Tag: ideas

Masculinity As Absence

Also I don’t have a really good terminology for talking about the thing I’m about to talk about, but I think it’s kind of important, which is that like I think femininity and masculinity are defined kind of like this in this culture.

I don’t have good words for this, so bear with me, so there are things that aren’t exactly culturally defined masculinity or femininity, sets of stuff that are associated with masculinity and femininity but work in a slightly weird way.  So like masculinity is associated with force, toughness, violence, humor, logic, and so on.  Femininity is associated with aesthetics, nurture, diplomacy and so on.

I’m going to refer to these as Set A (force, toughness, etc) and Set B (aesthetics, nurture, diplomacy)

Anyway, I think and I think set A and set B exist independently, as in it’s not a sliding scale from one to the other.

Like you can have high set A and high set B, high set A and low set B, low set A and low set B, or none of either or medium amounts or any number of variations, the point is that they don’t correlate to each other.

BUT I think that masculinity in our society as it stands means having medium to high set A, and ideally no set B at all.

Whereas femininity is still considered femininity as long as you have high set B, and as long as that’s true you can actually have a fuck ton of set A.

I don’t think femininity is the absence of “masculine” set A characteristics, I think masculinity is the absence of femininity.

Femininity socially exists as a presence, you put a pink bow on anything and it becomes “girly” but you can add as many spikes to a lipstick tube as you want and it’s still feminine.  Masculinity is an absence. 

Am I making sense?

Androgyny seems to be “low to medium set A, little to no set B” because the presence of more than trace amounts of femininity makes something immediately get seen as feminine.

Remember that time I pissed off GOMI

By humorously pointing out similarities between Dove Real Beauty campaigns (and the idea of “average” woman/”wholesomeness” as ideal of beauty) to Nazi ideals of womanhood?

That was great.  I love how much finding entertaining connections between unrelated ideas upsets people, how the possibility of valuing something purely as “well isn’t that an interesting thought” makes people so terribly indignant.

Note: Sometimes I make posts connecting really odd things, not because I think they are in fact connected, but because I think the way I’ve managed to relate them is entertaining and “ooh isn’t that a fun idea” 

Like I have a whole long patter about rock n’ roll and the idea of the arcane nature of feminine sexuality, and how breasts and dicks are symbolically similar, and it’s a fun train of association, but it’s not actually universal truth, it’s just a fun series of ideas to play with.