Fungus Gnat
Well-Known Member
How aggressive is the human female? When the anthropologist Sarah B. Hrdy surveyed the research literature three decades ago, she concluded that the competitive component in the nature of women remains anecdotal, intuitively sensed, but not confirmed by science. Science has come a long way since then, as Dr. Hrdy notes in her introduction to a recent issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society devoted entirely to the topic of female aggression. She credits the stunning amount of new evidence partly to better research techniques and partly to the entry of so many women into scientific fields once dominated by men.
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 intrasexual competition is the most important factor explaining the pressures that young women feel to meet standards of sexual conduct and physical appearance.
To see how female students react to a rival, researchers brought pairs of them into a laboratory at McMaster University for what was ostensibly a discussion about female friendships. But the real experiment began when another young woman entered the room asking where to find one of the researchers.
This woman had been chosen by the researchers, Tracy Vaillancourt and Aanchal Sharma, because she embodied qualities considered attractive from an evolutionary perspective, meaning a low waist-to-hip ratio, clear skin, large breasts. Sometimes, she wore a T-shirt and jeans, other times a tightfitting, low-cut blouse and short skirt.
Full story:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/19/science/a-cold-war-fought-by-women.html?smid=fb-share&_r=3&
The claws come out for the one on the left but not for the one on the right, why? Bitches be crazy.
