May 14·edited May 14Liked by Kryptogal (Kate, if you like)
I think this is somewhat a semantics issue. Maybe we can break it down this way:
- Authentic womanhood -> womanliness (periods and stuff, as described above)
- Performative womanhood -> femininity
- Authentic manhood -> manliness
- Performative manhood -> gentlemanliness
Femininity and gentlemanliness are both performative, fake, tamed, less disgusting and somewhat submissive facets of man/womanhood created to cater the needs of the other sex in the courtship process.
If we had true gender equality, men would have similar issues with gentlemanliness as you have with femininity. However, it is not the case - femininity seems pervasive as you noted, while one can wonder if gentlemanliness is even a thing anymore.
"Femininity" seems like a default required state for women, while "manliness" is still a default required state for men.
I think this is yet another problem with enforcing feminism and gender equality while keeping hypergamy. With hypergamy, the male partner's ability to provide is usually more important than whether he is a gentleman (however, women consider men who both provide and are gentlemen a 'catch' or 'full package'). But for men, woman's ability to 'provide' in the financial sense is worthless (or even worth negative), so femininity becomes the only valuable thing women can offer men. In traditional sense, woman's 'ability to provide' was her readiness to bear and care for children, but in a culture of deliberately childless women you described in your previous post and are a part of yourself, women have even less to offer men but their femininity.
We also need to look at the social class. It seems to me that femininity is a must for upper and middle class women, but not necessarily for lower class. Poor women can afford to be non-feminine, as a poor man that doesn't have much to provide himself will happily settle for one to avoid loneliness and inceldom. Middle and upper class men would never do that. This is why poor women who adopt femininity have a shot at hypergamous relationships with middle/upper class men (as nicely described by Stella here: https://humancarbohydrate.substack.com/p/my-greek-town-doesnt-need-more-tradwives ).
Conversely, it seems that performative manhood - gentlemanliness - is now optional in middle and maybe even in upper classes. Man's status and ability to provide is more important, and gentlemanliness is just nice-to-have. And, as Rob Henderson described in his popular essay ( https://www.robkhenderson.com/p/no-one-expects-young-men-to-do-anything ), lower class women don't even require their men to provide, which leads to disastrous consequences.
Not sure I buy that childless women with jobs have nothing to offer except femininity. I married a guy who is okay with a non-femme woman (I haven't put on makeup in years) and was interested in a dual-income. We do have a few kids, but that shop is closed now, and he still wants to keep me around. I think there must be something else he likes about me. I suspect that on some spectrum of manliness, we are both closer to the center than to the extremes, and therefore don't need the traditional stereotypical crap to be happy together.
Perhaps the masculinity or femininity has to sum to a constant (one being the inverse of the other): you have stable pairs consisting of masculine men and feminine women, or feminine men and masculine women, or moderately masculine men and moderately feminine women.
Good point with gentlemanliness rather than masculinity as the real opposition to femininity (how we tend to define it, at least). The decline in gentlemanliness preceded the feminist movement really taking off with the anti-male stuff. Interesting.
I think your second paragraph absolutely nails one of the biggest problems in the world, especially as, all around the (western, at least) world the middle and working classes are being impoverished and destroyed.
I also wondered how time and culture specific these observations are. As you know, I am from India and in my experience performative femininity is a niche that only some women leaned into. It is considered kinda trashy and desperate by the actually womanly women because it is still just as effective at getting the attention of men in the short term. You are right in that “feminine” behaviors of grooming and fawning are almost universally hypnotizing to men, but there seemed to be an overall cultural consensus back home that the women who hypothesize and the men who fall for it and enjoy being hypnotized are both missing the mark and acting kind of disgusting. Actually, in that cultural context, the women I know really do get so much more womanly(although they would call it becoming more feminine) when they are around each other instead of around men.
I am not entirely sure why the common understanding about these things doesn’t exist in the western world anymore. I have been wondering if the lack of any real divine female archetypes in the western Mythos has something to do with it. Traditional womanliness, as opposed to femininity, is also respected and even feared more than it is loved romantically, and perhaps that’s just too boring for the modern fast paced world?
As an aside, I wonder how much of the disgust women have for masculinity comes from endocrine dysfunction- or intentional disregulation in this case. I know I am like a broken record on this but for about 4 generations now quite a significant portion of western women have been on hormonal birth control for most of their fertile years. It is already well known that it alters women’s attraction to men in very significant ways that would fit this pattern. Of course, I am biased here, as someone who is very much attracted to extremely masculine men, but the data does speak for itself- since the use of hormonal birth control became so common, men have become biochemically less and less masculine. There is correlation, and a clear mechanism of causation. I don’t think I am letting my judgement get clouded by my preferences and attraction.
I'm not really sure. My guess would be that advertising and mass media and everything fake to induce longing and envy on a mass basis was basically invented in America, in Hollywood and Madison Avenue (industries heavily populated by gay men, FWIW). And I think we've just been exposed to that for so many decades that we're worse than other cultures, and have been marinating in a simultaneously over sanitized yet overly eroticized fantasy world of illusions for so long that that we've lost touch with anything else. Maybe? But you're right there's essentially zero respect for or fear of or interest in matriarchs. Everyone is trying to be a perpetual teenager.
Though up til about the past ten years, there WAS a similar feeling that people who just go fully fake with sexual attraction were trashy. And moreso of that feeling in some parts of the country then others. Instagram seems to have blown that all away and now being a fully filtered thirst trap posting pictures of your Facetuned ass all day is apparently considered acceptable, at least among Gen Z.
I will admit, I fully loathed masculine men most of my life, while I was on hormonal birth control. If you were a jock or soldier or anyone remotely in the realm of that, forget it, I hated and feared you. It was I only when I went off hormonal BC in my 30s that I suddenly found the masuline barbarian types alluring. And I ended up marrying a guy who is very far on the totally extreme end of masculine...he is a complete stereotype of a man's man... and I definitely would not have liked him when I was younger and swallowing hormones every day. So you may be right about the endocrine stuff.
The pioneers were PT Barnum and then, later, Edward Bernays. Bernays was the neohew of Sigmund Freud, invented the Madison Avenue industry and culture, and detailed his methodology in a book called "Propaganda," a term he invented IIRC. Never thought to wonder whether he was gay. The book is a short read, and very eye opening.
Interesting. For some reason, when I was in the 7th grade, our whole chorus concert was dedicated to PT Barnum and we sang There's a Sucker Born Every Minute etc. Now I want to know the answer to this too.
"I am not entirely sure why the common understanding about these things doesn’t exist in the western world anymore. I have been wondering if the lack of any real divine female archetypes in the western Mythos has something to do with it."
Astute observation! I would like to clarify that the Western world once had an understanding of Female/Woman that was natural and authentic...but this was obscured and buried under Centuries of Christian/Catholic indoctrination. Blame Christianity for creating the Western obsession with dominant "alpha" and "trad-wife" stereotypes. All boils down to Adam and Eve...
Meanwhile, Indian culture recognizes fierce and destructive deities like Durga and Kali who are embodiments of Power (i.e. Shakti).
European pagan cultures venerated warrior goddesses.
The problem is not *original* western culture...but the subsequent Christian distortion thereof.
How do you suppose one goes about reviving the old European pagan archetypes? Or creating new ones to match modern times? I know the transition to Christianity wasn’t exactly peaceful but the Christian ideas have been completely ingrained in the western culture already, most people are so resistent to abandoning them even when they aren’t practicing Christians.
The last sentence is the problem, but I also realize that an inner awakening is necessary and that I cannot help those who do not wish to open their eyes to the truth.
I do not "preach" or "convert" as this would be contrary to a true traditional ethos.
The only way to awaken the archetypes would be to immerse oneself in classics like The Iliad/Odyssey, Celtic, Norse, and Scandinavian legends. It is also living and enchanting one's mundane life.
Many people embrace a non-believing "cultural Christianity" out of convenience. It is a "ready made" solution. That is the main reason for its popularity among right-wing groups.
On the argumentation front, I''m doing my part for the pagan re-awakening with my writings here on substack by talking through ideas and pointing out how the inherent conflict in moral priorities in the West muddles thinking, and then charting priority-balancing courses through the arguments. Given the weakness if Christianity in the 21st century, and the shallowness of the moral reasoning of her child-religions, the time for such a transition feels quite ripe to me.
You may not know this but in Indian culture the old deities are constantly revived in their influence through rituals and modern re-imaginings of the ancient myths. Perhaps we need to start weaving the old female archetypes into modern media storylines- there are already plenty of the male ones that have been reskinned for the Marvel movies and such.
What, the warrior woman? Starting with Wonder Woman (who was invented by a polyamorist into bondage and femdom...really, look it up), you've got Eowyn, Catwoman, Black Widow, Brienne of Tarth, Furiosa...where do I finish?
Can you name one that is actually treated by anyone as a fearsome deity to be respected, held sacred or worshipped? All the ones you’ve named are either some sexual fantasy, joke characters or just embody masculine virtues in a female body and so can’t really be taken seriously outside of their warped “girlboss” narrative.
I don't think this will work in the West. We already have too many new-age "neopagan" groups who have bowdlerized the classic archetypes. Some are very political, attempting to graft LGBT interpretations, while others are too superficial. I have become increasingly cautious about people merging "witchcraft" with paganism, because insufficient scholarship goes into it.
In order for european mythology to be incorporated today, we would need authors who are devoted to the source material and will not try to hijack it with post-modern ideas. I shudder to recall some of the awful Wagner opera productions that have occurred in the last 20 years.
I can agree that the revival needs to be handled by intelligent and faithful people, but beyond that I don’t agree. Old archetypes and especially the goddesses need to be embodied, it doesn’t quite matter in what way you do it or what you package it as. In fact, as an outsider I wont speak on the rhetoric of it at all. But if you are going to dismiss the entire embodied world because it has been taken over by idiots rn then you are never going to have any influence in it and it will stay just as idiotic forever.
My mother definitely completely scorned it. I was not allowed to have Barbies as a child, for example, and she had a lot of contempt for such things. She told me she once made an offer on a house, but withdrew it when she actually met the owner, because the woman was such a "Real Housewives" type that it turned her off to the idea of living in the same house. And the one time I decided to cut my hair short(ish) in 8th grade, I don't think she's ever been so overjoyed or proud of me. None of this worked bc by the time I was 20 I basically looked like a life size barbie doll.
But I hear plenty of women say the opposite, that their mothers scolded them to be more feminine and told them no one would like them if they weren't. It probably depends somewhat on your particular subculture.
It is an age thing but not so much related to being single or married. It seems like grown men and women being perpetually stuck in adolescence is the problem.
But it’s not just youth and beauty in the western world anymore, is it? It’s all supernormal stimuli satirizing natural youth and beauty.
The weirdest part is when the exaggerated signals of youth and beauty start mattering more than the real thing. Like when instead of showing off the natural flushing or blushing of their cheeks in response to real things, young women think that they have to cover it up with make up and a permanent, dead painted blush.
I honestly don't know what to make of this, because I've been told this is the case by so many women, but it's never been my experience and I've observed the opposite so many times, where men seem to prefer women who wear no make-up or minimal/"natural" make-up, who dress comfortably (definitely a male preference for dresses, but those can be soooo comfy), who play sports, who aren't afraid to be a little grossly silly or make fart jokes, who don't order salads in restaurants etc. I think the concept of "femininity" you describe here is a marketing scam to sell women products, and in my experience it's been pushed (on me at least) by other women. No man has ever told me I need to wear make-up, or high heels (I've had a couple men I've dated ask me not to wear heels because they were 5'9 and I'm 5'5). I haven't worn a bra in a decade and no one seems to care. It has been my experience that men prefer shaved legs and armpits, but heck I know some women who don't do that either and are in great heterosexual relationships. Even the men I know who are in relationships with women who wear more make-up and dress up a bit more, they usually like them for other reasons (e.g. will talk about how smart she is, or how funny or sweet, or various skills etc not that she wears a full face of make-up and heels to parties). Plus, it seems when men try to point out that they aren't really into what you call the "feminine artifice", a lot of women reply that their choice to wear make-up etc isn't for them anyway? Maybe the men I'm thinking of (my husband, my friends' husbands/boyfriends, my husband's male friends, my male relatives, various ex-boyfriends and male friends I've had over the past 20 years) are the minority. But heck they're pretty great. And if not doing the "feminine artifice" is filtering out the dudes who want that, then seems like a massive win to me.
Edit: In this sense I agree with the article's assessment that what we call "femininity" is manufactured and artificial and different from authentic "womanliness" (which I think men are attracted to), and I agree most women are not naturally inclined toward artificial femininity ... but I think we've been lied to that the majority of men want that from us and that artificial femininity is mostly pushed on women by other women, and, as you suggest, possibly by effeminate men. (I think more by men with some crap to sell us, regardless of sexuality etc).
This really, and I mean REALLY depends on sub-culture. I lived in Vermont for a while, and would have said things like what you're saying here. In fact I recall being made fun of for wearing (extremely minimal) makeup a few times. My dad also had an aversion to women he thought were superficial bimbos.
But then in a lot of the rest of the country, guys think women in Vermont or Washington or whatever are just all ugly. And plenty of (often racial minority) sub-cultures place an enormous emphasis on grooming and looking done and like you put a lot of effort into it. The natural outdoorsy, useful, functional woman thing seems to primarily be a white, upper-middle class, recreational-outdoorsy area thing.
And like I said, I salute those guys. And women like you are lucky. Seriously, it is way better to be like that then spending all of your spare income on getting your nails and eyelashes and eyebrows done. I am often amazed that every cashier I see working at McDonalds has lash extensions and professional nails when those things cost hundreds of dollars a month.
But be happy for the norms where you live.
As far as this goes: "a lot of women reply that their choice to wear make-up etc isn't for them anyway?" Give me a break. No one wears makeup for themselves. You can't see your own face. Obviously makeup is for other people. And no one else but men cares if you're pretty, so who else would it be for? They're just saying that because it makes them look lame if they don't. Or they don't want their husband to think they're looking to attract other men. Or they're totally un-self aware.
You’re having trouble believing other people (women) are different than you. When I’m home alone and do something “feminine” like put on make up and cute clothes who the hell is it for if not for me?! I have a strong aesthetic sense! Sue me! I’m also someone who hates being forced into anything, including femininity displays (see my hair removal decisions - not very popular, but can’t say I had trouble attracting men.) Look around, a subset of humans clearly care a lot about beauty, and it’s found in many things. Also how does your island of men lead to poetry and the orchestra? You’re really into your husband, which is fantastic, but he’s not the only type of guy out there. Baths were big in Rome and ancient Japan, super patriarchal cultures. Men and women are more alike than different. And I actually believe that on average there are observable differences in men and women (naturally, independent of socialization) - but you’re (mostly in a funny way) way overstating it.
Yeah, I mean obviously I was exaggerating for comic effect, I don't actually think the all woman island would starve. Though I do think the men would design a ranking system. ;) This is just something I've noticed from watching historical documentaries, how every single society (really up until the past few decades) has created an astonishing assortment of ridiculous hats that show one's relative rank. Lincoln's hat was plain but ALSO taller than everyone else's. That's just a little thing that amuses me.
Even if you dress up when you're alone, isn't the purpose kind of testing out or doing a little theatrical dress rehearsal for yourself? Imagining or seeing what it would be like to dress that way for others?
And yes, I know my views on gender stuff have become rather polarized because of happening to be married to someone on like the 99th percentile of masculine. Previously I thought the genders were basically the same except for the baby making stuff, because I definitely overlap on most bell curves, and mostly I spent my early years hanging around artistic and intellectual types where the men and women sort of clustered in the overlap. Similar to how I'm pretty tall for a woman and on the right side of the bell curve, but right in the middle of the male bell curve, so I know that even when we talk about group differences, there is still a huge amount of overlap in those curves. It does create a rather jarring experience though to live with someone who is truly in the part of the bell curve where there is zero overlap (and not only that but his entire work and social world is the same). It makes you realize where the real differences are.
Notably though, they're not that noticeable UNTIL you get sex-segregated groups. Then, there's no tempering influence and the extremes become amplified. I think that's part of the increasing gender polarization now, is because men and women are clustering into sex-segregated parts of the internet where they just amplify each other's tendencies. I would bet that if men and women voted in totally separate elections, without any exposure to the issues or what the other side was voting on, you would get hugely enormous differences. But that's just a thought exercise and guess.
There was an interesting set of documentaries on Apple TV about this camp for boys and girls where they take the strongest students in the state, and they go and create their own little fake government and do elections at a week long camp. There was one for the boys and one for the girls. They came out SOOOO different. The boys' camp was all about gun rights and freedom and rah rah nationalism and defense, and the women's camp they ended up basically not agreeing on any issues because it was too mean to disagree (except for one very disagreeable girl who was focused on issues), and the winner of the whole girl's election ran on a platform of men not being able to tell women to smile, lol. Anyway if you are interested in these topics I would recommend those shows, they're just one episode each, called Boy's State and Girl's State.
“No one else but men cares if you are pretty so who else would it be for?”
Try this experiment. Get your female friends to talk to a woman they don’t know for 10 minutes. After the stranger has gone, ask your friend what they were wearing. Most will be able to give you a good stab at a description.
Repeat with male friends. Most won’t be able to tell whether the stranger was wearing glasses or not.
If men don’t actually notice (and most don’t) who else would it be for?
Fair enough -- I'm in Vancouver, which certainly meets the middle / upper-middle-class recreational-outdoorsy description, demographics mostly white, Asian, and brown -- maybe the "feminine artifice" is expected more among non-white people here, but it's definitely not just white women getting lots of male attention without the "feminine artifice" or just white men showing interest in women without it. (And, of course, there's lots of women who put on the "feminine artifice" in some situations and not in others, but I don't see this falling into distinct "men around" "men not around" categories.)
I wonder how much of the culture is driven by health. I told my husband about this conversation and he said men like health and natural beauty, which can be faked with make-up. Vancouver is an easier city to be healthy in than most -- an easier city to have naturally clear, healthy-looking skin. And of course, wearing make-up on your face all the time destroys your skin, so it's a self-perpetuating cycle. I think I'm very lucky to have had a mother who told me it was better to just go out in public with a pimple than to try to cover it with make-up, clog my pores, and make the situation worse. If you wear make-up all the time, then yeah, you tend to look not-so-great without it ... same goes for a lot of skin products tbh. If you wear sunscreen all the time, you're more likely to burn on days you don't wear it. Etc.
If you have the "feminine artifice" on all the time, you're going to attract men who are attracted to that. If you are sporting more of a "natural", low-maintenance look, you're going to attract men who are attracted to that. I still wonder how much of the "feminine artifice", in places where it's more common, is driven by *other women* more than men. It seems like online men get in trouble with women quite a bit for saying they prefer the "natural" look? I did some googling after seeing your comment and the Internet indicates that the majority of men prefer women with no make-up (or, in dating photos, with "natural" make-up -- but of course that men prefer photos of women with light "natural" looking make-up doesn't actually prove they prefer make-up over no make-up in the real world; I've heard lots of men complain that women typically are less attractive than their online dating profile indicates -- with no make-up photos, it's the opposite, you look better in the real world than in photos).
I don't mean to give you a hard time, but I see this kind of message a lot and I think it's important for women to hear that they *can* opt out of the "feminine artifice" (if they wish to) and there are men out there who might actually prefer them for that. Most people, men and women, are attracted to authenticity and confidence. If you're authentically into high heels and make-up, that's going to be more attractive than if it's obvious you're only putting on the mask and costume out of insecurity. (Men definitely prefer women who are physically fit and healthy, but there's lots of reasons to want to be physically fit and healthy that have nothing to do with attracting a partner).
Re women wearing make-up for themselves, IDK I personally hate how it feels on my face so I don't "get" how anyone could like it, but some women definitely claim this (I've seen lots of "lipstick makes me feel empowered" articles). I sincerely shave my legs for myself because I prefer how it feels, I'm guessing lots of people would think that's weird. (You can see your own face in mirrors and photos? There are mirrors and mirrored surfaces and cameras everywhere, and as I mentioned above, make-up tends to improve how one looks on camera).
>And no one else but men cares if you're pretty, so who else would it be for?
Obviously not. It is women who care about pretty visuals, making art like painting or decorating their homes. If you care about looking around your home and it is pretty - and most men would gladly live in a concrete bunker furnished with cardboard boxes, just look at the typical garage workshop - then it is logical you also care about yourself being pretty. Most men seriously do not care at all, visuals, looks, just do not recognize as anything important. We are annoyed when before going out we have to wait for her to put on make-up, we would much prefer if she would just pull on a jeans and tee and we are out the door like we do.
I agree with you regarding aesthetics in general as I spend a lot of time money and effort on my landscaping and garden to make it beautiful, for example, while my husband would be perfectly fine to pave over all of it and have just be concrete, as you note. However, I enjoy looking at my beautiful garden and landscaping. I don't have to look at myself unless I'm looking in a mirror. I only make myself look good for his benefit, he's the one who has to look at me. And when he's out of town I'm quite happy to look like a horror those days and skip the makeup and hair routine, it's so much more efficient wrt to use of my time.
I think this is it. I always found women like this off-putting and false. I think it's something new. I didn't see it as strong when I was younger. I always figured it was part of the female intra sexual competition rather to attract guys.
I think there may be a touch of projection in this article. I'm not a woman, so I can't say with certainty. However, I do know quite a few women who have worked in typical masculine jobs and yearn to be feminine (whatever that means to them) when they get home.
I think what you are pinpointing in this article is more of the stress to signal feminine behaviors. It is work, no doubt. I can tell you as a man, being "masculine" is just a container word. It doesn't hold any significant value as each woman is going to have her own interpretation as to what masculine is. What men have figured out (and women as well) is what behaviors are most likely to attract the opposite sex (you also touch on this).
I think the main thing that you are missing, that is an inherent difference between men and women, is that men are much more harsh and uncaring about how someone feels about something; you do or you don't, your feelings about it are irrelevant.
So while I understand your sentiment and do mostly agree (girls without boys around to impress act much differently or who have taken their men for granted), a man whining to another man that he doesn't want to push himself, be competitive, useful, have that edge, etc. (and trust me, there are a lot of men like that out there) is disregarded by other men.
Guys haze one another instinctively to sort of the bitches from the useful men. We operate in a world of utility that women will never experience. Just as women want a guy who has his shit together, men too, want those types of men around them and have little time for anything but.
This is not a comment of me trying to say that things are unfair for men, I don't care and no man should either; it is a part of the experience of being a man. What I am saying however, is both sexes have their roles to play to make them more successful (whatever that may be, including attracting the opposite sex) and you can't change what men are attracted to, regardless of your complaints same as men can't change women.
Is it work? Yes. You can choose to put in the work or not, but you aren't changing the game. Feminism has tried and against all odds, guys still want what they want and women still want what they want. As an individual you have to decide how much work you are willing to put in to attract and maintain a relationship with the opposite sex.
May 14·edited May 15Liked by Kryptogal (Kate, if you like)
Very interesting perspective and I think I buy the main thesis. But I disagree with how much you blame femininity on men. I would put the dynamic like this: 1. Femininity is discovered and women realize that men are attracted to it. 2. Being feminine becomes desirable and high status. 3. Women start to compete in femininity, going above and beyond what's attractive to men, to get status.
Compare with the gym bro meme were the guy starts lifting to get big muscles to attract women, gets too big for women to find it attractive but keeps lifting anyway to impress the other guys at the gym.
>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.
To me these men are like the people who don't eat cake since it's "too sweet" or don't enjoy reading fiction since it "isn't real". Good for them I guess but there's also something broken and unnatural about them.
"But I disagree with how much you blame femininity on men."
The irony is that blaming men IS an example of hyper feminine behaviour :)
To blame men for women's behaviour is to deny women's own agency and free will and exaggerate men's agency and free will. This way of framing the issue defines women as 'acted upon' objects/ victims. This is great for evading personal/ social responsibility and dumping it all on men's shoulders.
This is what feminists do all the time. No social issue is ever the fault of women (women have no agency), it is only ever he fault of men (only men have agency). This is why feminism is the most extreme example of 'performative femininity' imaginable.
The author said: "Most of the attributes that are considered “feminine” are entirely artificial performances put on for the benefit of men"
Again, this is a hyper feminine way of framing the issue. Women are somehow 'forced' to act the way they do by men for men's benefit, therefore women's behaviour is not in their control, therefore women are not accountable for their behaviour (only men are) = a display of hyper femininity.
So anyway men are hard wired to provide protection and resources to women ('he for she'). Men are also most attracted to fertile (young) women who have an agreeable disposition because these are traits which make women the most suitable mothers. This is why women are most likely to affect 'femininity' (youth, fertility, an agreeable disposition) when the ship is going down and there are not enough lifeboats, or when there are wolves or bandits outside the village, or when there is a food shortage or natural disaster, or when trying to attract a high status man in a nightclub when there are other females competing for his attention and wallet, or when going through an acrimonious divorce and laying claim to half the husband's estate, or when getting pulled over for speeding etc etc.
These are all examples where putting on a feminine display is absolutely beneficial to women (and may save her life). This is an option not available to men.
In the west we now have a very safe and comfortable society (paved streets, electric lighting, safe public transport, comfortable offices with indoor plumbing etc) which protects women and provides opportunities to earn a wage in environments that are as safe as any kitchen (ie the modern office). This means western women can afford to adopt more of a (superficial) masculine identity, and still be safe and protected.
So maybe the post-feminist pseudo-masculine ('empowered woman') identity is the actual 'performative' fake persona! ...... because in the event of a natural disaster, civil war, food shortages, economic crash or an end to welfare (free money from the state paid for by men's taxes) most women would once again revert to overt femininity (AKA traditional femininity) in order to emphasise the biological differences between men and women and to provoke men's natural instincts to provide for and protect women. This also explains why in more brutal and harsh cultures (the developing world etc) women tend to be much more feminine in behaviour and dress.
What the trans women are doing is exaggerating their vulnerability and agreeableness, as well as portraying themselves as weak and precious (like a delicate vase) which are all FEMININE traits. Women really are fragile and precious from a biological perspective. Women are the limiting factor for reproduction and women's fertility window is short. And women (and babies) are extremely vulnerable throughout the whole reproductive cycle - right up until the child reaches adulthood.
Femininity is really just highlighting (and exaggerating) women's fragility and preciousness, just as masculinity is highlighting (and exaggerating) men's strength and disposability.
This is why Emma Watson's famous 'he for she' speech at UN Women is the epitome of traditional femininity in action. She wore white, acted like a frail little girl and they even played baby music (a sort of lullaby) as she came up to speak at the podium. The only thing missing was any appreciation of men's sacrifices to women, or any mention fo women's agency or obligations to society (such as providing children to avoid population collapse and raising them properly - full time - instead of handing them over to the state). This is what distinguishes feminism from traditional femininity ...... feminists are spoilt brats (I was going to say selfish, narcissistic cunts but I resisted!).
Your note 4 is sweet and flattering. But I tried it with the lesbians--even had a fun threesome with a trans man!--and I can attest that lesbians are capable of generating vast volumes of drama, even with no penis-possessors in the picture.
Really enjoyed this essay. Found you through Walt Bismarck, btw.
One complication for your thesis that needs accounting for... little girls LOVE femininity WELL before they are old enough to "notice boys," indeed while they are still kind of annoyed and grossed out by them. The hair styling, nail painting, costume jewelry, obsession with designing "looks" and "'fits" for their characters, the sweetness and cuteness, princesses... a lot of the feminine stuff that will later be attractive to men, and they ALREADY love it, at least in these pre-sexual, prototypical forms. Sure, to some extent it could be simple preparatory imitation of the grown women around them, but a lot of it just seems genuinely FUN and inherently appealing to little girls' brains.
Well, this is true I was definitely like that as an elementary age kid. Me and my friends loved doing each other's makeup at sleepovers, etc. But I think that's just because we liked doing make-believe for all kinds of things and pretending to be adults. We also used to play "office" all the time. Each of my friends and I set up a little fake office in our closets and then would call each other and pretend to talk about business. Everything that involved pretending to be an adult seemed fun and glamorous. By the time I was like 16 I was already annoyed by the amount of time it took to do my makeup and having to wake up even earlier before school to do it. And I DEFINITELY hated actually working in an office once I got my first office job!
Don't get me wrong, you will not pry either my job nor my my makeup from me unless it's over my dead body...but that doesn't mean I don't resent and see both of them as like...SIGH, I have to do THIS again today for the 7,000th time??
That's fair. Kids play by imitating lots of things whose real versions they later resent as adults, with "femininity" perhaps just being one example, and this needn't undercut the reality of that later resentment.
BTW, my wife says that we are just rehashing the exact same arguments as Germaine Greer and her critics in the 1970s...
There are way too many generalizations in this piece, but I think the key takeaway—which I read as "femininity is a performance downstream of femaleness which especially flamboyant gay men deserve lifetime Oscar awards"—intuitively works for me.
A friend of mine, who's gay not the glam-queen type, was the first to express to me how ridiculous he found the tendency of certain gay men to "over-feminate", screaming "bro, stop, even women don't act like that!" And I agree. The gay guy in the girls group is the girliest of them all, snapping fingers and drawing an S shape with his body every time he talks.
My reservations about your theory however is the idea that femininity did not (at least in part) originate with women—or isn't natural to women—and that women completely loathe the performance of femininity. I think gay men could not have invented femininity anymore than Robert Downey Jnr could have invented blackness, even though he did a hell of a great job at it in Tropic Thunder. Gay men have obviously latched on to feminine generalities and the reason they exaggerate it to the high heavens is the same reason novice actors tend to over-act a role. The right balance and grace doesn't come naturally to them so they overshoot the mark every time. I think effeminate gay men-queens think that by being more feminine than the most feminine woman they know, it'll compensate for the detracting effect of their anatomical male aesthetic and the sorority will get to see and accept them as one of their own.
I agree some of femininity clearly is an artifice, but it was developed by women in response to the dynamic mating games of our species. The blush for a touch of youthful flush, the talc powder for the appearance of silky smooth skin (which, perceptually, is good health), the push up bra for larger breasts which is erotic as fuck & screams "breast milk for the bouncing baby boy" (I know larger breasts don't necessarily produce more milk; men are mostly idiots).
Plus, there has always been intra-sex competition among women for men, and that, more than anything else, explains the condition and trajectory of feminine beauty standards. It's not lost on me that a lot of it is done to please the eyes of men, but that doesn't make it male-originated, the same way men putting themselves through immense pain to achieve 6-packs or burning their eyes out on computer screens to achieve wealth and status is done in good part to please women but isn't female-originated.
I also think there's an argument for femininity being natural to women. It really depends on how you define natural I guess. For me, a given expression is natural if the expressor possesses the inner disposition to give effect to that expression. After aeons of biological and social evolution, it seems to be the case that some predisposition to creating the feminine artifice must be ingrained in women at this point. Because even though across cultures the expression of femininity may be slightly different, it's not so different that you can't see the common strains that transcend each culture-specific expression and whose explanation must likely lie in the domain of the biological.
Your point about women hating femininity was hilarious, mostly because I've always been curious about it. I'd be furious if I had to spend every other week at the saloon while brutal hands twist the hair on my scalp so tightly it gives me a headache for days. I've braided my hair a few times and even though I loved the look, I hated the headaches a bit more. Two of my little sisters have told me the moment they get to university, they'll definitely cut their hair. I'm such a sucker for long hair, I blackmailed them into promising they won't. I'm a terrible person. I'll repent, I promise.
But despite these experiences, I don't know how much I can confidently conclude that women don't like femininity. Too much trad-wife content filtered into my feed at some point last year and effectively ruined my capacity to make that judgement. I can't count how many times I heard women say: "oh women just want you to be masculine enough so they can be their full feminine self"; "feminism is full of shit because women love being feminine and feminism is trying to make women more like men", etc. So while I think the pain of feminine beauty is wicked enough to demand loathing, I'm not sure I can discount the words of the women I've encountered in real life and online that profess to enjoy their femininity.
Okay, I'm done. I enjoyed reading you and I will keep reading you going forward. Perhaps your Substack should be renamed "The Quiet Part Out Loud."
I think her article should be taken seriously but not literally. It’s deliberately exaggerated in order to be funny, which it is. It’s a caricature of the truth, but caricatures work, when they work, because they exaggerate something that’s really there.
> But what you see here is that that men get MORE masculine, without social norms. Society restrains their fullest masculine expression.
Without social norms, you’re in the position of having to reïnvent society, which is ... not pretty.
> Women want to believe that men are ALSO oppressed by social expectations.
Fail to conform to the wrong expectation, in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and you’ll be very physically oppressed, compressed, shorn, twisted, flexed and fractured.
> 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.
It may come naturally for some, but, whether it does or not, you need to give others a reason not to beat you up, take anything valuable you may have by force and kill or enslave you. In society, you _may_ be able to abstract these functions away, but someone still has to perform them, and you still need them to respect you.
> 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.
Probably because noöne would respect the man who said it, unless he were already in a secure high-status position and could afford it as countersignaling.
Interesting perspective on masculinity and societal expectations. It’s important to consider the complexities and pressures that individuals face in conforming to certain norms.
Look, I could produce a version of this essay mirrored to reflect the reverse sentiment: that masculinity is pure artifice and men hate having to perform it. The mirrored essay would make the following points:
-Men actually think going to the gym to get jacked is a torturous slog. Eating boiled chicken and broccoli for six months straight to get your body fat percentage low enough to display rippling veins is agonising. Because these things are horrible, men have to contort their minds into enjoying it.
-Men actually "do not dream of labour", and resent the hyperlegible hierarchy of professions and lifestyles ranked by desirability. Also, men actually hate the fact that you can look them up on LinkedIn and index their status and rarity well before the first Hinge date. A "male utopia" is one where a man who failed to/chose not to connive his way to a top-of-the-line graduate school and white shoe firm is not penalised relative to a man who did! Men actually hate the dickswinging.
-Men actually don't want to beat each other up in a vacuum; they only do this when they have to compete for women because they really love being with women. This claim is evidenced by the well-documented association between uneven sex ratios and violence.
A so on. A whole host of "Men actually aren't really into [stereotypical masculine thing], but do it to get women/for female attention" claims. What would you make of an essay like that? Personally, I'd check the author's CV on linkedin, laugh at his bench press PB and tell him to stop with the soy milk. Then I would add two remarks:
1. The nature of a human being is obviously not fully one thing or the other. The fat MGTOW insisting that he's genuinely happy playing video games instead of enjoying the fruits of masculine attractiveness (whether natural or artificial, innate or learned) is no less performing an artifice than the roided gym bro whose cynicism about women both thwarts and fails to hide his tender longing to be loved by one. And I strongly believe the same is true for the woman-apparently-transcending-femininity that you posit. If there are days you when you want to buy a lipstick called "Prosecco Malibu Orgasm" and pair it with bubblegum pink heels or whatever, and you pointedly refuse you do the thing you want, you're performing an unhealthy artifice too.
2. If you have *zero* first-order desire to perform the -inity of your gender, you need to recognise the following things:
2a. You are in the minority. Most people have at least *some* first-order desire to perform masculinity/feminity. They just like the sight of a Windsor knot framed by the collar of a starched Oxford shirt in the mirror; they would wear the Prosecco Malibu Orgasm lipstick even if no potential partner or instagram follower ever got to see it. (No, seriously. Think about most people at their mentally healthiest. They wouldn't dress for women / they wouldn't dress for men / they would dress for themselves!)
2b. You are not well catered for, because most people's preferences cater to most other people's preferences. Does this suck? Of course this sucks. Can this situation be changed at the macro level? In time, maybe, but not quickly enough to be of use to you. So you need to strategise. Specifically, you need to actively seek out potential partners who do not expect performances of -inity. You need to do your damnedest to avoid lusting after (or god forbid, falling in love with) people who are into that sort of thing.
2c. And most importantly: if you can't be arsed to perform -inity, you cannot expect a partner who will perform -inity while you don't. I'm not interested in levying a charge of hypocrisy. Everyone's hypocritical, everyone wants to take without having to give. I'm just observing facts: if you're a man who can't be arsed to perform masculinity, the kind of woman who'd be attracted to you is unlikely to have killer mascara and a wardrobe full of trendy strappy curve-sculpting athleisure (she's not ugly; she's just not interested in performing femininity. The man is just a fat neckbeard to me tho.). It's this sort of wanting-it-both-ways (I can't be arsed to perform my -inity, but why am I not adored by the sexy people who perform their -inity so well?) in my repeated observations, that chiefly causes grief. It's perfectly fine to have competing desires (see point 1) -- your imperative is to determine which you want *more* and accept the requisite tradeoff.
Getting jacked is pretty horrible, but not being physically weak or grossly obese is great. An insane weight regimen is agony, but a reasonable one is pretty fun. Plus, spices don’t add many calories, so put a nice rub on that chicken and grill it.
Enlightening post overall, definitely makes many female actions and words make more sense.
However, I strongly disagree with your hypothetical that a society of men stranded on an island would degenerate into one of murderous chaos. Certainly, a natural hierarchy would emerge, but most men would be more inclined to cooperate with the others rather than engage in antisocial behaviors. The vast majority of us are not low IQ high-impulse criminals.
I agree with most of the article, but this was written by someone who has not spent a lot of time around lesbians. I also disagree with the part about gay men.
You've made a great argument for the fakeness of femininity, but really, the same could be said for any non-gerrymandered definition of masculinity as well. The 'masculinity' that women try to talk men out of (i.e., the prison chimpanzee behavior) has almost no relation to the masculinity that men perform in order to please women: gaining muscle, getting ahead in the business world, social dominance / assertiveness, and so on. Every single one of these is a grueling slog, and there are very few men who are motivated to cultivate these for their own sake. Rather, these are done to please women, in the same way that feminine behaviors are performed to please men.
I'd also like to point out a strange asymmetry in your desert island example: You say that, when straight women get put on a desert island, their performative femininity would go into overdrive, because they're trying to pander to men. Meanwhile, when a bunch of men get put on a desert island, their masculinity also goes into overdrive. Doesn't this suggest to you that the same mechanism might be at play, then? I guarantee that, if you put a group of gay men on that same island, we would see the same kind of ordinary, sane behavior that we saw from the lesbian women.
The funny thing is, quite recently, I was planning a similar post to yours, where I naively categorized masculinity as 'the stuff we demand from men' and femininity as 'the stuff women are inclined to do', and using that as a basis for further argumentation. Maybe this is a common mistake for people to make in general. I guess it goes to show that cross-gender empathy is one of the hardest things to get right in contemporary discourse.
No no I didn't say the straight woman island would involve performative femininity...they wouldn't be doing their hair and feigning helplessness til they starved. I said they would fall into female-female social dynamics, which involves coalition building by everyone complimenting each other and disparaging themselves to ensure no one is threatened by someone who thinks they're better than anyone else, etc. That is womanly behavior that naturally emerges and no one teaches it to them.
Also, I think we know what they'd be doing on the all gay island, lol.
I don't think the things you mentioned are done for women directly for the most part. Men have been building their muscles going back all the way to the Greeks, mostly to show off for and intimidate other men. You think guys in jail or the military are pumping iron to impress ladies? Or go on any Insta account dedicated to photos of male muscles or gym bodies or body builders...the followers are all men. This stuff impresses other guys, to the point it's a pretty classic meme online about getting ripped (ie: expectation: cute girls fawning on you saying you're cute and asking if you're single / reality: dudes giving you fist bumps and saying "huge traps bro"). Brad Pitt was at the height of his popularity with women when he was a young,slight pretty boy with floppy blond hair in the 90s...and didn't become popular with men til he started doing steroids and bulked up by 70 lbs for Fight Club and Troy. I could go on with many such examples.
Men did not ever talk about doing things like pursuing business or getting muscles to attract women until the 2000s when internet men started giving each other advice on how to get laid, and the whole idea of that strikes older men as embarrassing pandering...you're supposed to do that to earn self respect and prestige among other men.
But I also think that you're just generally confusing two distinct types of mating efforts by males. Think about any nature documentary. There are efforts at pageantry done purely to attract females by putting on a show and hoping to be selected: elaborate songs and calls, or bringing tokens, or building a fancy nest, or showing off plumage, or doing crazy mating dances, or puffing out one's expandable throat, or showing off coloration, etc. There is no other species in the animal kingdom where it's the females rather than the males that do this type of showmanship or have the more elaborate showoffy coloration to attract mates...only in humans has this been reversed where the women are the ones putting on the show and that's part of why I'm blaming it on gay guys. :)
But there's a second type of male mating efforts...which is by far more common among mammals...which has nothing at all to do with directly enticing a female, it's just battle with other males. They have to intimidate, drive off, or fight off their male rivals til he's gone and then he just gets the female bc the other male is gone and that's it. That is most of what male mammals do all day, besides eating, is driving other males off their territory and getting rid of them, or fighting over access to the females in heat. But the females have nothing to do with that, they don't get to pick, they're just the prize for the winner. And I think you're mistaking a lot of behaviors that human men do to intimidate and gain status over and impress other men, for things to perform for women. It is pretty common for men to project their ideas of what they think is cool or impressive onto women and assume they do too. But men revving their obnoxiously loud engines are signalling to other men, much like a lion roaring to the other males to back the fuck up...women hate engine revving. Car shows are filled with men showing off their cars for each other. The only women there are the paid models and men who dragged their wives. Bodybuilding competitions have mostly male audiences. And at the office it's the young males who are impressed by and actually admire the big swinging dick, while the women all think he's a narcissist and make fun of him behind his back.
Now of course there are men who attract women with showmanship, and yes the ladies love the actors and singers and comedians putting on a show for them...that's natural and seen around the animal kingdom and women certainly do love a man who dazzles with his wit or artistry. But Magic Mike dropped panties because of his dance moves...if he was just standing there flexing his muscles with no artistry, it would only be men surrounding him and giving him props.
Maybe you should work through that aspect for your article...what's actually a performance for women versus other men, and why men mistake these two so often.
Lots of good points in here, but I think the bit about building muscle is way off. You say yourself that women 'like a hot, strong body', and woman-targeted romance novels tend to depict men who are way more muscular than the average guy on their covers. Take a look at this thread where women are posting their ideal body types: https://x.com/caitpsych/status/1767434710958116877?s=46 There's no veiny Schwarzenegger-types, for sure, but these people are, on average, way above the median man as far as muscle is concerned. I suspect what's happening here is something analogous to the "I don't like makeup" guys: they actually do like makeup, quite a lot, they just don't like it to be ludicrously excessive or poorly applied. Meanwhile, what they think of as a normal woman's face is actually a heavily decorated one. So too with the "I don't like muscle" women.
Engine revving and dick-swinging are definitely not what I was hinting towards when I was talking about status, assertiveness, and so on. Think less on the dominance side of things and more on the prestige side: or, like you say, wit and artistry. I don't think it's that controversial to claim that competence and mastery are attractive to women, and while it's possible that a competitive drive is part of natural masculinity, the things that men choose to master are highly motivated by the desire to impress women. (Why do you think speedrunning video games, an activity that women tend not to care about, is so much more niche than, say, playing an instrument or a sport, despite all three taking a similar amount of dedication, even when so many men are captivated by video games?)
Also, with respect to your desert island example: Why do you think that the lesbian women wouldn't engage in naturally emerging womanly behavior, as the straight women do? If it's a natural default behavior, and not behavior motivated by, say, an unconscious response to mate scarcity, shouldn't we see it across the board, regardless of sexuality?
I will certify for you that liking the lesbian lumberjack makes you a 100% full USDA manly man. She's one of the women who should go create a superhuman race with the barbarians. And liking a woman who keep the whole home warm though a cold winter with her wood chopping skills makes you Paul Bunyan. Well done.
She's kind of cute, though I'm not a manly man. I'm not sure how masculinity in men and masculinity/femininity in the women they're attracted to correlate. It would be an interesting study!
Well I mean...lesbians...it's not like gay men. It's as much of a lifestyle and political choice as a sexual orientation. In my observation at least. Most of them have sex with guys sometimes, or did at one point. You just have to be a really impressive yet also nice barbarian who respects her admirable qualities. The Tormund to her Brienne of Tarth. He would've worn her down eventually, the spark was there.
I mean, hell I don't know, I can't speak for lesbians. But yeah that's my suspicion. I mean, he would have to be a NICE barbarian (to her at least). Like Tormund.
It's a trade-off. You mentioned that primitive tribes feature little in the way of "feminine" behavior. Well you know what else they don't have? Restraints on masculinity.
All of this feminine behavior may seem tiresome, but leveraging the one and only true asset women have - sex appeal - in the battle for social dominance is the only thing that places women in a relatively equal status in society.
Without it women as a class are just smaller, weaker, needier and more emotional people. I know, it sucks, and maybe it isn't worth it. Maybe men really are just brutes.
But then again maybe balance is built into the system this way: we men suffer in our ways and you women in yours.
> murdered or beat up some of the losers or assigned them to cleaning duty
And here, I think, we see the flaw in what is overall an excellent and thought-provoking essay. Insofar as “masculinity” = “dominance and aggression” within this framework, we know what happens to men who are insufficiently “masculine”: they are victimized by other men. But the most “masculine” men are rewarded — by other men — with status, wealth, access to women, etc.
Thus, can it not be said that masculinity is as much a performance for a male audience as femininity is?
Oh 100% I do think that to the extent masculinity is ever not natural, it is almost entirely incentivized and enforced by other males. There are often complaints from a certain sort of man that it comes from women, but I think it's easier for them to project their grievances onto a softer target and they're afraid to face the real source of their woes, which is men above them on the status hierarchy.
For many men, their immediate tormentors may indeed be women. Women engage in pretty fierce intrarsexual status competition, and keeping males in line with the narrative can be a big part of that. Any man who has ever declined sex with a woman only to be subjected to homophobic slurs is aware of this dynamic.
I think this is somewhat a semantics issue. Maybe we can break it down this way:
- Authentic womanhood -> womanliness (periods and stuff, as described above)
- Performative womanhood -> femininity
- Authentic manhood -> manliness
- Performative manhood -> gentlemanliness
Femininity and gentlemanliness are both performative, fake, tamed, less disgusting and somewhat submissive facets of man/womanhood created to cater the needs of the other sex in the courtship process.
If we had true gender equality, men would have similar issues with gentlemanliness as you have with femininity. However, it is not the case - femininity seems pervasive as you noted, while one can wonder if gentlemanliness is even a thing anymore.
"Femininity" seems like a default required state for women, while "manliness" is still a default required state for men.
I think this is yet another problem with enforcing feminism and gender equality while keeping hypergamy. With hypergamy, the male partner's ability to provide is usually more important than whether he is a gentleman (however, women consider men who both provide and are gentlemen a 'catch' or 'full package'). But for men, woman's ability to 'provide' in the financial sense is worthless (or even worth negative), so femininity becomes the only valuable thing women can offer men. In traditional sense, woman's 'ability to provide' was her readiness to bear and care for children, but in a culture of deliberately childless women you described in your previous post and are a part of yourself, women have even less to offer men but their femininity.
We also need to look at the social class. It seems to me that femininity is a must for upper and middle class women, but not necessarily for lower class. Poor women can afford to be non-feminine, as a poor man that doesn't have much to provide himself will happily settle for one to avoid loneliness and inceldom. Middle and upper class men would never do that. This is why poor women who adopt femininity have a shot at hypergamous relationships with middle/upper class men (as nicely described by Stella here: https://humancarbohydrate.substack.com/p/my-greek-town-doesnt-need-more-tradwives ).
Conversely, it seems that performative manhood - gentlemanliness - is now optional in middle and maybe even in upper classes. Man's status and ability to provide is more important, and gentlemanliness is just nice-to-have. And, as Rob Henderson described in his popular essay ( https://www.robkhenderson.com/p/no-one-expects-young-men-to-do-anything ), lower class women don't even require their men to provide, which leads to disastrous consequences.
Not sure I buy that childless women with jobs have nothing to offer except femininity. I married a guy who is okay with a non-femme woman (I haven't put on makeup in years) and was interested in a dual-income. We do have a few kids, but that shop is closed now, and he still wants to keep me around. I think there must be something else he likes about me. I suspect that on some spectrum of manliness, we are both closer to the center than to the extremes, and therefore don't need the traditional stereotypical crap to be happy together.
Perhaps the masculinity or femininity has to sum to a constant (one being the inverse of the other): you have stable pairs consisting of masculine men and feminine women, or feminine men and masculine women, or moderately masculine men and moderately feminine women.
Good point with gentlemanliness rather than masculinity as the real opposition to femininity (how we tend to define it, at least). The decline in gentlemanliness preceded the feminist movement really taking off with the anti-male stuff. Interesting.
LOL
"Gentlemanliness"
Meanwhile you have no problem invading any conversation and turning it into a pissing contest about your own irrational opinions.
Get back to your video games.
Thank goodness we have a male here to mansplain what femininity is!
Thanks for proving her point.
Men ruin everything. Go play video games.
I think your second paragraph absolutely nails one of the biggest problems in the world, especially as, all around the (western, at least) world the middle and working classes are being impoverished and destroyed.
I also wondered how time and culture specific these observations are. As you know, I am from India and in my experience performative femininity is a niche that only some women leaned into. It is considered kinda trashy and desperate by the actually womanly women because it is still just as effective at getting the attention of men in the short term. You are right in that “feminine” behaviors of grooming and fawning are almost universally hypnotizing to men, but there seemed to be an overall cultural consensus back home that the women who hypothesize and the men who fall for it and enjoy being hypnotized are both missing the mark and acting kind of disgusting. Actually, in that cultural context, the women I know really do get so much more womanly(although they would call it becoming more feminine) when they are around each other instead of around men.
I am not entirely sure why the common understanding about these things doesn’t exist in the western world anymore. I have been wondering if the lack of any real divine female archetypes in the western Mythos has something to do with it. Traditional womanliness, as opposed to femininity, is also respected and even feared more than it is loved romantically, and perhaps that’s just too boring for the modern fast paced world?
As an aside, I wonder how much of the disgust women have for masculinity comes from endocrine dysfunction- or intentional disregulation in this case. I know I am like a broken record on this but for about 4 generations now quite a significant portion of western women have been on hormonal birth control for most of their fertile years. It is already well known that it alters women’s attraction to men in very significant ways that would fit this pattern. Of course, I am biased here, as someone who is very much attracted to extremely masculine men, but the data does speak for itself- since the use of hormonal birth control became so common, men have become biochemically less and less masculine. There is correlation, and a clear mechanism of causation. I don’t think I am letting my judgement get clouded by my preferences and attraction.
I'm not really sure. My guess would be that advertising and mass media and everything fake to induce longing and envy on a mass basis was basically invented in America, in Hollywood and Madison Avenue (industries heavily populated by gay men, FWIW). And I think we've just been exposed to that for so many decades that we're worse than other cultures, and have been marinating in a simultaneously over sanitized yet overly eroticized fantasy world of illusions for so long that that we've lost touch with anything else. Maybe? But you're right there's essentially zero respect for or fear of or interest in matriarchs. Everyone is trying to be a perpetual teenager.
Though up til about the past ten years, there WAS a similar feeling that people who just go fully fake with sexual attraction were trashy. And moreso of that feeling in some parts of the country then others. Instagram seems to have blown that all away and now being a fully filtered thirst trap posting pictures of your Facetuned ass all day is apparently considered acceptable, at least among Gen Z.
I will admit, I fully loathed masculine men most of my life, while I was on hormonal birth control. If you were a jock or soldier or anyone remotely in the realm of that, forget it, I hated and feared you. It was I only when I went off hormonal BC in my 30s that I suddenly found the masuline barbarian types alluring. And I ended up marrying a guy who is very far on the totally extreme end of masculine...he is a complete stereotype of a man's man... and I definitely would not have liked him when I was younger and swallowing hormones every day. So you may be right about the endocrine stuff.
The pioneers were PT Barnum and then, later, Edward Bernays. Bernays was the neohew of Sigmund Freud, invented the Madison Avenue industry and culture, and detailed his methodology in a book called "Propaganda," a term he invented IIRC. Never thought to wonder whether he was gay. The book is a short read, and very eye opening.
Interesting. For some reason, when I was in the 7th grade, our whole chorus concert was dedicated to PT Barnum and we sang There's a Sucker Born Every Minute etc. Now I want to know the answer to this too.
I think what this all boils down to is that:
A. Men are crazy
B. Men ruin everything
That's all you really need to know.
This is why I don't believe in male allies, specifically in the "trans" fight. They are the origin of the problem.
"I am not entirely sure why the common understanding about these things doesn’t exist in the western world anymore. I have been wondering if the lack of any real divine female archetypes in the western Mythos has something to do with it."
Astute observation! I would like to clarify that the Western world once had an understanding of Female/Woman that was natural and authentic...but this was obscured and buried under Centuries of Christian/Catholic indoctrination. Blame Christianity for creating the Western obsession with dominant "alpha" and "trad-wife" stereotypes. All boils down to Adam and Eve...
Meanwhile, Indian culture recognizes fierce and destructive deities like Durga and Kali who are embodiments of Power (i.e. Shakti).
European pagan cultures venerated warrior goddesses.
The problem is not *original* western culture...but the subsequent Christian distortion thereof.
How do you suppose one goes about reviving the old European pagan archetypes? Or creating new ones to match modern times? I know the transition to Christianity wasn’t exactly peaceful but the Christian ideas have been completely ingrained in the western culture already, most people are so resistent to abandoning them even when they aren’t practicing Christians.
The last sentence is the problem, but I also realize that an inner awakening is necessary and that I cannot help those who do not wish to open their eyes to the truth.
I do not "preach" or "convert" as this would be contrary to a true traditional ethos.
The only way to awaken the archetypes would be to immerse oneself in classics like The Iliad/Odyssey, Celtic, Norse, and Scandinavian legends. It is also living and enchanting one's mundane life.
Many people embrace a non-believing "cultural Christianity" out of convenience. It is a "ready made" solution. That is the main reason for its popularity among right-wing groups.
I seccod the classics.
On the argumentation front, I''m doing my part for the pagan re-awakening with my writings here on substack by talking through ideas and pointing out how the inherent conflict in moral priorities in the West muddles thinking, and then charting priority-balancing courses through the arguments. Given the weakness if Christianity in the 21st century, and the shallowness of the moral reasoning of her child-religions, the time for such a transition feels quite ripe to me.
You may not know this but in Indian culture the old deities are constantly revived in their influence through rituals and modern re-imaginings of the ancient myths. Perhaps we need to start weaving the old female archetypes into modern media storylines- there are already plenty of the male ones that have been reskinned for the Marvel movies and such.
What, the warrior woman? Starting with Wonder Woman (who was invented by a polyamorist into bondage and femdom...really, look it up), you've got Eowyn, Catwoman, Black Widow, Brienne of Tarth, Furiosa...where do I finish?
Can you name one that is actually treated by anyone as a fearsome deity to be respected, held sacred or worshipped? All the ones you’ve named are either some sexual fantasy, joke characters or just embody masculine virtues in a female body and so can’t really be taken seriously outside of their warped “girlboss” narrative.
I don't think this will work in the West. We already have too many new-age "neopagan" groups who have bowdlerized the classic archetypes. Some are very political, attempting to graft LGBT interpretations, while others are too superficial. I have become increasingly cautious about people merging "witchcraft" with paganism, because insufficient scholarship goes into it.
In order for european mythology to be incorporated today, we would need authors who are devoted to the source material and will not try to hijack it with post-modern ideas. I shudder to recall some of the awful Wagner opera productions that have occurred in the last 20 years.
I can agree that the revival needs to be handled by intelligent and faithful people, but beyond that I don’t agree. Old archetypes and especially the goddesses need to be embodied, it doesn’t quite matter in what way you do it or what you package it as. In fact, as an outsider I wont speak on the rhetoric of it at all. But if you are going to dismiss the entire embodied world because it has been taken over by idiots rn then you are never going to have any influence in it and it will stay just as idiotic forever.
Is this performative femininity something that the older, married women might scorn the younger, single women for?
My mother definitely completely scorned it. I was not allowed to have Barbies as a child, for example, and she had a lot of contempt for such things. She told me she once made an offer on a house, but withdrew it when she actually met the owner, because the woman was such a "Real Housewives" type that it turned her off to the idea of living in the same house. And the one time I decided to cut my hair short(ish) in 8th grade, I don't think she's ever been so overjoyed or proud of me. None of this worked bc by the time I was 20 I basically looked like a life size barbie doll.
But I hear plenty of women say the opposite, that their mothers scolded them to be more feminine and told them no one would like them if they weren't. It probably depends somewhat on your particular subculture.
It is an age thing but not so much related to being single or married. It seems like grown men and women being perpetually stuck in adolescence is the problem.
The spell of youth and beauty does tend to make one an idiot then.
But it’s not just youth and beauty in the western world anymore, is it? It’s all supernormal stimuli satirizing natural youth and beauty.
The weirdest part is when the exaggerated signals of youth and beauty start mattering more than the real thing. Like when instead of showing off the natural flushing or blushing of their cheeks in response to real things, young women think that they have to cover it up with make up and a permanent, dead painted blush.
I agree, that is weird and I can’t quite understand it.
I honestly don't know what to make of this, because I've been told this is the case by so many women, but it's never been my experience and I've observed the opposite so many times, where men seem to prefer women who wear no make-up or minimal/"natural" make-up, who dress comfortably (definitely a male preference for dresses, but those can be soooo comfy), who play sports, who aren't afraid to be a little grossly silly or make fart jokes, who don't order salads in restaurants etc. I think the concept of "femininity" you describe here is a marketing scam to sell women products, and in my experience it's been pushed (on me at least) by other women. No man has ever told me I need to wear make-up, or high heels (I've had a couple men I've dated ask me not to wear heels because they were 5'9 and I'm 5'5). I haven't worn a bra in a decade and no one seems to care. It has been my experience that men prefer shaved legs and armpits, but heck I know some women who don't do that either and are in great heterosexual relationships. Even the men I know who are in relationships with women who wear more make-up and dress up a bit more, they usually like them for other reasons (e.g. will talk about how smart she is, or how funny or sweet, or various skills etc not that she wears a full face of make-up and heels to parties). Plus, it seems when men try to point out that they aren't really into what you call the "feminine artifice", a lot of women reply that their choice to wear make-up etc isn't for them anyway? Maybe the men I'm thinking of (my husband, my friends' husbands/boyfriends, my husband's male friends, my male relatives, various ex-boyfriends and male friends I've had over the past 20 years) are the minority. But heck they're pretty great. And if not doing the "feminine artifice" is filtering out the dudes who want that, then seems like a massive win to me.
Edit: In this sense I agree with the article's assessment that what we call "femininity" is manufactured and artificial and different from authentic "womanliness" (which I think men are attracted to), and I agree most women are not naturally inclined toward artificial femininity ... but I think we've been lied to that the majority of men want that from us and that artificial femininity is mostly pushed on women by other women, and, as you suggest, possibly by effeminate men. (I think more by men with some crap to sell us, regardless of sexuality etc).
This really, and I mean REALLY depends on sub-culture. I lived in Vermont for a while, and would have said things like what you're saying here. In fact I recall being made fun of for wearing (extremely minimal) makeup a few times. My dad also had an aversion to women he thought were superficial bimbos.
But then in a lot of the rest of the country, guys think women in Vermont or Washington or whatever are just all ugly. And plenty of (often racial minority) sub-cultures place an enormous emphasis on grooming and looking done and like you put a lot of effort into it. The natural outdoorsy, useful, functional woman thing seems to primarily be a white, upper-middle class, recreational-outdoorsy area thing.
And like I said, I salute those guys. And women like you are lucky. Seriously, it is way better to be like that then spending all of your spare income on getting your nails and eyelashes and eyebrows done. I am often amazed that every cashier I see working at McDonalds has lash extensions and professional nails when those things cost hundreds of dollars a month.
But be happy for the norms where you live.
As far as this goes: "a lot of women reply that their choice to wear make-up etc isn't for them anyway?" Give me a break. No one wears makeup for themselves. You can't see your own face. Obviously makeup is for other people. And no one else but men cares if you're pretty, so who else would it be for? They're just saying that because it makes them look lame if they don't. Or they don't want their husband to think they're looking to attract other men. Or they're totally un-self aware.
You’re having trouble believing other people (women) are different than you. When I’m home alone and do something “feminine” like put on make up and cute clothes who the hell is it for if not for me?! I have a strong aesthetic sense! Sue me! I’m also someone who hates being forced into anything, including femininity displays (see my hair removal decisions - not very popular, but can’t say I had trouble attracting men.) Look around, a subset of humans clearly care a lot about beauty, and it’s found in many things. Also how does your island of men lead to poetry and the orchestra? You’re really into your husband, which is fantastic, but he’s not the only type of guy out there. Baths were big in Rome and ancient Japan, super patriarchal cultures. Men and women are more alike than different. And I actually believe that on average there are observable differences in men and women (naturally, independent of socialization) - but you’re (mostly in a funny way) way overstating it.
Yeah, I mean obviously I was exaggerating for comic effect, I don't actually think the all woman island would starve. Though I do think the men would design a ranking system. ;) This is just something I've noticed from watching historical documentaries, how every single society (really up until the past few decades) has created an astonishing assortment of ridiculous hats that show one's relative rank. Lincoln's hat was plain but ALSO taller than everyone else's. That's just a little thing that amuses me.
Even if you dress up when you're alone, isn't the purpose kind of testing out or doing a little theatrical dress rehearsal for yourself? Imagining or seeing what it would be like to dress that way for others?
And yes, I know my views on gender stuff have become rather polarized because of happening to be married to someone on like the 99th percentile of masculine. Previously I thought the genders were basically the same except for the baby making stuff, because I definitely overlap on most bell curves, and mostly I spent my early years hanging around artistic and intellectual types where the men and women sort of clustered in the overlap. Similar to how I'm pretty tall for a woman and on the right side of the bell curve, but right in the middle of the male bell curve, so I know that even when we talk about group differences, there is still a huge amount of overlap in those curves. It does create a rather jarring experience though to live with someone who is truly in the part of the bell curve where there is zero overlap (and not only that but his entire work and social world is the same). It makes you realize where the real differences are.
Notably though, they're not that noticeable UNTIL you get sex-segregated groups. Then, there's no tempering influence and the extremes become amplified. I think that's part of the increasing gender polarization now, is because men and women are clustering into sex-segregated parts of the internet where they just amplify each other's tendencies. I would bet that if men and women voted in totally separate elections, without any exposure to the issues or what the other side was voting on, you would get hugely enormous differences. But that's just a thought exercise and guess.
There was an interesting set of documentaries on Apple TV about this camp for boys and girls where they take the strongest students in the state, and they go and create their own little fake government and do elections at a week long camp. There was one for the boys and one for the girls. They came out SOOOO different. The boys' camp was all about gun rights and freedom and rah rah nationalism and defense, and the women's camp they ended up basically not agreeing on any issues because it was too mean to disagree (except for one very disagreeable girl who was focused on issues), and the winner of the whole girl's election ran on a platform of men not being able to tell women to smile, lol. Anyway if you are interested in these topics I would recommend those shows, they're just one episode each, called Boy's State and Girl's State.
“No one else but men cares if you are pretty so who else would it be for?”
Try this experiment. Get your female friends to talk to a woman they don’t know for 10 minutes. After the stranger has gone, ask your friend what they were wearing. Most will be able to give you a good stab at a description.
Repeat with male friends. Most won’t be able to tell whether the stranger was wearing glasses or not.
If men don’t actually notice (and most don’t) who else would it be for?
Fair enough -- I'm in Vancouver, which certainly meets the middle / upper-middle-class recreational-outdoorsy description, demographics mostly white, Asian, and brown -- maybe the "feminine artifice" is expected more among non-white people here, but it's definitely not just white women getting lots of male attention without the "feminine artifice" or just white men showing interest in women without it. (And, of course, there's lots of women who put on the "feminine artifice" in some situations and not in others, but I don't see this falling into distinct "men around" "men not around" categories.)
I wonder how much of the culture is driven by health. I told my husband about this conversation and he said men like health and natural beauty, which can be faked with make-up. Vancouver is an easier city to be healthy in than most -- an easier city to have naturally clear, healthy-looking skin. And of course, wearing make-up on your face all the time destroys your skin, so it's a self-perpetuating cycle. I think I'm very lucky to have had a mother who told me it was better to just go out in public with a pimple than to try to cover it with make-up, clog my pores, and make the situation worse. If you wear make-up all the time, then yeah, you tend to look not-so-great without it ... same goes for a lot of skin products tbh. If you wear sunscreen all the time, you're more likely to burn on days you don't wear it. Etc.
If you have the "feminine artifice" on all the time, you're going to attract men who are attracted to that. If you are sporting more of a "natural", low-maintenance look, you're going to attract men who are attracted to that. I still wonder how much of the "feminine artifice", in places where it's more common, is driven by *other women* more than men. It seems like online men get in trouble with women quite a bit for saying they prefer the "natural" look? I did some googling after seeing your comment and the Internet indicates that the majority of men prefer women with no make-up (or, in dating photos, with "natural" make-up -- but of course that men prefer photos of women with light "natural" looking make-up doesn't actually prove they prefer make-up over no make-up in the real world; I've heard lots of men complain that women typically are less attractive than their online dating profile indicates -- with no make-up photos, it's the opposite, you look better in the real world than in photos).
I don't mean to give you a hard time, but I see this kind of message a lot and I think it's important for women to hear that they *can* opt out of the "feminine artifice" (if they wish to) and there are men out there who might actually prefer them for that. Most people, men and women, are attracted to authenticity and confidence. If you're authentically into high heels and make-up, that's going to be more attractive than if it's obvious you're only putting on the mask and costume out of insecurity. (Men definitely prefer women who are physically fit and healthy, but there's lots of reasons to want to be physically fit and healthy that have nothing to do with attracting a partner).
Re women wearing make-up for themselves, IDK I personally hate how it feels on my face so I don't "get" how anyone could like it, but some women definitely claim this (I've seen lots of "lipstick makes me feel empowered" articles). I sincerely shave my legs for myself because I prefer how it feels, I'm guessing lots of people would think that's weird. (You can see your own face in mirrors and photos? There are mirrors and mirrored surfaces and cameras everywhere, and as I mentioned above, make-up tends to improve how one looks on camera).
> It seems like online men get in trouble with women quite a bit for saying they prefer the "natural" look?
Definitely—we get either called hypocrites or lectured on how the “natural” look is not natural at all and we don’t really know what we want.
>And no one else but men cares if you're pretty, so who else would it be for?
Obviously not. It is women who care about pretty visuals, making art like painting or decorating their homes. If you care about looking around your home and it is pretty - and most men would gladly live in a concrete bunker furnished with cardboard boxes, just look at the typical garage workshop - then it is logical you also care about yourself being pretty. Most men seriously do not care at all, visuals, looks, just do not recognize as anything important. We are annoyed when before going out we have to wait for her to put on make-up, we would much prefer if she would just pull on a jeans and tee and we are out the door like we do.
I agree with you regarding aesthetics in general as I spend a lot of time money and effort on my landscaping and garden to make it beautiful, for example, while my husband would be perfectly fine to pave over all of it and have just be concrete, as you note. However, I enjoy looking at my beautiful garden and landscaping. I don't have to look at myself unless I'm looking in a mirror. I only make myself look good for his benefit, he's the one who has to look at me. And when he's out of town I'm quite happy to look like a horror those days and skip the makeup and hair routine, it's so much more efficient wrt to use of my time.
Clear, but you sound like in many ways not typical. I bet you never follow make-up artists.
Lol you're correct about that!
I think this is it. I always found women like this off-putting and false. I think it's something new. I didn't see it as strong when I was younger. I always figured it was part of the female intra sexual competition rather to attract guys.
I think there may be a touch of projection in this article. I'm not a woman, so I can't say with certainty. However, I do know quite a few women who have worked in typical masculine jobs and yearn to be feminine (whatever that means to them) when they get home.
I think what you are pinpointing in this article is more of the stress to signal feminine behaviors. It is work, no doubt. I can tell you as a man, being "masculine" is just a container word. It doesn't hold any significant value as each woman is going to have her own interpretation as to what masculine is. What men have figured out (and women as well) is what behaviors are most likely to attract the opposite sex (you also touch on this).
I think the main thing that you are missing, that is an inherent difference between men and women, is that men are much more harsh and uncaring about how someone feels about something; you do or you don't, your feelings about it are irrelevant.
So while I understand your sentiment and do mostly agree (girls without boys around to impress act much differently or who have taken their men for granted), a man whining to another man that he doesn't want to push himself, be competitive, useful, have that edge, etc. (and trust me, there are a lot of men like that out there) is disregarded by other men.
Guys haze one another instinctively to sort of the bitches from the useful men. We operate in a world of utility that women will never experience. Just as women want a guy who has his shit together, men too, want those types of men around them and have little time for anything but.
This is not a comment of me trying to say that things are unfair for men, I don't care and no man should either; it is a part of the experience of being a man. What I am saying however, is both sexes have their roles to play to make them more successful (whatever that may be, including attracting the opposite sex) and you can't change what men are attracted to, regardless of your complaints same as men can't change women.
Is it work? Yes. You can choose to put in the work or not, but you aren't changing the game. Feminism has tried and against all odds, guys still want what they want and women still want what they want. As an individual you have to decide how much work you are willing to put in to attract and maintain a relationship with the opposite sex.
Very interesting perspective and I think I buy the main thesis. But I disagree with how much you blame femininity on men. I would put the dynamic like this: 1. Femininity is discovered and women realize that men are attracted to it. 2. Being feminine becomes desirable and high status. 3. Women start to compete in femininity, going above and beyond what's attractive to men, to get status.
Compare with the gym bro meme were the guy starts lifting to get big muscles to attract women, gets too big for women to find it attractive but keeps lifting anyway to impress the other guys at the gym.
>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.
To me these men are like the people who don't eat cake since it's "too sweet" or don't enjoy reading fiction since it "isn't real". Good for them I guess but there's also something broken and unnatural about them.
Hm. I'm a woman who finds cake too sweet, married to a guy who doesn't mind my lack of femininity. You might have something there.
"But I disagree with how much you blame femininity on men."
The irony is that blaming men IS an example of hyper feminine behaviour :)
To blame men for women's behaviour is to deny women's own agency and free will and exaggerate men's agency and free will. This way of framing the issue defines women as 'acted upon' objects/ victims. This is great for evading personal/ social responsibility and dumping it all on men's shoulders.
This is what feminists do all the time. No social issue is ever the fault of women (women have no agency), it is only ever he fault of men (only men have agency). This is why feminism is the most extreme example of 'performative femininity' imaginable.
The author said: "Most of the attributes that are considered “feminine” are entirely artificial performances put on for the benefit of men"
Again, this is a hyper feminine way of framing the issue. Women are somehow 'forced' to act the way they do by men for men's benefit, therefore women's behaviour is not in their control, therefore women are not accountable for their behaviour (only men are) = a display of hyper femininity.
So anyway men are hard wired to provide protection and resources to women ('he for she'). Men are also most attracted to fertile (young) women who have an agreeable disposition because these are traits which make women the most suitable mothers. This is why women are most likely to affect 'femininity' (youth, fertility, an agreeable disposition) when the ship is going down and there are not enough lifeboats, or when there are wolves or bandits outside the village, or when there is a food shortage or natural disaster, or when trying to attract a high status man in a nightclub when there are other females competing for his attention and wallet, or when going through an acrimonious divorce and laying claim to half the husband's estate, or when getting pulled over for speeding etc etc.
These are all examples where putting on a feminine display is absolutely beneficial to women (and may save her life). This is an option not available to men.
In the west we now have a very safe and comfortable society (paved streets, electric lighting, safe public transport, comfortable offices with indoor plumbing etc) which protects women and provides opportunities to earn a wage in environments that are as safe as any kitchen (ie the modern office). This means western women can afford to adopt more of a (superficial) masculine identity, and still be safe and protected.
So maybe the post-feminist pseudo-masculine ('empowered woman') identity is the actual 'performative' fake persona! ...... because in the event of a natural disaster, civil war, food shortages, economic crash or an end to welfare (free money from the state paid for by men's taxes) most women would once again revert to overt femininity (AKA traditional femininity) in order to emphasise the biological differences between men and women and to provoke men's natural instincts to provide for and protect women. This also explains why in more brutal and harsh cultures (the developing world etc) women tend to be much more feminine in behaviour and dress.
What the trans women are doing is exaggerating their vulnerability and agreeableness, as well as portraying themselves as weak and precious (like a delicate vase) which are all FEMININE traits. Women really are fragile and precious from a biological perspective. Women are the limiting factor for reproduction and women's fertility window is short. And women (and babies) are extremely vulnerable throughout the whole reproductive cycle - right up until the child reaches adulthood.
Femininity is really just highlighting (and exaggerating) women's fragility and preciousness, just as masculinity is highlighting (and exaggerating) men's strength and disposability.
This is why Emma Watson's famous 'he for she' speech at UN Women is the epitome of traditional femininity in action. She wore white, acted like a frail little girl and they even played baby music (a sort of lullaby) as she came up to speak at the podium. The only thing missing was any appreciation of men's sacrifices to women, or any mention fo women's agency or obligations to society (such as providing children to avoid population collapse and raising them properly - full time - instead of handing them over to the state). This is what distinguishes feminism from traditional femininity ...... feminists are spoilt brats (I was going to say selfish, narcissistic cunts but I resisted!).
Your note 4 is sweet and flattering. But I tried it with the lesbians--even had a fun threesome with a trans man!--and I can attest that lesbians are capable of generating vast volumes of drama, even with no penis-possessors in the picture.
I have known at least two bi women (both spectrumy) who have told me they prefer to date men because they can't deal with all the extra feelings.
Really enjoyed this essay. Found you through Walt Bismarck, btw.
One complication for your thesis that needs accounting for... little girls LOVE femininity WELL before they are old enough to "notice boys," indeed while they are still kind of annoyed and grossed out by them. The hair styling, nail painting, costume jewelry, obsession with designing "looks" and "'fits" for their characters, the sweetness and cuteness, princesses... a lot of the feminine stuff that will later be attractive to men, and they ALREADY love it, at least in these pre-sexual, prototypical forms. Sure, to some extent it could be simple preparatory imitation of the grown women around them, but a lot of it just seems genuinely FUN and inherently appealing to little girls' brains.
Well, this is true I was definitely like that as an elementary age kid. Me and my friends loved doing each other's makeup at sleepovers, etc. But I think that's just because we liked doing make-believe for all kinds of things and pretending to be adults. We also used to play "office" all the time. Each of my friends and I set up a little fake office in our closets and then would call each other and pretend to talk about business. Everything that involved pretending to be an adult seemed fun and glamorous. By the time I was like 16 I was already annoyed by the amount of time it took to do my makeup and having to wake up even earlier before school to do it. And I DEFINITELY hated actually working in an office once I got my first office job!
Don't get me wrong, you will not pry either my job nor my my makeup from me unless it's over my dead body...but that doesn't mean I don't resent and see both of them as like...SIGH, I have to do THIS again today for the 7,000th time??
That's fair. Kids play by imitating lots of things whose real versions they later resent as adults, with "femininity" perhaps just being one example, and this needn't undercut the reality of that later resentment.
BTW, my wife says that we are just rehashing the exact same arguments as Germaine Greer and her critics in the 1970s...
There are way too many generalizations in this piece, but I think the key takeaway—which I read as "femininity is a performance downstream of femaleness which especially flamboyant gay men deserve lifetime Oscar awards"—intuitively works for me.
A friend of mine, who's gay not the glam-queen type, was the first to express to me how ridiculous he found the tendency of certain gay men to "over-feminate", screaming "bro, stop, even women don't act like that!" And I agree. The gay guy in the girls group is the girliest of them all, snapping fingers and drawing an S shape with his body every time he talks.
My reservations about your theory however is the idea that femininity did not (at least in part) originate with women—or isn't natural to women—and that women completely loathe the performance of femininity. I think gay men could not have invented femininity anymore than Robert Downey Jnr could have invented blackness, even though he did a hell of a great job at it in Tropic Thunder. Gay men have obviously latched on to feminine generalities and the reason they exaggerate it to the high heavens is the same reason novice actors tend to over-act a role. The right balance and grace doesn't come naturally to them so they overshoot the mark every time. I think effeminate gay men-queens think that by being more feminine than the most feminine woman they know, it'll compensate for the detracting effect of their anatomical male aesthetic and the sorority will get to see and accept them as one of their own.
I agree some of femininity clearly is an artifice, but it was developed by women in response to the dynamic mating games of our species. The blush for a touch of youthful flush, the talc powder for the appearance of silky smooth skin (which, perceptually, is good health), the push up bra for larger breasts which is erotic as fuck & screams "breast milk for the bouncing baby boy" (I know larger breasts don't necessarily produce more milk; men are mostly idiots).
Plus, there has always been intra-sex competition among women for men, and that, more than anything else, explains the condition and trajectory of feminine beauty standards. It's not lost on me that a lot of it is done to please the eyes of men, but that doesn't make it male-originated, the same way men putting themselves through immense pain to achieve 6-packs or burning their eyes out on computer screens to achieve wealth and status is done in good part to please women but isn't female-originated.
I also think there's an argument for femininity being natural to women. It really depends on how you define natural I guess. For me, a given expression is natural if the expressor possesses the inner disposition to give effect to that expression. After aeons of biological and social evolution, it seems to be the case that some predisposition to creating the feminine artifice must be ingrained in women at this point. Because even though across cultures the expression of femininity may be slightly different, it's not so different that you can't see the common strains that transcend each culture-specific expression and whose explanation must likely lie in the domain of the biological.
Your point about women hating femininity was hilarious, mostly because I've always been curious about it. I'd be furious if I had to spend every other week at the saloon while brutal hands twist the hair on my scalp so tightly it gives me a headache for days. I've braided my hair a few times and even though I loved the look, I hated the headaches a bit more. Two of my little sisters have told me the moment they get to university, they'll definitely cut their hair. I'm such a sucker for long hair, I blackmailed them into promising they won't. I'm a terrible person. I'll repent, I promise.
But despite these experiences, I don't know how much I can confidently conclude that women don't like femininity. Too much trad-wife content filtered into my feed at some point last year and effectively ruined my capacity to make that judgement. I can't count how many times I heard women say: "oh women just want you to be masculine enough so they can be their full feminine self"; "feminism is full of shit because women love being feminine and feminism is trying to make women more like men", etc. So while I think the pain of feminine beauty is wicked enough to demand loathing, I'm not sure I can discount the words of the women I've encountered in real life and online that profess to enjoy their femininity.
Okay, I'm done. I enjoyed reading you and I will keep reading you going forward. Perhaps your Substack should be renamed "The Quiet Part Out Loud."
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I think her article should be taken seriously but not literally. It’s deliberately exaggerated in order to be funny, which it is. It’s a caricature of the truth, but caricatures work, when they work, because they exaggerate something that’s really there.
> But what you see here is that that men get MORE masculine, without social norms. Society restrains their fullest masculine expression.
Without social norms, you’re in the position of having to reïnvent society, which is ... not pretty.
> Women want to believe that men are ALSO oppressed by social expectations.
Fail to conform to the wrong expectation, in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and you’ll be very physically oppressed, compressed, shorn, twisted, flexed and fractured.
> 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.
It may come naturally for some, but, whether it does or not, you need to give others a reason not to beat you up, take anything valuable you may have by force and kill or enslave you. In society, you _may_ be able to abstract these functions away, but someone still has to perform them, and you still need them to respect you.
> 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.
Probably because noöne would respect the man who said it, unless he were already in a secure high-status position and could afford it as countersignaling.
Interesting perspective on masculinity and societal expectations. It’s important to consider the complexities and pressures that individuals face in conforming to certain norms.
I think it’s time to link this post: Duncan Sabien, “Review: Conor Moreton's "Civilization & Cooperation"” (<https://homosabiens.substack.com/>).
Look, I could produce a version of this essay mirrored to reflect the reverse sentiment: that masculinity is pure artifice and men hate having to perform it. The mirrored essay would make the following points:
-Men actually think going to the gym to get jacked is a torturous slog. Eating boiled chicken and broccoli for six months straight to get your body fat percentage low enough to display rippling veins is agonising. Because these things are horrible, men have to contort their minds into enjoying it.
-Men actually "do not dream of labour", and resent the hyperlegible hierarchy of professions and lifestyles ranked by desirability. Also, men actually hate the fact that you can look them up on LinkedIn and index their status and rarity well before the first Hinge date. A "male utopia" is one where a man who failed to/chose not to connive his way to a top-of-the-line graduate school and white shoe firm is not penalised relative to a man who did! Men actually hate the dickswinging.
-Men actually don't want to beat each other up in a vacuum; they only do this when they have to compete for women because they really love being with women. This claim is evidenced by the well-documented association between uneven sex ratios and violence.
A so on. A whole host of "Men actually aren't really into [stereotypical masculine thing], but do it to get women/for female attention" claims. What would you make of an essay like that? Personally, I'd check the author's CV on linkedin, laugh at his bench press PB and tell him to stop with the soy milk. Then I would add two remarks:
1. The nature of a human being is obviously not fully one thing or the other. The fat MGTOW insisting that he's genuinely happy playing video games instead of enjoying the fruits of masculine attractiveness (whether natural or artificial, innate or learned) is no less performing an artifice than the roided gym bro whose cynicism about women both thwarts and fails to hide his tender longing to be loved by one. And I strongly believe the same is true for the woman-apparently-transcending-femininity that you posit. If there are days you when you want to buy a lipstick called "Prosecco Malibu Orgasm" and pair it with bubblegum pink heels or whatever, and you pointedly refuse you do the thing you want, you're performing an unhealthy artifice too.
2. If you have *zero* first-order desire to perform the -inity of your gender, you need to recognise the following things:
2a. You are in the minority. Most people have at least *some* first-order desire to perform masculinity/feminity. They just like the sight of a Windsor knot framed by the collar of a starched Oxford shirt in the mirror; they would wear the Prosecco Malibu Orgasm lipstick even if no potential partner or instagram follower ever got to see it. (No, seriously. Think about most people at their mentally healthiest. They wouldn't dress for women / they wouldn't dress for men / they would dress for themselves!)
2b. You are not well catered for, because most people's preferences cater to most other people's preferences. Does this suck? Of course this sucks. Can this situation be changed at the macro level? In time, maybe, but not quickly enough to be of use to you. So you need to strategise. Specifically, you need to actively seek out potential partners who do not expect performances of -inity. You need to do your damnedest to avoid lusting after (or god forbid, falling in love with) people who are into that sort of thing.
2c. And most importantly: if you can't be arsed to perform -inity, you cannot expect a partner who will perform -inity while you don't. I'm not interested in levying a charge of hypocrisy. Everyone's hypocritical, everyone wants to take without having to give. I'm just observing facts: if you're a man who can't be arsed to perform masculinity, the kind of woman who'd be attracted to you is unlikely to have killer mascara and a wardrobe full of trendy strappy curve-sculpting athleisure (she's not ugly; she's just not interested in performing femininity. The man is just a fat neckbeard to me tho.). It's this sort of wanting-it-both-ways (I can't be arsed to perform my -inity, but why am I not adored by the sexy people who perform their -inity so well?) in my repeated observations, that chiefly causes grief. It's perfectly fine to have competing desires (see point 1) -- your imperative is to determine which you want *more* and accept the requisite tradeoff.
Getting jacked is pretty horrible, but not being physically weak or grossly obese is great. An insane weight regimen is agony, but a reasonable one is pretty fun. Plus, spices don’t add many calories, so put a nice rub on that chicken and grill it.
Enlightening post overall, definitely makes many female actions and words make more sense.
However, I strongly disagree with your hypothetical that a society of men stranded on an island would degenerate into one of murderous chaos. Certainly, a natural hierarchy would emerge, but most men would be more inclined to cooperate with the others rather than engage in antisocial behaviors. The vast majority of us are not low IQ high-impulse criminals.
I agree with most of the article, but this was written by someone who has not spent a lot of time around lesbians. I also disagree with the part about gay men.
You've made a great argument for the fakeness of femininity, but really, the same could be said for any non-gerrymandered definition of masculinity as well. The 'masculinity' that women try to talk men out of (i.e., the prison chimpanzee behavior) has almost no relation to the masculinity that men perform in order to please women: gaining muscle, getting ahead in the business world, social dominance / assertiveness, and so on. Every single one of these is a grueling slog, and there are very few men who are motivated to cultivate these for their own sake. Rather, these are done to please women, in the same way that feminine behaviors are performed to please men.
I'd also like to point out a strange asymmetry in your desert island example: You say that, when straight women get put on a desert island, their performative femininity would go into overdrive, because they're trying to pander to men. Meanwhile, when a bunch of men get put on a desert island, their masculinity also goes into overdrive. Doesn't this suggest to you that the same mechanism might be at play, then? I guarantee that, if you put a group of gay men on that same island, we would see the same kind of ordinary, sane behavior that we saw from the lesbian women.
The funny thing is, quite recently, I was planning a similar post to yours, where I naively categorized masculinity as 'the stuff we demand from men' and femininity as 'the stuff women are inclined to do', and using that as a basis for further argumentation. Maybe this is a common mistake for people to make in general. I guess it goes to show that cross-gender empathy is one of the hardest things to get right in contemporary discourse.
No no I didn't say the straight woman island would involve performative femininity...they wouldn't be doing their hair and feigning helplessness til they starved. I said they would fall into female-female social dynamics, which involves coalition building by everyone complimenting each other and disparaging themselves to ensure no one is threatened by someone who thinks they're better than anyone else, etc. That is womanly behavior that naturally emerges and no one teaches it to them.
Also, I think we know what they'd be doing on the all gay island, lol.
I don't think the things you mentioned are done for women directly for the most part. Men have been building their muscles going back all the way to the Greeks, mostly to show off for and intimidate other men. You think guys in jail or the military are pumping iron to impress ladies? Or go on any Insta account dedicated to photos of male muscles or gym bodies or body builders...the followers are all men. This stuff impresses other guys, to the point it's a pretty classic meme online about getting ripped (ie: expectation: cute girls fawning on you saying you're cute and asking if you're single / reality: dudes giving you fist bumps and saying "huge traps bro"). Brad Pitt was at the height of his popularity with women when he was a young,slight pretty boy with floppy blond hair in the 90s...and didn't become popular with men til he started doing steroids and bulked up by 70 lbs for Fight Club and Troy. I could go on with many such examples.
Men did not ever talk about doing things like pursuing business or getting muscles to attract women until the 2000s when internet men started giving each other advice on how to get laid, and the whole idea of that strikes older men as embarrassing pandering...you're supposed to do that to earn self respect and prestige among other men.
But I also think that you're just generally confusing two distinct types of mating efforts by males. Think about any nature documentary. There are efforts at pageantry done purely to attract females by putting on a show and hoping to be selected: elaborate songs and calls, or bringing tokens, or building a fancy nest, or showing off plumage, or doing crazy mating dances, or puffing out one's expandable throat, or showing off coloration, etc. There is no other species in the animal kingdom where it's the females rather than the males that do this type of showmanship or have the more elaborate showoffy coloration to attract mates...only in humans has this been reversed where the women are the ones putting on the show and that's part of why I'm blaming it on gay guys. :)
But there's a second type of male mating efforts...which is by far more common among mammals...which has nothing at all to do with directly enticing a female, it's just battle with other males. They have to intimidate, drive off, or fight off their male rivals til he's gone and then he just gets the female bc the other male is gone and that's it. That is most of what male mammals do all day, besides eating, is driving other males off their territory and getting rid of them, or fighting over access to the females in heat. But the females have nothing to do with that, they don't get to pick, they're just the prize for the winner. And I think you're mistaking a lot of behaviors that human men do to intimidate and gain status over and impress other men, for things to perform for women. It is pretty common for men to project their ideas of what they think is cool or impressive onto women and assume they do too. But men revving their obnoxiously loud engines are signalling to other men, much like a lion roaring to the other males to back the fuck up...women hate engine revving. Car shows are filled with men showing off their cars for each other. The only women there are the paid models and men who dragged their wives. Bodybuilding competitions have mostly male audiences. And at the office it's the young males who are impressed by and actually admire the big swinging dick, while the women all think he's a narcissist and make fun of him behind his back.
Now of course there are men who attract women with showmanship, and yes the ladies love the actors and singers and comedians putting on a show for them...that's natural and seen around the animal kingdom and women certainly do love a man who dazzles with his wit or artistry. But Magic Mike dropped panties because of his dance moves...if he was just standing there flexing his muscles with no artistry, it would only be men surrounding him and giving him props.
Maybe you should work through that aspect for your article...what's actually a performance for women versus other men, and why men mistake these two so often.
Lots of good points in here, but I think the bit about building muscle is way off. You say yourself that women 'like a hot, strong body', and woman-targeted romance novels tend to depict men who are way more muscular than the average guy on their covers. Take a look at this thread where women are posting their ideal body types: https://x.com/caitpsych/status/1767434710958116877?s=46 There's no veiny Schwarzenegger-types, for sure, but these people are, on average, way above the median man as far as muscle is concerned. I suspect what's happening here is something analogous to the "I don't like makeup" guys: they actually do like makeup, quite a lot, they just don't like it to be ludicrously excessive or poorly applied. Meanwhile, what they think of as a normal woman's face is actually a heavily decorated one. So too with the "I don't like muscle" women.
Engine revving and dick-swinging are definitely not what I was hinting towards when I was talking about status, assertiveness, and so on. Think less on the dominance side of things and more on the prestige side: or, like you say, wit and artistry. I don't think it's that controversial to claim that competence and mastery are attractive to women, and while it's possible that a competitive drive is part of natural masculinity, the things that men choose to master are highly motivated by the desire to impress women. (Why do you think speedrunning video games, an activity that women tend not to care about, is so much more niche than, say, playing an instrument or a sport, despite all three taking a similar amount of dedication, even when so many men are captivated by video games?)
Also, with respect to your desert island example: Why do you think that the lesbian women wouldn't engage in naturally emerging womanly behavior, as the straight women do? If it's a natural default behavior, and not behavior motivated by, say, an unconscious response to mate scarcity, shouldn't we see it across the board, regardless of sexuality?
This was very interesting and thought-provoking.
Now I just can't figure out whether finding women like this lesbian woodchopper attractive makes me actually a gay man or not.
https://www.instagram.com/nicole_coenen/
Not that it matters, since I'm married anyway, or that she would care. I just can't figure out how that fits in with all this.
I will certify for you that liking the lesbian lumberjack makes you a 100% full USDA manly man. She's one of the women who should go create a superhuman race with the barbarians. And liking a woman who keep the whole home warm though a cold winter with her wood chopping skills makes you Paul Bunyan. Well done.
She's kind of cute, though I'm not a manly man. I'm not sure how masculinity in men and masculinity/femininity in the women they're attracted to correlate. It would be an interesting study!
But how can she create a superhuman race if she won't... never mind. Me confused.
Well I mean...lesbians...it's not like gay men. It's as much of a lifestyle and political choice as a sexual orientation. In my observation at least. Most of them have sex with guys sometimes, or did at one point. You just have to be a really impressive yet also nice barbarian who respects her admirable qualities. The Tormund to her Brienne of Tarth. He would've worn her down eventually, the spark was there.
You sure it would be a barbarian? I would expect a very femmy guy to be a more likely converter; after all she's attracted to women, right?
I mean, hell I don't know, I can't speak for lesbians. But yeah that's my suspicion. I mean, he would have to be a NICE barbarian (to her at least). Like Tormund.
And therein lies the key to femininity - “you’re allowed to”. Permission personified.
It's a trade-off. You mentioned that primitive tribes feature little in the way of "feminine" behavior. Well you know what else they don't have? Restraints on masculinity.
All of this feminine behavior may seem tiresome, but leveraging the one and only true asset women have - sex appeal - in the battle for social dominance is the only thing that places women in a relatively equal status in society.
Without it women as a class are just smaller, weaker, needier and more emotional people. I know, it sucks, and maybe it isn't worth it. Maybe men really are just brutes.
But then again maybe balance is built into the system this way: we men suffer in our ways and you women in yours.
> murdered or beat up some of the losers or assigned them to cleaning duty
And here, I think, we see the flaw in what is overall an excellent and thought-provoking essay. Insofar as “masculinity” = “dominance and aggression” within this framework, we know what happens to men who are insufficiently “masculine”: they are victimized by other men. But the most “masculine” men are rewarded — by other men — with status, wealth, access to women, etc.
Thus, can it not be said that masculinity is as much a performance for a male audience as femininity is?
Oh 100% I do think that to the extent masculinity is ever not natural, it is almost entirely incentivized and enforced by other males. There are often complaints from a certain sort of man that it comes from women, but I think it's easier for them to project their grievances onto a softer target and they're afraid to face the real source of their woes, which is men above them on the status hierarchy.
For many men, their immediate tormentors may indeed be women. Women engage in pretty fierce intrarsexual status competition, and keeping males in line with the narrative can be a big part of that. Any man who has ever declined sex with a woman only to be subjected to homophobic slurs is aware of this dynamic.