Should We Stop Using Masculinity and Femininity?
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- Опубликовано: 2 июн 2024
- Join me for a healthy debate over whether or not the terms 'masculine' and 'feminine' have become outdated or not.
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Talk Topics:
00:00 - Welcome!
04:12 - Traditional ideas of masculine and feminine
10:55 - Do our hormones play a roll?
13:02 - Why it is outdated
21:09 - Why it isn't outdated
24:13 - Listener input
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Disclaimer: I am not a mental health specialist, just a Canadian gal with an old soul who likes to crack the ice on deep conversations that can foster personal growth and positive change.
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Masculinity and femininity are very cultural ideas. I’m Yoruba but I grew up in Canada and I would say that femininity in my culture is a lot broader than the idea of femininity in Canadian society. I find Canadian/western ideas of femininity to be quite limiting. Lol we still have lots of patriarchy in Yoruba culture but women in my culture also have a lot more room to be assertive, loud, opinionated etc and it isn’t considered “masculine” in the same way as it does in the western world
That's really interesting. Thanks for sharing!
I love that in this community, it is possible to have this kind of conversation! I feel like it's not outdated when we talk about energy, not so much man and woman.
Thank you for talking about this! I can also see both sides. The concept of yin and yang dates back over 3000 years. It's an idea that demonstrates the duality of life. We all have both masculine (yang) and feminine (yin) within us, regardless of gender expression. The issue is that the patriarchy has hyjacked these terms to put people in boxes rather than using these concepts to better understand ourselves. I think it's up to the individual to decide if these terms are outdated. "Masculine" and "feminine" aren't inherently problematic, it just has to do with how you perceive it.
I agree. I recently had reiki done and was told I was too much in my masculine energy. I've been in fight mode for the past 4 months over an unjust situation and needing to voice my opinion on it a lot. I walked away from that session feeling like I was somehow wrong in expressing my anger. I've rejected that label. Women should be able to express anger without being told they're being masculine. I think it's an archaic way of thinking.
I've always had an issue with the use of masculine and feminine as terms used especially spiritually. Most of the time a more specific adjective works just fine instead of conflating the idea of softness or vulnerability with women. I find it's rare that the term feminine is needed to describe what people mean with it. But that's also coming from me, someone that doesn't see the correlation between gender and personality traits or feelings. There is a place and time to use it to mean what the words are currently defined as by broader society, yes, but it's pretty easy to get rid of the terms in your own vocab for the most part without losing anything. I don't see how gender has anything to do with spirituality, the whole soft is feminine and assertive is masculine dichotomy in spiritual spaces is what keeps me away from them. I'm both which makes me ME, I don't need to label parts of me one thing or the other.
Since these terms are tied to how society sees gender I hope to see them change just the way society's view on gender changes. There is a reason why femininity in the west is different from feminity in the global south. The less we put boxes around things the more flexible the terms become.
There is no straight answer to these terms being outdated because of that. Words have their use while having their downsides. If you haven't read Amanda Montell's book "Wordsl*t" yet I highly recommend it, because it's adjacent to this topic in many ways.
I am french, and as french people know, there is no gender neutrality in our language. Everything is either feminine, or masculine : a lamp is feminine, a computer is masculine. I moved to Québec and found myself arguing with my Québécois boyfriend over if some things are masculine or feminine (such as kitkats or other chocolate bars, to me it's masculine, to him it's feminine). I think life would be much more easy if we had more neutral, because we know that gender isn't binary but we fail to have official language to designate the people that don't consider themselves male or female. In that sense I do think that femininity and masculinity are outdated. However, I do not think we should stop using them completely, I just think we should make room for ✨something else ✨. People still relate to femininity and masculinity, but there should be an "otherinity" that people could lean into. The true problem is the gender norms that are pushed, consciously or not, onto little kids. I remember that when I was a kid, it was very common to say stuff like "he bullies you cause he likes you and boys will be boys", being reprimanded because I would sit with my legs wide open and "it's not feminine to do that" and I ended up being a tomboy at 7 years old because being a girl and the expectations pushed onto girls were tiring as hell. I'm now 25 and surprise surprise, I am no longer a tomboy because I learned to dissociate femininity / masculinity and being a woman / a man. I lean into both sides oftentimes and my boyfriend is also somewhere very much in the middle, he is a social worker, so he is a caretaker of sorts and breaks a bunch of masculine societal norms so the things he does could be considered feminine. Except that if I say my boyfriend has feminine tendencies, society would tend to have the misconception that he must be gay, because we seem to associate femininity in men, as gay. There's a whole lot of deconstruction to do there I believe, and I wish that femininity would stop being mistaken as being weak whereas masculinity is often considered being tough. I do agree with the person that said that feminine feels more light and soft while masculinity feels darker in a way, and I also agree about the fact that as we don't go from day to night with just a switch, feminine and masculine seems to be more of a spectrum, as a lot of things that are human are in the end :) Thanks a lot for this food for thought Kalyn, have a nice day 🌞
I just think it’s a lot more helpful use specific adjectives. if you want to say someone is assertive you can say that or emotional you can just say that or nurturing then you can just say that. I just don’t see the value of using words like femininity and masculinity. I don’t think they’re always the most helpful because how are we even sure we’re referring to the same thing? Because nobody has a monopoly on what masculinity and femininity mean. Everyone can define those for themselves but we all know what “nurturing” or “assertive” or like more obvious words actually mean. Cause what if I say that femininity means being assertive to me?? The terms aren’t actually fixed so that’s why I find them unhelpful personally 🤷🏾♀️
This reminds me of that cartoon where two women sitting at their desks at work are speaking to each other. Woman 1 goes: What is the difference between assertive and aggressive? Woman 2 goes: Your gender.
Even these descriptors are often charged with gender-based bias.
@@shaneechung8807exactly there are very gendered ways we describe the same behaviour depending on who is doing it.
I think it’s important to not erase masculinity or femininity by making everything too ambiguous. A certain characteristic of a person could be masculine, feminine, both, or neither.
BUT masculinity… associated with being male..And femininity… associated with being female…. Are still real and highlight the differences of the genders and that’s a good thing.
I have been loving the conversational coffee talks atm, so fascinating to see everyone’s perspectives!
Kaylin is glowing with femininity, right, and it shows her spirit is glowing her skin ect...
Just discovered your channel today. Thank you, I cannot wait for you to share more 😊
Thank you for such a balanced conversation. I definitely agree that while there are reasonable questions to be raised about its timeliness in regards to the terms the concepts are not outdated. There are times where I exude certain traits more than others (depending on the situation or season of my life) but I always exude feminist and masculinity, the ratios might just shift from time to time. And it is a spectrum, I particularly loved the comparison of the many stages of light that occurs before night into day and vice versa
I'm also pregnant atm, and currently I've been craving orange juice or oatmilk, these things are sooo refreshing to me. Or super cold water 🫖☕🍶
Super surprised to hear you reading my opinion on your phone and agreeing with that, that was so unexpected. Great conversation!
Words are interesting and more specifically definitions are interesting. Because they boil down to someone somewhere made it up and decided that was how it was defined. Depending on culture and time in the world others agreed with those things. The reason I think the terms and concepts should be abolished entirely is simply because what is considered "masculine" or "feminine" has changed over culture and time and still varies depending on culture and place. I wrestled with my gender identity for years and tried to fit every mold you can think of. I landed on Agender because nothing has a gender. How one defines that varies and it is rooted in what is considered as these terms. Deconstructing things all the way down is what gets change and ultimately grows us all as individuals in just the way we think and interact with others. That said, I love how BeyonceStan worded a response to this because they put it how I wish I could have. All of the languages in the world and access to them and society struggles to come up with non oppressive words for outdated things simply due to "how we always have done something" or one could argue they simply don't want to grow or change. I don't see caring or nurturing as a feminine energy any more than a masculine. Or proactivity as inherently masculine. Words evolve and change. I can think of many words that have done this. We don't use the words except to mention as history. We just don't use them in modern and commonplace society. Energy has no gender until a person places that on it. It just requires deconstruction. I use all pronouns and don't have a gender because the concepts don't exist.
also, i’ll just say it, organized christianity really messed a lot of this up
Although it was an idea that I liked at the beginning, which helped me at some point to understand and respect my body's energy cycles, I think that nowadays we should start using new terms to define these types of energy (in the same way as many people started using plant based instead of vegan). The terms have been widely used to perpetuate these "traditional" gender roles, especially within religion (and I'm sorry to anyone who feels offended, I don't want to offend anyone's religion, but we know that many Christians use religion to practice and perpetuate chauvinism and violence). This type of concept has been used as a justification to criticize (with many erroneous facts) the feminist movement, keeping women out of the work environment as if women did not have the necessary capabilities, instead of encouraging the redesign of the work environment to accommodate the differences, forcing physical relationships even when women don't feel like it because "masculine energy" requires physical contact to express affection (associated with feminine energy), among other oppressions that I have constantly seen online, also brings bad consequences for men, who lose the right to express this softness because it is considered feminine, as if it were a bad thing. For me, they became synonymous with violence and being a woman who likes things considered feminine, I started to feel dirty, as if I were contributing to this violence against women and men who benefit from and identify with energies different from those expected of their genders. I actually started to feel a certain repulsion towards the terms and stopped using them so as not to collaborate with those who were distorting them.
i love that this came out right while i’m in the middle of talking about masculine and feminine energy on my channel! i do think there is such value in understanding the difference between these energies, but yin/yang could also work
I find the words masculine and feminine divisive. It's so binary. I don't like the idea of men being the dominant ones or women being submissive. When little boys are sensitive, I don't want them to be pushed into stoicism, for example. The conversation about language is a funny one too because a chair in French is feminine (la chaise), but in Russian, it's masculine (stul). ;) Go figure!
To your point at the end about why we have conflict. I recommend Behave by John Sapolsky which dives into your question looking at reasons for tension from biological, sociological, hormonal, generational etc. lenses.
What happened to the vlogs? I thought you said you are focusing on vlogs this year.
10/10 coffee talk
Before even watching the video, I think that to do away with masculine and feminine and only use androgynous or genderless is to ignore the beauties that those things have to offer. I don't think we need to do away with masculine and feminine but handle them with the maturity and respect we should apply to any other way of being.
Not the way that her tea became the perfect balance of masculine and feminine at the end 😂🍵
No. It’s like saying “should we say that daytime and nighttime are the same?” Or saying “should we act like the sun and the moon are the same object?”Like lol, no.
A wonderful RUclipsr I watch, Contra points (Natalie Wynn), did a recent video where she touched on the idea of masculine/feminine. I'll link it, but she had a similar conclusion that humans are complex and the dichotomy of masc/fem is too simple.
The video is quite long, her thoughts on masculine and feminine are in the last 10 minutes or so.
ruclips.net/video/bqloPw5wp48/видео.htmlfeature=shared
I think the terms are far more harmful than not, and are often used as a tool to put people "in their place," particularly women but sometimes men too. Who decided that being nurturing and soft was feminine? Why is being assertive or hustling masculine? Is it something we innately are, or was it trained into us? Who benefits most from those stereotypes? (hint: it's the patriarchy) The more you pull the thread on these terms the more they fall apart and look ridiculous. We used to be taught that tens of thousands of years ago men were the hunters and women were the gatherers, but research has found that women were hunters too, so even that old stereotype is a lie. I find it especially upsetting the way "enlightened" people in the spiritual community are now using masculine/feminine energy to tell women that we're not existing the right way, and hey here is a course you can buy to fix you! I've seen hundreds of women in spiritual spaces worrying about not being in their feminine energy enough and then coaches prey on them, it's disgusting. I'd love to abandon the terms all together.
I completely agree, at the end of the day what’s the value? Isn’t better for everyone to focus on the virtues that will make them a better person? Like when you think of a “good person” what character traits do we associate with that and can’t we all just strive for that?
Masculinity and femininity are both necessary and beautiful. Life would be very dull if we all had the same beige personality.
I believe that it is very adaptable for humans to pick up on patterns, and women typically possessed those feminine traits just as men did the same with masculine traits, because it made most sense in a society where people had to survive, and the best way to do that was to delegate tasks in a traditional manner. Woman couldn’t go out and hunt when they had a child that they had just given birth to and needed to feed all the time. just as men couldn’t constantly invest in their children when they needed to make sure the child had food to survive. These roles were there to breed survival. In the modern world it’s not as necessary since we’re not constantly fighting for our lives. That doesn’t change the fact that all these years in the past have contributed to making us humans adapted for that type of lifestyle and in some less developed countries, these roles can still be adaptable, so for a lot of women and men embracing those traditional roles, feel very natural and right, and seeing people deviate, feels very unnatural and wrong. When really it’s just a product of us living in a part of history where things have changed so rapidly and human evolution is trying to catch up. traditional roles are often demonized when in actuality, I believe that they originally were very sensible and anyone pushing for or against them both have reason to do so.
When you're not only obsessed with crystals, but you actually sniff and then lick them every night before you go to your bed, which is actually made of Tarot cards.