@article{ref1,
title="Our grandmothers' legacy: challenges faced by female ancestors leave traces in modern women's same-sex relationships",
journal="Archives of sexual behavior",
year="2021",
author="Reynolds, Tania A.",
volume="ePub",
number="ePub",
pages="ePub-ePub",
abstract="Investigations of women's same-sex relationships present a paradoxical pattern, with women generally disliking competition, yet also exhibiting signs of intrasexual  rivalry. The current article leverages the historical challenges faced by female  ancestors to understand modern women's same-sex relationships. Across history, women  were largely denied independent access to resources, often depending on male  partners' provisioning to support themselves and their children. Same-sex peers thus  became women's primary romantic rivals in competing to attract and retain  relationships with the limited partners able and willing to invest. Modern women  show signs of this competition, disliking and aggressing against those who threaten  their romantic prospects, targeting especially physically attractive and sexually  uninhibited peers. However, women also rely on one another for aid, information, and  support. As most social groups were patrilocal across history, upon marriage, women  left their families to reside with their husbands. Female ancestors likely used  reciprocal altruism or mutualism to facilitate cooperative relationships with nearby  unrelated women. To sustain these mutually beneficial cooperative exchange  relationships, women may avoid competitive and status-striving peers, instead  preferring kind, humble, and loyal allies. Ancestral women who managed to  simultaneously compete for romantic partners while forming cooperative female  friendships would have been especially successful. Women may therefore have  developed strategies to achieve both competitive and cooperative goals, such as  guising their intrasexual competition as prosociality or vulnerability. These  historical challenges make sense of the seemingly paradoxical pattern of female  aversion to competition, relational aggression, and valuation of loyal friends,  offering insight into possible opportunities for intervention.<p /> <p>Language: en</p>",
language="en",
issn="0004-0002",
doi="10.1007/s10508-020-01768-x",
url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10508-020-01768-x"
}