a>s<\/em>. I read just the abstracts of the articles, and it looks like fascinating and respectable work (more so than how it was made out in many reports). The problem may be that it doesn\u2019t go far enough. Again from The New York Times<\/em>, here\u2019s what the researcher herself has to say about the study:<\/p>\n

\u201cWomen are indeed very capable of aggressing against others, especially women they perceive as rivals,\u201d said Dr. [Tracy] Vaillancourt, now a psychologist at the University of Ottawa. \u201cThe research also shows that suppression of female sexuality is by women, not necessarily by men.\u201d<\/p>\n

Stigmatizing female promiscuity — a.k.a. slut-shaming — 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.<\/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><\/blockquote>\n

And that\u2019s where I got a little touchy. Because it feels kind of convenient to place slut shaming solely at the hands of women. There\u2019s a definitiveness about \u201cshows that the suppression of female sexuality is by women\u201d that\u2019s unearned, and a whole world of wiggle room in that \u201cnot necessarily by men.\u201d And \u201csex is coveted by men,\u201d but not ever by women? Really? And there\u2019s the interesting aside that promiscuity could be a revolutionary act, jeopardizing the \u201cpower-holding position of the group,\u201d which I actually kind of like the sound of. Make love not war!<\/p>\n

I haven\u2019t done a study, but I have been called a slut and silenced at least as often by men as by women. And often, unexpectedly, women have had my back when just about all the men in my environment were turning theirs. Women have expressed admiration for my following my own path — much of what I hear on this website is a good example. <\/p>\n

Oddly enough, I even got a few voices of affirmation from some young women in the Catholic high school I attended, where I was bullied, threatened, minorly assaulted (pushed, knocked down, had things stolen), and isolated for being a \u201clezzie\u201d and general slutmonster. (Triple threat! I\u2019ll steal your boyfriend AND your girlfriend, plus weirdo!) In settings ranging from a Burning Man gathering to a vacation in Brazil, my sexy dress and behavior has been complimented and applauded. Women and men worked together to set up the whole culture of \u201centhusiastic consent required\u201d within the Burning Man culture, with workshops and messages applauding women\u2019s (and everyone\u2019s) autonomy and sexual expression. <\/p>\n

What about the women who have been bravely and decisively working as sex-positive educators and therapists, or working to change legislation all over the world, or living their full sexuality and thus serving as examples and developing new paths? (Paging Betty Dodson — an extraordinary pioneer and supporter of women\u2019s sexuality.) This kind of support of other women\u2019s sexuality, by women, has been happening for hundreds of years, though it hasn\u2019t always been so well-articulated as \u201csex positivity\u201d until recently. <\/p>\n

What would you call a woman who organizes a slut walk, or the Anonymous (and out there) women behind uncovering what happened in Steubenville? Are such women anomalies, waking each morning determined to grit their teeth and tamp down their inborn bitchiness, that little voice apparently inside every women as part of our evolutionary makeup that says: \u201cTake her down. Rip her to shreds. Call her a slut.\u201d<\/p>\n

If women are hard-wired to compete for men, where does that leave polyamory altogether? How about the families that are making it work? I don’t hear much about lesbians fighting over straight men. Who do trans people compete over? As a bisexual, who am I fighting for? Obviously, I’m confused. When I feel happy hearing Chris or Isaac talk about women they find appealing, where on Earth is that feeling coming from, if I’m hard-wired to be bitchy? Maybe I’m an alien.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not sure I want to take down the actual study, the women researchers behind it, or the idea of having much more study into the female animal. Evolutionary psychology as a field, despite being populated with a proportion of douchebags<\/a>, can make a strange bedfellow for those trying to create social change. Polyamorists have been helped in their pursuit of acceptance and perhaps equal rights by Sex at Dawn<\/em>, for instance. But it\u2019s a field rife with ambiguity and, whoa, lots of academic competitiveness and backstabbing — as soon as someone releases a study, another speaks up to try to prove it wrong. There\u2019s also the issue that the whole line of \u201chey, penguins are naturally gay!\u201d argument has not yet changed the mind of an evangelical Christian right-wing teabagger, not as far as I know. Last, it seems to imply that certain injustices and just plain bad behavior must simply be accepted because they\u2019re hard-wired into the animal. Because science.<\/p>\n

While the questions researchers ask are of course culturally biased, calling to close off areas of questioning isn\u2019t the solution. The damage is done more by what our culture did with the results — the resulting spin and discussion — that turned it into a big \u201ca-ha! I knew y\u2019all was bitches all along!\u201d gotcha moment. It turned the findings into blamings: It\u2019s your own fault, ladies; you\u2019re doing these things to each other, so if you don\u2019t succeed in the workplace or in the world, it\u2019s not anyone else\u2019s problem. You\u2019re just mean to each other; you can\u2019t help it, because you\u2019re programmed to fight over men. Sorry. Move along, there\u2019s nothing to change here.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s reminiscent of the persistent myth of \u201cmommy wars,\u201d in which women are said by popular culture and media to be constantly competing and attacking each other as mothers. Issues such as the state of our schools, class inequality, vaccination and health, food safety, sexism, workplace inequality — all can be explained away as simply bitches sniping at each other. Home schooling, or seeking GMO labeling for produce? You\u2019ll be positioned quickly as a hover mother, a fussy woman who\u2019s trying to make other mommies look bad and impinge on their choices. <\/p>\n

Some of this positioning and cultural reduction of real problems to catfights is done by women, and some of it by men. And yes, it does appear to be done out of a sense of competition for scarce resources. But maybe that scares resource isn\u2019t \u201cavailable men.\u201d And too, the fear and the fighting might stem from such an evolutionary trigger. But those scarce resources go far beyond a few viable bachelors.<\/p>\n

Those scarce resources are security, food, water, shelter, energy, autonomy, the power to build and maintain community, sexuality — I don\u2019t know if I could list them all. They\u2019ve been made, deliberately or unconsciously, scarce. This is what you\u2019re seeing when a woman politician attempts to shame through a piece of legislation limiting women\u2019s access to birth control. She\u2019s attempting to put limits on women\u2019s sexuality, true. But she\u2019s also looking to limit women\u2019s autonomy, control food and energy sources, and most of all confine both men and women to generations-long roles as consumers doing unvalued labor. And she\u2019s helped in that effort to control others by lots of other women and lots of men.<\/p>\n

At the heart of what they\u2019re doing is the conviction that love itself is a scarce resource. And that is what I struggle with myself, every day, to prove wrong. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Maria Padhila Science has proven that I am an irredeemable, hard-wired bitch. It feels so good to have an excuse. Recent news of results of a research study were quickly pounced on and extrapolated into irrefutable scientific evidence that women are bitchy to each other and basically mean girls at heart, so all the … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7221,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72182"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7221"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72182"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72182\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}