No sooner had sociologists discovered what they dubbed female
alternative aggression —the unpleasant, but one would think
obvious fact that pubertal girls snub, exclude and spread vicious
rumors about one other — than these findings were made
inconsequential by another shocker: that when it comes to plain,
old-fashioned physical brutality, girls are quickly catching up
(and in some instances have caught up) with boys.
In her 2002 best-seller Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of
Aggression in Girls, author Rachel Simmons was taken aback to
find that our little princesses were not all sugar and spice, and
could in fact behave with such malice as to make Pfc. Lynndie
England cringe. But while Ms. Simmons was enthusiastically blaming
girls’ “alternative aggression” on a Western patriarchic system
that discourages the gentler sex from loudly or physically
expressing (or even acknowledging) its anger and petty jealousies,
rates of female violence were skyrocketing. Had she known, Ms.
Simmons doubtless would have cheered the fact that girls were
finally openly and honestly expressing their feelings, just like
the boys, ala fisticuffs. Throughout her book, Ms. Simmons and the
little vixens she interviewed lamented that — unlike their male
counterparts — society would not allow them to blow off their
anger quickly with a few blows to the snout and a jab to the solar
plexus.
Proponents of open and honest aggression might also celebrate
news that the FBI’s Crime Index for violent crimes shows that the
arrest rate for American girls soared 103 percent between 1981 and
1997. During that same period the arrest rate for boys rose a mere
27 percent. Reporter Marisa Trevino found that during the last
decade the rate of girls under 18-years-old arrested for aggravated
assault rose by 7 percent. Among boys such arrests fell 29 percent.
The most dismaying finding, Trevino suggests, was a 46 percent rise
of females who were a party to forcible rape. Among males, the
figure fell by 28 percent.
More recently, Richard Heikes, a principal for a Texas
alternative education center, told Women’s E-News, that he began
noticing this shift in gender dynamics in middle school two years
ago. “Right now, in my (alternative) middle school we are 50-50,
males and females. It used to be 70-30 or 80-20. The girls are
offending just as badly as the boys.”
Another study from the November 1999 Psychology Today
involving 460 female murderers and all but ignored by the
alternative aggression researchers, showed that women are growing
more stereotypically male in their reasons for murdering, and
concludes that for the first time in recorded history girls are
altering their pattern of aggression from the traditional female
form of hidden aggression to the ass-whupping male variety, the
inevitable result being that more and more of America’s sweethearts
are beginning to resemble Jerry Springer’s butt-kicking trailer
brides.
FEMINISTS ARE UNDERSTANDABLY reluctant to acknowledge that study
after study have shown that women are not only as potentially
violent as men, but they are potentially more violent, partly
because they expect not to be punished for their actions.
Psychology Today reported that two National Family
Violence Surveys, conducted in 1975 and 1985 with a total of 8,145
married and cohabiting couples, concluded that 12.4 percent of
women have assaulted their spouses, compared to 12.2 percent of
men. In severe assaults, the numbers were 4.6 percent for women and
5 percent for men. Across the pond the numbers are similar. A 1999
British Home Office study found 4.2 percent of both men and women
had been assaulted by a partner the previous year. True, assaults
by women often result in less serious injury, but apparently not
for lack of trying.
Meanwhile Irene Frieze, professor of psychology and women’s
studies at the University of Pittsburgh, undertook yet another
study to disprove the absurd notion that girls were more violent
than men in dating situations. Frieze, according to Psychology
Today, was dumbfounded to learn that of the college students
she surveyed, 58 percent of women had assaulted their dates,
compared to 55 percent of men. And yet despite such findings it is
male students alone that are forced to attend date rape seminars
and sensitivity training sessions, while across campus at the Tri
Delta House the sorority sisters smugly plot their next act of
alternative aggression.
Surprisingly, outside of radical feminist circles society and
the patriarchic culture are not being blamed for the skyrocketing
increase in female violence. More often than not scholars are
fingering the influence of feminism and something called the
“liberation hypothesis,” which briefly states that fifty years ago
if a young woman wanted to be bad she had relatively few
opportunities to do so. Equal rights have given women more economic
opportunities, but also more opportunities to be bad, or, as in the
case of Lynddie England, very bad.
With the disturbing case of Private England doubtless still
fresh his mind, Shepherd Smith, president of the Institute for
Youth Development, recently told Fox News that feminism is a
significant factor in girls becoming more violent. “You see females
modeling more male behavior, whether it’s women in the military, or
construction, hunting — traditional male activities — I think
that some of the spillover is that male aggression is picked up [by
girls] more than has been ever witnessed before.”
When Unlucky Lynndie goes away to Leavenworth for torturing nude
Iraqis she will have plenty of degenerate same sex company now that
females are making up a greater and greater portion of the criminal
justice population. Our generation has witnessed the percentage of
girls in juvenile jails soar from 5 percent to 20, and it is still
rising. In 10 or 20 years there will be as many females as males in
prison, Coramae Ritchey Mann, Ph.D., professor emerita of criminal
justice at Indiana University told Psychology Today.
One thing hasn’t changed. Most youth violence still occurs among
poor working class and blue-collar kids, the large majority of
these coming from broken homes with all the attendant drug, alcohol
and sex abuse. The Lynddie England types. In contrast, upper class
girls will continue to successfully hide their alternative
aggression from clueless parents and teachers. But it will be the
lower class girls who will continue to get the most “benefit” from
open and honest displays of aggression, largely in the form of
permanent records and time served.
