How Women Compete For Partners - Joyce Benenson

What is going on that a woman could actually say, "I feel terrible that that woman got a really expensive car," right? That's a, a male thing, right? Or, "I feel terrible that that woman bought this beautiful house, uh, 'cause I don't, I don't have that," and to feel as bad or worse than men. And overall, from... we had 22 items... women felt worse.

Over the last few months, one of the most interesting topics that I've learned about has been intrasexual competition, and particularly female intrasexual competition, because I think it's overlooked a lot. When we're talking about status-seeking behavior, when we're talking about competitiveness, immediately everybody goes to men as the, uh, how would you say? The prime example. That's the flagship example of what we're talking about. A lot of your work has looked at the unique and quite vicious ways that females enact their intrasexual competition, their status-seeking behavior. So, what is unique about the female competition for status when you compare it with males?

Okay, well, I guess I have a recent paper where I argue that females more than males engage in safe, um, subtle, and solitary forms of competition. So, this is a comparison. And by safe, I've done a lot of work, and many others have, um, suggesting that across animal species, females need to stay alive more. So, males can take risks. So you could have one male, uh, live fast, uh, die young, right? One male who inseminates lots of females and he dies very early in life, but he's still gonna leave a lot of, um, offspring. So, whether that's humans or others doesn't matter, and, um, he doesn't have to worry that much about survival. But females, if we're talking about mammals, are the ones who have to take care of the offspring, and this certainly goes for humans, and not only do mothers, but grandmothers in humans, so we're really taking care of offspring for many, many decades, um, have to take care of offspring. So, it's no good to engage in dangerous tactics. That would be stupid in terms of being able to take care of your offspring and your grandchildren too. So, number one, I would say females are safe, and part of being safe is, if you have a competitive interaction, if you have a conflict, um, you better be subtle about it, because if you go up as a male might and, you know, punch somebody in the face or, um, verbally harangue them or engage in any kind of very non-subtle direct behavior, then that's more likely to invite retaliation. So, uh, retaliation obviously can lead to a lot of injury and even death, and that... Males across many species are willing to do that 'cause, again, as I said before, they can still leave many offspring. But females can't because after a long period of gestating and lactating, uh, you have to (laughs) invest in protecting your offspring, and usually without the help of the male, and with humans it varies whether there's a male to help or not, whether the father's around, another male, not clear. So, it's very important, again, that, um, one is subtle in conflicts, in competition, and, and so what do we do? We, uh, develop all kinds of different types of tactics for competing, and they have to do with non-verbal gestures, um, voice intonation change that's derogatory, talking about somebody who you wanna get rid of. This is particularly obviously in humans if you're talking, um, where you socially exclude someone, so other females are around and you say, oftentimes in a very sweet way, "Did you know that this woman did this terrible thing?" And, um, you're trying to kind of... I, I think it's said very well by a number of women where they say it in a sympathetic fashion, but of course it's letting out terrible information about someone at the same, at the same time. So, you know, "It's so awful that this happened to," whoever, and then everybody there knows, and they wouldn't have known otherwise, and that reduces her, you know, uh, reputation with everyone else. So, these kinds of subtle tactics, obviously they're much safer, but, you know, they're something that I believe are honed over many years, but I see it even in three-year-old girls where it's like, "Did you see she, she's so bossy?" And that's a very common complaint where, uh, boys don't like bossy boys either, but they'll, they'll punch them (laughs) and run over their heads. I, I mean, I've actually seen that, and that's, that you have to deal with that. So, you know, you can argue about... Uh, I don't even say it's a comparison, like, which is worse, and people can go back and forth, but it's just different, and I do think it is very different. I, I don't think it's the same at all, and so I get surprised when people think there are no sex differences, and I'm like, "Have you ever been to a preschool?" And this is pretty early in life. I've, I've done my work primarily with children, though I'll... more recently with adults. But, you know, um, preschools, so obvious, you have the girls on one side and the boys on the other, and so you're socializing something that they naturally do, but it's socialized then for the next rest of your life, where, because of sex segregation, girls are more comfortable with the girls and boys are more comfortable with the boys. So, you get a lot of practice doing this, and you learn what it's like to be the butt of that, and you learn to avoid it if at all possible. So, um, this is socialization. I think a lot of people talk about socialization as coming from adults or parents or the media or social media or whatever, and sure that's there, but to me the power of social media as opposed to television or adults or even parents is that it's peers, and there's nothing stronger than peers as socializers. I, I just don't think people have understood that. So, you know, by the time you're three, you put a child into a-... uh, daycare, or a preschool, or whatever, y- you know, hunter-gatherer society, just a group, um, whoever's there, and the peers have a lot to say about whether you have someone to talk to and somebody near you, or whether you're all by yourself, which nobody wants. So, it's very, very powerful. And the third thing I talk about is solitary competition. This is just one from one of my papers. And I do think a big part, a big attraction of competition for males is making it public. So, you want to be able to show off that you beat this guy. I'm right now watching tennis matches 'cause I did a study on, um, what happens at the end of a tennis match. But, you know, that's what males want. They want public, conspicuous, um, contests, and the more people watching, the better off. And that's, of course, risky if you happen to be the loser, but it's, it gives the thrill, gets the testosterone going, the challenge. Um, females, they're new, relatively, to sports. Certainly, uh, research over the last many centuries and across the world has shown males are much more likely to play sports. But it's not just sports, it's verbal contests, it's any kind of competitive behavior. Males want it public, they want it conspicuous, and then they want it to be clear who's the winner and who's the loser. That's the way it goes. In contrast, females, I find, are much, much more solitary in their competition, but it doesn't mean they're not competing. It means that, for example, um, I once went to a store where somebody asked me if I were, I was, I was older than this, but they asked me if I was going to the local prom. And I said, "No, I'm not going to the local prom." "Why?" And the, the store owner said, "Oh, we have to write down everybody's dress to make sure that no woman gets, or girl, gets the same dress, because that would be really bad." But what the girls do is they try to find who has the best dress, and that's very important. So, if you can go farther, and if you can spend more money, um, and get a prettier dress, then that's competing in a solitary fashion, what I call, what, uh, kind of evolutionary biologists call scramble competition. So, I'm not going into contest, I'm not gonna yank your dress away from you, right? I'm not gonna go over to your house and steal it. I'm not gonna do something that's very direct and dangerous. Rather, I'm gonna go off, and I'm gonna see, oh, here are the dresses at this store where everybody else is going, but I can go to a better store, or I can find clothing some other place, or just the same with, um, finding a mate, or finding any food. If you cannot engage in c- in a contest, it's much better, it's much safer. So, females will be more likely to do that.