A few years back I was reading a book on counter terror forces, back in the day when hijacking airplanes was the main threat, and this special forces book mentioned that they were trained to shoot the women terrorists first. Germany also trained their special forces in the same manner with the idea being that a woman terrorist has strayed so far from a normal woman's mindset that they would be the first to blow up the hostages and the last to surrender. There was even a book written by a woman attempting to debunk this issue but in the end even the woman author admitted that when women go bad they go really, really bad.
Everyone remembers the third debate this year where Trump called Clinton "Such a nasty woman." in response to one of Clinton's personal attacks. The left snarled and flogged the statement in a futile effort to add a modicum of enthusiasm to the campaign while the rest of us had a good laugh at the obvious truth to the statement.
But the sentence stuck in my mind because this subject needs discussed, i.e., women in politics and whether or not they are entitled to society's usual protections for the weaker or more gentle. A functioning society will protect the young, the weak, children, the feeble minded, the ill, the disabled, the elderly, and of course properly behaving women. Notice that only the latter has a qualifier; the properly behaving.
Functioning societies protect women for several reasons. First is the advantage that men have with their physical strength and society has generally asked that men use that difference to defend women rather than dominate them for no other reason that women are the bearer of children and usually the caretakers and without children the tribe has no future. This differentiation of labor frees up men to work, hunt, or otherwise provide resources for both woman and child and for the remainder of the tribe.
Women also were considered inferior to men by most societies in the past so it was a curious mix of protection and enslavement. Aristotle thought that women would bring disorder and evil and were "utterly useless and caused more confusion than the enemy." Despite a handful of cases where women enjoyed equal rights to men the majority of females lived in patriarchal societies right up till the dawn of the 20th century.
But even in the older societies woman could and did lose their protection by becoming disreputable by either straying from matrimonial loyalty or by becoming too involved in the worldly affairs usually dominated by men. And while today's women would like to think they are far past such control in reality other women still use the same issues to control other women.
One of the quickest ways to understand women and why Trump got away with calling Clinton a nasty woman is to understand how women generally fight with one another. They tend to use stealth, covert tactics of manipulation and ostracism. Men will be upfront and invite you outside to settle things while women will have frenemies that they keep close so as to sabotage them but while doing so they are required to maintain a well meaning and well behaved façade.
Female aggression is a common theme in art and stories handed down through the generations. The wicked step mother in Cinderella, Snow White, Hansel and Gretel and one Greek playwright wrote "better a serpent than a step mother." In the 90's psychologists realized that children were at a higher risk of abuse and neglect if a woman remarried but when a man with children remarried the risk was even higher! And orphaned children were even more at risk with their step mothers when their father died.
During junior high and high school girls learn to form coalitions with other girls and use gossip and ostracism to marginalize other girls thought to be competitors. By attacking another's personality, character, loyalty, or appearance they believe they lower their victim's value and raise their own. Social media has honed this clique behavior to a lethal weapon and normal people watch and recoil at the toxicity. Then there is the master manipulator, the Lady Macbeth, that doesn't cultivate a gang of other females but prefers to broker power out of public sight by using the connections and power of her male relatives.
In the past women mostly worked at home so the transparency brought by working outside the home has chipped away at the thought that women must use covert aggression and propaganda. Even the feminazis are realizing that the glass ceiling might not be supported by the men in the workplace. The fact is that women can be vicious and even more vicious toward their own gender. Women use indirect aggression to get what they want and the ones that master that trade early are more likely to date earlier and have more boyfriends. Those that are bullied by other women are more likely to be depressed, suffer low self esteem, and more likely to commit suicide.
Interestingly enough researchers have found that women in poorer neighborhoods and ghettos are encouraged to actually use physical aggression to compete with other girls. The statistics on crime show that females account for 33% of assaults and 24% of aggravated assaults and that girls are far more likely to attack a boy than another girl but they do openly use physical aggression against their rivals than girls from the more privileged side of town.
Culture sets the role of femininity and all cultures will set different standards. A young woman from a poverty struck neighborhood is less likely to have a father so the mothers and even grandmothers take an outsized role in protecting the family. The stress of subsistence living in a tough area leads some of these mothers to get involved in the kid's fights out of family honor so these girls are encouraged to stand up for themselves and the normal passive aggressive behavior of women is looked at as a weakness. If the girls aren't tough then they become targeted for not being resilient. Developing a crazy or mean reputation will deter others from coming after the girl and a way of making herself known in the community. Conversely the girls that work on making themselves attractive are attacked for two reasons; being more attractive to the boys and also for having a higher status than the other girls. Like it or not, females continue to appraise their self worth through the reflection of what they believe the males in their society see in them.
Poor neighborhoods generate stress and evolution uses that stress to force aggression for resources and with the increased mortality of young men that increases competition among young women and even higher levels of outright aggression. The end result is that a woman using actual physical aggression is considered low class and less valuable.
There is another reason why society in general looks down upon aggressive women. A child that loses a father has a smaller chance of survival but a child that loses a mother has a much smaller chance of survival so women have evolutionally been selected for risk avoidance. They are more fearful than men so seeing a woman act aggressively expresses the opposite of femininity.
Hillary Clinton lost in part because of her policies and in part because of her aggressive attacks upon Trump. As the overwhelming majority of blacks had voted for the first potentially possible black president many expected women to support the first truly viable woman presidential candidate yet only 54% of women voted for Hillary Clinton. Clinton was aggressive, unfeminine, and she openly attacked rather than use the passive aggressive forms of undermining her enemy. In short she was indeed a nasty woman and that judgment didn't come from the majority of men in society but from the women in society.
