" Indirect aggression is characterized by a clique of relatively powerless (compared with their male counterparts) girls or women who exert power “indirectly” by bullying, gossiping about, slandering, and shaming one girl or woman so that she will be shunned by her female intimates, thrown out of her college sorority, perhaps fired from her job, divorced by her husband, and definitely dropped from the A-list of partygoers. Gossip is a chief weapon of indirect aggression. Slandering another girl or woman (“she’s a slut,” “she’s … different,” “she really thinks she’s something”) leads to her being ostracized by her female friends and peers, a punishment that girls and women experience as being put into solitary confinement or as a social death. "

― Phyllis Chesler , Woman's Inhumanity to Woman