Focusing on women and celebrating what makes them so unique, Evie Magazine helps women seek truth and find beauty...the kind that really mat
By: Jaimee Marshall
Published: Feb 10, 2026
New research shows that women show more indirect and verbal hostility towards women with larger breasts. Does this explain the hate for celebrities like Sydney Sweeney?
For years, it’s been folk wisdom that women with well-endowed chests, from Kate Upton to Sydney Sweeney, conspicuously find themselves the targets of disproportionate hostility compared to smaller-breasted women. The implication being that women find other women with large breasts sexually threatening, which motivates them to cut them down. Empirical research now supports this theory.
Study Finds Women Are More Likely to Target Women With Larger Breasts
A 2024 peer-reviewed study at Texas A&M International University’s Department of Psychology and Communication found that women were significantly more likely to engage in “derogation tactics,” such as verbal and indirect aggression, when shown photos of women with larger breasts. Women with C or D cups were disproportionately more likely to be the victims of verbal and indirect aggression than those with A and B cups.
Because breast size and shape are important physical traits in mate choice, which men find sexually attractive, and women are attentive to men’s interest in them and aware of women with attractive breast features (the famous photograph of Sophia Loren staring at Jayne Mansfield’s well-endowed assets comes to mind), the researchers made some predictions. They expected women would engage in verbal and indirect aggression when women possessed large and firm (non-saggy) breasts, notably if these women had a sexually competitive disposition.
The sample size was 114 Hispanic women, each of whom was shown 12 images of women’s bare breasts varying in size from A cup to D cup and three different levels of ptosis (firmness vs. sagginess). The researchers also measured the participants’ propensity to engage in same-sex competition using an Intrasexual Competition Scale (ICS), a 12-item inventory of statements like “I can’t stand it when I meet another woman who is more attractive than I am.” The women would then rate the statements for agreement on a scale of 1 to 7, with 1 indicating strong disagreement and 7 indicating strong agreement. Higher scores were associated with greater intrasexual competitiveness.
The women were then asked questions designed to measure their propensity to engage in verbal and indirect aggression, such as “How likely are you to be verbally aggressive against the woman?” and “How likely are you to be indirectly aggressive against the woman?” Curiously, levels of ptosis (i.e., how firm or saggy the breasts were) and women’s ICS scores (which have excellent reliability) were not predictive of women engaging in rival derogation. By far the most significant predictor was breast size, with C and D cups disproportionately more likely to be the victims of verbal and indirect aggression over A and B cups.
The researchers found no association between dispositional levels of intrasexual competition or breast perkiness with verbal and indirect aggression. One possible explanation is that the women in the sample skewed young, so markers of youth like laxity and firmness were not as easily discernible or threatening to them as breast size. Women were more likely to derogate women with larger breasts, even if they did not score high in dispositional interpersonal competition, suggesting that seeing women with large breasts makes women more competitive than their baseline disposition would predict. This study suggests breast size alone can provoke hostility, notably in one direction: the bigger the bust, the bigger the hate.
Limitations of the Study
However, the study has some limitations. For one, this study was performed on a small, non-diverse sample: 114 college-aged, predominantly Hispanic women in a university setting. That’s hardly a representative sample that can be generalized to the broader population. There was also a limited range of breast features tested: breast size and firmness. Researchers proposed additional potential features for future study, such as cleavage.
The research participants, all women, were also viewing nude images of other women’s breasts. Since heterosexual women are unlikely to view other women naked in ordinary, everyday contexts, it’s worth replicating the study with clothed women to see if the findings persist. The participants also self-reported their feelings rather than measuring physiological effects such as heart rate or pupil dilation, which capture unconscious responses.
Prior research shows that “priming intrasexual competition by using a partner threat task can increase derogation tactics in women, such as rating them less favorably or preventing their partner from interacting with an attractive woman,” but no priming task was employed in this study. The authors also disclosed that while larger breasts were perceived as threatening in their sample, large breasts are not universally viewed as more sexually attractive. You might get a different result using a different sample.
Why Women Compete Indirectly With Other Women
Women have a unique evolutionary mating strategy. Rather than engaging in direct physical aggression or violence, women have learned to utilize indirect, non-physical strategies like gossip and rumor spreading as a means of subtly undermining sexual rivals without risking harm to themselves or their children. Due to women’s greater parental investment, aggression must go undetected, ruling out the much more overt male strategy of direct physical aggression and violence.
Women engage in these tactics when a competing attractive woman is directly threatening their relationship. However, they’ve also evolved mechanisms that increase their vigilance to potential threats. Studies show that women “condemn other women who expose their breasts and will view them negatively,” as well as women who are dressed provocatively, such as by showing cleavage.
Because men place a premium on youth and physical attractiveness in selecting mates, women have learned to become attentive to other attractive women and indirectly undermine attractive female rivals through tactics like reputation destruction to reduce perceived threats to their relationship. Attractive female rivals exhibit markers of physical attractiveness like facial femininity, lower waist-to-hip ratios, and larger breasts.
Women are then motivated to spread rumors about such women or increase other forms of aggression, which are effective, especially if the perpetrator is attractive herself. Other tactics include enhancing their own appearance when feeling threatened. Women who are higher in intrasexual competitiveness are more likely to enhance their appearance, have a more positive outlook toward cosmetic surgery, and are more likely to consider women with attractive features as sexually promiscuous.
A 2024 peer-reviewed psychology paper reporting on two studies found that intrasexually competitive women were more likely to advise women to cut off more hair than their attractive peers wanted. The more similar the women were in attractiveness to themselves, the more hair they recommended cutting off, even when the hair was in good condition and the client stated a preference for cutting off as little as possible. The conclusion drawn from these studies is that intrasexually competitive women engage in sabotage when they perceive women to be as attractive as themselves.
Female sexual rivalry is assortative, just like mate selection. In layman’s terms, people mate assortatively, meaning people tend to have an accurate grasp of their “mate value,” where they fall on the social hierarchy of attractiveness, and choose partners that are similar to them. This assortative pattern also pops up in competition with female rivals. Women are more motivated to sabotage other women they perceive as equally attractive or of the same mate value as themselves than women who are obviously more attractive, because they’re competing for the same pool of potential mates.
These studies demonstrate how competitive motives can play out in the background of female-to-female interactions, even when they’re removed from any obvious direct competition for mates. This 2022 study found women condemn other women who appear sexually permissive by dressing in revealing clothing, even when these women are not direct sexual rivals (including their boyfriend’s sister).
A woman is obviously not competing for a man with his sister, but women nevertheless continue to punish this behavior because it’s associated with a greater likelihood for casual sex and lowers its perceived cost. The consequence of that raises competition for attention and reshapes expectations for all women, so they have a vested interest in keeping the cost of sex high. One way they can do this is through enforcing norms by policing women’s behavior. Even if they don’t make sense in a specific context, policed behavior prevents norm drift.
When one woman raises the sexual bar, it pressures other women to follow. So why don’t women just play the game rather than sabotaging or policing other women’s behavior? A few reasons: sexual capital isn’t evenly distributed. Some women have odd proportions or excess body weight, are older, or have fewer attractive features. Assuming women do have the attributes to compete, overt sexualization comes with serious tradeoffs, like a perceived lack of seriousness or authority and higher scrutiny with age. It’s also a valve that, once opened, can hardly be turned off.
How This Plays Out in Popular Culture
Let’s go back to that infamous 1957 photo of Sophia Loren and Jayne Mansfield taken at a Paramount Pictures dinner at Romanoff’s in Beverly Hills. It’s become a piece of Hollywood iconography symbolizing female rivalry, jealousy, and the policing of female sexuality (often by other women). It’s a visual symbol for the woman-on-woman “violence” characteristic of making it in Hollywood. Women, especially legible sex symbols, are typically pitted against each other and feel their fragile sense of relevance and vanity acutely. The photo is, on the one hand, funny, especially in Loren’s retelling as someone earnestly concerned, anxious even, that Mansfield was about to spill out of her top and onto their table. But it’s also sad.
The photo is what we might call a “loaded image,” in that it communicates lots of ideas about women in Hollywood, even if they’re not necessarily true for the women frozen in the lens. One such idea is that there’s only room for one big star at a time and that women competing in the same industry with the same level of star power can hardly be friends or allies. It led me to wonder: is this still true today? It certainly was when this photo was taken.
Another iconic image taken on the same night shows rising star Jayne Mansfield approaching Marilyn Monroe’s table, where Monroe reportedly snubbed her. Mansfield was poised as Marilyn’s replacement, often referred to as “the King-sized Marilyn” or “the poor man’s Marilyn,” with the two constantly pitted against each other. Mansfield embraced this public rivalry, leaning into stunts like crashing photo-ops, wardrobe “malfunctions,” and other displays of opportunistic hypersexuality. Mansfield has been pictured sticking her hands inside Marilyn’s handprints in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. Both are rumored to have had affairs with President John F. Kennedy, were considered sex icons of their time, and met untimely demises: Monroe in 1962 at the age of 36, and Mansfield in 1967 at the age of 34.
It’s especially fitting, then, to see someone like Sydney Sweeney, a modern successor to that sex symbol archetype, satirize the Loren-Mansfield photo in a recreation with her Euphoria co-star Maude Apatow. The two play sisters on the hit HBO show, with Sweeney cast as the more sexually available sister whose looks have long overshadowed the plain and introverted Lexi (played by Apatow). By recreating the image, they’re playfully engaging in a kind of meta-commentary on female sexuality and competition.
Several waves of feminism after that infamous original photo, female relationships, and Hollywood itself have ostensibly evolved. Today, you hear more about the importance of being a “girl’s girl” than you hear about women tearing each other down. Following the takedown of some very powerful alleged Hollywood predators, the industry has undergone a lot of reform, for better or worse, and largely resulted in female kinship and solidarity. With the rise in popularity of sex-positive feminism and the normalization of sex work, women seem less likely than ever to shame other women for being sexually provocative. But some things stay the same.
Despite building a loyal female audience for years, Sweeney’s ascent into superstardom has landed her in controversy after controversy, including being accused of right-wing or even MAGA sympathies after a family member’s country-themed birthday party captured some family members donning “Back the Blue” merch and red parody hats that looked like MAGA hats. Her refusal to condemn her family was strike one.
Suddenly, she caught criticism for objectifying herself, not for the nude scenes she had been doing for years, but for overtly sexualized ad campaigns selling men’s soap and SNL Hooters skits drawing attention to her body and appeal with men. This escalated, most absurdly, when she was dragged into discourse accusing her of promoting white supremacy over an American Eagle ad that played on a “great jeans/genes” pun. So why does she inspire so much hostility now? Notably, from the female fans who were once her target audience demographic.
If we extrapolate from the research, Sweeney, who has always had a noticeably large chest, should have been receiving hate from women this whole time. But she wasn’t. There was a clear turning point in the past few years, and she didn’t suddenly grow breasts in 2024. Sweeney fits a familiar Hollywood archetype: the woman perceived as indulgently seductive and overeager to appeal to men while possessing highly visible sexual assets. A modern-day Mansfield, if you will, who was always juxtaposed with the more coy Monroe.
This helps account for the discrepancy between similarly voluptuous actresses like Christina Hendricks or Kat Dennings, who are nevertheless read as female-coded and embraced by women. Sydney Sweeney and Kate Upton, meanwhile, don’t seem particularly female-coded or liked by women in the same way. Large breasts may predict woman-on-woman hate, but in the real world, that hostility doesn’t distribute evenly. Hostility seems to peak when those assets are paired with male-aligned career signaling over female in-group affiliation. It concentrates around the women whose bodies are read as performing for men.
That’s why the female affinity for Sweeney, previously known as a sex-positive (implicitly) feminist actress doing indie roles who wasn’t scared to “ugg” it up, did a complete 180 once her image started to cater to male audiences and right-wing aesthetics in a way that wasn’t subverting them but playing into them. It also explains why she’s often compared to other famous women, like Sabrina Carpenter, and why commentary often turns to bemused attempts to deconstruct why one appeals to men and the other appeals to women. The body didn’t change; only the meaning attached to it did. That framing, more than any single trait, tends to trigger subtle, indirect forms of rivalry that have always shaped how women evaluate one another.
––
PDF | Physical features that are desired by the opposite sex may drive competition between members of the same sex to gain access to potenti
Abstract
Physical features that are desired by the opposite sex may drive competition between members of the same sex to gain access to potential mates. Women's breasts are considered sexually attractive to men, and it has been shown that women may engage in competitive tactics to compete with or derogate women with ideal physical traits (i.e., physically attractive features). In the current online study, we investigated Hispanic women's (n = 114) perceptions of breast stimuli that had been manipulated to display four levels of breast size (A-, B-, C-, and D-cup) and three levels of ptosis (i.e., levels of sagginess: non, low, and high) and their likelihood of engaging in rival derogation tactics, such as verbal and indirect aggression. The findings demonstrated that women were more likely to engage in rival derogation towards women with larger breast sizes. Women's dispositional level of intrasexual competition did not play a role in rival derogation tactics. The results are in line with previous research suggesting that women's rival derogation tactics are likely to be targeted towards women with attractive features that are desired by men.
––
Here, we identify a novel reason why women are often criticized and condemned for (allegedly) sexually permissive behavior due to their choi
Highlights
Potentially sexually permissive women are negatively judged across traits (Study 1).
Negative mating judgments “leak” into non-mating-related judgments (Study 1)
Controlling for mating judgments reduces negative non-mating judgments (Study 1).
Women mentally represent other women's judgments of permissive rivals (Study 2).
Abstract
Here, we identify a novel reason why women are often criticized and condemned for (allegedly) sexually permissive behavior due to their choice of clothing. Combining principles from coordinated condemnation and sexual economics theory, we developed a model of competition that helps explain this behavior. We hypothesized that women collectively condemn other women who appear to be sexually permissive (based on their choice of clothing). Study 1 (N = 712) demonstrated that women perceived a rival with visible cleavage more negatively. These perceptions were ultimately driven by the belief that “provocatively” dressed women are more likely to have one-night stands. Study 2 (N = 341) demonstrated that women criticized provocatively dressed women, even when these women were not direct sexual rivals (e.g., her boyfriend's sister). Our findings suggest that future research should investigate competition outside of mating-relevant domains to understand women's intrasexual competition fully.
––
Intrasexual competition between women is often covert, and targets rivals' appearance. Here we investigate appearance advice as a vector for
Highlights
Women use competitor manipulation as a form of intrasexual competition.
Highly competitive women advised hypothetical salon clients to cut off more hair.
Women told clients of similar attractiveness as themselves to cut off the most hair.
Female intrasexual competition may be assortative with respect to mate quality.
Female intrasexual competition manifests without any contextual cues to mating.
Abstract
Intrasexual competition between women is often covert, and targets rivals' appearance. Here we investigate appearance advice as a vector for female intrasexual competition. Across two studies (N = 192, N = 258) women indicated how much hair they would recommend hypothetical clients have cut off in their hypothetical salon. Clients varied in their facial attractiveness (depicted pictorially), the condition of their hair, and how much hair they wished to have cut off. Participants also provided self-report measures of their own mate value and intrasexual competitiveness. In both studies, participants' intrasexual competitiveness positively predicted how much hair they recommended clients have cut off, especially when the hair was in good condition and the clients reported wanting as little as possible cut off – circumstances wherein cutting off too much hair is most likely to indicate sabotage. Considering data across both collectively, women tended to recommend cutting the most hair off clients they perceived to be as attractive as themselves. These data suggest that just like mating, intrasexual competition may be assortative with respect to mate value. They also demonstrate that competitive motives can impact female-female interactions even in scenarios which feature no prospective mates, and are nominally unrelated to mate guarding or mating competition.
==
It's wild when you get told that this is a myth and never happens. As if everyone who watched Mean Girls scoffed and said how completely unbelieveable it was.
Female intrasexual competition is like Fight Club: you have to fight, but you're not allowed to talk about it.
