At first glance this piece of research sounded interesting: A study about nasty comments in a computer game, analyzed by the gender of the recipient of those comments. A player named Jeff was introduced into the game. All other players in his team were male, but in some applications "Jeff" was given a female voice and in others a male voice. The results (note that playing poorly resulted in "dying"):
What we found was that Jeff’s teammates who died more often generally made more positive comments towards Jeff. And their performance, good or bad, had no effect on the number of negative comments they directed towards him.
In contrast, when Jeff used a female voice, he received many more negative comments, particularly from players who were performing poorly.
This suggests that men behaved according to a social hierarchy. When they were performing poorly – i.e. they were lower status – they did not challenge a male-voiced teammate, but they did challenge a female-voiced one.
This was supported by our results exploring skill level –- our proxy for an individual’s position in the hierarchy. Skill level didn’t affect how men behaved towards another man, but men lower in skill were less positive in the female-voiced treatment.
Interestingly, higher-skilled men were more positive towards women, but not men.
Where I started to wonder about the findings was in that third paragraph: The introduction of the hierarchy as the important variable:
First, hierarchies in computer games are not the same as real-world hierarchies. Neither am I sure that an individual's skill level is an adequate proxy for that individual's place in the hierarchy.
Second, and much more importantly, the authors argue that all this bullying of the girlz is because of dominance being so important for men to get mating partners (an evolutionary psychology explanation):
When you look at this situation from an evolutionary perspective, some of the reasoning becomes more clear. Since a man’s mating chances are better determined by his status than his looks, if a woman is usurping a man’s status by outperforming him, it means that he is less likely to be attractive to a potential mate, especially one that is higher than him in the hierarchy.
Although it’s unlikely that men are thinking about mate attraction when playing Halo 3, we think the increased negativity directed towards higher status women by some men is an unconscious response to having their masculinity challenged by a woman. “Losing to a girl” is still deemed unacceptable by many men as it can reduce their status in the eyes of others – both men and women.
The hostile aspects of gaming culture could thus be explained as the search for, and maintenance of, status. One way to ensure that a man doesn’t lose to a woman is to keep women from competing by making them feel unwanted in that environment.
Butbutbut. The competition for mates in evolutionary psychology is an INTRA-SEX competition, between individuals of the same sex. Or so I have always read. Men compete for a higher place in the hierarchy with OTHER MEN, not with women, so as to get most pu**y. From that evolutionary perspective the place of women in the hierarchy should be irrelevant.
Instead, the results seem to suggest that it's the other men's placing in that hierarchy which is irrelevant. Note that bit beginning the first quote above:
What we found was that Jeff’s teammates who died more often generally made more positive comments towards Jeff. And their performance, good or bad, had no effect on the number of negative comments they directed towards him.A possible response to this criticism comes from the second quote above:
Although it’s unlikely that men are thinking about mate attraction when playing Halo 3, we think the increased negativity directed towards higher status women by some men is an unconscious response to having their masculinity challenged by a woman. “Losing to a girl” is still deemed unacceptable by many men as it can reduce their status in the eyes of others – both men and women.
But that's not really part of the intra-sex mating competition in evolutionary psychology. It's something quite different, unless we argue that a general contempt towards women is an evolutionary adaptation in both women and men. Indeed, that explanation fits much better the general sexism theory (which the authors argue against in their paper) than their "disrupting the hierarchy" theory.
From a different angle one might argue that bullying women in this way is pretty likely to work against the chances of getting to mate with them. I get that men aren't supposed to think about their mating chances while playing this game, but if some faint-and-distant stone age voice mutters to them about the need to beat other guys to get more women, then that same faint-and-distant voice should warn them about women not liking nasty attacks as a prelude to the courting games.
The findings, as discussed in the linked article, give much stronger support to the theory that some men feel great shame when they lose to "girls," and the idea that there are places women shouldn't enter. Whether that has anything to do with intra-male sexual competition looks pretty dubious, given that the results don't show bullying used in that sense.
---
I haven't gone through the paper on the study (though I glanced at it). So be warned that my comments apply to only the popularization I linked to above. On the other hand, the popularization is written by the study authors, which means that it's directly based on the study itself.