The Healing Touch of Women.
- Akshay
- Feb 26
- 4 min read
It’s a well-known fact that women live longer than men. While the life expectancy of women is 73.8 years globally, it is only 68.4 years for men. In India, the gap is a bit narrower with 73.6 years and 70.5 years respectively.
Most of the research hitherto has focused on how women’s bodies react differently from men’s when exposed to stressful conditions. The most recent example of this was the COVID-19 pandemic. It was seen that when exposed to the virus, men usually had a humoral immune response while women had a more decentralised, targeted cell-mediated immune response that helped them recover faster.
However, as more people get intrigued by why women live longer than men, we realise that it is not just the physiology, but behavioural and social aspects also play an important role, one of which is the cooperation between women.
The Magical Helping Hand of Women
Pick any case study on how humans make decisions under stress, you’ll find a dialectical dilemma of “Fight or Flight”.
However, recent research shows that women are not really bound by this binary, instead, they follow what we now know as the “Tend or Befriend” response to stressful situations.
When a group of 120 individuals (60 men and 60 women) were surveyed on how they’d react under stress, the researchers found that while men became more selfish about their decisions, women became more “other-oriented” and were more likely to provide or seek help.
This helps women tide over crises through collective response, and makes them stronger by building a network of connections that could help them in the future.
Think about the last time you were overwhelmed. Maybe a bad day at work or a family drama. Who did you call?
Chances are, it was a female friend, your sister, or your mom. That instinct to reach out and support each other isn’t just comforting; it’s hardwired into the psyche!
What aids in this process is relatively high levels of oxytocin in women in certain situations, the hormone responsible for more empathetic behaviour.
No wonder then, that the female-to-female connection at times transgresses the differences in caste, class, or religion inter alia.
This phenomenon of women's solidarity has been captured beautifully in various movies released recently, be it Laapata Ladies (2023) or All We Imagine as Light (2024).
Female Solidarity: A Lifeline for Survival
Anything that has to do with forming connections is social, and anything that is social is borne out of the practices of the society.
Whenever there is a child-birth in the family, you would observe that caregiving responsibility is not of the mother alone but female relatives from either the maternal or paternal side (or both) come together to take care of both the mother and the child.
What underlies this connection is not only the understanding of what it takes to be a mother and shared experiences, but also that female cooperation has been a part of societies since ancient times.
The evolutionary perspective suggests that women in hunter-gatherer societies formed alliances with other women to protect themselves against violence from enemies when left vulnerable during male hunting expeditions.
Given their subjugation and domination in patriarchal societies, women form a separate class in relation to men, which sometimes obfuscates other differences.
This was succinctly put forth by none other than Simone De Beauvoir in The Second Sex (1949):
“They have no past, no history, no religion of their own”
“Man can think of himself without woman. She cannot think of herself without man. She is simply what man decrees; thus she is called ‘the sex.’”
We observe this theory in practice around us.
While most interactions between various classes and castes were proscribed, the interaction between a man and a woman had some exceptions.
In India, a man’s caste stops him from marrying a woman of a higher caste. Yet, a woman marrying into a higher caste (hypergamy) is not as objectionable. This hints that the identity of the woman is reduced to her sex in certain situations, even overpowering other identities such as caste, as Beauvoir argued.
When society reduces women to just their gender, it isolates them from other support systems, in turn pushing them to turn to each other for strength.
And the reason female friendships have that healing touch? It’s the emotional investment. Women don’t just hang out, they open up.
While female-to-female connections are considered “face to face” involving more intimacy and openness, men-to-men connections are considered “side to side”, as men often suppress their emotions with their friends or families.
This translates into women receiving more help from their friends (also observed in the findings of a survey from the Insititute of Family Studies).
Thus, the essence of female connections is to help (or ask for help) when in need. This allows them to be more socially integrated than men, in turn improving their physical and emotional well-being.
A research from 2019 estimates that better social bonds and integration can increase their longevity by up to 10% when compared to women who were not socially isolated.
The social support they enjoy acts as a buffer against potential threats, akin to how dense mangrove forests absorb the negative effects of tsunamis and mitigate the destruction that could follow.
In contrast, it is estimated that social isolation can increase mortality by up to 60%, apart from increasing susceptibility to depression, anxiety, and other mental illnesses.
Studies also show that men are more vulnerable to increased mortality risks due to loneliness or social isolation than women.
Now that we know that female connections have the power to improve your well-being, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that being part of women-dominated or led networks has a healing touch to it. More importantly, it should be considered whether it is time to normalise seeking help instead of choosing fight or flight.
So the next time you’re debating whether to cancel that coffee date with your bestie, don’t. It’s not just fun, it’s medicine for the soul.
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