【中文标题】为什么女人对同性如此恶毒？
【原文标题】Why Are Women So 'Bitchy' to Each Other?
【登载媒体】商业周刊
【原文作者】Claire Suddath
【原文链接】http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-11-25/why-are-women-so-bitchy-to-each-other#p2
假如说，你是一个女大学生，年龄在19到23岁之间。你和一位朋友坐在实验室里，正准备参与一项心理学研究的课题，题目是女人如何处理冲突。正在等待试验开始时，突然闯进来一个年轻女人，穿着亮粉色的上衣、黑靴子和一条你从未见过那么短的迷你裙。她问教授去哪儿了，你盯着她看。她离开之后，你或许会对你的朋友说——如果你和大多数女性一样——她的衣服有多糟糕、多不合适。你说，她的“胸部简直要从上衣里蹦出来”，她穿成这样或许是因为她背地里和教授睡觉。
这些话，的确是麦克马斯特大学心理学教授Tracy Vaillancourt在实地研究中得到的反馈，她研究的内容是所谓的女性“间接侵犯”，简言之就是“鸡婆”。也就是当女人评判对方时所表露出的交叉双臂、眼皮低垂、你的存在让我讨厌这类敌意表情。这种现象在小学就会出现，高中和大学最明显。这和一起迷恋明星、成群结队地上厕所不同，女人永远摆脱不了这个魔咒。这种侵犯倾向会一直持续到大学，甚至工作。你经常可以在聚会场合女人恶狠狠的目光和其他人的女朋友的身上感受到这种情绪。如果你足够诚实，你应该承认自己也做过这样的事。
Vaillancourt已经从事女人的侵犯方式研究多年。在2011年一份题为《无法容忍性感的同伴》的报告中，她和她的研究伙伴Anachal Sharma记录了大学年龄的女人在面对以下情况时的反应：先是毫无防备地遇到一个身材消瘦的金发女人，穿着卡其色的裤子和普通的T恤衫；然后同样一个女人穿上迷你裙、低胸上衣和黑色高跟靴。然后，她们把这些女人的反应录下来，给另外一群女人播放，让她们给“鸡婆”的程度打分（研究中直接使用到了“鸡婆”（bitchy）这个词）。Vaillancourt说：“我们说‘间接侵犯’，没人明白什么意思。但是一说‘鸡婆’，根本就不用再解释了。”
女人不喜欢她们性感的同伴。正如Vaillancourt所说，85％的女人都会对她“刻薄的一瞥。然后等她离开房间之后，她们说了很多贬损她衣服的话。甚至有一个女人当面上上下下地打量她，‘你穿的是什么他妈玩意？’”
近期，Vaillancourt把这些发现总结在一篇论文中，发表在皇家学会哲学会报期刊上。其中还包括了一些类似的研究，比如频繁表现出间接侵犯的年轻女性一般会更早约会，更早发生性行为；工作中女人用这样的态度来歧视对方；当女人遭遇到这种侵犯时，她们的心律会加快，会变得愤怒。
Vaillancourt谈到她的研究时说：“所有这些都在我的预料之中，只不过印证了我的假设。”或许这就是Tina Fey的电影《贱女孩》的科学解释。Vaillancourt的研究被CBS早间新闻和《纽约时报》报道，不出意外，给她招致了铺天盖地的批评声。
Vallaincourt说：“有一个英国女人长篇大论地声讨我，他以为我是一个美国南方的保守白种男人，”她说自己其实是加拿大人，也并不保守，“呃，而且我还算年轻。” Vallaincourt说还有一些人不赞同她给测试对象的装扮方式。“一个女人给我发电子邮件，说她并不觉得穿短裙的女人性感，而是觉得不正经。她难道没有从这句话中感到讽刺吗？”
从事这样的研究困难重重，即使研究者是一个年轻的女科学家，因为研究过程必然会遭遇男性至上思维的抵制。你会在科学研究中使用“鸡婆”这个字眼吗，即使这是最容易被人理解的通俗说法？你如何定义“性感”？（答案是：一个被描述的对象从进化角度上说具有吸引力。）Vallaincourt在2011年的一项研究中，向研究对象出示一张被处理过的性感模特照片，这个模特显得比较胖。她们觉得来自这个胖姑娘的威胁比较小，她们宁愿和这个胖姑娘，而不愿意和瘦姑娘做朋友。这表示，苗条的女人要比丰满的女人遭遇更多的“间接侵犯”。
Vaillancourt说她对这些问题很敏感，但不赞成不可以研究或者批判女性侵犯行为的说法。她说：“有些人给我写信，担心我落入了女人擅于相互中伤的传统思维。但事实的确是这样。所有女人都是这样，我是说，如果我在20年之后遇到了一个衣着暴露的女孩，或许也会做同样的事。”
这并不是说女人比男人更残忍，男人也会有同样的行为（你怎么看待Jerry Seinfeld仅仅凭借一句“你好Newman”就大红大紫？）。他们更可能采取身体侵犯的方式，比如欺负或者打架，这让批评一个人的服装几乎成为了文明的代名字。简单来说，男性和女性都是傻瓜。
Vaillancourt相信，研究女人的行为，尤其是阴暗面，是非常重要的，因为科学界有机会象审视男人的进化特征一样审视女人。她说：“早期达尔文提到，雄性相互竞争交配权，人们根本没有意识到雌性也会这么做。我们对女性的看法已经发生了变化。”女人也会相互争抢男人的注意力（反之亦然），但她们也会在有可能互相伤害的环境中竞争。在工作中刻薄待人不会给你带来任何好处，只会给你带来一个敌人，总有一天敌人也会对你恶语相向。
原文：
Let’s say you’re a college-aged woman, somewhere from 19 to 23, and you’re sitting in a university lab with a friend, where you’re both about to participate in a psychological study that you’ve been told is about how women handle conflict. You’re waiting for the experiment to start when in bursts a young woman in a bright pink top, black boots, and the tiniest miniskirt you’ve ever seen. She wants to know where the professor is. You stare at her. When she leaves, you probably turn to your friend and—if you’re like most women—say something about her terrible, inappropriate outfit. Her “boobs were about to pop out” of her shirt, you say. Or maybe she’s dressed like that cause she’s secretly sleeping with her professor.
These comments were made in a genuine psychological study conducted by McMaster University psychology professor Tracy Vaillancourt, who studies what she calls female “indirect aggression,” which is usually shorthanded as bitchiness. It’s the old arms-crossed, eyelids-lowered, I’m-bored-by-your-existence expression of hostility that women exude when they’re sizing each other up. It starts in elementary school and is perfected in junior high and high school. Unlike other social habits such as severe celebrity crushes and going to the bathroom in groups women never quite grow out of this one. The aggression persists through college and sometimes, even at work. You can find it oozing from dagger-eyed women at parties and seething from other people’s girlfriends. If you’re honest, you’ll probably admit you’ve done it, too.
Vaillancourt has studied women’s aggression techniques for several years; in a 2011 study hilariously titled “Intolerance of Sexy Peers,” she and her research partner Anachal Sharma recorded college-aged women’s reactions when they unexpectedly encountered a thin, blond woman in khakis and a plain t-shirt and then again when the same woman wore a mini-skirt, low-cut top, and tall black boots. Then they showed the footage to a group of other women and asked them to rate the level of “bitchiness” in each reaction. (The term “bitchy” is used in the study.) As Vaillancourt explains, “when we called it ‘indirect aggression,’ none of our subjects knew what we were talking about. With ‘bitchy,’ we didn’t even have to explain it.”
The women did not like their sexy peers. Eighty-five percent of them gave her “a critical once-over,” as Vaillancourt puts it, “and then when she left the room, they made derogative comments about her outfit. One woman looked her up and down and said— right to her face—”What the f––– is that?”
Vaillancourt recently summarized these findings in a paper published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B that also referenced similar studies such as one finding that young women who exhibit indirect aggression tend to date and have sex earlier; that women use it to discriminate against each other at work; and that when women are on the receiving end of this type of behavior, their heart rates increase and they became upset.
“Nothing about this really surprised me, it just validated my hypotheses,” Vaillancourt says of her research, which is basically the scientific explanation for Tina Fey’s movie Mean Girls. Vaillancourt’s work has since been covered by CBS This Morning, the New York Times and—not surprisingly—has earned her considerable backlash.
“I had one woman in England write this long rant about me in which she assumed I was a Southern, conservative white man,” Vallaincourt says, pointing out that she’s Canadian and definitely not conservative, “and, uh, let’s just say I’m young-ish.” Vallaincourt says she’s also received complaints about the way her test subjects were dressed. “One woman e-mailed me to say she didn’t think the girl in the short skirt looked sexy, she looked like a tart. Does she not see the irony in that statement?”
It’s hard to study something like this, even as a youngish female scientist, because questions of sexism arise before you can even conduct the research. Should you use the word “bitchy” in a scientific study, even if it’s the colloquially preferred term? How do you define what “sexy” is? (The answer: Describe the subject as having “qualities considered attractive from an evolutionary perspective.”) In one part of Vallaincourt’s 2011 study, subjects were shown a picture of the sexy model that had been digitally altered so that she looked overweight. They felt less threatened by her when she was overweight and said they’d choose her as a friend over the thin version, which implies that thin women encounter more of this “indirect aggression” than overweight women do.
Vaillancourt says she’s sensitive to these issues but she does not accept that female aggression shouldn’t be studied or criticized. “Some people have written to me, worried that I’m perpetuating the stereotype that women are mean to each other. Well, they are,” she says. “All women act this way. I mean, if I were 20 years old and encountered that girl in a sexy outfit, I’d probably do the same thing.”
This doesn’t mean that women are crueler than men are. Men exhibit the same type of behavior. (What do you think Jerry Seinfeld was accomplishing with all that “Hello Newman?“) They’re also more likely to use physical aggression such as hazing or getting into fist fights, which makes criticizing someone’s outfit almost civil in comparison. Basically, every member of both genders is a complete jerk.
Vaillancourt belives that studying women’s behavior, especially its seedier side, is important because it forces the scientific community to look at female evolutionary traits as seriously as it considers men’s. “Early on, Darwin highlighted the fact that males compete among each other for mates; it wasn’t even on people’s radar that females do the same thing,” she says, “We’re changing how we study and think about women.” Women compete this way for male attention (and vice-versa), but they also compete in situations where they’re actually doing each other harm. Being catty to someone at work isn’t accomplishing anything; it’s just earning you an enemy. One day that enemy might bad-talk you, too.
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