According to a new Cornell University study, developmental psychologists have found that college-aged women tend to judge their promiscuous female peers negatively and deem them unsuitable for friendship.
Developmental psychologists from Cornell University conducted a study where in they found that college-aged women tend to judge their promiscuous female peers negatively and deem them unsuitable for friendship. In the study, promiscuity was defined as bedding more than 20 sexual partners by the time a person reached his/her early 20's.
The study found that women also tend to prefer less sexually active women as friends even though they themselves expressed liberal views about high number of sexual lovers and casual sex.
However, for men, no uniformity in male friend preference was observed. They preferred both sexually permissive potential friends as well as non-permissive ones. Some also showed no preference at all when asked to rate both kinds on a scale of 10 based on friendship attributes. The only trend observed was that permissive males preferred less permissive males as friends as they saw them as a lesser threat to steal their girlfriends.
Lead author Zhana Vrangalova, a Cornell graduate student in the field of human development notes that though with time people have become more broad-minded about casual sex, even today "slutty" women are looked down upon while "studly" men are celebrated.
"For sexually permissive women, they are ostracized for being 'easy,' whereas men with a high number of sexual partners are viewed with a sense of accomplishment," Vrangalova said. "What surprised us in this study is how unaccepting promiscuous women were of other promiscuous women when it came to friendships - these are the very people one would think they could turn to for support."
Seven hundred and fifty one college students took part in the study. They were asked to provide information about their past sexual experiences and their opinion of casual dating. Then they were provided with a near-identical bio data of another male or female peer. The only difference was the number of sexual partners they had (2 or 20). Participants were then asked to rate these peers on a scale of 10 based on a few friendship attributes like warmth, competence, morality, emotional stability and overall likability.
Researchers observed that regardless of their own sexual experiences women rated sexually permissive women more negatively on nine of ten friendship attributes and only gave them positive ratings on their characteristic of outgoingness.
Men, on the other hand, didn't have any such preferences and only chose less sexual men as they perceived them as a lesser threat as potential competitors for girlfriends
The study was titled "Birds of a Feather? Not When it Comes to Sexual Permissiveness" and published in the early online edition of the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships.
