Quote:New research into the science of slut-shaming has found that promiscuous women can’t get a break—even from other promiscuous women. For a study published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, researchers from Cornell University asked college women to read a vignette describing a hypothetical female peer, “Joan,” then rate their feelings about her personality. To one group of women, Joan was described as having two lifetime sexual partners; to another group, she’d bedded 20. The study found that women—even women who were more promiscuous themselves—rated the Joan with 20 partners as less competent, emotionally stable, warm, and dominant than the Joan who’d only boasted two.

Quote:Take the press coverage of the Cornell study, which has focused heavily on female attitudes toward promiscuous women while sliding over the male attitudes unearthed in the research. While researchers were quizzing women about Joan, they presented a group of men with identical descriptions of a male peer, “Jim.” In opposition to the female response, the young men actually rated Slutty Jim as more competent and emotionally stable than Prudish Jim. The men did see Slutty Jim as a threat to their own sexual security—what the researchers call “mate guarding”—but that threat didn’t translate into perceiving Jim as a bad person.

Quote:Slut-shaming isn’t just an instance of girl-on-girl crime, much as we love that Mean Girls narrative. It’s everyone against girls.