A few posts back, I promised to talk about the essential qualities of femininity…so here goes.

Many different schools of thought have tackled the question of “what are masculine and feminine?”, and I’ve compiled this list of words for you from quite a few different sources, from the writings of David Deida to Taoist philosophy.

Read this list over and see if you can get a feel for the common thread that all these words describe. It’s important to remember one basic point: masculine and feminine are not opposites…they are complements. Neither is “better” or more “important”…they are simply different and equally valid ways of relating to and experiencing the world.

Masculine…..Feminine
Rational…..Emotional
Logic…..Intuition
Unchanging…..Changing
Stillness…..Motion
Yang…..Yin
Consciousness…..Radiance
Penetrative…..Receptive
Emptiness…..Fullness
Detachment…..Embrace
Nothingness…..All
Oneness…..Many
Solitude…..Togetherness
Letting go…..Relating/Completion
Freedom…..Connection
Agency…..Communion
The Perceiver…..The Perceived
Eros…..Agape
Presence…..Surrender

Yeah, I know…some of these terms are pretty abstract. But they all describe essentially the same thing…the same paired concepts that can hardly be said to exist independently of each other. (That’s why I’ll often use the well-known but little-understood Taoist words “yang” and “yin” instead of “masculine” and “feminine”, because they encompass so much more than what’s in your pants.)

As a whole, masculinity embodies a cut-and-dried, solid, you-are-what-you-are way of being…whereas femininity “goes with the flow”, naturally reflecting what is happening in the moment. That’s why men can so easily perceive women to be fickle, overly emotional, and irrational…and then come to the natural conclusion that she’s (cue jazz hands)….”craaaaa-zeeeeeeee!”

The point is not that she doesn’t make sense, because she most certainly doesn’t, strictly from the point of view of the masculine comprehension. But remember…by contrast, the masculine way of looking at things and dealing with the world can (in a woman’s eyes) brand a guy stubborn, insensitive, and uncaring.

The point really is that from the larger perspective, neither way of looking at things is ideal in all circumstances. And, perhaps more importantly, both ways complement each other. There are gifts for you somewhere inside that’s woman’s craziness.

So…think about that. Read that list a couple or a dozen times. Wrap your brain around what it means for you to be “a guy”…and what it means for a woman to be in contrast with that. I’ll go into this next time in Part 2, when I’ll talk more about those crazy gifts and how to unwrap them.

We can’t be afraid anymore. And that’s the real downfall of the American male. They’re afraid of everybody. They’re afraid of foreigners; they’re afraid of women; they’re afraid of losing; they’re afraid that they can’t fall asleep at night; they’re afraid that they can’t get it up. That’s the downfall, that’s the underlying cause of the decline: fear.

When we let go of that fear, things will change. The fear is what stops us from being men. Because men should not be afraid. Aggression is a symptom of fear. Men don’t need to be so aggressive. They’re supposed to be heroes and fathers and do great things. And this is not what men are doing anymore—they’re playing video games and getting fat on hot dogs. The women are moving ahead. And if they can’t do it with men, they’ll do it on their own. We need to make this world better. Men want to be heroes and if we don’t make men heroes, we’re only hurting ourselves.

—Kenneth Willardt, fashion photographer, in The Decline of Men, by Guy Garcia