All women are Attention Whøres. Your mother, your sister, the girl at the bar and the wife you've been married to for 20 years are all attention seeking. Some to a greater and some to a lesser degree, but it is an integral part of the feminine gender to desire attention. This isn't to say men are immune to vanity or attention seeking, but it is to say that the utility of attention is far more integral to female acculturation than for men.
From a very early age attention is a primary reinforcer for girls. As I've mentioned in few prior posts, part of my psychology education included child psych and my favorite subject has always been my ever-present 7 y.o. (at the time) daughter when doing case studies. To understand the feminine attention dynamic you have to go back into a female childhood socialization. There are countless studies that show attention-as-reinforcer has it's roots in biomechanics. I should also add that there really is no absolute nature, or absolute nurture dyanmic so a definite amount of socialization and learned behavior intrinsically reinforces attention as rewarding, but the root of attention seeking behavior begins in female biology.
A few things to start with
In the same respect that men posess testosterone as their primary, gender-defining hormone, women's bodies produce estrogen and oxytocin in larger volume. Studies have shown both these hormones foster feelings of nurturing as a primary feminine trait for parental caring and oxytocin is a precursor for feelings of trust and comfort. Cross cultural studies also indicate that girl babies are picked up and given affection 4 times as often as are boy infants and toddlers. In addition, studies of pre-adolescent and adolescent degrees of attention to both genders by parents always favors the female child. Correlation of this would indicate the rewarding benefit of attetion to the female as well as a behavioral modeling influence directed towards masculine independence by socializing boys to not be dependent upon the reinforcing aspect of attention.
Female Socialization
Little girls fight in an entirely different realm than do boys. Where boys fight in a the physical realm, girls fight in the psychological. That's not to exclude girls from actually coming to blows, but far more common is the occurance of psychological combat and in no realm is this more effective than the denial of reinforcing attention within a female social collective.
Little girls have a predictable tendency to form small girl-only collectives or 'peer clutches' from the time they are introduced into kindergarten. This social collective progressively becomes a rewarding and reinforcing social unit, locking out those not included and nurturing those who are. This dynamic can and often does last through high school (i.e. Cliques, etc.), into college and into mature adulthood, but the commonality within all variations of this clutch is the qualifying influence of the affirming power of attention.
Should one member of the clutch offend another, it is the hierarchy of an individual member's ability to maintain the most attention that generally determines the victor in the dispute. The worst consequence of such a dispute being ostracization from the group - thus the absoulte denial of this reaffirming attention-as-reinforcement. The clutch develops a hirearchy of influence depending upon each girl's ability to attract and maintain reinforcing attention. This attention can be from any source; within the group, outside the group and opposite sex attention becomes the most valuable after puberty.
A capacity to attract attention denotes social rank within the peer clutch. The more attractive the girl, the more popular she bcomes and the more influence she weilds. This isn't to say that any particular female cognizantly realizes this directly. However, when ostracized from the collective, this capacity for attracting attention in a high degree makes her despised. The attention can still be beneficial for affirmation (i.e. realized jealousy), it's just that the intent that has changed.
Thus, women use attention not only for their own affirmation - individually and collectively - but also to do combat with each other. Far more damaging than physical fighting is the long term psychological impact of denying this reinforcement, or better still, delegitimizing or disqualifying a girl/woman's capacity to attract this attention. Combine this with a woman's natural, and innately higher agency to communicate both verbally and non-verbally (i.e covert communications) and you can see the potential this has in damaging a rival. Attention is the coin of the realm in girl-world. It is literally a form of currency.
This might explain a woman's natural propensity to gossip. When a woman attacks the respectability and character of another ("she's such a slut"), in essence, she is assualting the woman's agency for garniering attention by delegitimizing it.
The ticking clock
Now lets add to this complex attention construct the universal female recognition that, as a woman ages her sexual marketability decreases. Bear in mind that a woman's primary agency for attracting this reinforcing attention is her her sexuality and physical beauty as rewarded by men. This then fosters an imperative for this attention-combat to intensify as a woman reaches her 'expiration date'. In the last 30 years there has been a definite push through the feminization of society to de-emphasize this natural propensity and/or to divert this affirmation to be derived from other sources (i.e. career, independence, internal rewards, etc.). However it has yet to be fully (if ever) realized within western female-centric culture. All one needs do is tally the countless number of beauty products and the methods used to advertise them in popular media. 90% puls of all advertising specific to 'career minded' women is still for beauty products. Irrespective of popular socialization, this attention dynamic will not be ignored.
