InvisibleBlack
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ORIGINAL: Psychonaut23
Your usage is at odds with the traditional usage.
Evidence, please.
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ORIGINAL: Psychonaut23
Your usage, and several other people's, seems to be mired in exactly the sort of confusion and vagueness that Judith Butler hoped to introduce with her work Gender Trouble.
I am completely unfamiliar with both her and her work. I suspect it's related to blurring gender roles or to there being no need for gender roles.
I am not making the case that the terms masculine and feminine are interchangeable or that their definitions share a great deal of commonality. I am arguing that the term "weak" does not correspond with "feminine". I would agree that the term "strong" does correspond with "masculine" but that does not necessarily imply that "weak" must apply to "feminine" - Gollum in Lord of the Rings is probably the antithesis of what one would consider "masculine" (including being weak and craven) but I don't think he could be described as feminine.
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ORIGINAL: Psychonaut23
I prefer the more traditional usage, including Eastern conceptions such as found in Taoism, simply because I prefer my words to actually refer to something, rather than refer to a huge mess of postmodern academic babble.
Your assertion - that your words actually mean something - does not necessarily follow from your stated premise. Stating an opinion as fact doesn't make it so.
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ORIGINAL: Psychonaut23
Instead you need to start with a definition of femininity and then seek out women who exemplify that. Otherwise you run the danger of picking women from the middle of the curve instead of at the end.
That would work if we weren't disagreeing about the definition of femininity. In my experience, when two people are viewing the same word or concept in different ways, the most reliable method for driving down to the core of a definition, when a dictionary or a thesaurus is too simplistic to capture the nuance of a term, is to run through instances which exemplify the word and then attmpt to derive the commonality between those instances.
A definition in the abstract isn't very helpful without some application or validity in the real world.
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ORIGINAL: Psychonaut23
There is also a question of what "weak" means. It's the opposite of strong, of course. Delicate things are weak. Pretty things are weak. Sensitive things are weak. These are necessarily ideas I agree with, but these are the associations that people generally have with these terms.
Delicate things are weak, by definition. However, I don't think the term used was delicate - as in fragile - I think it was delicacy as in "the quality of requiring great poise or tact" or "sensivity with regard to what is fitting and proper" - Delicacy would not permit her to be rude. To my mind, a certain degree of gentility or elegance is a component of something being feminine.
Pretty has to do with aesthetics and I consider such terms to to be "strength-neutral". When I say "The Christmas lights are pretty" I'm not making a value judgement about their innate strength or weakness.
Sensitivity is a tricky one depending on how you use the term. I'd have to ask Mister Webster what he was thinking. I read it as "sensitive" as in "having a higher perception than normal" not as in "being more emotionally vulnerable". I suppose a case could be made for the other way. I'm now curious what other people think - is being "sensitive" a feminine attribute and in which sense - or is Noah Webster off -base here?
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ORIGINAL: Psychonaut23
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I'll use the same genre I was using for "gentleman". I consider Morticia Addams (in either the Carolyn Jones or Anjelica Huston incarnation) quite feminine. I don't believe she is weak.
Quite feminine in appearance, perhaps, but not in temperament or demeanor. There's very little about Morticia that is yielding and soft. Morticia is more a femme fatale, and the femme fatale is generally quite masculine in her being, while quite feminine in her appearance. This is what makes her so deadly, of course.
Ah, you've now introduced "yielding" and "soft" as feminine requirements. I suppose that goes with "weak".
I view the femme fatale as a feminine archetype, as such I reject your claim that it displays masculine attributes. I'd have to say that the femme fatale goes about achieving her aims in an entirely un-masculine way and this what makes the character so compelling - her strength is not masculine and that is what inspires both the allure and the trepidation in the men around her.
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ORIGINAL: Psychonaut23
Now, I consider Morticia to be a magnificent example of the many ways women can be, and the only woman I ever fell in love with was very Morticiaesque, both in appearance and temperment, but a paragon of feminity? Not quite.
I think the character is exactly a paragon of feminity and I find it interesting that you can't see it. If what you're saying is that the only way a woman can be strong as by functioning as a sort of ersatz man, I think you're doing the entire gender a disservice. I think there's a type of strength that is distinctly feminine, that there are a host of women who display it (both fictional and non-) and that strength is one of the benefits that gender differences bring to social interactions as it is different in outlook and implementation than the male-oriented "masculine" strength.
If the only woman you ever fell in love with was "Morticiaesque" and Morticia is "quite masculine in her being" then what you're saying is, at an intellectual and emotional level - you view yourself as drawn to the masculine?
That aside - I'm trying to get a handle on your view of femininity - can you put forward a couple of examples? Who do you consider extremely exemplifying the feminine?
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ORIGINAL: Psychonaut23
Except that both examples you gave are of men who are in control of themselves entirely, who act entirely indepdently -- often against great resistance -- and force their concept of right and wrong on to the world.
And again, can you imagine the Man With No Name submitting? To anything except his own will? Of course not, because he is the idealized masculine man. He has no desires except the good, he has no need for social relationships at all, he is the perfect loner, complete lacking in feminine traits...
And Gary Cooper's most famous western hero, Marshall Will Kane, was -- in fact -- the town's Marshall, so he was -- in fact -- a man in a position of authority. Also, as anyone who has ever seen the movie can tell you, he was a man who would not submit.
I wasn't trying to put forward the Western hero as an example of a masculine submissive. I was trying to show that masculinity does not require dominance. Being independent is not being dominant. Refusing to submit is not being dominant. Being in complete control of yourself is not being dominant. Dominance and submission are by their very nature social attributes. Someone alone, the "perfect loner", can be neither dominant nor submissive.
My point is, it is possible to be the "idealized masculine man" without being dominant.
Moving on - since the Western hero is only one masculine archetype - when we look at such masculine models as the football star, the marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima, the Spartans at Thermopylae and the like - would you agree that it's possible to be extremely masculine and be a team player? That independence is not a prerequisite for being masculine?
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ORIGINAL: Psychonaut23
No, I was just pointing out that the only example you gave were examples which most people would not cite as "exemplars of how to succeed in life."
I didn't think we were discussing "how to succeed in life" - although I do think most people would probably regard Julius Caesar as successful. Most of the "Great Romances" end badly. I think it's a component of the genre.
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ORIGINAL: Psychonaut23
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VideoAdminAlpha is a bad moderator. She put me on active moderation for expressing a political opinion that does not violate the TOS. It's an abuse of her position and power, and she should not be allowed to moderate this or any other forum.
To bad this won't survive moderation.
For what it's worth, I don't see a lot of mileage in getting into a pissing contest with the moderator. I missed your actual post so I can't comment on its content or what about it was objectionable or violated the TOS, but in the time I've been on the boards the moderation here hasn't been very extreme and recently has only gotten more lenient. Active moderation is very rare these days.
I'd advise just letting this go and moving on.
[Edited for typos - not so many of them this time.]
< Message edited by InvisibleBlack -- 1/19/2010 4:49:44 PM >
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