BBC’s Magazine today has a fantastically breathless article documenting what I can only imagine to be the “increasing trend” of girls being (gasp) perpetrators of violence. “These reports still jolt society in a post-feminist age,” according to the article, “Partly because they are so rare and partly because women are not expected to be aggressive.“ Which is actually true, if you replace “society” with “the set of people who are shocked by this,” and “post-feminist age,” with, I dunno, some statement that isn’t shown to be wrong by the very sentence it lives in.
Also? Don’t tell us it’s rare and in the next paragraph show us statistics that say women are convicted of 30% as many assaults as men, which doesn’t exactly make instances of girls! fighting! rare and beautiful snowflakes.
Here’s a fun game: read the article while at least pretending to believe that boys and girls perform acts of violence for more or less the same reasons—as a demonstration of power / because they’re angry / because they think it’ll get them what they want / because it does get them what they want / because it can be fun / because they’re trying to impress someone they want to pounce on. And now marvel:
Her report suggests female displays of aggression have a function within a group.
“Such violence was considered deeply meaningful; it served to maintain group solidarity, reinforce friendships, affirm allegiances, and enhance personal status within the group.”
But Victim Support says the main underlying reason for this aggression is people growing up in violent homes or suffering abuse at the hands of a partner.
Because, of course, when boys fight with fists, “bottles, knives and even pieces of wood,” it’s just boys being boys. When girls do it, it’s because they’re damaged, beautiful flowers—just one more sign of a collapsing society.
You’re dead on– these justifications for female violence are completely bogus, or at least, apply equally well to men as they do to women.
Ah yes, it’s true– in England, “lad culture” is popular and glorified. Which is to say, downing a few pints and picking a fight for no reason is popular and glorified– as long as it’s just the lads who are involved. Fighting is how boys prove that they’re MEN! God forbid you point a wagging finger at them. “Ladettes”, on the other hand…
(Oy, who came up with the word “Ladette”, anyway?)
By the way, I lived in London for two years. While I was there, if I’m remembering right, I witnessed six fights (most of which were broken up before serious injury resulted). Two of of the six were between women. So, that figure of 30% sounds just about right to me!
Were they preceded by gossip and vicious rumors? Deep down, all fights between women are really nasty hair-pulling cat-fights, after all.
These attitudes always blow my mind, based as they are on the premise that, paraphrasing the immortal words of Simone de Beauvoir, that there are two categories of people, human beings and women, and when women start behaving like human beings, they are accused of acting like men.
Look at *any* historically repressed subgroup. They often do appear to be a flavorless, colorless mass, disallowed (sometimes violently, always economically) as they are by the subgroup in power from developing *any* pronounced tendencies towards *anything* other than what’s approved for them by the empowered subgroup. Then watch the repressed group as their repression begins to be lifted. Suddenly, they’re showing all these “statistically anomalous” behaviors like, gasp, excelling in areas the empowered subgroup always said they’d be bad at! And also, failing in areas the empowered subgroup always said they were *innately* good at! In other words, wow! Showing extremely similar characteristics to the empowered subgroup overall! Just like they were all members of the same biological species or something regardless of what the social dynamics of their culture were!
EYE
ROLL
Oh well…
As for what sparked them, I really couldn’t say. But, and I hate to feed stereotypes here, I was up close and personal on one of them, and it was pretty much what people would call a nasty hair-pulling cat-fight. No actual hair-pulling that I can remember, probably because both women had shortish hair, but it did seem like they were going about it very differently from how men would.
It happened right next to me, and I happened to be the first person on the scene trying to pull them apart. So I saw everything. Two middle-aged women with pub-regular physiques were calling each other slags, then one slapped the other in the face, and suddenly they were clawing at each other. Very early on one of them pulled at the other one’s shirt and a breast came out in the open. Soon after, I and some others managed to pull them apart, and they both had visible bloody scratchmarks on their chest and neck.
I swear I’m not making up a masturbatory fantasy here. One thing it definitely wasn’t was sexy. I suppose part of it was these were not very physically attractive women, reeking of alcohol and tobacco. More unnerving was the shockingly potent hate that these two women were directing at each other. But most disturbing of all was the fact that one of them had two kids with her– the older one couldn’t have been more than ten — and they were watching the whole thing. No, you’re not allowed to have kids in pubs in England. It was still only late afternoon, and this incident happened on the outside patio (I was sitting with friends from my theatre school at a different picnic table), so maybe that’s how they got away with it.
In retrospect, maybe my feeling that a “catfight” was qualitatively different from a, um, “dogfight”, could largely be my own male filtering. After all, if two men take hold of each other’s shirts and you end up seeing their bare chests, you don’t think twice about it. And maybe guys grappling in close quarters instinctually fight in more or less the same way, except that because their fingernails tend to be shorter, they don’t leave the same kinds of scratchmarks behind. (Also, long fingernails would make both men and women less likely to make a fist in order to punch.) Even fighting in front of one’s kids would probably be seen as far less offensive if men did it than if women did it, in this world of double-standards we’re in.
But at the time at least, it certainly reinforced some of the common stereotypes in my head.
I know what you mean Quin. It’s really hard not to sound stereotypical but from the fights I’ve seen in my life, mostly back in high school, women and men do seem to fight different. The nastiest fight I’ve ever seen was in Jr. High between two girls. It was brutal, the first teacher who stepped in to break it up got punched out, and it took several teachers with the help of some students to finally break it up, but even while being held apart they wouldn’t give up. Maybe its because I’ve been lucky enough to not see too many fights that I’ve never seen guys fight like that, but from what I’ve seen there is something of a difference. I think it’s because as was mentioned, guys will fight over nothing when they are drunk, so they don’t have that underlying hate to turn the fight really nasty. Guys have those kinds of fights too, but the ones we usually see in public are the drunken bar brawls.
Hopefully someday people of all genders, races and classes can learn to settle their differences without violence, but I’m not going to hold my breath.
Clearly neither of you have spent a lot of time around male rednecks.
Yes, I tried to avoid them as much as possible growing up. As a result I am now a girly man.
Kilgore Trout, perhaps I wasn’t clear enough. It’s true that my take on the situation fed straight into the regular stereotypes at the time it happened. But in my last comment I was trying to suggest that maybe I had just perceived it that way because of my own cultural biases.
For the record, the men I saw fighting were usually much scarier than the women. For whatever reason, I had very little hesitation getting involved in the fight between the women. But only once in London did I personally get involved in trying to break up a fight between men. And in one case I was frankly too terrified of the aggressor to even go near, even though he was just viciously kicking another guy, bloody and unconscious, in the middle of the street.
Lisa K, I know you can probably kick anybody’s punk ass here. Don’t worry, if I see you getting into a fight, I won’t try to get in your way.
HA. I am in SORRY shape nowadays, I probably couldn’t *outrun* anybody on here anymore, much less kick anybody’s butt. Oh well, now that I’m no longer on stupid business trips every other week MAYBE I can start going back to the gym on a regular basis…yer lucky you were *able* to avoid male rednecks growing up, clearly you ALSO did not grow up in Kansas.
Women always fought-if not with fists than in the way in which they were taught to fight. The “delicate flower” defense was a survival tactic. Women have historically been taught to absorb the hit and return firepower from a safer defense position. I’m glad we can get to punching out in the open these days.