Women Don't Want Friends That Sleep Around, While Men Don't Mind

Confirming the general consensus of anyone who has had a social interaction, ever, a new study has found that men who sleep around are generally viewed more positively than women who do.

As I said, that's (sadly) not really news to anyone, but we do get a few interesting pieces of data from the study, published by researchers at Cornell University in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. We get a scientific quantification of being promiscuous—sleeping with more than 20 men or women by the time you're in your early 20s—in case you were wondering. We also learn that women categorized as promiscuous don't want to be friends with other promiscuous women. Men, on the other hand, are cool with having friends who have slept around.

Based on a short bio, 751 college students were asked to rank two hypothetical, same-sex friends in 10 different "friendship attributes." The only difference between the two hypothetical people were the number of people they'd had sex with, either two or 20.

Regardless of their own sexual histories, women test subjects rated the person who had slept with two people more positively in nine different friendship attributes than an identical person who had slept with 20 people.

Promiscuous women did win in the "outgoing" category though, which means they're fun to take to parties or a bar. Men who had only slept with two people scored higher on the ever-important "is this person going to steal my girlfriend" friendship test, while men who slept around scored higher or equal on everything else.

"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," Zhana Vrangalova, lead author of the study, 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."

In this hypothetical world in which the number of people a person has slept with is broadcast as a floating avatar above their heads, Vrangalova wonders how the hell any of these promiscuous women have friends. "The effect is that these women are really isolated," she said, and is considering future research into whether they turn to gay or straight men who might be more "accepting" of their behaviors. In the real world, people probably utilize a trait known as discretion to decide with whom to share their entire sexual histories.

Though researchers can't know for sure why women who sleep around are ostracized (American culture? Religion? Popular magazines?), they think it might be self-propagating: Women don't want to be perceived as being floozies, so they avoid those women that they themselves perceive to be promiscuous for fear of being connected. The same effect doesn't appear nearly as distinctly in men. It's a striking double standard.