There are clever ways and not so clever
ways to gossip. The clever way would be to say “I’m so worried about Agnes’ drinking,
I genuinely hope she doesn’t end up losing this job too.” The non-clever way would be
to say something like “Did you guys hear Agnes’ has started drinking again? Guess it’s
just a matter of time until she gets fired.” I’ll explain that more in-depth later in this
video, as well as female competition, jealousy, and more. But to get there, let’s first take a
look at how we got to where we are. The first half of this video basically will be based
on this article “Our Grandmothers Legacy: Challenges Faced by Female Ancestors
Leave Traces in Modern Women's Same-Sex Relationships” and then I’ll share
some of my personal experience. Throughout most of human history, women
were heavily dependent on their male romantic partner for the survival of not
only themselves but of their offspring. Naturally, other women were
their primary competitors, as each woman wanted to secure a
committed, high-earning partner, as an impoverished partner meant lesser
chance of them and their children surviving. Now, men experience competition too,
but women feel especially competitive, jealous and experience distress when it comes
to looking attractive, since this is what men, throughout history, have valued the most in women. In other words, it wasn’t just
other women that felt threatening, but attractive women in particular.
So, generally, women, from a young age, prefer not to be surrounded by friends
who surpass them in physical appearance. And if we look at two female friends,
the less physically attractive friend is more likely to have heightened romantic
rivalry within the friendship. And so, attractive women show a heightened preference for
gay male friends, in part because they perceive gay men as more likely to provide honest and
helpful romantic advice than other women. I want to just chime in here with a quick
anecdote: Once upon a time I was living with a bunch of models. Like, actual, working models,
all incredibly gorgeous. And prior to moving in I admittedly felt intimidated. I had this
preconceived notion that they wouldn’t be very nice. Well actually, they were the nicest girls I
had ever lived with, and I had lived with other, you know, normal, average-looking girls prior
to that. Anyway, I can tell you the full story of that another time if you’re interested. Let
me know, now let’s get back to this article. As women, we may not only be threatened
by other attractive women, but also by women who signal sexual openness. This
is because, in short, across cultures, men are more likely to commit infidelity
and to engage in casual sex, and so when other women dress provocatively for example,
we might respond with more hostility and rude comments than we would if that same woman was
dressed more conservatively. We’re also less willing to introduce a woman who exhibits
cues of sexual openness to our boyfriends. This holds true even when it’s not in-person.
When women are exposed to attractive fashion models who assume flirtatious and sexually
open postures, they experience heightened jealousy about their relationships and
feel compelled to derogate and ostracize those models. This suggests that female
psychology is well designed to detect and thwart threatening same-sex rivals
from undermining their partnerships. Now, although to most people, at least in the
west, losing a male partner isn’t typically detrimental to our survival, the historical
cost of losing a male partner and therefore our own and our child’s access to resources
and survival is still deeply ingrained in us. Phew. I kind of feel like I need therapy after
all of that, and we’re only getting started. Oh you too? Well, good thing video is in paid
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and it also gets you 10% off your first month of BetterHelp so you can connect with
a therapist and see if it helps you. Now, across ages and cultures, girls and
women are much less physically aggressive than boys and men. This is because
historically, women didn’t want to risk being physically harmed, or worse,
as that put their child at risk. However, women are equally if not more likely
to engage in indirect aggression. So what is indirect aggression? It’s basically the attempt to disrupt a
person's social opportunities and relationships, using tactics such as spreading rumors,
gossip, disclosing secrets and ostracism. And it’s usually quite effective, since we
tend to dislike people who we’ve learned negative information about, especially if
the information comes from multiple sources, it’s believed as more credible. As women we do
experience social exclusion more frequently, as well as online rumors and cyberbullying. Now, while all of this might make you want
to sign up to therapy, and you should, go to betterhelp.com/lana, us women are also
each other's biggest allies. We highly value our same-sex friendships and we strongly
desire intimacy within these relationships, and women, more so than men, experience
high levels of worry and distress about potential friendship abandonment or replacement. Historically, having strong relationships with
other women also meant survival, both for oneself and for one's offspring. Women relied on midwives
and you know the whole it-takes-a-village thing. We also know that social support is strongly
linked to better health and increased longevity. One thing that I found to be particularly
interesting when I read this article, perhaps because I hadn’t really considered
it, was the part that discusses how women, relative to men, more strongly prefer
equal distributions of resources and power over unequal or equitable distributions. For instance, among children, girls are
more uncomfortable than boys when selecting group leaders. In adolescence, girls are more
distressed than boys by a friend surpassing them in popularity or close friendships, and we assume
successful or popular females to be entitled. Popular girls are often disliked, ridiculed
and ostracized, and women more often fear that their female friends’ admiration
will turn into envy or resentment, so they minimize successes to
avoid coming across as proud. We see this desire for even distribution
across the board. Here are some examples: both women and men preferred male over
female leaders; women expect female leadership candidates to perform worse at
their job and less likely to be promoted; female employees report more support
from their male than female supervisors. Even within sports, where competition is the
explicit goal, female athletes show less positive or friendly behaviors toward the opposing
team following a match than do male athletes. So what do we seek for in our female friendships? It seems women strongly prioritize
kindness in their same-sex friendships, and compared to men, we hold higher
expectations of our friends overall, especially for trust and empathic
understanding, loyalty, and commitment. We tend to have a stronger desire to provide
support and reassurance to friends in need, and girls and women who don’t provide this support
tend to have fewer friends. The standards for kindness are especially high for popular girls,
who might otherwise be perceived as threats. Compared to men, we are more likely to
question our friendships if they do not live up to certain standards or “signs of
devotion”, such as friends who cancel plans, fail to stand up for us or disclose our
secrets. Basically, any cues of disloyalty. Now, touching on jealousy, compared to
male children and adolescents, girls report stronger jealousy over
their friends’ relationships with others along with heightened
monitoring of their friendships. A similar pattern is observed among adults, with women feeling immense jealousy
about their best friends’ forming a new, and potentially more intimate relationship
with a samesex peer, in part because we fear our friend may share our personal secrets to this
new friend, potentially ruining our reputation. Now, this is all quite conflicting.
There are incentives to compete with other women for high-quality romantic partners, as well as incentives for cooperating with
other women to form strong bonds. Ideally, you’d want the benefits of male investments
as well as female cooperation and support. The article points out one “tactic” if you
will that’s sometimes used, which was the intro of this video, namely how you appear to
others. For example, you can gossip in a way that appears kind and sympathetic simply by wording
it that way, instead of appearing malicious. The article ends with explaining how women
are often more aggressive than they themselves believe they are. We often self-deceive
our vicious motivations. In other words: we may actually be unaware of our
involvement in gossip and relational aggression because we earnestly believe we
are speaking out of concern for the targets. I will of course link the article below, and I
really recommend that you read it. It’s quite long, I of course would only talk about parts of
it otherwise this video would be an hour long. Now while reading it, or perhaps you hearing
it now, parts of it can be quite uncomfortable (laugh) right? I mean no one wants to believe that
they ever put other women down or that they are malicious in any way, and we don’t want female
friendships to be portrayed in a negative light. This article of course isn’t suggesting that we’re
all just a bunch of highly competitive, jealous, gossipy pricks, but it does shed some light on
some of the things that I believe many of us have experienced and it’s interesting learning
about where certain behaviors might stem from, and most importantly, to hopefully detect some
of these behaviors in ourselves and work on them. I personally have absolutely experienced jealousy,
sabotage, ostracization. At the same time, I absolutely cannot, with a clear conscience, say
that I myself have not ever taken part in those things as well. Especially as an insecure
teenager. Of course I have. We all have. Now, we all have but to different extents, and I
think that’s important. There’s a big difference between “I was a bit of a prick when I was
16 and I’d be jealous of the most beautiful girl in my class and secretly afraid my boyfriend
wanted her instead of me”, vs “I’m a grown adult woman and I can’t stand seeing beautiful women
and actively secretly try to put them down”. There’s no historical or biological
excuse for being a prick. Now, I’d like to share with you some of my
personal experiences when it comes to female friendships, specifically some of the common
traits of female friendships that fizzled out, vs female friendships that have
remained. Please share yours in the comment section as well, I’d love to read it. Let’s begin with the common traits
of friendships that fizzled out The emotional dumper. You know the type
of friend who genuinely has no interest in you? You meet up, you spend the
first hour listening to them vent, and in the midst of it they realize they should
probably ask about you, and so they say “anyway, how are you?”. You feel like you have about 15
seconds to word vomit until they lose interest and start talking about themselves again.
They ask for your advice (that they never take by the way) and they need someone to
complain to. That person is you, hurray! The friend who hates your happiness for no
reason. I strongly hold the belief that good friends are people you’re excited to share
good news with. The opposite are friends who will find faults in anything you share.
They supposedly get a “bad vibe” from your new boyfriend despite never meeting him;
they criticize your promotion and try to give you a reason not to be so excited about
it. Eventually, you stop feeling like sharing good news with them, and then… you stop
feeling like sharing any news with them. The friend who’s in a constant state of
crisis. There’s always a crazy story to tell, some drama they somehow got themselves involved
in, and oh they didn’t respond to you for a week because they lost their phone and now they want to
borrow some money from you because they spent it all on their night out and didn’t think about
the cost of the cab back home. They flaked on your plans, again, even though you’re literally
standing outside the bar waiting for them.
The male-obsessed one. It seems like
they value nothing more in life than male validation. Anywhere you go
it’s so they can meet cute guys, all the clothes they buy it’s to make the boys
stare. And they don’t mind glancing over your boyfriend once in a while and joke about
stealing him. But hey, it’s just a joke. The bad influence. When you’re simply not better
or thriving in any capacity with them. Perhaps you become more superficial, drink more, make
careless decisions. Yes you’re responsible for yourself but I’d steer clear of people
who encourage and celebrate poor decisions. The seriously fragile friendship. I’ve had
best guy friends, and best girl friends, and in my experience, the guy friends always
felt more reliable. After an argument, I had no fear of our friendship fizzling out, or
were they going to start distancing themselves now? Is it fixable? Am I still invited to
their birthday? Will I now be ostracized in school? Whereas with guy friends, I didn’t
have those concerns. It always felt more stable, more like a sibling type of relationship where you
just know that you can call and show up anyway–an argument doesn’t change anything. As the
saying goes: if it’s fragile, let it break. Different morals. It’s important for me to note
that, friendships don’t always fizzle because something serious happened or because anyone is
a bad person. Sometimes, you just no longer see eye-to-eye. Sometimes, you come to learn that
there are some differences between you two that are too important to ignore. Like let’s
say, for example, you really value hard work, discipline, self-improvement, personal
growth, education… and they have no interest in any of those things. They might be
very interested in other things that are of no value to you. This type of misalignment
could be a call for a friendship breakup. Common traits of female friends
I currently have in my life We genuinely like each other. I can genuinely
sense that they’re happy for me, and I’m equally happy for them. I want them to do well. I
want them to be happy. And when they’re not, when they’re hurting, my heart aches, and
I want to help them. When they light up, I light up. There’s a mutual
deep caring for one another. There’s consistency. They’re not going to
disappear for a while and then come back. I never wonder where we stand, if we’re still
friends, if they like me, if they’re sad or mad about something that they’re not telling me,
because I know they’d tell me, and I’d tell them. If there’s ever a disagreement, we’ll air
it out, and we’ll move on. It’s easy like that. There’s nothing to be gained
from one another. There are no disingenuous incentives. I don’t “need”
them for anything. They don’t have money, or connections or followers or “clout” that I
could benefit from. I’m with them, and they’re with me, purely for who we are. As Aristotle
called it, it’s the “perfect friendship”. When it comes to female friendships, or
other women in general, there’s one piece of magic that I admire so much about us.
It’s The unspoken language that we share. Here comes another anecdote. One time I was at a dinner type of thing with
a few other people, some were single, some were coupled up, and I was there with a guy that I had
been seeing for a while. Let’s call him Simon. Simon particularly enjoyed making condescending
jokes about me, preferably in front of others. On this particular evening, as we were all gathered
around the dinner table, and after one too many condescending jokes that no one but him found
to be funny, I felt hurt, I became distant. Anyway, everyone was chatting and
eating and drinking. Simon was clueless, or he just didn’t care. I sat there, mostly
quiet, and I looked up and was met by the eyes from the girl sitting from across
the table. I didn’t know her very well. We exchanged a look, it must’ve lasted a few
seconds, but it was enough for her to let me know that she knew, and I knew that she knew.
She wasn’t clueless. A girl I barely knew made me feel more seen and heard than this guy who
supposedly loved and cared for me so deeply. I absolutely adore how us women seem to be able
to communicate almost telepathically. How we can communicate with just a look, a tap on the arm, a
one worded text. How we move a bit closer when we see a woman walking by herself at night, because
we know it might provide a sense of safety and comfort. How our eyes automatically search for
another woman when you’re on an empty subway at night, and the sense of relief when we find it;
the familiarity in an unfamiliar female face. Us women… we do that for one another, and we
don’t even have to ask for it. It’s so cool, and it’s one of those things that makes
me love being a woman in this world.
