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Studies by clinicians at Columbia University in the late 1980s reveal a fascinating and emblematic gender difference concerning fear. When asked to write a fear-laden story about death, male subjects overwhelmingly chose to write about the terror of their own death.
Women subjects, given precisely the same instructions, wrote stories about the death of a loved one—a child, a spouse, a parent. They almost never attached their greatest fears to the loss of their own lives, but instead to the sense of powerlessness over the lives of others—regarded as personal and private.
What's most fascinating about looking at gender differences in terms of fear is the way the discussion unmasks the forces behind our own anxieties to reveal the fear we dare not admit. Instead of the more typically masculine patterns of bottling up anxiety and irritation, or acting out in terms of violent or outwardly destructive behavior, women are more likely to manifest their feelings in terms of physical symptoms—nagging and vague complaints, headaches, dizziness, toothaches, cramps, and allergies—and the symptoms are often prompted by clues from the culture letting us know this is perfectly acceptable in women.
Anthropologist Elizabeth Janeway suggests:
"It was not so long ago that our own Western civilization cherished the idea of childish dependence and ignorance of the world as being the height of feminine charm. At the same time, such ignorance was felt to be both cause and result of feminine frivolity (read, triviality): Women were frivolous because they know nothing about the way the significant operations of society took place."
Clearly, we see that what was labeled women's "frivolity" naturally prevented women from being allowed to take part in activities that might give them some insight into important matters concerning these "significant operations of society." Women's entry into the workplace world is incomplete; fear reveals the fact that women are less than easy with the realization of our own ambitions. Occasionally, and with often-disastrous effects, we deploy fear as penance for power.
While all of us are naturally fearful during the most vulnerable years of childhood, boys and girls alike, girls are not taught or encouraged to slough off their fears and anxieties, or to fight their enemies and demons directly. Part of the reasoning behind this is perfectly adaptive for the real world of the playground—a girl who punches, even when she punches her enemy, will be regarded as deviant in a way that a boy would not—and also for later life. The ordinary woman will have to be more cautious when she walks alone in a new city than the ordinary man.
Fair enough. But how we deal with perceived, habitual, and inherited fear is worth examination. The feeling of fear—whether or not there is a real danger—is nevertheless real.
In Fiona Gallacher's "Sex Role Orientation and Fear," we learn that women reported significantly higher fear scores than men, even though their responses did not indicate that females actually experienced greater levels of physiological disturbance; they said they were more afraid than their male counterparts, believed it was true, but acted at least as courageously as the men. The passivity encouraged in girls by our culture feeds directly into the early development of habits of fear, according to a study titled "The Aetiology of Fear," which reports Masserman's findings that "a feeling of helplessness intensifies fear while having something to do reduces it."
Not surprisingly, the man who lives with a fearful woman will, according to psychologists and sociologists, begin to feel drained by the constant lack of an energy-filled, honest, and mutually responsible interaction. His energy will be sapped by his unconscious resentment, boredom, and sense of futility about changing this pattern.
Her "feminine fears," once an ego-boosting delight, will become a heavy weight instead. To many men, a fearful woman seems a willing captive within the walls of her own home, tending her children, and toiling endlessly with her formulae for improving her life one day when things won't be quite so pressured or hectic. He fears (often correctly) that such a day will never come.
The implications of this are manifold and emblematic of the way gender roles function; the woman apparently receives the benefit of feeling protected, but the horizon of her real future and her own competence remains out of focus and out of reach.
Her fear is her cage; the complex gridwork of her anxieties, jealousies, resentments, illnesses, isolations, and failures keep her locked in, even though she cannot see that it is a larger sense of fear which prevents her from achieving success and developing healthy relationships.
