Victoria Pendleton

I just... oh fuck it. Why does it even matter if someone's pretty? What has it to do with anything? And can't someone be 'feminine' AND have meaty thighs, a deep voice and facial hair? Or does feminine just mean 'hairless, high-pitched and skinny'? (No wonder most women have such screwed up body images.) And for that matter, why do women need to be feminine? What's so disastrous about being 'unfeminine'?

Fuck it. I've had this argument too many times.

The problem with perceptions of both masculinity and femininity is that existing stereotypes are caricatures of what it means to be masculine or feminine.

The real standard for comparison is not some Barbie/Superman cartoon-derived image, but instead that everyone is feminine or masculine according to the measure of their family.

There will be families which are strongly masculine in their appearance, and that will of course apply to both men and women in that family, and vice versa for families that are strongly feminine in appearance.

In each case, the only yardstick that someone could fairly be judged by would be a sibling of theirs of the opposite gender. As many people don't have siblings of the opposite gender, this is of course not always possible, and an 'imaginary sibling' would have to do.

Barring serious illness or accidents, all women will be more feminine than their (potential) brothers, and all men will be more masculine than their (potential) sisters. At the same time, it is of course possible for a woman to appear less feminine than a man from a more feminine family, and again vice versa.

In a way, masculinity and femininity are, of course, red herrings. What people understand by these shortcuts is made up of many other factors of appearance, behaviour, strengths and weaknesses, etc. against cultural norms.

At the end of the day, if people refused to respond to stereotypes and caricatures (e.g., supermodels and bodybuilders), the wide variety of people who exist would feel attracted to a similarly wide variety of different people. (Caricatures do an unfortunate job of overlaying real inclinations, which are of course still there even if submerged.)