Yesterday, Ann Friedman wrote that females — human or otherwise — enjoy sex as much as the next sex, so long as they don’t believe they will be socially punished for it. “Many straight men still find it a turnoff when women are sexual aggressors,” she wrote. A Cornell study finds women make excellent slut-shamers, too.
A survey of 751 students, summarized on Science Daily (via Salon) and to be published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, found that college-aged women see promiscuous women as unsuitable for friendship. Even women with “liberal attitudes about casual sex or a high number of lifetime lovers” would prefer to hang out with prudes. Men had mixed feelings about slutty men, in some cases preferring them as friends. “The effect is that these women are very isolated,” said lead researcher Zhana Vrangalova, who posits that women (and men) perceive promiscuous people as a threat to their own mating game. She suggested “future research” to determine whom the sluts could befriend — perhaps straight or gay men who would be accepting of their behavior. (Anecdotally: Yes.) Also of note is that the study yielded a scientific definition of slutty: “bedding 20 sexual partners by their early 20s.”
