A Cold War Fought by Women

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/19/science/a-cold-war-fought-by-women.html

Various researchers found some interesting results, which I wanted to share here. A few snippets from the article:

Other studies have shown that the more attractive an adolescent girl or woman is, the more likely she is to become a target for indirect aggression from her female peers.

?Women are indeed very capable of aggressing against others, especially women they perceive as rivals,? said Dr. Vaillancourt, now a psychologist at the University of Ottawa. ?The research also shows that suppression of female sexuality is by women, not necessarily by men.?

Studies have shown that women?s ideal body shape is to be thinner than average ? and thinner than what men consider the ideal shape to be. This pressure is frequently blamed on the ultrathin female role models featured in magazines and on television, but Christopher J. Ferguson and other researchers say that it?s mainly the result of competition with their peers, not media images.

Unfortunately some of those links lead to scientific articles that are behind a paywall and some other claims are not backed up by citations. So take it with a grain of salt, I guess, but I found some of these findings surprising (not in a sense that I believed the contrary, but that I had not considered it the presented way).