Sadly Moon, I cannot share your enthusiasm for the article even though the subject had the potential to be very interesting. It came across as outdated, despite only apparently having been published 3 years ago, and appeared to me to be more of a reflection of the writer's own experiences growing up in New York than an informed piece of journalism. In trying to explain that male femininity cannot be easily defined the author then went on to label certain film characters as feminine based around her own arbitrary interpretation of femininity. Given that Disney was mentioned as having "an entire catalogue of Disney villains reinforcing the message that male femininity is inextricable from depravity" then failed to give one example, seeking instead to insist that this was also perpetuated in other films. Not being familiar with the characters in the films mentioned I looked these up; but failed to understand how these had been classified as "male femmes" save perhaps the long hair in one instance. If that was the deciding factor then I wonder how Lux would have interpret Braveheart?moonshadow wrote:I'm not sure how this will be received here, but I drew a lot of encouragement from it.
Going back to the ideas of what might constitute as feminine I notice that "caring about one’s appearance" is mentioned. Given that in 2016 men's grooming industry worldwide was worth £14.8bn ($18.7bn) then surely that suggests that there must be an awful lot of effeminate men around somewhere. It dip a toe into the water regarding feminine traits being culturally coded, but didn't expand on this and on the whole I found the lack of discussion around the matter disappointing. Overall I thought the article was lazily written in that it offered nothing new (other than perhaps that New York now recognises 31 gender categories) and included outdated terms, such as tomboy, to a contemporary issue when the linked page even mentions that “Tomboy doesn’t feel present tense to me at all. It feels retro, this affirmative way of talking about a girl who likes boy things, as if boy things were better.”.
On the positive side, you do seem to have stimulated an interesting thread