SCIENCE!: American Women Are Becoming Less Feminine

Longtime Chateau guests know I’m keen to *preen* when the pretext is right. But sometimes even an egregious preening can’t sufficiently convey the tumescence of my stroked ego when SCIENCE! lands a study in my lap that grinds me to completion.

A recurrent theme at CH is the personal observation that American women are becoming less feminine. As it so happens, CH was right! A new study finds that, hey, American women are becoming less feminine.

Masculine and Feminine Traits on the Bem Sex-Role Inventory, 1993–2012: a Cross-Temporal Meta-Analysis

The Bem Sex-Role Inventory (BSRI) is one of Sandra Bem’s most notable contributions to feminist psychology, measuring an individual’s identification with traditionally masculine and feminine qualities. In a cross-temporal meta-analysis of U.S. college students’ scores on the BSRI (34 samples, N = 8,027), we examined changes in ratings on the Bem masculinity (M) and femininity (F) scales since the early 1990s. Additional analyses used data collected in a previous meta-analysis (Twenge 1997) to document changes since the BSRI’s inception in 1974. Our results reveal that women’s femininity scores have decreased significantly (d  = −.26) between 1993 and 2012, whereas their masculinity remained stable. No significant changes were observed for men. Expanded analyses of data from 1974 to 2012 (94 samples, N = 24,801) found that women’s M rose significantly (d  = .23), with no changes in women’s F, men’s M, and men’s F. Women’s androgyny scores showed a significant increase since 1974, but not since 1993. Men’s androgyny remained the same in both time periods. Our findings suggest that since the 1990s, U.S. college women have become less likely to endorse feminine traits as self-representative, potentially revealing a devaluation of traditional femininity. However, it is also possible that the scale items do not match modern gender stereotypes. Future research may need to update the BSRI to reflect current conceptions of gender.

This is yuge… (news, as well as study sample size.) The implications in the study’s findings about the transformation of the American sexual market are profound. If American women are becoming less feminine, then American men will find them less attractive, especially as long-term investment vehicles for marriage and family. And that is what the data show; the overall marriage rate is down and the age of first marriage is up, coinciding with the period during which women have lost their feminine charms.

Men are dropping out because women are leaning in. Way to go, feminist harpies!

In the big picture, female femininity has declined over the last generation or two because of feminist indoctrination and social signals encouraging and celebrating the abandonment of femininity.

In the bigger picture, widely and cheaply available birth control, abortion, obesity, processed food toxins, and female economic self-sufficiency have all conspired to denude women of their femininity and to impel women to adopt masculine posturing.

In the biggest picture, the loss of American women’s femininity is exactly what one would expect to see in a culture that is unmooring from its historical K-selected, predominantly White biomechanical foundation (patriarchal, high paternity certainty, slender women with low cock counts) and drifting toward an r-selected, increasingly nonWhite society (matriarchal, low paternity certainty, muscular and obese women with high cock counts) similar to the African sexual market norm, (where men more than anywhere else in the world are “dancing monkeys” for women and the women toil in the fields and bring home the bacon while crapping out kids from behind-the-bush trysts with multiple fathers).

When men’s sexuality is maximally restricted, and women’s sexuality is released of all constraints, the inevitable result is a dispiritingly corporate romantic market of supplicating male lackeys and aggro “slut positive” careergrrl chubsters whose very financial independence (government gibsmedats by any name) obviates the need to be more pleasing and feminine to attract beta male providers with tight resource sharing Game.

An unfeminine androgyne is the New World Woman, and she is letting men know they aren’t worth her effort to please, (and her unkempt vagina has seen lots of action DEAL WITH IT).

PS Would have loved to have seen this study controlled for race (if it hadn’t been). Mass invasion of nonWhites must certainly skew raw femininity/masculinity scores in one direction or another.

PPS Another SCIENCE! ❤ CH knob job: Storytelling ability increases a man’s attractiveness as a long-term romantic partner.