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Butch and Femme Women

            
             Butch women have been characterized as traditionally masculine in their personality and femme women as traditionally feminine. In humans, men tend to exhibit lower levels of parental investment in offspring than women do (Low, 1989). Women must incur the costs associated with internal fertilization, placentation, and gestation in order to reproduce. A study is proposed to examine the differentiation between femme and butch lesbians in sociosexuality. Participants will complete a questionnaire that includes sexual identity questions and the sociosexuality inventory. It is predicted that butch lesbians will have a more unrestricted and therefore higher sociosexuality than femme lesbians.
             Past research on partner preferences of homosexual and heterosexual men and women suggests that lesbians exhibit a unique configuration of partner preferences (Deaux and Hanna 1984; Gonzales and Meyers 1993; Groom and Pennebaker 2005). Bassett and colleagues (2000) have found that femme lesbians may pursue romantic relationships similar to heterosexual women, while butch lesbians similar to heterosexual males. Extended research that supports these hypotheses also suggests that butch lesbians may be physiologically similar to heterosexual men due to prenatal androgen exposure (Bassett et al. 2001; Brown et al. 2002; Pearce et al. 1996; Singh et al. 1999). Brown and colleagues (2002) support these suggestions with their finding of finger length differences in butch and femme lesbians in which butch lesbians show smaller deviations between the two finger lengths of the right hand. Past research has shown that finger length is associated to prenatal androgen exposure that results in men having longer ring fingers than women (Manning et al. 1998). Singh and colleagues (1999) examined a study where testosterone levels of subjects were analyzed from saliva samples. Results presented that those who rated themselves as being more butch than their partners had higher salivary testosterone levels than their partners.


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