Masculinity & Femininity

Abstract

Masculinity has a social connotation as opposed to the biological maleness of a man. Masculinity is how a community of biological men reacts to the social and natural forces. In the beginning of mankind, men had two primal necessities – sex and hunger. To satisfy these two urges within a given natural environmental framework, often dangerous enough to impose death, men and women reacted to live together in small groups. So, at that time, the struggle for a group of people was simply threefold - protections from nature’s forces, gathering food to satiate hunger and getting partner(s) to have sex. These three activities gave birth to different traits in both men and women. These traits or characteristics were called masculinity for men that very often women liked and demanded and femininity for women that very often men liked and demanded. Till this time it was okay. But no sooner than later, they faced another problem, i.e., except nature’s forces and animals, they needed to take care of another force, i.e., the other similar groups. Other groups of people also needed to satiate hunger and sex. For these reasons they started to visit places where they could satisfy their primal urges. And thus the clashes among groups became inevitable. That’s the bitter beginning of so-called human ‘civilisations’. From then onwards, mankind started to create localities, villages, towns, cities, and countries. And within these artificial frameworks, men and women started to react differently. In this journey the evolution of these reactions was actually the ongoing history of masculinity for men and femininity for women. Till this point it was understood. But this journey of reactions became fatal when the force of masculinity was used against the force of femininity or to oppress women. Similarly, the opposite, i.e., that usage of femininity to oppress masculinity, was also visible, though on a smaller scale. These two phenomena were the byproducts of patriarchal and matriarchal societies, respectively. The point was that mankind needed food, sex and protection, and for that, nature had abundant resources. But the problem occurred as the nature also provided mankind with intelligence, which had both bad sides and good sides. This ability to use intelligence, or precisely to think, pushed mankind to live in a better way on this earth. And this capacity of the human mind gave birth to two things – trade to secure more wealth for the future and religion as food for the mind. That was it. Mankind had indeed discovered two most important things, wealth and religion, which became two great tools to control the resources on this planet. And naturally the men and the women reacted within these systems governed by religions and wealth. So, masculinity and femininity changed their forms with a lot of dark and bright shades. The creation of wealth inherently created the class-based society, where some people became rich and most of the people became oppressed and poor. Thus, depending on this class system, masculinity and femininity changed their forms. These class-based societies evidently had more forms like feudalism, capitalism, imperialism, colonialism and more. All of these forms of society evidently forced the men and the women to develop different traits of masculinity and femininity. So, now we are living in a world where democracy is celebrated as the best form of society. But we are not free from the problem of defining ourselves, as the forces of masculinity and femininity often clash to oppress each other. The wars and conflicts to flex the muscles of masculinity are knocking at our doors almost every day. The femininity has lost the battle to the race for wealth and is being forced by the new fabrics of society to shed its benevolent skin. These are all nothing but the reactions of the men and the women subject to social, economic, and historical forces that dominate our existence. Thus, the masculinity and femininity that are the traits gained by the men and the women by continuously reacting to the surroundings are also taking both good and bad shapes. However, so far we have talked about only the men and the women as the two dominating existing sexes on this planet. But there are also other kinds of people who are biologically different from these two major sexes. To them, masculinity and femininity may have different meanings. They in general are termed as LGBTQ+ people and feel their sexual urges in different ways. Also, there are some people who are biologically male but psychologically feel like female and vice versa. They also belong to this LGBTQ+ community. However, they might have female masculine traits or male feminine traits. The definitions of masculinity and femininity hold the same meanings that are derived from the qualities of biological males and biological females reacting to various forces, respectively, over the course of time. So, this chapter is going to elaborate on the evolution of masculinity and its future as a complimentary quality to femininity.