The rumor spreading, shunning and backstabbing of "mean girls" may be a relatively accurate picture of women's social interactions, one researcher says.

Though both men and women use such indirect aggression in relationships, women use backbiting to demoralize competition and take sexual rivals out of the picture, one researcher argues in a review article detailed today (Oct. 27) in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.

"Women do compete, and they can compete quite fiercely with one another," said Tracy Vaillancourt, the paper's author and a psychology professor at the University of Ottawa in Canada. "The form it typically takes is indirect aggression, because it has a low cost: The person [making the attack] doesn't get injured. Oftentimes, the person's motives aren't detected, and yet it still inflicts harm against the person they're aggressing against."

Mean girls

Anyone who has braved the halls of middle school has seen mean girl behavior firsthand. And across many different cultures, researchers have found that girls rely mostly on indirect aggression rather than physical conflict or overt aggression, which men use more frequently.

That led Vaillancourt to hypothesize that the behavior is rooted in humans' evolutionary past. But why would sneaky meanness have become so ingrained in the female repertoire?

In short, because mean girl aggression works so well.

Because of women's role in childbearing and rearing, they are less expendable than men and couldn't risk injury by settling disputes with their fists, said Anne Campbell, an evolutionary psychologist at Durham University in the United Kingdom, who was not involved in the work. Instead, social exclusion and talking behind someone's back allowed women to work out conflicts without endangering their bodies.

Backbiting and gossiping aren't unique to women, though. "There is virtually no sex difference in indirect aggression," Campbell told LiveScience. "By the time you get to adulthood, particularly in work situations, men use this, too."

But these attacks are more powerful weapons against women, who, in the evolutionary past, depended on each other to raise children; so shunning could severely hurt a woman and her children's survival odds. As a result, women may have evolved to be exquisitely attuned to such slights, Vaillancourt speculates.

Not only does such cattiness make the targeted women too sad and anxious to compete in the sexual market, some studies suggest it can make men find rivals less attractive — provided the badmouthing comes from a cute woman, Vaillancourt said.

Sexual policing

Women often punish perceived sexual transgressions, Vaillancourt said. Studies in dozens of countries have found that women use indirect aggression against other women for being "too sexually available," Vaillancourt said.

"It's women who suppress other women's sexuality," because if sex is a resource, then more sexually promiscuous women lower the price of it, Vaillancourt told LiveScience.

One way to avoid the most destructive effects of girls' indirect aggression is to make sexual policing less powerful, Campbell said.

"We want to achieve a situation where that accusation [of promiscuity] had no power, where we don't have that double sexual standard," Campbell said. "But how we get there, I don't know."

And women don't compete over things they don't value, Vaillancourt said. So women who put less emphasis on dating, or women who are past their sexual peak, are less likely to engage in mean girl behavior (at least over men).

they've simply adapted to using a weapon the patriarchy had initially created.

How would women know to slut-shame if men hadn't jealously created the concept of a "slut" in the first place?

What came first, chicken or an egg? I think people have wrong idea about patriarchy, truth is people tried every social form, from matriarchy to equality to patriarchy and the last one just turned out best for everybody, it was the most progressive society available SPAM. It is easy for us to judge now that our bellies are full and we are not in constant danger of being eaten but our ancestors lived in a lot less rosy world. While patriarchy may look unfair by today standards we must remember that everything we have we owe to patriarchy, the matriarchal societies that existed unanimously failed. That is because of a fact that men evolved with greater capacity to put the interest of a group in front of their own interest, that is why men primarily go to war or work dangerous jobs. Women on the other hand, just like in this article are very good at pretending they care for common interest but they will always put themselves and their children in the first place, which is totally reasonable but too self centered to make for a good leadership. And while there are always exceptions to every rule believing that because makes the wrong assumption that women were somehow innocent from the start and have only learned to be mean from evil dirty men, which is putting pussy on a pedestal all over again.

everything we have we owe to patriarchy

...the wrong assumption that women were somehow innocent from the start and have only learned to be mean from evil dirty men, which is putting pussy on a pedestal all over again.

The fact of the matter is that men are in power. We're on top. Well, maybe not "we" since I'm a racial minority, but I'm still more "on top" in many ways than white women. Since we're the ones in power, we define reality more. We create the social constructs. And we made them to benefit us the most without as much regard for other groups, naturally. And, while I'm really not a fan of zero-sum gender dynamics, the fact remains that we made some things worse for women while we made some things better for ourselves. One of these worse things is the sexual double standard that birthed slut-shaming, which not only makes things worse for women directly, but also reinforces a fiercely competitive sexual market that makes it harder for the average guy to get laid.

The point I'm ultimately trying to make here is that, in some ways, women really did learn to "be mean from evil, dirty men" in a sense. The oppressed adapt to survive by adopting the rules of the oppressors. I'm suggesting that men in power created slut-shaming to commodify women's sexuality, and that women forced themselves to fit into that mold in order to appease said men in power.

I believe you are oversimplifying things, male-female social interaction can't be reduced to "men on top- women below" because while men hold and have always held a lot of visible power that does not mean women were powerless, in fact their power was arguably in some way even equal or greater than the power of men. Why? Because of the man's ingrained need to protect women from harm and appease her standards of a good partner, all women needed to do was convince men they were in some kind of danger to bend them to their will, and also as women always meant status that means that, while indirectly women played a rather large part in social structures just by selection of acceptable mates. Simply put it is just a simple natural selection, a certain characteristics are desirable so people with such characteristics have a greater chance to transfer their genes to the offspring. As for commodifiying somebody's sexuality i hate to break it to you but sexuality is a commodity, one with a very real price. Sometimes men buy that sexuality with another kind of commodity, work, and sometimes with money. In the grand scheme of things women need to bear children so they are vulnerable and cant provide as well while pregnant and with small children, on the other hand men have excess time on their hands and are unable to procreate on their own, so they exchange what they have for what women have. When you strip it down to the barest level it is not much unlike exchange of goods, despite all the feelings involved in the grand scheme of things individuals are irrelevant, what is relevant is that the species best genetic samples procreate with other best genetic samples and bear healthy children who will continue doing the same thing. Strategies for that are often so complicated and so contradictory that they are nearly impossible to navigate.Game theory teaches us that cooperation can be developed purely from selfishness, if you exchange your chickens for apples the other guy is growing then if you do not deliver chickens you will not receive next batch of apples, it is not in your best interest to double cross your partner, unless you think you can get away with it in which case it becomes in your best interest. And the people who can balance the risks to always end up on top are the successful ones. So is in sexual interactions, the best scenario for woman is to have children with high quality male and have her children cared for by a male of lower quality as high quality males are hard to hold on to. It is best strategy for males to be high quality and have children with as many women as possible but failing that they will settle for a role of provider as long as they are sure their wife will not have children with other men. So it is a risky proposition for women to have children with high quality males because if they get caught they can wind up alone with the child, but many will still do it if they think they can get away with it, simply because the women with such traits had the best prospects of maintaining their genes. Evolution knows no mercy.

I always thought that the "sexual policing" was a direct byproduct of the patriarchal hegemony - Men wanted to commoditize women's sexuality in order to exercise male dominance and to keep women oppressed.

I think it might look like women created and perpetuated their own sexual double standards, but to me it seems like they've simply adapted to using a weapon the patriarchy had initially created. How would women know to slut-shame if men hadn't jealously created the concept of a "slut" in the first place?

Thoughts?