What is “masculinity?” This has been probably the most common questions that I have faced over the past five years while writing on the topic of female masculinity. If masculinity is not the social and cultural and indeed political expression of maleness, then what is it?
At the outset, the author makes clear that the term “female masculinity” is not going to be as easy to define as it may seem to the reader. And that expectation is part of the point. Female masculinity is not simply an imitation of male masculinity and, indeed, cannot be that because male masculinity is not as easily defined as many may think. A major focal point of this text is that society must find ways to jettison the conventional ideas of gender as being simplistically an either/or construct based on genitalia. Gender is not identical to a person’s sex.
The tomboy film has long since disappeared as a distinct genre, and it is worth asking why. Where are the next generation of girl actors, sassy girls playing tough tomboys and pushing the limits of compulsory femininity? And what exactly is the threat of the little-girl film and the tomboy aesthetic? One can only speculate, but it seems reasonable to suppose that the tomboy movie threatened an unresolved gender crisis and projected or predicted butch adulthoods.
The author is a self-described tomboy, recounting various episodes from her life even into adulthood of having to deal with the peculiar difficulties that come with being a girl whom many mistake as a boy based on external appearances. The tomboy is the fundamental starting place for all gender identity issues related to those who have grown up to be exemplars of female masculinity. What is interesting, however, is that even as the societal landscape has made more room for the tomboys of the past who have grown up, media role models for such girls have been consistently shrinking since the end of the 1980’s. Which must surely mean something in the debate some persist in keeping alive that glorifying “deviant” gender subversion in films and on TV is a primary cause of such subversive “deviancy.”
To recognize how completely we have ignored female masculinity as a culture, consider the following questions: Why is there no word for the opposite of “emasculation”? Why is there no parallel concept to “effeminacy”? (In fact, these two words mean exactly the same thing!) Why shouldn’t a woman get in touch with her masculinity?
To be technically precise, there actually is an antonym for emasculation. That word is masculation which is defined as the process of endowing male characteristics or attributes in order to make an object more masculine. Of course, that is not what the author means here by opposite. What is intended in this quote is the question of why isn’t there a word for symbolically rendering a women as unfeminine by removing her sexual organs in the way that emasculation represents the symbolic equation of losing masculinity by removing a male’s reproductive anatomy? Although it is not the direction the author takes the narrative, the question raised here unexplored potential for deeper research: this lack of a feminine equivalent to emasculation carries the suggestion that masculinity is more inextricable from its association with the anatomical connection to gender than femininity. If being male means masculinity is transformed into femininity simply through the loss of his sexual organs, what does this really say about gender when the same process for a woman does not even have a name?
