Expanding on the extended phenotype (Professor Richard Dawkins)
As a result of 4 phases of feminism & the rise of technology replacing manual labor over the last 100 years, women are being born with wider shoulders, smaller hips, they are becoming taller and producing higher levels of testosterone and lower levels of prolactin. In both men an women, cortisol levels are increasing as women are literally turning into men and men are literally becoming more feminine with smaller bone structures, lower sperm counts, lower levels of testosterone, weaker muscles & less competitiveness and spirit. This is celebrated in western society as Female empowerment & Toxic masculinity, but masculinity is not being destroyed, it is being adopted biologically in women and bread out of men.
Celebrating masculine traits in women is not removing masculinity from society — it is encouraging women to become more like men, both behaviourally and biologically. From an evolutionary psychology perspective, this creates tension because men and women evolved for different reproductive and survival strategies over hundreds of thousands of years.
Women are biologically designed around motherhood, bonding, and long-term offspring survival. Higher estrogen, prolactin, and oxytocin levels support nurturing behaviour, emotional attunement, pair bonding, and infant care. Women also evolved physically different bodies for reproduction: wider pelvises for childbirth, higher body fat percentages, different pain-processing systems, and less dense skeletal structures than men. Even neurologically, female brains tend to show greater interconnectivity between hemispheres, which is associated with social cognition and emotional processing, whereas male brains evolved more toward task specialization, spatial processing, and competitive behaviour.
Men evolved differently because male reproductive success historically depended more on status, competition, dominance, risk-taking, and resource acquisition. Testosterone drives much of this behaviour. Aggression, ambition, physicality, stoicism, and hierarchical thinking were adaptive traits for males competing against other males for access to mates and territory.
Modern culture increasingly rewards women for adopting these masculine behaviours: career obsession, competitiveness, emotional detachment, promiscuity, dominance, delayed motherhood, and rejection of dependency or nurturing roles. Evolutionary psychology would argue that when women are pushed toward male behavioural strategies, hormonal systems adapt accordingly. Chronic stress, competition, delayed reproduction, and status-seeking environments are associated with elevated cortisol and testosterone while reducing oxytocin and prolactin expression. This is part of the extended phenotype: environment and culture feeding back into biological expression.
The result is not equality in the evolutionary sense, but convergence. Women become more behaviourally masculine while men are simultaneously discouraged from traditional masculine expression. Society then produces two groups increasingly disconnected from the traits that originally complemented one another.
This becomes especially visible in modern dating culture. Dating apps have distorted female mate selection mechanisms by exposing women to an artificially inflated pool of high-status males. Evolutionarily, female hypergamy — attraction toward higher-status mates — once operated within small tribal groups. Technology has amplified this instinct globally. Now the top percentage of men receive the majority of female attention, leaving average men increasingly excluded from reproduction and relationships.
This creates downstream neurochemical effects. Both sexes experience rising loneliness, lower serotonin stability, anxiety, and attachment insecurity. Casual sex culture further destabilizes pair bonding. Women typically experience larger oxytocin increases during sex, making them biologically more inclined toward emotional attachment after intimacy. Men, however, evolved to bond more strongly through loyalty, protection, shared hardship, and long-term commitment rather than sex itself.
This mismatch creates emotional asymmetry in hookup culture. Many men in one-night stands pursue purely physical gratification with minimal emotional investment. From an evolutionary perspective, this resembles short-term mating psychology detached from pair-bonding instincts. Sex becomes increasingly aggressive, impersonal, and performative because the emotional framework surrounding it has been stripped away. Men often behave more violently or mechanically during casual encounters precisely because they do not psychologically perceive the woman as a bonded partner or future mother of their children.
The broader consequence is declining trust between the sexes, collapsing birth rates, weaker family structures, and rising psychological dissatisfaction despite material abundance. Evolutionary psychology suggests humans are attempting to override millions of years of sexually specialized adaptation with modern ideological models, but biology does not disappear simply because culture changes.