Why Self-Objectifying Women Feel Lonelier: Rivalry With Other Women Holds the Key

When a woman sees herself primarily as a body to be looked at rather than a person to be known, the damage may extend far beyond her own mind. A new pair of studies published in Archives of Sexual Behavior suggests that self-objectification quietly reshapes how women treat their female peers, turning potential friendships into rivalries and, in the process, deepening loneliness. The research, conducted by Yijia Dong and Xijing Wang of City University of Hong Kong, offers a fresh interpersonal account of why women who habitually monitor their appearance report feeling isolated, and it challenges the assumption that seeing romantic interest everywhere might buffer that isolation.

Self-objectification is a concept introduced by psychologists Barbara Fredrickson and Tomi-Ann Roberts in their influential objectification theory. When women are repeatedly exposed to sexual objectification, they may internalize an observer’s perspective on their own bodies, evaluating themselves more on appearance than on internal qualities such as thoughts, emotions, or personality. Decades of research have tied this mindset to physical and mental health risks, diminished self-efficacy, and impaired cognitive performance. Yet, as Dong and Wang point out, self-objectification originates in social interaction, and surprisingly few studies have asked how it changes the way women actually interact with others. Loneliness, the social pain of lacking desired connections, seemed like the natural place to look, especially since earlier findings linking the two had been inconsistent.

Previous work offered a mixed picture. One earlier study found that body surveillance, a hallmark of self-objectification, correlated with loneliness through a chain running from body shame to reduced self-esteem, but the direct statistical association between surveillance and loneliness evaporated inside the full mediation model. A more recent study of junior high school students found no significant relationship between self-objectification and loneliness at all. Rather than abandon the question, the researchers reframed it. Both self-objectification and loneliness are rooted in social life, they reasoned, so the link between them might run through altered patterns of interaction, both with other women and with men.

The first proposed pathway involves intrasexual competition, the tendency to compete with same-sex peers for access to and retention of mates. The authors drew on evolutionary reasoning, including the ovulatory competition hypothesis, which holds that periods of heightened mating motivation amplify women’s competitive tendencies, and on empirical findings that women seeking mates are more likely to derogate competitors. Self-objectified women, who tend to derive self-worth from appearance and from romantic relationships, may experience a sense of mate urgency that fuels this competition. In turn, competing creates social comparison and rivalry rather than connection, and prior studies have linked interpersonal competition, mate-focused competition specifically, and even indirect aggression to greater loneliness.

The second pathway ran in the opposite direction. The researchers proposed that self-objectified women, who see men as sexual agents and themselves as sexual objects in cross-sex encounters, should be prone to romantic interpretation bias, or RIB: the tendency to misread neutral or ambiguous interactions with men as romantic. If a woman believes many men are romantically interested in her, her perceived need for social connection might be fulfilled, echoing research on the sex-is-power belief, which creates an illusory sense of empowerment. In this framing, RIB could function as a psychological balm, reducing loneliness by fabricating a sense of easy access to connection.

To test these competing predictions, the team ran two studies with distinct methods. Study 1 was a seven-day diary study of female university students, a population chosen because self-objectification peaks in young women and students interact frequently with both sexes. After a baseline survey measuring trait self-objectification, self-perceived attractiveness, social desirability, and demographics, 114 participants completed short questionnaires each evening for a week, rating their daily self-objectifying feelings, competitive behaviors, romantic interpretations of interactions with men, and loneliness. The design generated 786 daily observations nested within participants, which the researchers analyzed with multilevel modeling in Mplus, an approach suited to capturing how these variables fluctuate and co-move within individual lives.

The diary results supported the competition pathway. On days when women felt more like a body than a person, they engaged in more intrasexual competition, with daily self-objectification significantly predicting daily competitive behavior, and competitive behavior in turn predicting greater loneliness that day. A within-person mediation effect emerged, meaning the chain from self-objectification through competition to loneliness held at the level of daily fluctuation, and it survived statistical controls for trait self-objectification, self-perceived attractiveness, social desirability, age, relationship status, and subjective social status. Self-objectification also predicted stronger romantic interpretation bias on a given day, but RIB showed no association with loneliness and no mediating effect, leaving the second hypothesis unfulfilled even in this ecologically valid setting.

Study 2 moved from correlation to causation. Nearly 200 Chinese heterosexual women were randomly assigned either to write about internalizing the gaze on their appearance or, in the control condition, to recall a visit to a functional place such as a bookstore or supermarket. The manipulation succeeded: primed women reported thinking more about how their bodies looked to others. Those women also displayed stronger intrasexual competition tendencies, as measured by the Intrasexual Competition Scale, and stronger romantic interpretation bias, assessed with cartoon scenarios of ambiguous male-female interactions. Using bootstrapped mediation analysis, the researchers found that self-objectification caused higher state loneliness, and that this effect was carried by increased competitive tendencies, a mediation that remained significant even with relationship satisfaction and the full set of controls included. Again, RIB rose but did nothing to reduce loneliness.

The failure of RIB to soothe loneliness is arguably the study’s most provocative finding. The authors suggest that, like the sex-is-power belief, which research shows does not translate into real political or economic power, romantic interpretation bias may offer brief psychological solace without generating genuine social resources. They also note structural realities that could blunt any benefit: adult women’s networks contain relatively few men, so even heightened romantic interpretation has limited opportunity to affect daily loneliness, and women who doubt that platonic cross-sex friendships are possible may forgo valuable sources of connection. The researchers acknowledge a further measurement caveat: in the diary study, reports of romantic interest from real men could sometimes reflect accurate perception rather than cognitive bias, particularly for more attractive women who genuinely receive more attention.

The practical implications cut against common intuitions. Because loneliness predicts serious mental and physical health problems, and because the loneliness of self-objectified women appears to flow through rivalry with other women, the authors argue that interventions should target the systemic forces that normalize sexual objectification, such as oppressive thinness ideals, and should encourage women to view same-sex relationships cooperatively rather than competitively. Educators and clinicians, they add, should help women interpret men’s intentions more accurately, fostering non-romance-focused cross-sex interactions instead of relying on romantic illusions that the data show provide no relief. Future work, the authors suggest, could extend the interpersonal framework to men’s self-objectification, which may likewise shape competitive behavior and bias interpretations of women’s interest.

Subject of Research: The interpersonal mechanisms linking women's self-objectification to loneliness, focusing on intrasexual competition and romantic interpretation bias

Article Title: Reframing Self-Objectified Women’s Loneliness Experience: The Mediating Roles of Intrasexual Competition and Romantic Interpretation Bias

Article References: Dong, Y., & Wang, X. (2026). Reframing Self-Objectified Women’s Loneliness Experience: The Mediating Roles of Intrasexual Competition and Romantic Interpretation Bias. Archives of Sexual Behavior. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-026-03533-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10508-026-03533-y

Keywords: self-objectification, loneliness, intrasexual competition, romantic interpretation bias, women, objectification theory, social psychology, diary study, cross-sex interaction, mate competition, body surveillance, Archives of Sexual Behavior