The article is devoted to identifying the psychologically real meaning of the word "femininity" in the linguistic consciousness of Russian-speaking youth, taking into account the gender factor. The relevance of the study is determined by the transformation of ideas about gender roles that occurred in the 21st century, and the need to clarify the content of basic gender-marked concepts in the modern linguistic worldview. The object of the study is the linguistic consciousness of Russian-speaking youth. The subject of the research is the structure of the psycholinguistic meaning of the word "femininity" and its gender characteristics. The aim of the work is to determine the psychologically real meaning of the word "femininity" and to identify its integral and differential components in male and female associative fields. The material for the study was the data from a free associative experiment conducted among Russian-speaking respondents aged 17 to 30 using electronic questionnaires. The methods used in the work included free associative experiments, quantitative analysis, semantic interpretation, and comparative analysis. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the attempt to analyze the gender difference in the content of representations of femininity among respondents who formed their ideas about gender roles during the emergence of a pluralistic model of gender. As a result, it was found that in the associative fields of respondents of both genders, the aesthetic component related to perceptions of beauty is dominant; however, the structure and degree of detail of this component differ. In the female subcorpus, the associative field is characterized by greater specification, while in the male corpus, the component is represented by the abstract noun "beauty" without clarifying parameters. There is a greater role of behavioral and personal characteristics in the male subcorpus. The presence of a reflective layer of meaning is identified in the female corpus, actualizing the attribute of insincerity. It is concluded that the psychologically real meaning of the word "femininity" does not completely coincide with its lexicographic description and includes both normatively established traits and additional components dependent on the gender parameter of the respondent.
Varvara Sergeevna Zababurkina (Sun,) studied this question.