Bitchiness: Nature or Nurture?

There was a study in Ontario that was conducted by Tracy Vaillancourt, a psychology professor at the University of Ottawa, and a PhD student, Aanchal Sharma on 86 straight women in a lab at McMaster University. Their study? They were to scale the bitchiness of the participants. When asked as to why bitchiness, Vaillancourt answers simply “Bitchiness is the term that people use.” She explained. “If I ask someone to describe what this is, they’d say it’s bitchy.”

In their study, they divided their participants into two groups, each being paired with another woman, either a friend or a stranger. They were then instructed that they were going to participate in a test about female friendships before they were interrupted by one of two women.

Half the participants were interrupted by a thin, blond, attractive woman with her hair in a bun, dressed in a plain blue t-shirt and khaki pants, which the researchers called the conservative confederate. The other half found themselves in the company of the sexy confederate, the same woman, instead wearing a low-cut blouse, a short black skirt, boots, and her hair sexily un-bunned.

What they have discovered through that experiment was then the sexy confederate was more likely to have garnered negative comments. The women were far more likely to be bitchy to her as compared to the conservative confederate. It was also noted that their responses were more pronounced when the participants were paired with their friends, rather than strangers.

In another experiment by Vaillancourt,she simply showed study participants one of three images: Two featured the conservatively dressed woman and the sexy woman, dressed as described previously. Another showed the sexy woman with her body and face digitally altered so as to appear heavier.

She then asked a different group of women whether they’d want to be friends with the woman in the photo, to introduce her to their boyfriend (if they had one), or to let her spend time with their boyfriend alone.

The participants tended to answer “no” to all three questions for both the heavy and thin sexy women. They were nearly three times more likely, for example, to introduce the conservatively dressed woman to their boyfriend than the thin sexy woman.

To Vaillancourt, this showed that women, “are threatened by, disapprove of, and punish women who appear and/or act promiscuous,” regardless of their weight.

The clinical term for women’s bitchiness is indirect aggression – aggression we don’t want to get caught for. “You tend to do it such that you won’t be detected,” she explained. “Or you make an excuse for your behavior, like, ‘I was only joking.’ Direct aggression is just what it is: physical or verbal aggression.”

Psychologists Roy Baumeister and Jean Twenge have also theorized that women, not men, are largely the ones who suppress each others’ sexualities, in part through this sort of indirect aggression.

“The evidence favors the view that women have worked to stifle each other’s sexuality because sex is a limited resource that women use to negotiate with men, and scarcity gives women an advantage,” they wrote.

In his research in the 1990s, University of Texas psychologist David Buss found that women were more likely than men to “derogate,” or insult, their mating rivals in two ways, as he described to me in an email:

First, the “slut” factor: “spreading gossip that the rival woman is ‘easy,’ has slept with many partners, and is basically, in my terms, pursuing a short-term mating strategy.”

Second, on physical appearance: “Saying the woman is ugly, has fat thighs, and an astonishing variety of other vicious things about a rival’s physical appearance and mode of dress, such as wearing revealing clothing, plunging necklines, or short skirts.”

In his book, The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating, Buss argues that women do this because, evolutionarily, women who are willing to have casual sex undermine the goals of women who want long-term relationships. “Slutty” women hint to men that it’s okay not to commit because there will always be someone available to give away the milk for free, as it were. Their peers’ “derogation” is thus intended to damage the reputation of these free-wheeling females.

But then some scholars of indirect aggression argue that slut-shaming isn’t evolutionary, it’s hard-wired.

“Why are these women doing this? I think there are many ways we could explain that,” Agustin Fuentes, chair of the department of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, told me. “In our society, if you’re given the choice between these images, you’re going to say, ‘I don’t want my guy next to a girl with a short skirt.’ But that’s not because, evolutionarily speaking, your guy is more likely to cheat on you with the short-skirt girl.”

He argues that though this and other studies show how important physical appearance is to the way women respond to each other, there’s too much cultural baggage at play to say it all comes from our primate ancestors. The short-skirt-boots combo, for example, is already a “meaning-laden image,” he said.

In her own recent research, Anne Campbell, a psychologist at Durham University in the U.K., argued that young women tend to use indirect aggression to a greater extent than young men, in part because that’s the most socially acceptable way for women to compete.

What do you guys think? Is bitchiness nature or nurture? But regardless if its nature or nurture, the passive-aggressive behavior women have toward their same gender is sad, but not surprising. It’s implied that the way we bash other women is somewhat of a defense mechanism to compete for potential mates. It doesn’t make it any less wrong, though.

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