Below is the abstract of a forthcoming BBS target article on:
STAYING ALIVE: EVOLUTION, CULTURE, AND WOMEN'S INTRA-
SEXUAL AGGRESSION
by Anne Campbell
This article has been accepted for publication in Behavioral and Brain
Sciences (BBS), an international, interdisciplinary journal providing
Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in
the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences.
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____________________________________________________________________
STAYING ALIVE: EVOLUTION, CULTURE, AND WOMEN'S INTRA-SEXUAL
AGGRESSION
Anne Campbell
Psychology Department
Durham University
South Road
Durham DH1 3LE
a.c.campbell(a)durham.ac.uk
KEYWORDS: female, aggression, violence, competition, sex
differences
ABSTRACT: Females' tendency to place a high value on protecting
their own life enhanced their reproductive success in the
environment of evolutionary adaptation because infant survival
depended more upon maternal (rather than paternal) care and
defence. The evolved mechanism by which the costs of aggression
(and other forms of risk-taking) are weighted more heavily for
females may be a lower threshold for fear in situations
which pose a direct threat of bodily injury. Females' concern
with personal survival also has implications for sex differences
in dominance hierarchies because the risks associated with their
formation in nonbonded exogamous females are not offset by
increased reproductive success. Hence, among females, disputes
do not carry with them implications for status as they do among
males, but are chiefly connected with the acquisition and
defence of scarce resources. Consequently, female competition is
more likely to take the form of indirect aggression or low-level
direct combat than among males. Under patriarchy, men have held
the power to propagate images and attributions which are
favourable to the continuance of their control. Women's
aggression has been viewed as a gender-incongruent aberration or
dismissed as evidence of irrationality. These cultural
interpretations have "enhanced" evolutionarily based sex
differences by a process of imposition which stigmatises the
expression of aggression by females and causes women to offer
exculpatory (rather than justificatory) accounts of their own
aggression.
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To help you decide whether you would be an appropriate commentator for
this article, an electronic draft is retrievable from the World Wide
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Ftp instructions follow below. Please do not prepare a commentary on
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ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/BBS/bbs.campbell
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To retrieve a file by ftp from an Internet site, type either:
ftp
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or
ftp 128.112.128.1
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cd /pub/harnad/BBS
To show the available files, type:
ls
Next, retrieve the file you want with (for example):
get bbs.campbell
When you have the file(s) you want, type:
quit