[Vision2020] The Spirit of Sisterhood Is in the Air and on the Air

[Art Deco]

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April 23, 2012
The Spirit of Sisterhood Is in the Air and on the Air By NATALIE
ANGIER<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/a/natalie_angier/index.html?inline=nyt-per>

When first we meet Hannah, the wondrously mopey mid-20s heroine of HBO’s
new hit series “Girls,” she seems to have more strikes against her than a
bowling alley at Fenway Park. Her parents have cut off her monthly stipend.
Her literary-magazine boss refuses to turn her unpaid internship into a
real job. Her atonal lover explores his sex fantasies on her awkwardly
untitillated body. She lives in New York City. She majored in English.

Yet offsetting all those slings and risk factors is a powerful defense
system: girlfriends. Hannah has a tight-knit network of three female
confederates, one best friend and two sturdy runners-up; and while none of
the girl-women can offer much material support, no spare bedroom in a
rent-controlled apartment, they are each other’s emotional tourniquets.
You, fat? Don’t make me laugh. An unpleasant doctor’s appointment? We’re
going too. Lena Dunham, the creator and star of the series, has said that
while her titular characters may all date men, female friendship is “the
true romance of the show.”

As in urban jungles, so too in jungle jungles. Researchers have lately
gathered abundant evidence that female friendship is one of nature’s
preferred narrative tools.

In animals as diverse as African elephants and barnyard mice, blue monkeys
of Kenya and feral horses of New Zealand, affiliative, longlasting and
mutually beneficial relationships between females turn out to be the basic
unit of social life, the force that not only binds existing groups together
but explains why the animals’ ancestors bothered going herd in the first
place.

Scientists are moving beyond the observational stage — watching as a couple
of female monkeys groom each other into a state of hedonic
near-liquefaction — to quantifying the benefits of that well-groomed
friendship to both picking partners. Researchers have discovered that
female chacma baboons with strong sororal bonds have lower levels of stress
hormones, live significantly longer and rear a greater number of offspring
to independence than do their less socialized peers.

Similarly, wild mares with female friends are harassed less often by
stallions and have more surviving foals than do mares that lack social
ties. Female mice allowed to choose a friend as a nesting partner will bear
more pups than females forced to share straw space with a mouse they
dislike.

And female elephants keep in touch with their chums through frequent
exchanges of low-pitched vocalizations called rumbles. “We liken it to an
elephant cellphone,” said Joseph Soltis, a research scientist who works
with elephants at Disney’s Animal Kingdom in Florida. “They’re texting each
other, I’m over here. Where are you?”

Hannah may even be onto something primal, or at least primate, in setting
the size of her inner circle of friends. Researchers have determined that a
female baboon with a small but devoted core of grooming companions will be
less prone to jagged spikes of the stress hormone
cortisol<http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/test/cortisol-level/overview.html?inline=nyt-classifier>than
a female who casts her social net wide but not deep.

The ideal buddy count? “To have a top three seems to be what’s important
here,” said Joan B. Silk, a primatologist at the University of California,
Los Angeles. With a trio to lean on, she added, “you see the kind of
strong, stable relationships that help females cope better with stress.”

Some signs of female camaraderie are easy to spot. Lionesses suckle each
other’s cubs. Female spotted hyenas greet each other through elaborate
ceremonies of mutual trust, lifting a leg and exposing their famously
penislike genitals to their snuffling sisters and their bone-crushing jaws.

Elephants touch trunks, share food, play lifeguard for the day. Dr. Soltis
cited the time a female elephant rescue the wayward baby of her closest
friend after it stumbled headlong into the elephant submersion pool, by
hauling the panicked calf out with her trunk. Hey Hortense where RU? Got
Dumbo. Bring towel.

Sometimes displays of female friendship become heated, hyperbolic, a monkey
chant for the home team. Marina Cords of Columbia University has spent more
than 30 years studying the blue monkeys of Kenya, 10-pound primates that,
their name notwithstanding, are really charcoal gray.

She has seen many violent territorial disputes between neighboring monkey
groups, in which the adult females line up to fight in the treetops, the
adult males mostly hang back to watch, and the young monkeys scamper
obliviously below. The females scream, lunge, bite, rip the flesh of an
enemy’s calf down to a bloody frill round the ankle. And when the battle
ends, the salon sessions begin.

“There’s a frenzy of grooming among the females in the same group,” Dr.
Cords said. “You see them huddling together in clusters, with individuals
scooting from one huddle to another, as though everybody is trying to groom
as many individuals as possible.” They comb and pluck with their fingers,
soothe scabs and wounds with their lips.

Through grooming, the monkeys decompress, and remind one another that their
fates are still linked. After all, should a group of blue monkeys grow too
large it will split into factions, and the sisterly comrades of today may
be flaying you a new pair of anklets tomorrow. Shall we groom?

In other cases, affiliative behaviors are subtle and difficult to track.
For years female chimpanzees were viewed as asocial, content to forage
alone or with dependent offspring while largely ignoring other females of
their group. The males may be legendary kin-based allies, born and reared
together and wedded to their natal turf. But as the so-called dispersing
sex, female chimpanzees must leave their birthplace at
puberty<http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/specialtopic/puberty-and-adolescence/overview.html?inline=nyt-classifier>and
seek asylum in another group, which means being surrounded by
unrelated
females all competing for the same goods. What’s to like about that?

In a 10-year study of West African chimpanzees, however, Julia Lehmann of
Roehampton University in London discovered that at least for her
population, the stereotype of the standoffish female was wrong. Her adult
females were cultivating friendships and expressing their affections in
myriad ways — staying within eye contact as they foraged by day, resting
back to back while relaxing at home.

“Most of the females in my study have at least one close associate with
whom they always hang out,” Dr. Lehmann said. Coalitions between the males
may be showier, she said, but female friendships appear more resilient,
lasting until one member of the bonded pair dies.

Dr. Lehmann does not yet know why female chimpanzees seek female friends.
But it’s not as a deterrent to male aggression. “Male chimpanzees are so
dominant that even two females can’t do much against them,” Dr. Lehmann
said.

Instead, Dr. Lehmann and others suspect that the story for chimpanzees will
turn out to be similar to what’s been shown in female baboons. For baboons,
friendship is not about extra weaponry. It’s about biochemistry and
predictability.

According to Robert M. Seyfarth of the University of Pennsylvania, who with
his colleague Dorothy L. Cheney, recently
reported<http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-psych-120710-100337>in
the Annual Review of Psychology on the evolutionary origins of
friendship, baboon life is extremely stressful, especially for females.

Male baboons are comparatively huge and nasty. The ones you know boss you
around and bite off the tip of your ear. The ones you don’t are
infanticidal. Leopards are always leaping. Food is scarce.

“You have to have somebody to hang onto,” Dr. Seyfarth said. “A friend
gives you an element of predictability and certainty, and you can use that
to buffer you against all the things you don’t have control over. There’s a
biochemical component to this.”

A familiar friend calms and equilibrates, mops up the cortisol spills that
can weaken the immune system, and in so doing may help lengthen life — in
baboons, humans and other group-minded kinds. “Yes, having coffee with
friends is good for you,” Dr. Silk said, “and we should all do it often.”

You look gorgeous. Have a cookie. Now tell me what’s on your mind.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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