It lit a fire inside me. Go check it out.
For the past two months, I’ve participated in a bi-weekly course on sex & gender in the ancient Greek world. Bed-rocking revelation of the month: In Greek antiquity, gender was not subservient to a person’s sex.
Male philosophers & participants in the symposiums would voice their appreciation for the feminine qualities of another man. They used words like beauty and grace, and were not shy in expressing this appreciation poetically and convincingly.
Sappho, the poetess from the Isle of Lesbos, often described a person she desired without particular reference to their sex. She spoke of masculine charms and feminine allures in her recount of their character.
From an amorous perspective, gender often existed independently of a person’s sex. Possessing qualities from both genders could enhance desirability.
I’m with the Greeks on that one. There’s something overwhelmingly magnetic about a person who is equally soft and rugged.
It could be the symmetry.
Artists of the ancient world sculpted, painted & penned figures of divine beauty with perfect symmetry; a matched balance of halves. This is how we’ve come to process bodily beauty. Bilaterally symmetrical faces, breasts, six packs and legs are deemed closer to perfect.
People augment their bodies in hopes of gaining a more perfect symmetry. They hope to edge closer to perfection by balancing their halves.
In many cases, the need for symmetry compels us to search out balance on a deeper-than-visual level.
It’s no wonder that so many Cosmo-reading, pink dressed & princess crowned girls-turned-women are out there searching for “their other half”. They live in the explicit feminine, and they feel they must express this gender to its fullest extent. They are severely unbalanced in the spectrum of gender expression, and so they search far and wide for the rugged & stoic explicit masculine. Without that other half, they feel incomplete.
“I came into this world on the fifteenth of September in the year of the rabbit. I was born a girl.
With my birth came ideas & belief systems that were set to define who I was. Most of these views were bestowed upon me without my permission. The essence of my gender was one of them.
From a very young age, I was taught consistently & subliminally about what it means to be a girl, to the point where it became second nature. The Disney films, fairy tales, & depictions of women in the media gave me a good definition of what femininity was. It also showed me what femininity wasn’t.”
—Ev`Yan sexloveliberation.com
The process of gender definition snaps into motion the moment we are born. It’s the pink blanket or the blue blanket, over and over again. Five thousand pink blankets later, it’s unsurprising that a woman feels the need to subscribe to Cosmo mags & lust after emotionless men with bulging biceps and a bad attitude. Without that guy, their femininity is unanswered. There’s nothing on the other side.
When I meet a person who has struck the internal balance of masculine and feminine, I’m a moth to a brightly burning flame. They’re dynamic. They’re powerful. They’re electric. They possess an internal symmetry of human character.
They aren’t bothered with looking for another person to fill in the missing half, and they aren’t wasting time or energy on the fulfillment of a gender role.
They are practicing the fine art of authenticity.
Are you?
Do you feel balanced, or do you edge to one side of the gender spectrum? What does masculine mean to you? What does feminine mean to you? Do you spend time nourishing your halves?
Spot fucking on! You said everything I wanted to say but couldn’t (or didn’t have enough room to). I am so glad that you read my post, because it prompted you to write your thoughts, which are wise, forthcoming, & inspirational.
Also, I love this sentence: “Possessing qualities from both genders could enhance desirability.”
THANK YOU.<3
Very well said . . I hadn’t thought about gender & unanswered femininity this way before. Thanks for your insights.
xoxo
Society needs huge wake up I am humbled thank you very much
I found this comment very insightful,, I’ve always been very aware of the parts of me that are more masculine, even if I’ve not voiced them outloud, I’ve always looked at it as an
inadequacy, as if I wasn’t living up to my full potential, But at the same time I never wanted to be that pink tutu wearing girl in sex in the city.
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“It’s no wonder that so many Cosmo-reading, pink dressed & princess crowned girls-turned-women are out there searching for “their other half”. They live in the explicit feminine, and they feel they must express this gender to its fullest extent. They are severely unbalanced in the spectrum of gender expression, and so they search far and wide for the rugged & stoic explicit masculine. Without that other half, they feel incomplete.”
I really, really love this post! Through my adolescent years, I was constantly struggling with my “sexual identity”; sometimes, I wanted to be so “feminine” in the traditional sense of the word, and sometimes I felt so much the urge to be the “strong, masculine, rugged and stoic”, that it left me really confused and sometimes even wondering if maybe I was bisexual or lesbian, because a relationship with a woman seemed like the only way I could exploit my “stronger” side. Turns out, I was wrong and there are some guys who aren’t threatened by a symmetric girl, hehe, it really sucks that society gives you only two choices, pink or blue, when there is a lot of beautiful purple in between.
Yes, yes, YES! These are the thoughts that have been burning in the back of my brain but I haven’t quite figured out how to articulate. Thank you for articulating them for me!
And thanks for joining my 100 Years::100 People::100 Changes campaign! You rock!
very well put. you are very eloquent and articulate