Women are most often victims of shaming due to inequality in moral behavior for men and women. A study conducted by Michael E. Price, Nicholas Pound and Isabel M. Scott from the Department of Psychology, School of Social Sciences, Brunel University in Middlesex, England, and published in Archives of Sexual Behavior, explored that concept.
Researchers found that "restrictive sexual morality is a key element of most religious codes and politically conservative ideologies," but "individual-level associations between opposition to promiscuity and adherence to these belief structures are somewhat circular, by definition, and consequently not particularly informative."
"Humans a regroup-oriented and moralistic organisms and, as conservative and religious moral systems tend to oppose promiscuity, it is not surprising that members of these groups will also tend to oppose it," researchers said, according to PsyPost. "A more interesting issue is how these moral systems became so opposed to promiscuity in the first place."
Researchers noted that both sexes are more opposed to promiscuity when the female is dependent on the male economically. Paternity is a particularly important issue in such cases.
"When a female and her offspring depend more on male investment, this investment is more valuable to her, her offspring, and the male providing it (if the offspring are also his own)," Price explained to PsyPost. "Further, when females depend more on this investment, it should also be costlier for males to provide, because its increased value should motivate men to expend more time and energy to produce it."
"Due to the increased value and cost of male parental investment under conditions of greater female dependence, actions which undermine paternity certainty (and which thus reduce male motivation to produce parental investment), such as promiscuity, will become more threatening to both mated men and mated women," the researchers said.
A lot of it comes down to competition. Men have more to lose if they are spending money raising a child that isn't their own, and women don't want other women as competition for their male's resources.
But the general double standard sticks: "men are in general more favorably disposed than women towards short-term mating," the researchers wrote.
