The End of Men and the Rise of Women (25 page)

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 girlfriend-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.

W
HAT 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.

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.

I
N 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.”