Any difference in the sets of characteristics between the two? Or are they just filtered by how the same characteristics gets expressed by gender?
Dedication to family. More emphasis on providing and defending as masculine and more on nurturing as feminine, but mama bear is a real female thing and dads nurturing their kids is manly.
Confidence. Assertiveness. Helping others. Willingness to sacrifice for a greater good. Ambition. …
Any that are positive characteristics on one list that aren’t on the other and aren’t just being a good person while being your gender?
(Covered some in other threads but I don’t think linking matters. A humble opinion discussion is independently worthwhile.)
One perspective, necessarily colored by my uncommon personal experience:
There is nothing good about myself that I stopped doing when I transitioned from presenting myself as a man to presenting myself as a woman. There’s no upright behavior - sticking up for others, having perseverance, being confident and outspoken in the workplace - that I gave up. And every one of those positive attributes is also something that I recognize and admire in other women, cis and trans alike.
I certainly think there are correlations between certain gender presentations and certain behaviors/traits. That’s what sociologists who study gender mean when we say gender is performative. It’s not that gender is made up, it’s that gender is how you perform your social role. But those are just that, correlations, and they aren’t intrinsic to a given gender. Ask any lesbian how she feels about muscly stone-butch ‘masculine’-presenting women… Whose woman-ness isn’t in any way diminished by their expressing some traditionally-masculine traits.
All that said! I think this is a worthwhile discussion and that it is useful to talk about positive or healthy masculinity and femininity. Because those categories, masculine and feminine, carry cultural expectations and social programming that can itself be positive or negative, useful or destructive. When we talk about positive/healthy masculinity I don’t think we should be identifying traits inherent to manhood and saying “these ones are good.” I think that would be useless. Because if they’re inherent, then… How do we encourage/discourage them? Do we really want to be in the position of saying “you are a man, therefore you have this negative trait. Fix it.”
I think a better approach is to try to identify behaviors/traits that are encouraged by our social/cultural structures and say “these are things that we should continue to emphasize/teach/encourage” (like confidence and assertiveness and self-sacrifice) and “these are things we can do without” (like enjoyment of violence and detachment from one’s emotions).
If you read up on the Likability Penalty, women are often viewed negatively when displaying characteristics like confidence, directness, ambition, etc. However those exact same characteristics are seen as positives in men and managers. The women are expected to be the quiet ones, peacemakers and helpful and motherly. I am not aware of any research if it is held against men that take care of their family, help you out, etc. In fact, I think it is seen as going above and beyond in men.
That that is the major difference in the sets, that positive masculinity is seen as a good attribute in men. Positive femininity is seen as ranging “That’s what you’re supposed to be doing.” to “You’re being a bitch by speaking up and making you’re views known.”
Thank you for your post, it’s very thoughtful and bears re-reading.
I’m a gay man. Naturally, some view me by nature as not masculine, and others don’t care. I try to be a better person in general, and if I present as a non-standard gender type, I don’t care. Fortunately I don’t have to care any more, I’m too old for it to matter to anyone.
It used to matter to me a lot. From the moment I realized I was gay (age 7), I was terrified about being found out and socially ostracized, so I tried hard to be not-effeminate. I couldn’t manage “hearty” and “butch” so I settled for stoic and unemotional. These kinds of gender norms have been damaging to my life, and I wish they would go away.
p.s. for anyone who has and everyone else who hasn’t wondered, my user name here is intended to be somewhat ironic. As well as being an actual character from a movie.
The terms are equally well deserved because there are certainly toxic females whose relationship with husbands and children are often unhealthy or even blatantly harmful.
There is sexism involved in all of this. Women are often automatically perceived as the victims of breakups with men being unjustly penalized by a system that I, for one, feel leans noticeably in the direction of females. I think that, on the whole, men have a harder time gaining custody even if they deserve it. Support payments are often unduly harsh, etc.
There’s so much overlap and so much resonance between the many different queer experiences - I know a thing or two about ‘overcompensating’ with stoicism and gruffness; I was scared of my distinctly-not-a-man vibes being recognized and punished. We can all benefit so much from listening to eachother and connecting. I’m so sorry that you were hurt, and I’m very glad you’re here.
It’s hard to overstate how much social pressure contributes to a culture’s views of what constitutes positive and negative gender traits. Specifics do not yield easily to definition because too many overlapping elements confuse and contort understanding.
A country is not a culture. America has dozens, maybe hundreds, of cultures, made up of location, class, race, religion, age, interests, and experiences. Many of these are fluid and quickly switchable, others can slowly change over time. Opinions about positive gender traits can change by reflecting an individual’s overarching opinion about that culture. The reverse can also happen, with an individual who is viewed positively becoming an exception to the generalization about the culture.
Personal feelings are often muddied by the loud voices around them. If schools tacitly or implicitly teach positive or negative gender roles, those usually will be absorbed by students even if contrary to other cultural attitudes. The same is true for depictions in popular media or loud voices on social media. Acceptance and conformity are immensely powerful drivers.
Learn to be yourself is great advice that is also trite and glib. I’ve spent my entire life trying to find and balance my place in these various cultures. I think mostly I’ve learned how to project an image, which, as George Burns said, “The key to success is sincerity. If you can fake that you’ve got it made.”
There’s Aristotle’s theory of the Golden Mean, which posits that virtue exists in between its deficiency and its excesses.
To apply that to (artificially imposed) masculine vs feminine virtues: the “whateveah happened to Gary Coopah?” virtue of quiet, calm resilience. And there’s a lot to be said for it. In life, just take your lumps and move on. A true hero doesn’t always win, but he always picks himself up after he loses. Conflict resolution? “Least said, soonest mended.” You get the idea.
…and so did Richard Cory, who ‘one calm summer night, Went home and put a bullet through his head.”
On the other hand, the traditional feminine virtue of openness and seeking consensus can be taken to excess, and even weaponized. See any episode of any “Housewives of” franchise for “I’m still processing what you said, and I’m just following the need for closure (so I’m going to breathe new life into a dead, pointless quarrel).”
I’d say that deliberate helplessness — I can’t be expected to do that, I’m a girl!, that sort of thing — is toxic femininity; as is teaching that sort of thing, and putting down women who don’t do it. So is negatively commenting on how other women look — while men do that too it’s usually in a different fashion. So is insisting that men in general aren’t fit to care for children, or clean house, or control their own sexual impulses — though come to think of it there are plenty of men who do that too. Usually when they themselves don’t want to do those things, though, so that’s also doing it in a different fashion.
I don’t think of hypocrisy, entitlement, lack of self awareness, or malevolence as being traits more common in one gender.
This is a tough question. I’m a cisgender woman so my opinion is shaped by that. I kind of think sexuality and sexual instinct are important factors here. I am attracted to masculinity. I have to believe masculinity is a thing because despite my largely heteronormative leanings, there are butch lesbians I’ve been attracted to. I don’t think anything could come of it, but these women are presenting something that overrides my tendency toward people with penises. If they weren’t doing something distinctly manly, I’m not sure how that could happen, because I am not attracted to female bodies.
At the same time, people of either gender can exhibit pretty much any trait. These traits in research may cluster around certain genders, but a lot of the traits mentioned here are great to have regardless of what gender you are.
The thing is, it seems to me that social modeling is hugely important to developing minds, and it also seems to me that many (most?) girls grow up looking at female role models and boys look at male role models. I look at my son, who has a dim understanding of gender but nonetheless naturally gravitates toward my husband and other men. I’m not sure it even really matters what positive traits are being portrayed as male vs female, it’s just important for kids to have some kind of positive modeling associated with the gender they identify with. I would not assume, therefore, that kids look at men and women indiscriminately when trying to figure out how to be. I think, generally, cis girls look to women and cis boys look to men. So whatever positive traits we identify as manly or womanly is less important than ensuring girls have access to good women and boys have access to good men.
Have you ever watched any of the Real Housewives series on Bravo? I don’t know if there is a name for it but I think those shows present a very toxic version of distinctly feminine behavior - entitlement, gossiping, bickering, aggressive social positioning and power plays, weaponized sexuality, self-victimization, manipulation. Pretty much everything you described.
Much like their toxic male equivalents, toxic female traits take stereotypical or even positive female traits and twist or exaggerate them in a self-serving way.
Nope, but based on your description, it does sound like they are working a lot of stereotypes that I would agree could fall into the category of “toxic femininity”.
Although some of them (“entitlement”, “power plays”, etc.) don’t seem from that one-word description to be specifically female-coded. I agree, though, that there are distinctly female-coded versions of such behaviors that I’d lump into the “toxic femininity” class.
My husband loves watching those. For what it’s worth, he says it’s like watching pro wrestling without the (fake) violence. Scripted, and full of stereotypes; everybody loves to watch the “bad” ones, and the “good” ones don’t last very long.
I’m not going to claim that such never happens but it does not seem to currently be the typical case:
our data indicates that the “success-likeability penalty” for women that Sandberg is concerned about does not exist. While there may be individual examples of it, our aggregate data shows the opposite is true. Further, there is no male “success-likeability bonus.” On the contrary, male leaders are perceived more negatively as they move upward, while women generally maintain their likeability throughout their careers.
Anecdotally, I have very strong confident assertive female colleagues. They are liked and respected just fine. Our company has had a few CEOs over the past decade. Last three were a man, a woman, and a man, in that order. The woman CEO was the one I … disliked the least. She was the most direct, and the least full of shit. The smartest. She was still a corporate hack but she was the most competent and honest about it one of the three!
@Kimstu that list of yours is a good summary. Playing faux helpless is a great example of toxic femininity. Yeah weaponized sexuality. Using exaggerations of stereotypes to just short of parody levels to accomplish goals. But I’m focused on positive characteristics of both socioculturally defined sets.
Do you mean that you want to know what portions of the stereotypical sets describe positive characteristics? Because I think the positive characteristics are positive for people of any gender; though they may be expressed in somewhat different styles.