Julia Serano in Sexed Up and I believe before that de Beauvoir in Second Sex both discuss how generally femininity is almost defined as an absence of masculine qualities. In Serano’s case, it’s even about how we quickly judge a person’s gender or sex based on certain characteristics and the way those are unevenly weighted - a beard / facial hair is more weighted as a gendered characteristic, and more likely to make someone see a man than breasts would make someone see a woman.
If I had more time I would pull out the relevant quotes from those works, but I do think if we are comparing the way we discuss emasculating in relation to castration and removal of genitals, I’m really not sure what similar concept or word we would have for when this is done to women, e.g. genital mutilation to remove the clitoris is not generally seen as removing female essence, whereas removing a man’s testes or penis is more likely to be interpreted or understood as removing his masculine essence, or at the very least reducing how masculine he is.
Maybe part of this is even more practical: a man’s sex hormones are produced by external organs that can be removed and which literally would make him less masculine, whereas a woman’s sex hormones are produced by internal organs that are harder to remove. (Not to naturalize the social and political perspective, there are clearly arbitrary cultural values getting exposed here.)
Julia Serano in Sexed Up and I believe before that de Beauvoir in Second Sex both discuss how generally femininity is almost defined as an absence of masculine qualities. In Serano’s case, it’s even about how we quickly judge a person’s gender or sex based on certain characteristics and the way those are unevenly weighted - a beard / facial hair is more weighted as a gendered characteristic, and more likely to make someone see a man than breasts would make someone see a woman.
If I had more time I would pull out the relevant quotes from those works, but I do think if we are comparing the way we discuss emasculating in relation to castration and removal of genitals, I’m really not sure what similar concept or word we would have for when this is done to women, e.g. genital mutilation to remove the clitoris is not generally seen as removing female essence, whereas removing a man’s testes or penis is more likely to be interpreted or understood as removing his masculine essence, or at the very least reducing how masculine he is.
Maybe part of this is even more practical: a man’s sex hormones are produced by external organs that can be removed and which literally would make him less masculine, whereas a woman’s sex hormones are produced by internal organs that are harder to remove. (Not to naturalize the social and political perspective, there are clearly arbitrary cultural values getting exposed here.)
Ooh, I think I might need to read these books … fantastic comment BTW :-)