Abstract When confronted with images of attractive women, women who are hostile toward women (HTW) may demonstrate negative upward comparison, i.e., feel bad about themselves, or they may discount other women’s attractiveness. We examined the relations between women’s HTW and negative upward comparison, discounting, and body consciousness. The effect on HTW of viewing images of women also was examined. HTW was higher among those first exposed to the images than among those in a control condition. In general, analyses of the two conditions separately indicated that HTW was associated with devaluing the attractiveness of attractive and average-looking images, but not with negative upward comparison. In contrast to the association between HTW and discounting, body shame was consistently related to negative upward comparison, as well as to HTW.
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Notes
To distinguish the general construct of hostility toward women from the scales that assess it, we use HTWS to refer to the scale and HTW to refer to the general concept, which includes hostile sexism (HS).
Three or four of the models in the images may have been Latina, however, their ethnic background was not provided.
We thank an anonymous reviewer for this analysis.
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Loya, B.N., Cowan, G. & Walters, C. The Role of Social Comparison and Body Consciousness in Women’s Hostility Toward Women. Sex Roles 54, 575–583 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-006-9024-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-006-9024-0