@DarkKnight,
Hey Chase, can you extrapolate on differences between now and back then? With all the exposure kids have these days to the whole wide world I would have thought social skills are increasing, but I too see more weirdness with people in general. Perhaps shyness even.
There's more awkwardness, with girls less sure how to deal with flirtation, or more likely to flirt back in more stilted, less smooth ways.
The level of "confident femininity" has declined and younger women in general seem to feel less sure how to act.
It's not a new process. If you compare Millennial women with the women you see in older cinema, they (Millennials) were clearly a lot less confident in their femininity, though they were better off than the latest crop of Gen Z girls are.
It appears to me there is a progressive trend in women over the decades of:
- Increased uncertainty around flirtation
- Increased hesitancy around acting feminine
- Higher likelihood to respond with more male / androgynous responses
- Less of an attempt to act 'classy' / more embracing of 'crudeness is cool'
- Increased discomfort around people who act classy (implying she is simply not able to adapt to behave that way at all; i.e., it is not even within her social repertoire)
- Increased discomfort surrounding sex (guilt, shame, blame, fear, etc.)
- Less tact in talking about sex (will just come right out and say stuff with zero feminine mystique)
- Worse at carrying on conversations
- Worse at asking other people about themselves
- Worse at being interesting
- Worse at communicating their wants and needs
- Worse at understanding/predicting what other people want
- More likely to try to lecture you on random things autistically
There are studies out there claiming that social skills are not declining. Namely, this study of 2010 kids vs. 1998 kids:
Although the study has an asterisk noting "There is a notable exception—social skills are lower for children who access online gaming and social networking many times a day".. but that is most people today, 13 years after this 2010 study was conducted.
There are self-reports by Gen Zers claiming they think their own social skills have gone down:
McDonald’s Workforce Preparedness Study shows importance of soft skills development in first jobs
hospitalitytech.com
Maybe part of what it might be is not a
decline but a
shift:
Away from social skills revolving around clear sex roles and cooperative, classy communication, and toward androgynous/unisex social roles and self-focused communication / self-promotion / bragging ("OMG I am SUCH a victim, look at how
victimized I am! Other people have it SO much better! Hey you shouldn't say that thing you were saying, you need to say the right things and hold correct positions.").
This is not just women. This trend seems to be affecting both sexes if you ask me, toward more androgynous, self-focused communication rather than sex role specific other-focused communication.
There has also been a progressive simplification in communication going on for at least a century in American English.
If you read novels from the early 20th Century and look at the verbal courtships then, courtship from back then is filled with layered hints and indirectness and implications and suggestion that is simply gone from modern courtship. You can read books or watch cinema from basically every era and see the decline in courtship complexity. Compare literature from the 1910s with film and TV shows from the 1960s; courtship is far more direct in the 1960s than it was in the 1910s, though it still had some layers of indirectness and hinting/suggestiveness. Then compare that with 2010s and 2020s courtship and even if you are running indirect game you still need to use very simple language and be clear about your interest (obvious qualifications, statements of intent, etc.) or else the other person just doesn't even get it and the courtship dies.
I think a large part of this is the decline in attention spans and the increasingly hectic pace of modern life. There simply is not time to stand around and have a complex courtship with layer upon layer of hidden meanings. You just have to get to the point. Now the competition is not around eloquence but efficiency: can you communicate all the right things in all the right ways before the countdown timer is up?
Now you mention this, usually the girls who have made this comment are pretty tall women, and with tall I mean approximating 1.80 meters. Perhaps a correlation there that they feel less girly due to their size?
Ah, yep, that'll do it.
Tall girls feel less girly.
They also have a superiority/inferiority thing going on.
They know they're objectively more attractive due to their height.
They also know a lot of men are very intimidated by them, and meanwhile the guys they like are perfectly fine going for girls a lot shorter than themselves. Can almost give them a slight tint of cautious protectiveness about themselves.
It could be that as much as it is "copycatting male braggadacio."
Chase
