Feminine Differential - Gender Insight

Several of my post recently have dealt with female or feminine empowerment. If this is not a concept you support and encourage then you are not as feminine as you pretend to be.  Empowerment means embracing our femininity, not rejecting it. So if you are only putting on the costume, then you are only superfluously living your femininity. There is much more.     

Mary Claire Lagroue at the web site Verlie made this comment about being feminine:

Caitlyn Jenner has been a source of much controversy in the past year, so it was no surprise that sparks flew recently when she said that the hardest part about being a woman was “figuring out what to wear.” Maybe that’s the case if you’re a reality TV star living among the Kardashian clan, but pretty much every other self-respecting woman on earth (and some men, too) was less than thrilled with this gross simplification of what it means to be a woman.
Perhaps the one good thing about Jenner’s comment is that it has allowed us the opportunity to really consider womanhood.
When I think about what it means to be a woman, I admit that I tend to think about femininity and how we express that. What does it mean to be feminine? Is it wearing pearls and nice dresses? Staying at home to care for children and tend to the house while your husband works? Is it our mannerisms—dainty waves, coy smiles, batting lashes? All of these images hark back to visions of femininity as a specific external style and dress—ones which may have been in style more in the past than today. In that sense, Jenner was on to something in that our external expression matters.

....We can cling to clichés, or we can create a positive, empowering definition of what femininity can mean for modern women.

There are universal qualities like sweetness and strength, depth and lightheartedness, confidence and vulnerability - These qualities stretch across the gender definitions of what it means to be a woman or a man. Positive qualities are worth celebrating and emulating.   

Read the whole article and examine your cross gender adventures. Do you want to be a poor imitation or worthy of serious regard?  Go past the superficial and have real insight into the gender you represent. There is much more to being feminine than just putting on a dress.  Yes, feminine empowerment is our goal as well.  Be bold.