Thousands of years ago, when we roamed the earth in isolated tribes, there was very little moving from one tribe to another, apart from the purposes of mating.
A woman might be brought back as the unexpected bonus from a trading expedition, but it must have been rare for a woman of breeding age to suddenly show up alone and unannounced among a group of strangers.
One can see why the men would have been excited about the new girl on the block; but also why the women would eye her with extreme suspicion. What was she doing there, and why was she causing the men to look at her in that way?
Thus, I imagine, did bitchiness first enter the world.
Resources were scarce. The top guy's sperm was at a premium. She who got it had the best chance of bearing offspring who would carry her DNA into the future.
Competition was not only rampant but a necessary strategy, as far as survival was concerned. Make things unpleasant for those who might want to steal your place as woman number one, and maybe they'll just pack up and go away. Reveal and revel in the other gal's flaws.
Bitchiness made biological sense back then.
Fast-forward to the 21st century.
A woman is about to start a new job. She's an attractive sort of woman. Let's say that she's not yet menopausal, and keeps herself in good shape. She feels nothing but goodwill toward the people she'll be working with. It's not a competitive work situation - she wants to do her job, not take away anyone else's. And yet, as she contemplates her first week of spending eight hours a day among strangers, she finds herself worrying about things a man would never bother with. Should she wear loose, concealing clothes - at least until the other women in the office get to know her and, with luck, come to like her? A heterosexual man revving up for his debut in a new office situation would never think about the advisability of making himself look worse. He would probably give little thought to how he looked at all, apart from being clean and shaven.
But he wouldn't mentally review his wardrobe, agonizing, "Gosh, do those pants make me look too sexy? Will some colleague of mine who hasn't been to the gym lately find my waistline threatening?"
While no woman I know cares a tinker's damn about her co-worker's bodily fluids, there's still some beneath-the-surface barnyard behavior going on when a new woman comes on the scene in an office situation. If her feathers look too shiny or she talks too much about how many eggs she lays, the other females will make sure she's fully informed ASAP about just where she stands in the pecking order.
Perhaps, as relative newcomers to the professional world, we're still trying to figure out how our womanliness fits in with working in an office.
Maybe bitchiness in the workplace is nothing more than what psychologists call an obsolete coping strategy - an adaptive behavior whose reasons for being no longer exist. As the survival value of networking and cooperation asserts itself, bitchiness is surely on its way out. Younger women, it seems to me, partake of it much less than the older ones do. (But, as a young friend of mine pointed out, a woman will still spot the run in her co-worker's stocking from way across the room, whereas a man might not notice his cube-mate's newly amputated limb.)
We're left with the amazing power of perception honed by 50,000 years of thinking competitively. It's an evolutionary door prize of the highest order.
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