Replacing the Terms “Masculine” and “Feminine”

The most difficult part about discussing gender and equality is dealing with the preconceived notion of masculine and feminine. The first obstacle is that of etymology. After all, the word masculine originates from the word male, while feminine derives its meaning from female. This saddles both words with gender specific meaning.

The second obstacle is the gender specific bias attributed to the word. Tradition might say that to be nurturing is a feminine trait while being aggressive is a masculine trait. This produces the side effect of emasculation or “efeminization” (curious why this word does not exist?) of an individual simply because he/she (note the tricky gramatical issue here) embraces aspects of the opposite gender. A loving father can certainly be nurturing, while a cornered mother can certainly be aggressive.

Based on my arguments in the past few post, I propose the use of the terms intuitive ways of being and rational ways of being. Although on the surface these may appear to be gender specific behaviors, they are not. Admittedly they are ways of being more readily identified with one gender over another based on our long standing social biases. However, these terms allow us to separate the ways of being (which are not necessarily related to biology) from gender (used within the context of this post to convey biologically specific differences).

All in favor, say “ay”.