| You Are 40% Feminine, 60% Masculine |
 You are not overly sensitive and not easily moved. Occasionally, though, something will get through and touch your heart! |
Are You Masculine or Feminine?
That's probably close enough to accuracy for a pop psych quiz. I've never felt I wholly fit in with other women, and sometimes it seems to go beyond the way I've never fit in in other areas to be about my not fitting in as a woman. I'm just not keen on being in all-female groups. Assuming they're men who can carry on a conversation and that I have some point of commonality with, I much prefer the company of men to that of all-female groups. I am really uncomfortable in social situations where all the men start going off in one group and the women in another. I have been known to complain that "most women never want to talk about anything but diets, makeup, and hairstyles!" Of course, that is unfair, and not just because you'd have to add recipes and desserts to the list; it's not true either, but I think there is a certain amount of truth hidden in its incompleteness. What really bugs me about all female groups is the compulsion to agree: everyone is supposed to agree about everything, otherwise you're not being nice, and scholars of male-female speech differences will tell you this is because women like to build community when they talk, blah blah blah, but I just find it damned annoying. Goodness knows there are some men who can't argue without getting angry and a lot of men who can't argue well, but in general men are better about sometimes disagreeing chat and for this and possibly other reasons are more fun to talk with.
I also think women try to get too involved emotionally and personally with me; I am reserved and do not rush to share personal matters with people I hardly know. Women are more apt to be nosy than men and to invade my space. I also don't like the way most women tend to say "I feel" instead of "I think". Or the way they're so big on Hallmark-invented holidays and...okay, I'm getting a little negative here.
I was happy enough with being a girl in the eww, boys are yucky phase and before, but I found the onset of puberty upsetting. It's probable most people do to some extent, but I don't know if some quirk of personality made it more upsetting than average to me or not; I do know it coincided with my growing awareness of a gulf between me and my classmates--or a growing gulf--due to differing intelligence levels, and that may have exacerbated things. Unlike the girls around me, I saw no point in taking any interest in boys until I got to the point where I was experiencing sexual desire regularly, at age fifteen. (Even then my interest had to remain largely theoretical for a while!) In early adulthood, I was told on several occasions that my sexual attitudes and responses were male. In separate instances I also took some criticism for a particular sexual attitude that is more associated with men. I've also been given to understand that I'm cold and unfeeling, which is apparently a more male sort of thing;
On the other hand, I'm married; my sexual desires have always been for men; I have a number of pasttimes that are considered traditionally feminine in our society; I love, love, love puppies; I understand the appeal of small things (like baby clothes); I sometimes inexplicably want to mother the vulnerable, especially the small and vulnerable (like injured or frightened puppies, shy children, Ralph Wiggum); and I go soft and syrupy inside when I see babies--only in my innards, I try to keep my outards dignified--and I have many times felt that irrational or perhaps extra-rational yearning for a baby that women sometimes get. I'm also feminine enough that my marriage has sometimes had a little of that friction that is supposedly caused by male-female differences. I call my husband to deal with the mice and lizards that occasionally slip into our house and I would call him to deal with snakes; this is utterly unreasonable, but I do it shamelessly. It does not bother me to cry in front of him. He has sometimes indicated he finds me overly emotional and irrational. And, although he's several times yelled out "You're a MAN, baby", he once said--in the tone of a man who knows he's going to regret saying it!--that I was "acting like, I hate to say it, a woman".
Sooo...what does all this mean? Damned if I know. Humans are complicated.
