Femininity is Fake, But Masculinity is Real

Society suppresses masculinity, but invents femininity

Photo by Monika Kozub on Unsplash

In 2013, I spent my summer nights sitting on the floor of my new house, assembling IKEA furniture and watching trash TV. I had finally paid off my student loans, paid off my alimony obligations, and sold my junky starter home to buy my very own Kryptogal Dream House. I got to pick the funky 70s-era architecture that everyone else hated, paint the walls whatever color I liked, eat whatever I wanted for dinner without a negotiation, and watch whatever I wanted on TV. I was in utter heaven.

Naturally, I took the opportunity to do all the things I never could when I was living with others, like leaving the bathroom door open or walking around in my underwear or having dinner at midnight. And this included watching TV I could never convince a male housemate to watch.

One night, I clicked on HBO and a documentary called “Downtown Girls: The Hookers Of Honolulu” was on. PERFECT.

Except it wasn’t what I expected. The hookers were all transexuals, as they used to be called (and the documentary had originally been released in 2005). They were all born male, and were in various stages of transition, from having had full sexual re-assignment surgery, to having breast implants and hormones, but also a penis, to having no intention at all of ever doing re-assignment surgery. And they were all very feminine with their makeup and hair and dress, but were various levels of convincing in “passing” as women, from virtually undetectable to obviously a male.

Before I watched this documentary, I had almost no exposure to anything relating to trans people, other than some jokes in movies and being vaguely aware that there was some type of fetish for “trannies” in porn and prostitution. I doubt I had yet heard the concept “transgender” as opposed to “transsexual.” It was not yet a political issue, at least in my universe.

The documentary was fascinating for several reasons, including the subjects’ explanations for how they were able to trick their customers who didn’t know they were natal women…including the one who still had a penis, who claimed she just “tucked it” and then had anal sex while the customer believed it was vaginal sex. That did not seem possible or comprehensible to me.

And they talked about how for many of their customers, they did know, but they didn’t want to acknowledge that they knew, so the whole transaction was a bit of mutual play-acting, where both the prostitute and the john would pretend the john didn’t know the prostitute was not a natal woman…even though their activities would often directly involve doing things with the prostitute’s penis.  As they explained it to the HBO crew, there are a lot of paying male customers who really want the female package and clothes and boobs and mannerisms, just with a penis.  Wow. Weird.

But what was ultimately the most striking thing about the documentary, which I just couldn’t get past, was how freaking feminine they all were. I’d never seen anything like it. The way they walked. The way they stood. The way they gestured. The way they talked. The way they giggled. The way they sat.

I had never in my life met an actual human woman that was as feminine in behavior as these transgender prostitutes. Not even close. I kept thinking to myself that I would have to take acting and voice coaching lessons for YEARS to ever be able to achieve a level of feminine behavior that even slightly matched their performance, if it was possible at all. I kept trying to imagine any woman I knew in real life, even the most girly ones, being able to pull it off. I couldn’t think of anyone that was even within the realm of being so feminine.  

The transgender hooker’s performances were some kind of otherworldly embodiment of femininity that I could not comprehend or understand. What exactly was it they were DOING?? I couldn’t identify it. Obviously it involves a breathy girlish voice, but it wasn’t just that, it was something else. A center of gravity, a posture, an essence. Like they were enacting a purely platonic form of feminine mannerisms, but often not even in a convincingly female body. It drove me nuts.

Eventually I just came to the conclusion that men are WAY BETTER at being feminine than women, and left it at that.

But a few years later, when transgender issues started becoming a thing, and “transgender women are women” a mantra, it never sat well with me. And I realized why.

The Feminine is Not Female

See, I have always known that what is “feminine” is actually just artifice. Most of the attributes that are considered “feminine” are entirely artificial performances put on for the benefit of men. None of them are natural or inherent to being female. In fact, women bitch about the burden of femininity constantly, and we find it to be an enormous burden and really resent it. But they’re the things that make men love us, so we do them.

I’m talking about painting our faces, bleaching and removing our body hair, pitching our voices upwards to sound more sweet, tottering around on tiny stilt-shoes, pushing up or padding out our boobs, pretending to be innocent, walking in the way that makes your ponytail swing side to side instead of stay flat, wearing clothes that exaggerate the parts men like and hide the ones they don’t, porn actresses who SMILE while supposedly sexually aroused (which no one does), all that stuff.

These feminine attributes are in contrast to those I deem “womanly”, which are natural and inherent to females, but often suppressed or hidden, because men mostly find them completely disgusting, or at best distasteful. I mean periods, and menopause, and birthing a placenta, and armpit and pubic hair, and the murderous ferocity of maternal love, and our erotic impulses, and intuitions, and the ugliness of what a real orgasm looks and sounds like, and all kinds of things that all women experience as a result of being in a female body. Which are mostly things that men don’t want to ever have to think about or look at or deal with.

Many men will be thinking, that’s bullshit, MY wife/daughter/girlfriend is super feminine and she loves being feminine and it’s natural to her…kryptogal is just a mannish man-hating dyke. Except, they’re wrong. First of all, I appear to be perfectly feminine, I know how to play the game as well as anyone. It’s not like it’s hard, it’s just a pain in the ass. Of course I do those things, because I am ultra, super-duper straight and unfortunately for me, love men and men only.

But more importantly, just think about it for a moment. If femininity was natural to women, then why are they universally less feminine when no men are around? Would it not be the other way around, if it was natural? Without men, they could be free to express their TRUE feminine nature. But it’s the opposite. A man without any women around is even more like a man. Women in women’s prisons act much more like men, while men in prisons act like barbarian chimpanzees.

In college, I lived in a studio attic apartment above a dozen sorority girls who lived below. As long as there were no boys around, the hair is up in a bun, the sweat pants are on, they’re comfortable and they’re being themselves, which is not feminine. Only when a boy appeared would they all go running for the bathroom to get their makeup on and change into something cute. No shame, I’m the same way.

And anyone who has raised a daughter has watched the drastic change that occurs around the time she becomes conscious of boys. Pre-pubescent girls think farts are hilarious and participate in belching contests and are equally as disgusting as boys in all ways. And then puberty hits and all that vanishes overnight (while the boys carry on).  

If femininity were inherently female, then lesbians would be the most feminine women of all, given they live in the most female world. Yet they’re the least feminine. (I realize that’s a stereotype, but stereotypes exist for a reason, who cares).

And that’s because all “femininity” is completely artificial and a performance to pander to men and get them to be nice to us or fall in love or at least not keep us in cages or take away our vote or something. Because men love femininity, it’s for them. Women don’t really like most masculinity. Yes, we like a hot, strong male body. But we hate your engine revving, and your pissing contests, and your violence, and your obsession with weapons, and how you turn literally fucking everything into a competition or a contest. We try to shame you out of much of your masculinity, and it sort of works just barely. While you shame us INTO our femininity and good God how we burn with resentment over it.

I mean, we really absolutely hate that we have to be feminine for you, and you guys just don’t understand this. You think that’s just the awful feminists. The cunty man-haters. It’s why you want a nice trad wife who just LOOOVES being feminine. Guess what? She doesn’t. It’s all bullshit. No woman likes it. She’s just putting more chips on betting she can get more out of you, faster, with less effort.  

But lesbians don’t have much reason to pander to men, hence no reason to do all the fakery of femininity. Which is why lesbians truly are superior human beings and generally incredibly competent all around. They’re not wasting so much mental space and time having to engage in total artifice every single day. Strand a bunch of lesbians on an island together, and they will get shit done, while also being nice to each other, and everything will be perfectly fine.

Strand a bunch of non-lesbian women on an island, and they’ll spend so much time trying to figure out ways to criticize each other’s ideas while making it sound like a compliment, sharing their mutual traumas, and trying to convince each other that they don’t actually disagree on anything that they’ll barely have time to cover themselves with a palm frond or eat a coconut, while the lesbians would’ve constructed 5 huts. And they won’t look much like women anymore, by the time they’re rescued.  

And strand a bunch of guys on an island, and they will have engaged in 43 mini-battles for dominance, invented a series of different sized hats or badges that show everyone’s rank and how much tribute they have to pay to the guy just above them, built the winner a special chair, murdered or beat up some of the losers or assigned them to cleaning duty, built an arsenal of weapons along with their shelters, and will be planning not just how to escape but how to possibly conquer the next island over or fight off anyone else who tries to take their island.

Sorry, I do love my stereotypes.

But what you see here is that that men get MORE masculine, without social norms. Society restrains their fullest masculine expression. That is not at all the case with women. Without society, we don’t get more feminine, we get less so.

Masculinity is natural to men, and society tries to contain it. They harbor fantasies of being the barbarians they wish they could be, and they resent women for suppressing their natural nature.

Women harbor fantasies about all men going blind so that we can finally cut our hair short and never have to wear makeup again. And we deeply resent men for motivating us to spend so much time, money, and energy putting on a fake ass performance of being “feminine”, because most of you make it clear how grossed out and repulsive you find women who don’t.

Don’t believe me? Check out this post by a beautiful young women, full of despair at the burden of having to appear beautiful, how she can never enjoy her life because of this burden, with hundreds of likes and dozens of comments from women thanking her for putting it into words.

am i hot enough for a good life?

This is, I believe, one of the reasons that men and women have a hard time understanding each other. Men assume that women feel like they do, with their masculine feelings seeming natural and inherent – why wouldn’t it be the same for women?

But no, the women say, our gender roles aren’t natural at all, we’re oppressed, we’re forced into this! We’re so mad at you for making us have to live like this!

Who is forcing you?! Say the men. You do it yourselves, we don’t make you.

It’s the patriarchy, women respond.  

It’s not the Patriarchy, it’s Because Men are Superficial Jerks and Women Want to Be Loved

It’s not the patriarchy. As much as it might feel nice to have an amorphous intangible magical force for us women to blame.

It’s just that most women are attracted to men and want to attract one. And even if they don’t, they at least want men to be nice to them, or not be awful to them. And it’s blatantly apparent what men like to see with a woman, and what makes them disgusted and cruel and sometimes even actively hostile to the point of arousing fury. So we do the thing and put on the artifice that gets men to be nice. But we don’t experience it as natural, and it will always feel like a terrible, horrible burden. This is why many women somewhat look forward to being old crones, when they can finally just give up and not have to do it anymore, and people will still be polite, because they’re little old ladies.

It's a problem the other way around, too. Women want to believe that men are ALSO oppressed by social expectations. That they’re not all barbarians. That deep down they’re just under terrible pressure to live up to macho standards and that it doesn’t come naturally. So they say things like “the patriarchy hurts men too”. Except it doesn’t catch on, and doesn’t resonate with men, and they don’t care.

Because masculinity is natural, and femininity is fake.

And this is why so many women are so offended by a man saying he’s a woman because he feels like one. Because what he really means is that he feels feminine. That he loves femininity. That he wants to be feminine.

But actual women hate having to be feminine. We burn with resentment about it. If we could be loved by men without it, we’d toss femininity in the trash pile and never give it a second thought. Yes, we very rarely, like for a few hours or days our whole life, revel in it on those few days it worked so well that we hypnotized everyone in the whole room or arena and everyone loved us. But like, that’s NOTHING compared to the years and decades of daily drudgery, hiding our womanliness and pretending to be feminine.

Oh, how most women dream of being loved without having to be feminine. It’s our utopia. Our secret shame. Most women will not like to admit any of this, because even in ADMITTING you hate having to be feminine, a man might hear you, and then he won’t like you anymore. We can’t take the chance, he has to believe it’s true. But it eats away at us, this performance, this artifice, this lifetime of faking, just to be loved, and it’s even worse that we have to hide it and pretend to like it. Because men need the performance to be genuine, to seem natural. If it doesn’t seem totally natural, it’s almost as gross and disappointing as if she didn’t bother trying to be feminine at all.  

So when a man claims to be a woman, when what he really means is that he feels feminine, it gives the lie to his claim right away. All that is “feminine” are the things that males love about women, the vast bulk of which are completely artificial. Being feminine isn’t what makes us women, it’s what we resent the most about being women.

What makes us women are the things that are womanly, which are the things no trans woman ever has to experience, and probably doesn’t want to. What makes us womanly are things that men mostly don’t like, which gross them out.

And it really, really chafes when a man, who loves femininity (as they all do), claims that he loves the performance invented for men SO MUCH that he wants to embody it himself, and that the artifice somehow actually makes him a woman. He steps into this thing that tortures us, that was created for the pleasure of men, and claims that that’s all there is to being a woman. He could not portray a greater misunderstanding of what it is like to actually be female if he tried.

Did Gay Men Invent Femininity?

And also, after watching the Honolulu Hookers, I want to suggest that men probably came up with femininity in the first place. Because I’ve just never seen any actual female be that good at performing femininity, as those trans hookers were. I’m just not sure that women could have come up with it ourselves. And one also doesn’t see much evidence of what we call “feminine” in more primitive human cultures that also claim to not have gay men (you do see plenty of womanliness though).

It occurs to me that gay men have forever ruled fashion houses and runways and beauty salons and the general industry of female beauty. Because no one knows more than a gay man about what men like AND how to attract men. They’re the only ones on both sides of that coin.

So yeah, I’ll just say it. My new theory is that almost everything that is considered feminine was actually invented by gay men, at some point.  They created it, and they gave it to women, and women adopted it, and it works. And a few men adopted it too. And the men are better at it.

I know that sounds wild, but just consider it. If it wasn’t homosexual males who came up with it, then why are they so much better at it than actual females? And why are gay men so good at teaching women how to be feminine? Like, they’re better at teaching women than women are. And why does your standard transexual hooker out-feminine any actual female homemaker with five kids? I’m just saying. I don’t know, maybe that’s going a bit far. Just a theory.

But I mean, we know there’s a significant market among male customers for a person who looks and acts feminine in every single regard…the boobs, the lips, the hair, the makeup, the voice…except for having a penis. I mean, just MAYBE that’s because gay men actually invented everything feminine because they’re super good at knowing what men like? And that some men even like that stuff so much that they’re totally fine it’s performed by a male with male genitals? Better than some gross womanly female, right?! And that femininity is therefore super gay? No? Maybe? Okay, that’s a little out there.

But like, has there EVER been a market for, or erotic interest in a person who looks and seems totally masculine in every regard…super tall, wide shoulders, ripped abs, deep voice, giant hands, big biceps…just with a vagina?? I could be wrong, but I strongly suspect that image is universally repulsive to everyone. There is something much worse about Conan the Barbarian with a vagina, than Jessica Rabbit with a penis.

Oh, I can’t wait for someone to send me a link to the Barbarians with Vags fetish site. Sigh. You sick people will come up with anything, won’t you?

Alright, sorry if I’ve taken this one too far. But I’ve 70% convinced myself that femininity is totally gay. And besides this last part, the rest is true.

Caveats:

1.      I realize that transgender men and homosexual men are not the same thing and that sexual orientation is separate from gender identity. But the ultra-feminine trans women are the ones who are attracted to men, so they’re both males attracted to males. The trans women who are attracted to women are awkward and bad at femininity, just like plenty of females all.

2.      I know there are some traits associated with women that don’t really fall into the category of “feminine” as I’ve defined it, nor necessarily of “womanliness”. Things like being empathetic or interested in horoscopes or being passive aggressive. I didn’t know what to do with these and didn’t want to distract from my nice, neat theory, so I left them out. It’s hard to tell sometimes what is culturally dependent or not – horoscope interest obviously is. And being passive aggressive is just the natural behavior of the individual that has relatively less power in a given situation and more to risk from a direct confrontation. So admittedly these traits make my theory less elegant, but I also think there are not really very many of these. And mostly you can stick them in the bin with womanly qualities. Which I guess men don’t universally loathe. But they don’t particularly like most of them.

3.     I also realize that plenty of gay men are not at all feminine, and they’re not all flaming fashion queens. I’m not saying all gay men. I’m just saying SOME gay men came up with all this stuff. The queenish ones.

4. I also recognize that there are a minority of truly excellent men who love and appreciate women even when they’re not doing the feminine artifice. The ones who think makeup and high heels are silly and that an all-natural hippy style woman with leg hair is totally attractive. I applaud you. You’re the best. Truly, three cheers for the lucky woman who manages to bag you, and three cheers to you for not being hypnotized by a bunch of fake smoke and mirrors. For being man enough not to be such a milquetoast little baby that you’re afraid of a full bush. It takes a true barbarian to love a lady who looks like a cave woman, so I fully applaud you. I’m totally serious, you’re superior to most men the way lesbians are superior to most women. Actually, maybe you and the lesbians should be the ones to go to an island together and then you can populate a new group of all natural, superhuman barbarians, and eventually rule over the rest of us pathetic dopes, who are all so dazzled and cowed by showmanship. It’ll be a piece of cake, once most men have moved on from actual females and are spending all their time sending tokens to 100% feminine, 0% womanly AI avatars.