Whenever the topic of gender identity (as separate from physical sex) comes up, people seem either completely confused as to what traits identify a person as a particular gender, or they seem genuinely convinced that this or that is a gender identifier despite the fact that the next person is absolutely convinced of the opposite. Nevertheless, a few specific items have popped up as standards. Let's take a look at them:
High Heels: Clearly feminine, as only women and transvestites wear them. But did you ever ask WHY women wear them? Historically, they caught on with women attempting to look more masculine, and have become the standard for upper-class women since the 1980s, around the same time as shoulder pads. The shoes to make women look taller, combined with the artificially broadened shoulders, was an attempt to make women more man-like, and thus, more professional. Meanwhile, women who AREN'T professional or upper-class or office types generally don't wear high heels except for super-formal occasions. Strange, that such a staple of feminine presentation should only be present in women attempting to exude power, which is generally considered masculine. And I'm not even going to get into cowboy boots.
Long Hair: This is the go-to identifier for every educator who tries to explain that gender presentation is different from sex, yet for some reason, no one seems to follow this rule. Men with long hair, such as bikers, surfers, rock stars, metal-heads, mountaineers, etc. are all considered super-masculine. Whenever we want to say that women with short hair are more man-like, we tend to point toward short-haired lesbians, but we overlook the often larger number of young women with pixie cuts, which make them look more cutesy, and the even larger numbers of old ladies with short hair, simply because it's easier to maintain. In fact, when was the last time you saw a woman over forty who had long hair? I think this idea of short-haired men and long-haired women comes from 80s and 90s cartoons, where some character comically mistakes a man for a woman or vice-versa because of hair length, but it just doesn't reflect real life. If anything, long hair is an identifier of youth, and short hair is an identifier of maturity. And even that has exceptions.
Glasses: Have you ever noticed that when a man puts on glasses, he looks less masculine, but when a woman puts on glasses, she looks less feminine? That's because glasses are basically neuter. Unfortunately, neuter is a concept that doesn't exist in our modern gender-categorization culture. People need for everything to be either masculine or feminine, so as to identify whether the presence of that particular thing makes a person more cis or more trans. Glasses are the bane of gender-identity systems, because they defy all gender.
Pink: Whenever people list masculine colors, they basically list every color except pink. While it is true that women, on average, are better at detecting color differences than men, and as such, a woman is more likely to identify a particular color by a specific hue or shade (fuchsia, chartreuse, mauve, aqua, periwinkle, etc.), while men are more likely to describe a color in broader terms (red, blue, green, yellow, etc.). Strangely, this gets pushed aside for the all-powerful and all-important women-like-pink rule. This rule has become so invasive that I've seen stereotypically male products (specifically, a tool kit and a toy machine gun) listed on the package as "for ladies" or in the girls' section of the toy store, simply because it was pink. Now, we all (hopefully) know that pink used to be considered masculine over a hundred years ago, and fashion simply changed, but how few of us remember that even as early as the 1980s, men would often wear pink outfits. The blue-for-boys-and-pink-for-girls rule was applied only to small children in the 80s, not adults or teens, and by the 1990s, the PC backlash was in full swing, so teens were actively rebelling against the feminizing pink rule. Has there ever been a time when the color pink was associated with adult women? Except for a small handful of rich west coasters, and even then, only some of the time, I don't think so. Ironically, the pink breast cancer awareness ribbons seem to be the only thing currently following this rule, in defiance of years of anti-pink women's empowerment, under the name of fighting against a predominantly female disease.
Sports: This seems like it should be the obvious one. Everyone knows that men love sports and women love shoe sales at the mall, or at least, everyone who has ever been to an 80s comedy club, where they were told this repeatedly by coked-up attention-seekers who stood in front of brick walls wearing loud oversized suit jackets, just before going into a bad Jack Nicholson impression. But I digress. There are two fundamental problems with the sports-are-for-men rule. First, all high schools have boys AND girls teams for every sport (except for cheerleading, which is usually exclusively girls... and just a couple of generations ago used to be exclusively boys.). If boys are playing sports and girls are not, then how does every school in the country fill out both teams? Second, there are some sports such as roller derby and field hockey, which are mostly associated with women. Here's a thought experiment. Picture a very feminine women suddenly taking up roller derby as a sport. You might think she seems manlier now. Then picture a man playing the same sport. He ought to seem even more manly because of this, but the opposite happens, because he is now playing a woman's sport. How can a thing exist that is for masculine women but not for men?
Science and mathematics: For people over the age of thirty, this should be a no-brainer. The jock is masculine, the cheerleader is feminine, and the science nerd is none of the above. We've all seen the trope in movies and television, and those of us of a certain age have almost certainly seen it in real life, where the dumb jock beats up the weak brainy boy, the hot girls make fun of the shy bookworm, and boy nerds and girl nerds end up with each other. Yet in recent years, people have been talking about science and math as if it were predominantly a masculine interest. Even more so, all forms of bullying are being ret-conned into the cis-gendered bullying the trans or gender-fluid. This would mean that the jocks were bullying the nerds for not being athletic, but would have to have equal or greater knowledge of math and science, in defiance of the nerd stereotype that is the basis for the bullying. Does this mean that the science nerds were accepted by the bullies all along? Does this mean that the bookish girl was masculine? Does this mean that the football team also plays chess or else they're non-gender-conforming? And to whom are they conforming, if almost nobody fits both the jock and the nerd stereotype? It all makes no sense. Furthermore, I'm always hearing about how there aren't enough women in STEM fields compared to men, but this is silly. There are plenty of women scientists and doctors, and none of them seem very masculine. In fact, nursing used by be a female stereotype, and that's a medical profession. Even in the early days when most professional jobs were held by men, women already had a foot in the door. Explain to me how a woman invented the first computer language, a woman wrote the first science fiction novel, a woman became the first two-time Nobel Prize winner, and now, in an age when so many other jobs are clearly male-dominated (finance, law-enforcement, etc.), the one field where the male-female ratio is only slightly off, is the one that is used as a gender-identifier? (And at the same time, the one we should be trying to balance out, apparently.)
Cooking and sewing: This stereotype that cooking and sewing are women's work comes from a time when most chefs and tailors were men. So, good luck figuring that one out.
Mansplaining: This buzz word keeps popping up, but there seems to be some confusion as to what it means. One definition says that it's when a man (always using a board meeting as an example, despite the fact that most people have never been to a board meeting in their lives) repeats something a woman just explained in order to take credit for the idea. I've seen this done as a joke in movies a couple of times, but I have never seen this happen in real life. In fact, if anyone actually did do this in real life, I'm sure people would not give the man credit for the idea. They would just look at him as if he were weird, or possibly feel insulted, as if the man were suggesting that the OTHER men were so stupid that they needed it explained to them twice. The second definition says that it's when men explain something assuming that a woman doesn't already know the thing. Now, I've seen a lot of people tend to over-explain or under-explain an idea, but I've never noticed any division along gender lines. A third definition is that it's when men throw out extraneous information as if to show off how smart they are. This relates back to the previous listing. The "um, actually" type of explanations tend to be mostly associated with nerds, and as I said before, nerd stuff is not masculine.
Comic Books: If you've seen the show The Big Bang Theory, then you know that comics, sci-fi and fantasy are guy things, and women, even nerdy women, have simply no interest or understanding of it. If you've ever been to an actual comic or sci-fi convention, then you know that that's bullshit. Seriously, most of Doctor Who's fan base these days is women, and whole families go to Marvel movies together. I think some of us might still be hung up on the old days of the 80s chick flick and the 80s dick flick, but movies have changed.
Video Games: If we're counting ALL games, then this is pretty gender-neutral, and according to some studies, more women play games than men. But when we say "video game," most of us tend to think specifically of shoot-em-up games, which tend to be mostly men. Again, this is a mostly recent development, because before home consoles, young people would hang out at the arcade and meet people, presumably of the opposite sex. I guess we can chalk this up to another one of those "mid-90s-only" rules that for some reason, stuck around.
Pubic Hair: Speaking of mid-90s rules, remember when shaving off your pubic hair was considered strange? From the evolution of the first mammals up to about the mid-90s, everyone, and I mean EVERYONE had a full bush of pubic hair. The first people most of us ever even heard of shaving their pubes off were the Heaven's Gate cult, which shaved them off as preparation to commit suicide and spiritually ride a spaceship behind a comet. The general consensus was that that was insanity. Then in the mid-90s, Brazilian waxing became trendy for models, after which the porn industry quickly adopted the shaved-women look. Shortly thereafter, free homemade internet porn overtook paid professional porn for online popularity, and the trend these days seems to be that most of the men are shaved, and the women are at about a fifty-fifty split on whether or not to shave or even trim. Yet for some bizarre reason, some people (some of whom write for Buzzfeed) have decided that it's just expected that women shave their pubes and men do not. Even more bizarre, a woman with a full bush is often referred to as having a "70s bush," as if that was the only time in history when women didn't shave. I'm genuinely confused by this. How have these people managed to rewrite history, including the present, with the exception of one seemingly random decade? And on the topic of body hair, why is it that the most physically fit guys (body-builders and swimmers) aren't considered "feminine" for shaving their chests, backs and legs?
Manspreading: This is a paradox. For some reason, we've been making tables lower and lower, forcing adjustable chairs to have to be lower and lower, meaning that people with longer legs cannot place them together. Supposedly men keeping their legs apart is a show of dominance, but imagine the opposite. Imagine that a man deliberately made his chair higher than everyone else's chair in the room, so that only he could have his calves vertical and his thighs parallel. This would be far more of a dominating position that sitting in a lower chair with his legs falling outward. The fact is that no man who is aware of this behavior does this deliberately. He is either completely unaware, or he tries to avoid it. Yet the mythology states that this is some sort of a power play. Even Buzzfeed videos on the subject can't seem to make it stick without noticing how gender-neutral a behavior this tends to be in practice. (I'm not picking on Buzzfeed, but they are a prime example.) And another thing. What about women who put both legs to one side? That's taking up more room than manspreading, but it's considered feminine, like riding a horse side-saddle. (And did anyone ever actually ride side-saddle? That sounds very impractical.)
Suits / Dresses: Most people, most of the time, wear t-shirts or sweatshirts with jeans. Suits and dresses only seem to show up for "fancy" occasions or top office executives. But okay, let's talk about clothing. If suits are masculine and skirts are feminine, then what is a ladies' pants suit? What if I'm wearing a Scottish kilt? What if someone buys a pair of women's boy-cut briefs? What about made-for-women "boyfriend" jeans? It seems to me that just about every men's article of clothing has a women's counterpart, and vice-versa, and that that counterpart has a counter-counterpart, and vice-versa again. The only thing that is consistently designed for men or women specifically in terms of clothing is button-down shirts which have the buttons on the right side for men, and on the left side for women. Unfortunately, no one can seem to remember exactly why we do this. Some say it was because of women being dressed by servants, others say it was because of men being dressed by servants, and yet others say it's simply so that the shopkeepers know which section of the store to put the shirts in. I've even heard one person say that it was to prevent sword handles from getting caught on fabric. No one knows. On top of that, most people don't notice a small detail like which way another person's shirt is buttoned without close inspection. It's not much of a gender identifier if you can't even identify it on sight. So unless you want everyone to walk around all day every day in tuxedos and prom dresses, then we're all going to end up clothing-wise looking pretty much neutral.
Fashion: Speaking of fashion, can someone explain this paradox to me? Women supposedly dress to impress other women. Yet all the specifics on women's fashion are dictated by what men supposedly want. However, we also stereotype men as being oblivious to what women are wearing, as being completely ignorant of fashion, and of being more concerned with saving money than looking attractive. Standards of women's beauty are determined why what men are supposed to find attractive, yet what men are supposed to find attractive is dictated by other women. By this logic, if you removed all the men from existence, women would be brutally oppressed by the men who would exist if they didn't not exist. Supposedly, this comes from the magazines, where they tell all the women what they have to do to impress a man, but then also tell the women that they should dump a man if he is too stupid to know that she must do all these things to impress him (these things usually involving spending money on the magazine's sponsors). But to make things even more ridiculous, the magazines are struggling, because not enough people are reading or buying them. How can society be so influenced by a dying medium? Have you ever read sex tips from a magazine? The spiciest suggestions they have are downright vanilla compared to what's on the internet, and not even on the niche websites. Somehow, these things are still having the impact of a pre-internet society, not on the society as a whole, but upon the way we discuss the people who discuss the society, as if it's not affecting perception, but rather the perception of the perception of the perception of the perception of society. (Go ahead and make a perception inception joke if you want.)
Makeup: This is a big one. Unless you're a clown or a mime or some other type of performer, men generally don't wear makeup. I will grant you that this is a good solid one with a fairly long history attached to it. (And by long history, I mean over a century. Not something that was changed in my lifetime.) A man who wears women's make-up is clearly attempting to be feminine. However, a woman who DOESN'T wear makeup is not necessarily masculine. She's just not AS feminine as a women who does wear it. So many women make a statement about not wearing makeup, as if they had just bravely stood against some massive social convention. The thing that these women need to understand is that men generally don't notice the difference. Women notice these things because they have a lifetime of experience making small adjustments to makeup, just as an auto mechanic is going to notice a change in the sound your car's engine makes way before you do.
Auto-Repair: Speaking of mechanics. In the old days, cars were simple and easy to fix, and most men knew the basics of making small repairs. In the modern age, cars have gotten so extremely high-tech, than no one who isn't a trained mechanic is qualified to make repairs to the engine, and tires have become so resistant to damage that most people can go years or even a lifetime without ever having to change a tire. Old people like to complain that young people don't know how to change a tire, but I can't blame them, since it's not likely to come up. (To be fair, old people like to complain about pretty much everything about young people, probably because it was done to them just the same.) Yet for some reason, there's a sort of running gag in movies and television that a man who doesn't know how to fix a car is supposed to feel somehow emasculated, especially if a women knows more about cars than him. This doesn't make sense. If a woman speaks French and a man does not, the man doesn't feel emasculated. So why is this one particular skill different from another? Apparently, we're still acting like it's the 1950s, and men had to fix their own cars. But these days, nobody is expected to fix their own cars. Hell, I can't even remember the last time I saw a car with a manual transmission, and yet this also is considered a "man thing." How is a thing that doesn't even exist anymore considered a masculine gender identifier?
Logical-Thinking / Emotional Thinking: Men are from Mars, women are from Venus... Bullshit, we're all both. Next.
Maternal Instincts: Supposedly, the big thing that makes women women and not men is that women are natural mothers. Of course, if you ask a first-time mother, she'll be completely overwhelmed, so where does this "natural" instinct come in? I think it must come from all those hackneyed sit-coms and movies where a man has to do housework and doesn't know what he's doing. To put this in perspective, the Dick Van Dyke Show even made a joke about how old and hackneyed this joke was, and that was back in the 1960s. Of course, these days, the joke has changed a bit. The 90s version of the joke was that men can't change diapers, so a woman has to come to the rescue. The 2000s version of the joke is that YOUNG people can't change diapers, so an old person has to come to the rescue. (Once again, the conversation about gender roles has not been updated since the 90s.) The truth is that taking care of children is something learned through practice. There is no magical moment when a new mother suddenly switches form neophyte to expert, because her maternal instincts just kicked in. Being a parent is learned over time, just like anything else.
Sex: Here's another bit of hackneyed 1980s stand-up comedy. Women are looking for their "one true love," but men just want to get laid and get out of there. This is just plain silly. If men are supposed to be afraid of commitment, then why is it just expected that the men do the proposing? If men want one-night stands, then why do men are also just as likely as women to be characterized as being jealous? Here's another one. The trope of the men going to a strip club. I've personally never been to a strip club, but everyone who has been says pretty much the same thing. The men are there just to have a casual night out, but the women are borderline sexual predators. Then there's porn. This is another supposedly a guy thing, but women apparently watch porn all the time. Plus, because of the amateur porn online, there are obviously a lot of women who are exhibitionists, which wouldn't make sense in a version of reality where women are all sexually reserved hopeless romantics. There's also this notion of the "friendzone," which came from a line in a 90s sit-com (Friends), which means that a man perceives a woman as bad if she doesn't have sex in exchange for kindness. This is odd because the episode that coined the tern used it to mean that a man misses his opportunity for a romantic relationship if he acts platonic for too long. How did that transformation happen? Then there's the old often-quoted statistic that men think about sex every X-number of seconds, but there's no additional information to give context. A one-second sexual thought over a lifetime can be broken down into an infinite number of infinitely short sexual thoughts, which when averaged out over the length of a day, can work out to zero time between sexual thoughts, and thus appear to be nonstop over all time. Unless these people literally think that men think about sex at regular intervals, which would mean that during the act of sex, the man STOPPED thinking about sex for that same number of seconds. Either way, it's just a bullshit statistic, like how people say we only use 10% of our brains. Still, the men-are-always-horny-and-women-are-never-horny trope was so prevalent in 90s sit-coms and commercials that many people didn't even notice when show would break their own established character rules for a quick non-contextual joke.
Aggression: Supposedly, men are more prone to be violent than women (except, of course, for PMS). Okay, statistics do back this one up. Violent crimes are more often committed by men than by women. However, men also statistically tend to be taller than women, and we don't consider height to be a gender identifier. If a tall woman isn't considered more manly than a short man, then why would a violent woman be considered more manly than a non-violent man? And besides, shouldn't we ALL strive to be non-violent? It seems a little silly that we would respect someone's masculine identity while at the same time, labelling an objectively bad behavior as part of being masculine.
What it all means:
In conclusion, a small group of upper-class people were born into the 80s, learned about the world in the 90s through movies and television only, and then somehow got stuck, never advancing with the rest of the world, evolving independently inside a bubble society, and now those same people are leading the discussion on gender politics.
