If women ran the world

Here for instance is George Sand, one of the boldest woman writers of the eighteen hundreds on the subject of conquest : “a silly, an odious need to experiment with guns, a game of princes… To sing the Marseillaise to the tune of the Empire seems sacrilege… I am very sad, and this time my old patriotism—my passion for the drum will not awaken…The whole world is going mad.”

It is all these and it is something more, something breeding in the hair spray free ozone layer of the naughties. Something that has recently emerged from the shadows, freed from the fear of being perceived as either too shrill a notion or a symptom of the weaker sex’s feebleness.

Something that is currently marching proudly into the limelight of the mainstream to be displayed as a strength and a Good Thing. I am talking about sheer goodwill.

This year, thanks to the assiduous efforts of the corporate marketing industry and the resultant hype, more women were aware of the significance of March 8 than ever before.

The commercialisation notwithstanding, women in Indian cities celebrated, sent greetings and messages to each other even as the media played up the event in every possible way. If in the past the event was associated more with protest, last week one noticed instead, a sense of exuberance and an outpouring of goodwill.

Women seemed to want to reach out to other women and also to feel a part of the larger community of womankind. Now imagine if you will, the sheer potential of a goodwill that is based on shared characteristics with a half of the world’s population; its power to transcend race, ideology, religion and a million other differences as of course its power to avert overt aggression: how do you go to war against your own kind?

The phenomenon of womanly goodwill has in fact been a striking feature of the showbiz industry in the West, most visibly over the past year. If musicians like Sheryl Crow and Shania Twain for instance have been putting to rest the stereotypical image of squabbling women, Hollywood actresses have been at pains to display camaraderie with female peers.

At this year’s Golden Globe awards for instance, Nicole Kidman thanked writers for writing parts for ‘strong, interesting women’. Kim Catrall of the women-oriented Sex in the City thanked her girlfriends with the line ‘men may come and go but women stay!’ Renee Zelweiger was unreservedly gushing about her Chicago co-star, Catherine Zeta-Jones : “the beauty, you are a goddess!” Regard, admiration, respect and even affection towards competitors? Not qualities that encourage a cold blooded war for sure.

But if these observations are not enough to convince one about the implausibility of violent assault in a woman-managed world then there are the findings of a recent landmark UCLA study on friendships between women.

Until this study was published apparently, scientists generally believed that people, when experiencing stress, triggered a hormonal cascade that revved the body to either stand and fight or flee as fast as possible – an ancient survival mechanism left over from the time we were chased across the planet by sabre-toothed tigers.

Now, reports Gale Berkowitz, the researchers suspect that women have a larger behavioural repertoire than just fight or flight. In fact, says Dr. Laura Klein, one of the authors of the study, it seems that when the hormone oxytocin is released as part of the stress responses in a woman, it buffers the fight or flight response and encourages her to tend children and gather with other women instead.

When she actually engages in this tending or befriending, studies suggest that more oxytocin is released, which further counters stress and produces a calming effect. This calming response does not occur in men, says Dr. Klein, because testosterone- which men produce in high levels when they’re under stress – seems to reduce the effects of oxytocin. Estrogen, she adds, seems to enhance it.