Metrosexuality and similar topics always raises gender identity question.
Most of the time, masculinity is defined as non-feminine or opposite-to-feminine.
Surprisingly, no one offers the definition of Feminine.
Kind of hard to ‘hit the target’ when no one agrees on its definition.
I don’t proclaim to have THE definition. I know this however (feel free to call me sexist), but I clearly considering ‘investing a good amount of energy and/or personality in the aim of pleasing others / getting attention’ as feminine far more (very) than masculine.
p-dog is just sexually challenged/frustrated right now, but hey what do you expect? he dances around air guitaring to justin timberlakes rock your body all day.
I was filling out an application for Target and when the gender question came up the answers were 1)female, 2)male, and 3)I’d prefer not to answer this question (something along those lines). I was like are you serious.
Well, what if you are born with one sex organ because of a hormonal problem during birth, but the rest of you is meant to be a certain sex. This happens, they do an operation at birth. Then the kid is told sometimes at a later time. What do you consider this person to be?
There are those people called “transgender”. In a few more years you will see the question, sex____ removed from all job applications. The may even have special rights to go along with it.
D23: Biologically, that does the job. Except for freaks, gays and lesbians, and various grays between the extremes. How do you categorize them?
(Some German guy put out the hypothesis for a third (what I would call hybrid or in-between) sex.
Maybe he was right. That statistical abberation just keeps getting bigger and bigger each year. And technology no allows them to breed or breed even more.)
In computer terms, you could say everybody starts out with a ‘feeling’ or feminine hardware and the masculinity is an OS you have to put on top of it.
Or, shorter, anybody can be touchy-feely by default. Having balls and/or classical high-T values however, is not automatic and has to be willed and/or beaten up/conditioned into you. Something that, culturally, few females can do while keeping their feminity. Yet, the same type of ‘rite of passage’ that men have to do to feel like men.
Hope this helps. Sorta. Not as easy to define as it seems, eh?
Dan: If I recall my A&P well enough, all human embryos start as female. Somewhere along the way, the brain starts secreting a hormone to cause the ovaries to descend and become testicles, the labia to merge and become the scrotum, and the clitoris to enlarge and become the penis. So, if those text books were correct - being male can be considered a birth defect as it is not how the fetus began is sexuality.
I know we have several of those in the medical profession among us… I’m curious if they have any input.
I am just wondering how the Y chromosome fits in the process you defined? Is it just the lacking parts (of the Y in contrast to the X) that modulates/potentiates expression of sex related pathways? Tons of questions.
Not sure it would be on topic, but physiology definitely impacts mental processes. For example, lesbians have inner ear mechanisms and processes that are different from heterosexual females. Is sexual orientation the sum of different internal physiological mechanisms? Or are sexual roles just culturally imposed? The classical chicken or the egg debate.
This in-between zone is not evident. But, as this post points out, precisely defining both poles with a definition that englobes more than just physiology is not easy either, so far. Once we define both extremes quite nicely, the gray zone will just be tones between these extremes.
Biologically, male and female are relative concepts. If you have a species that produces two different kinds of gametes (cells that can be used to reproduce), the gender that produces the larger gamete is female, and the gender that produces the smaller gamete is male.
There are male and female frogs, even though neither gender has a penis.