Female Fights

When women fight, it's not a pleasant sight.  And that doesn't solely go for physical confrontations, either.  Verbal sparring between members of the finer sex can also be very uncomfortable to witness.  While it's true that fights between men are also unpleasant, society's expectatations are that such events are more "normal" and "natural", as violent and unnecessary as they may seem.  Why our discomfort with female fights, then?  And what causes females to go at it with members of the same sex?  In this article, which is decidedly non-authoritative, we will explore some of the dynamics of this issue.  As female fights seem to be becoming more commonplace in western societies from the United States to Australia, including violent confrontations, it would do us good as people to see why this is becoming a trend, whether the trend can be expected to continue or even increase, and what we can do to ensure that it doesn't.  It doesn't seem right that instead of doing away with all fights, mainly fighting between men, that we actually seeing occurrences and more of an interest on the part of spectators in fighting between women.

According to popular consensus, a female fight occurs due to jealousy, particularly over a man.  Proponents of this theory cite as motivations the animal instinct to compete for a mate, which is rather strange as in most animals it seems to be the males of the species that fight for access to a mate.  I found it interesting and eye-opening to learn that women in our ('our' meaning North American) culture are taught from a very young age that they are in competition with other girls, and learn to put down other girls around them.  Once girls have grown up, this behavior is ingrained and takes on forms that can most simply be described as phony.  A girl can never trust when another girl compliments her, she said, as she might actually be putting one down.  She might have another meaning behind the compliment too, and the compliment might even be genuine, but there's no way to know!  I must say that I'm not entirely convinced this is true, and perhaps female readers can corroborate or deny the truth of this in the comments section, but I ended the conversation saying that I hoped things weren't as dismal as all that.  However, with all the interest in girl fight videos, female fight theater, and the like on the internet, there does seem to be some truth to this.  And take the recent rash of bar slashings in Australia- young women were slashing the faces of other young women with broken beer bottles, leading to a public ad campaign featuring the disfigured faces of slash victims exhorting women to stop the violence.  
Personally, I think it's a sign of something wrong in society.  People are uneasy and quick to lose their tempers, and it seems that most people are on guard against potential threats.  Everyone knows that a mother is the most fierce when the safety of her young is threatened; that's why you never get between a bear and her cub.  We also know that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned…  So where am I going with this?  Maybe the spate of woman on woman violence has something to do with environmental degradation, corrupt leadership, monstrous corporations, and other assorted evil in the world that threatens our very existence.  This could understandably upset some people, especially if it's true that women are the more intuitive of the two sexes.  Maybe this lashing out is an unconscious desperation at the sad state of the world, a world that is continuing to become more unfit for human habitation, directly threatening the well being of our children and grandchildren?  Think of the rampant obesity, the cancer, the depression, degenerative diseases, and the whole host of modern afflictions that are visiting humanity at younger and younger ages.  It's a truly horrendous humanitarian disaster that leaves few people unscathed. 

So that's the problem.  What's the solution?  I can't pretend to have the answer to that question, but I do feel that modern society lacks meaning for too many people, and that we need to address this issue first and foremost.  It seems like too big a problem to do anything about- where do you start?  As naive as it might sound, I believe we need to reestablish our connection with nature.  I think things like Permaculture, organic farming, and things that reforge our intimate link to the world we live in are the place to start.  Really.  There's very little in popular culture to indicate that there's any value to life outside of making money and being famous.  Certainly there are movies and TV shows that emphasize the important things in life, like universal love and family, most of the things you see in the news are about who did violence to somebody else, who's making a lot of money or losing it, and that sort of thing.  Our values are way out of whack, and most people work in jobs that are pretty meaningless in terms of directly supporting survival.  That's it, really.  We need to get our heads out of the gutters and take responsibility for the health of our world, and that just happens to be intimately intertwined with our own health.  Let's take care of our own needs more, growing food and doing things that really matter.  Maybe then we can see the value of cooperation over competition and live more peaceful lives.