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.