Cute miniskirt...catty comments...jeans, not so much
To see how females react to a rival, researchers brought pairs of them into a laboratory for what was ostensibly a discussion about female friendships.
But the real experiment began when another young woman entered the room asking where to find one of the researchers.
This woman had been chosen by the researchers because she “embodied qualities considered attractive from an evolutionary perspective,” meaning a “low waist-to-hip ratio, clear skin, large breasts.”
Sometimes, she wore a T-shirt and jeans, other times a tight-fitting, low-cut blouse and short skirt.
In jeans, she attracted little notice and no negative comments, whose reactions were being secretly recorded during the encounter and after the young woman left the room.
But when she wore the other outfit, virtually all the girls reacted with hostility.
They stared at her, looked her up and down, rolled their eyes and sometimes showed outright anger. One asked in disgust, “What the fuck is that?”
Most of the aggression, though, happened after she left the room.
Then the girls laughed about her and impugned her motives. One girl suggested that she dressed that way in order to have sex with a professor. Another said that her "boobs were about to pop out.”
Other studies have shown that the more attractive an adolescent girl or woman is, the more likely she is to become a target for indirect aggression from her female peers.
“Women are indeed very capable of aggression against others, especially women they perceive as rivals,” said a psychologist. “The research also shows that suppression of female sexuality is by women.”
Stigmatizing female promiscuity — a.k.a. slut-shaming — has often been blamed on men, but the experiment and other research suggest the stigma is enforced mainly by women.
Sex is coveted by men. Accordingly, women limit access as a way of maintaining advantage in the negotiation of this resource. Women who make sex too readily available compromise the power-holding position of the group, which is why many women are particularly intolerant of women who are, or seem to be, promiscuous.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/19/science/a-cold-war-fought-by-women.html?src=recg
