From the Mind of Trevor Stone

If I didn't want it linked, I wouldn't have put it on the World Wide Web :-) That said, it's a rough draft of a musing; I reserve the right to change my mind about anything I said.

Case in point: I deliberately avoided precise definitions of "male," "female," "masculine," and "feminine." The basics of male and female are pretty simple: X or Y chromosome, penis or vagina, chest hair or breasts, and so on. I also have hormone levels and non-sex physical characteristics in mind, which aren't as cut and dry since most are a matter of degree.

I think we can make significant headway in defining "masculine" and "feminine" by correlation to gender. If a lot more men do P we can label that masculine, if Q is a majority-female activity we can call it feminine. This is predicated on the (reasonable, I think) assumption that there are a lot more types 5 and 21 than types 1 and 25. Just as it's produced differences in typical weight and height, evolution has produced tangible differences in typical behavior between males and females, and those differences can be classified masculine and feminine. There are doubtless cultural influences as well, but I think they can be classified (at first pass, anyway) in the same way.

Again, I don't claim this is a perfect model nor is my goal to conclusively define gender terms. The graph may even be useful to people with different perspective on what constitutes gender. Someone raised in a matriarchal society would consider leadership a feminine attribute and thus might place, say, Hillary Clinton as a type 22 while someone raised in patriarchy would label her a type 2. A composite plot of a few hundred people done by many participants in two cultures could be a way to study differences in gender expectations.