I was watching a Miley Cyrus/Jonas Brothers concert on TV (don’t ask), and the one thing I noticed was the constant, almost trance-like state of the girls screaming for their favorite Jonas Brother (or if they identified with Miley, her).
This put me on the path of “remember when”, and I remember seeing shots of the Beatles coming to America, with teenage girls going crazy at the sight of these guys, screaming uncontrollably. Future generations had Duran Duran, New Kids, ect.
So, I have two questions… what is it about the female that causes this seemingly uncontrollable behavior, and why don’t males of a similar age do it?
Erich Fromm discussed this in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. He said that girls do it to demonstrate to each other that they are normal—that they are of the same mindset of their peers, and that they share the same interests and values. Fromm points out that they do not do it to garner the attention of the person they are screaming at, as an adolescent girl who suddenly found herself confronted by the subject of her idolatry with nobody else present would not start screaming in his face.
Though their lower voices might just make the male sounds “crowd noise” while higher-pitched screaming is more noticable and there is some selection bias there?
I think men are more likely to say words or word-like sounds, like “YEAH!” or “WOOHOO!!” so maybe that makes it less distinctive or less noticeable?
I have nothing to back that up; just ideas that might be worth considering.
We hear high pitched screams better. The invisible hand of evolution has perfectly crafted the cries of babies to get our attention and women’s screams share a bit of that too. This is all hard-wired for our survival: to keep babies from starving to death and to protect women from predators and to let women alert us to predators.
The secondary use of these noises are evident in this thread: screaming at concerts or screaming while in pain. Both are attention getters. Both signal something to others. A lot of evolutionary developments have dual or triple use.
No kidding. I live (and work) one thick, soundproofed window, one wide street, one park, one row of buildings and a second street away from a kindergarten. I still know exactly when recess starts and stops.
Honestly, they’re hoping the celeb boy they like will hear them, spot them in the crowd, invite them backstage, take off his shirt then do something… they’re not quite sure what, but it’s making their nether regions tingle. For me and my friends, at least.
OK… your nether regions tingled. Now we might be on to something. But at what age? I think many a teenage boy’s nether regions tingled at the sight of, say… Sheena Easton (ok, I’m dating myself here), but I never felt the urge to scream.
And the baby thing works too, but baby boys can scream just as loud and obnoxious as baby girls to get attention, and that goes away at some point.
The shrill, high-pitched tone of the female… it’s spring, and the neighborhood is alive. It’s worse than the cicadas.
