when are masculine / feminine frames useful, and when not? Language can bring us into more intimacy with reality, or separate us. It can help guide us, or obfuscate. How do we use "masculine" and "feminine" to be more intimate with the real (present), more honest, and more loving?
The 'masculine' and 'feminine' meaning-making about relationships annoys me often. Not so much when either is used by itself. These archetypes are powerful frames, better navigated in the light of consciousness. Both exist in me, along with a lot of other things.
I get the importance of biology too—"male and female" is what, like 2 billion years old? That's a lot of accumulated lineage karma in our DNA.
When it bugs me, it's not because its wrong or particularly fake—almost every parent that's not ideologically committed to a preconceived notion of gender notices some standard differences amongst young boys and young girls. Jack is so sensitive, but he also loves to pick up sticks and hit things. Ciça is so tough, but she also loves dolls and stuffed animals and her baby cousin Sanne. Jack doesn't really care about any of that stuff—Sanne is boring. Ciça lights up.
But I wonder if the heart of it is that I'm just scared of reifying black and white thinking. This kind of thinking seems to make people celebratory of killing or subjecting whoever the other tribe is. I can see that this frame—
- is often used to oversimplify
- often presents a false sense of control over a wildly chaotic world
- the categories are usually not clear, and often insulting, usually to the incredible women I know (like women are somehow less "rational" bc they're more "emotional"? This does not reflect the brilliant women and men I know, and literally all of the trans people I know are geniuses. Similar with intellectual/embodied, independence/connection, competition/harmony, etc)
- often pluralizes values instead of evaluating better and worse versions of any given polarity, or being willing to claim one side as being overall better. There is healthier and more toxic versions of chaos and order, for example.
I'm noticing the frame annoys me often as "masculine and feminine" in relationship, not so much when either is used by itself. That's interesting.
I realized after writing this another thing that bugs me is when they're taken too seriously. This isn't physics, and even then construct-awareness reveals reality entangled with the choice of how you look—I dont even mean quantum physics, I mean as literal as "what are you seeing right now from your eyes?" Whether it's light, or a screen, or atoms, or quarks, all depend on scale. Whether it's society, or the information age, or whatever, are all honest, accurate interpretations based on time, or purpose, or some other choice the subjective meaning-maker made in how to answer the question and engage/relate.
I guess I don't mind the frame so much as the assumption that it's somehow pre-existing rather than made and re-made. It is a well-worn groove, but ironically the self-help understanding of it is fairly new.
#masculinity