In , two women who were long past college age settled into a dorm room at a large public university in the Midwest. Elizabeth Armstrong, a sociology professor at the University of Michigan, and Laura Hamilton, then a graduate assistant and now a sociology professor at the University of California at Merced, were there to examine the daily lives and attitudes of college students.
The researchers interviewed the 53 women on their floor every year for five years—from the time they were freshmen through their first year out of college. On top of asking the students about GPAs and friend groups, the researchers also dug into their beliefs about morality—sometimes through direct questions, but often, simply by being present for a late-night squabble or a bashful confession.
As Armstrong and Hamilton write in a new study published in Social Psychology Quarterly , economic inequality drove many of the differences in the ways the women talked about appropriate sexual behavior. It seems there was no better way to smear a dorm-mate than to suggest she was sexually impure. One woman described her best friend like so:. That to me, if you want to talk about slutty, that to me is whoring yourself out. For her analysis, Armstrong divided the cohort in two, with wealthier women in one group and the working-class ones in the other.
Each group tended to band together, with the poorer half feeling excluded from Greek life and other high-status social activities. The rich women tended to view casual sex as problematic only when it was done outside of steady relationships, and even then, only when it included vaginal intercourse. They also tended to think all sex and hook-ups should occur primarily within a relationship. Armstrong notes that midway through their college experience, none of the women had made any friendships across the income divide.
To Armstrong, it seemed like even though the wealthy and poor women were slut-shamed roughly equally in private, it was mostly only the poor women who faced public slut-shaming. And it only seemed to happen when the poorer women tried to make inroads with the richer ones. A series of emissaries were sent up and down the hall in an attempt to make amends, but the damage had been done. The wealthier women, meanwhile, seemed unfazed by accusations of sluttiness if they came from their lower-status peers.
