Am I misunderstanding something? Wouldn't she be better positioned to resist the effects of the male? She has had 22 years worth of advances, and is dealing with a "primitive" male.
There are two scenarios that could explain this.
One, the fact that a particular trait is present in a current generation only tells us that it is superior relative to just one iteration prior, and not necessarily any more. There is no rhyme or reason to evolution. In fact, it is almost an evolutionary disadvantage to incorporate traits that were once fit, but no longer are, as it likely costs more energy, diminishing efforts against current threats.
A non-biological example of this would be US foreign policy. We are very well positioned to battle the Soviet Union in a Cold War turned hot. That threat is no longer with us, but we're left with strategies and equipment that are useful in that sort of situation. Today, our problems in the Middle East are not helped by the fact that we have thousands of costly nukes and tanks (not suited for urban warfare and occupation in Iraq and Afhanistan!). I'm no military buff, but I think that this illustrates the point.
Another scenario could be that the relationship between clingy males vs. females is much like that of a predator vs. prey[1]. Very clingy males result, successfully, in clingy progeny, resulting in more dying females, resulting in fewer clingy progeny, resulting in more females, resulting in clinginess being more successful, and so on...
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotka%E2%80%93Volterra_equation
Also remember that the Russians haven't gotten rid of their nukes yet...
In the case of war with the Soviet Union, I'm guessing that there was heavy emphasis on dealing with nuclear war or full-scale land combat in Europe, with the primary objective of beheading and toppling the Soviet control structure.
By contrast, in Iraq, our goal is (apparently) to occupy and subdue the entire region, which is a different, difficult problem.
PS: This is an unclassified summery I got while working on software that's designed to estimate casualties in both human lives and materials during conflict. It was developed because most of their existing models vastly overestimated US casualties in GW1 and this better estimated what happens when you take out air defenses and communication networks quickly.
If there's no distinct improvement from iteration to iteration, that means there could possibly be (and should be) iterations of males that are less harmful to the females than the current time frame males. In other words, some set of iterations before or after, should mimic conditions like one iteration prior to that of the female - correct?
Now it can be easily argued that culture itself is also cyclical (fashion, promiscuity, cultural rules all rotate), but it's definitely divorced from the pure animal kingdom.