# Feminine and Masculine--The most nonsensical adjectives ever.



## Marshmallow Moo (Sep 19, 2011)

I can never reason why anyone would call anything "feminine" or "masculine." If being feminine means the act of being female, and being masculine means the act of being male, then why would ANYONE ascribe these adjectives to material objects? While the problem isn't so much present in the English language as it is in others (e.g. Spanish, French), the problem is still present in English. For instance...

Blue is masculine, pink is feminine. Dogs are masculine, cats are feminine. Math is masculine, language is feminine. Intelligence is masculine, compassion is feminine. Big is masculine, small is feminine. Nature is feminine, the city is masculine. Heat is masculine, cold is feminine. The sun is masculine, the moon is feminine. There are many more but I don't want to make this post too long. 

While some of these things can be explained by perceived gender differences in preferences, why would ANYONE describe a color or an animal as masculine or feminine? And why would anyone use those terms anyway? They just don't make any sense. An object cannot be masculine or feminine unless it possesses that specific gender. Why anyone continues to use these nonsensical and archaic adjectives is beyond me. Anyone else have similar thoughts?


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## Ace Face (Nov 13, 2011)

LOL! I just posted the same thing at 3:39 on a different thread...

"As human beings, we thrive on adjectives. They help us put people into categories. The definitions of masculine and feminine are more partial to each person's own perspective. One person could base his definition solely on what equipment's inbetween one's legs. Other people's definition, which I believe is most people's definition, of masculine and feminine are moreso based on gender roles i.e. girls like pink and boys like blue. My personal opinion is that it's all BS. And from a Christian perspective, man and woman were one single creation before they were separated. The original creation of mankind possessed both male and female qualities. I think that's why it's important that we find balance in life. Don't be overly emotional, and don't be overly logical."


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## randomness123 (Mar 28, 2011)

i think our perceptions of gender over the years have become more vague over the years, so now you can justify anything as "masculine" or "feminine". Why this is necessary i don't know


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## M1R4G3 (Aug 21, 2011)

It's probably for much the same reason that the German language has multiple "the"s for its genders. It feels better aesthetically to some to classify things as they see them in comparison to others. I don't really think there is any more meaning to it than that.


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## TheBoss (Oct 27, 2011)

Ehh...Nature is feminine; not masculine. "Mother nature".

We categorize with what we know. Eventually, we assigned gender properties to ideas or materials. Every time based on the social preconceptions of the era and geographic area.
Those gender assignments change over the centuries. Schopenhauer (among others) was insisting women are basically children inside but a couple centuries later the Peter Pan syndrome was assigned to men.
Wisdom and knowledge (and strategic war) used to be a Goddess (therefore female traits) but in the dark ages those were assigned to males.

For a bright mind, such classifications only serve as guidelines on what current societies perceive/believe and why. Our intellect builds upon archetypes by default and no matter how advanced those intellects are they have foundations for every single thought process in a part of our brain (excuse the simplification here) that is limited. It works in boxes, is able to do categorizing and is finite. So, it creates archetypes as main categories and every single thing has to be assigned or based in one of those limited and finite archetypes. (A thing very much needed as it is how memory works to retrieve the info).
Is a limitation of human nature.

For computer geeks, It is the equivalent of Runtime libraries that must load before the main OS or program. Or the core engine language, which is extremely limited but without it nothing works.


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## Judas (Aug 11, 2010)

You don't have to take the adjectives so literally. I'm perfectly fine with them, and i actually think calling dogs "masculine" and cats "feminine" means something - it's in the.. "energy" of the sexes and the world, yin and yang


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## nonnaci (Sep 25, 2011)

On colors:

My interpretation of pink: a middle ground between the passion of rouge (color of blood or life-force) and the purity of blanc (a lack of pigment, carries infinite potential). Put the two together, we have emotional purity or naivete, which some would attribute to feminine (western bib Eve).

bleu: The traditional color of the sky. Its expansive, uniform (on cloudless days), and distant. The sky looks down on us from afar, its presence judges us as it knows no mortal can compete with its grandeur. This cold distant rationality is a typical quality of that men (greek, western) strive for.


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## redmanXNTP (May 17, 2011)

Marshmallow Moo said:


> I can never reason why anyone would call anything "feminine" or "masculine." If being feminine means the act of being female, and being masculine means the act of being male, then why would ANYONE ascribe these adjectives to material objects? While the problem isn't so much present in the English language as it is in others (e.g. Spanish, French), the problem is still present in English. For instance...
> 
> Blue is masculine, pink is feminine. Dogs are masculine, cats are feminine. Math is masculine, language is feminine. Intelligence is masculine, compassion is feminine. Big is masculine, small is feminine. Nature is feminine, the city is masculine. Heat is masculine, cold is feminine. The sun is masculine, the moon is feminine. There are many more but I don't want to make this post too long.
> 
> While some of these things can be explained by perceived gender differences in preferences, why would ANYONE describe a color or an animal as masculine or feminine? And why would anyone use those terms anyway? They just don't make any sense. An object cannot be masculine or feminine unless it possesses that specific gender. Why anyone continues to use these nonsensical and archaic adjectives is beyond me. Anyone else have similar thoughts?


I hope you're not denying gender differences exist, are you? 

Anyway, certain things like color have psychological effects upon people. There have been science experiments, for example, that one's accessible physical strength tends to drop when they're exposed to the color pink. I don't know if that (the principle, not the findings of the study) is tied in directly to pink being considered "feminine", but the point is that it's not at all surprising to me that human beings, who are very naturally prone to project and to anthropomorphize, naturally gravitate towards assigning male or female attributes to certain things. 

Given the centrality of sexual identity to being human, is this shocking to you? 

Also, the fact that certain things are non-linear or unquantifiable, such as why pink is feminine and blue is masculine, doesn't by itself invalidate them. I think we NT's struggle with that concept.


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## Sammiches (Oct 14, 2011)

Personally I wouldn't say cats are feminine, after all, lions.
Nor would I say dogs are necessarily masculine. Who invented those squirrel-rat dogs anyway?

If I was ever to use masculine or feminine when writing, I think it would be to describe a body, or something trying to resemble a body, like a sculpture. At least if it was made outside one of the expressionist eras.
They have their place, and words can always be used in weird ways to challenge the reader. Royal blood is said to be blue.


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## Jennywocky (Aug 7, 2009)

Vilen said:


> You don't have to take the adjectives so literally. I'm perfectly fine with them, and i actually think calling dogs "masculine" and cats "feminine" means something - it's in the.. "energy" of the sexes and the world, yin and yang


That. we're basically talking about 'energies,' and typically anything that connects to nurturing and relational activity is considered feminine, and aggression and conflict is considered more masculine... very basic roles that the two sexes have fallen into because of physical attributes and hormonal makeup that contributes to said behaviors.

So then these two basic energies start to be applied to element and other things. For example, fire is hot, voracious, and burning -- masculine. Water is deep, flowing, surrounding, full of life -- feminine. And so on. I don't think the "rationale" however dubious is difficult to follow.

As far as pink and blue, until about 1940, boys were pink and girls were blue. Today they're reversed. Boys also used to be dressed like little girls until the age of six or so. Culture itself can be seemingly arbitrary on what it considers gender appropriate.


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## Jennywocky (Aug 7, 2009)

Sammiches said:


> Personally I wouldn't say cats are feminine, after all, lions.
> Nor would I say dogs are necessarily masculine. Who invented those squirrel-rat dogs anyway?


i think the comment was referring to the average dog and the average cat in domestic society, not to the large cats that don't associate with people, etc. I mean, we're talking generalizations; pointing out an exception really doesn't say anything about the generalization itself. For whatever reason, western culture has decided dogs are more masculine than cats... although I was just thinking about pejoratives in our culture, and realized that "pussy" (cat) is a negative term for a weak man and "bitch" (dog) is a negative term for an assertive/aggressive woman... basically behavior by one gender that society has deemed the province of the other. Interesting, isn't it?


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## Obsidean (Mar 24, 2010)

Marshmallow Moo said:


> While some of these things can be explained by perceived gender differences in preferences, why would ANYONE describe a color or an animal as masculine or feminine? And why would anyone use those terms anyway? They just don't make any sense. An object cannot be masculine or feminine unless it possesses that specific gender. Why anyone continues to use these nonsensical and archaic adjectives is beyond me. Anyone else have similar thoughts?


Well research is now showing people actually do perceive colour as "masculine" or "feminine" depending how they perceive the situation. For example, a woman in a red room are deemed more "feminine" and men standing behind a red background are deemed more "masculine". Researchers are just beginning to find out how much we humans perceive different things in different situations.


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## Sammiches (Oct 14, 2011)

Jennywocky said:


> i think the comment was referring to the average dog and the average cat in domestic society


I wasn't at my most serious, apologees :tongue:



> I was just thinking about pejoratives in our culture, and realized that "pussy" (cat) is a negative term for a weak man and "bitch" (dog) is a negative term for an assertive/aggressive woman


That is interesting, but I wonder at what point those words started being used in that way, because pussy is also used in a sexual way and there are a lot of sexual insults in the English language today (I tend to think of them as American, but I digress,) so I'm curious whether that became an insult after it was "sexualised" or not. What was the topic in this thread again?


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## disappointed chiliast (Oct 27, 2010)

Sammiches said:


> That is interesting, but I wonder at what point those words started being used in that way, because pussy is also used in a sexual way and there are a lot of sexual insults in the English language today (I tend to think of them as American, but I digress,) so I'm curious whether that became an insult after it was "sexualised" or not. What was the topic in this thread again?


The etymology of the term is probably from pusillanimous, which means cowardly; but obviously that's not where it derives its present strength as an insult. 

Note also that "bitch" means an insufficiently aggressive man as well as an insufficiently aggressive woman. In general, the most insulting things you can call a man or woman are specifically female in character (bitch, ******, pussy; bitch, whore, cunt), which is pretty revealing. Calling someone a "dick" doesn't pack the same punch.


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## Manofadventure (Dec 20, 2010)

I always thought of masculine and femmine as the typical sort of gender stereotypes, so things like rules, work and decisiveness are masculine traits where the femminie is more aligned with lack or rules, creativity and love. If you look at this in a purely psychological standpoint, consciousness is the masculine part of a person and unconsciousness is the femmine part of a person


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## redmanXNTP (May 17, 2011)

TheBoss said:


> Ehh...Nature is feminine; not masculine. "Mother nature".


If you live in a hunter-gatherer society such as the Native Americans, dependent upon the unbelievably complex and mysterious forces of nature to provide for and sustain you, then nature is indeed mother-like as your provider and you are like its infant, wholly dependent upon it. That makes a lot of intuitive sense to me.

Another example of how such psychology affects our language is in the universal (to my knowledge) reference to boats as "she". The boat, which during long voyages in an often violent and unpredictable sea, must feel like a mother in the way that cradles and protects the sailers, and almost resembles a womb in some ways. 

One thing that's always struck me given the direct clash of these nations in World War II was the contrast between the the Germans' "Fatherland" and "Mother Russia".


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## redmanXNTP (May 17, 2011)

disappointed chiliast said:


> The etymology of the term is probably from pusillanimous, which means cowardly; but obviously that's not where it derives its present strength as an insult.
> 
> Note also that "bitch" means an insufficiently aggressive man as well as an insufficiently aggressive woman. In general, the most insulting things you can call a man or woman are specifically female in character (bitch, ******, pussy; bitch, whore, cunt), which is pretty revealing. Calling someone a "dick" doesn't pack the same punch.


With the exception of pusillanimous, those are all pretty new terms. Look them up in online dictionaries - they'll give you the history and origins of those words.


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## Ace Face (Nov 13, 2011)

redmanXNTP said:


> If you live in a hunter-gatherer society such as the Native Americans, dependent upon the unbelievably complex and mysterious forces of nature to provide for and sustain you, then nature is indeed mother-like as your provider and you are like its infant, wholly dependent upon it. That makes a lot of intuitive sense to me.
> 
> Another example of how such psychology affects our language is in the universal (to my knowledge) reference to boats as "she". The boat, which during long voyages in an often violent and unpredictable sea, must feel like a mother in the way that cradles and protects the sailers, and almost resembles a womb in some ways.
> 
> One thing that's always struck me given the direct clash of these nations in World War II was the contrast between the the Germans' "Fatherland" and "Mother Russia".


Ohhhh, good thinking!


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## ikky36 (Aug 17, 2010)

I believe one main reason that humans assign gender to objects is because gender is honestly the only major thing that differentiates our race. Hell, even color, our easiest to define characteristic after gender, is just the same color in different shades. So it's the easiest way for us to define things in terms we can relate to, anthropomorphizing things is something we've always done since we've developed language and culture and gender happens to be the greatest difference between individuals of the general population. 

That said, I think it is so silly and oppressive to have those connotations. I like to be able to do as I feel, and it's kinda hard to do that if you can get killed for seeming like the opposite arbitrary stereotyped object which doesn't even have gender to begin with. I'm all for doing stuff just because it's tradition or symbolic, but when it oppresses instead of liberates, I can't stand it.

That was a little more tangential than I wanted that to go, but that's my take on genderdized words.


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