Not my experience

[firecat]

http://healthland.time.com/2011/05/05/masculinity-a-delicate-flower/ (emphasis mine)

...manhood is a social status, something a guy earned historically, through brutal tests of physical endurance or other risky demonstrations of toughness that mark the transition from boyhood to manhood. But while that masculinity is hard-won, it can be easily lost.

Once earned, men have to continue proving their worth through manly action....

The phenomenon helps explain why men are so touchy about their masculinity. Women don't have the same problem, of course. Womanhood is largely seen as something innate, immutable: girls become women through puberty; once achieved, womanhood sticks.

This is not my experience. Is it yours?

Comments

[sqbr]

Well, I don't know that I've felt like my womanhood is in question, but my femininity feels like it is sometimes.

And I imagine it isn't most trans women's experience!

[cereta]

I was going to say, I think there's a difference between womanhood as femininity and womanhood as adulthood that's conflated in that quote. Not that I think menarche actually conveys adulthood anymore, but it is true that cis women have a concrete, relatively unambiguous marker of physical maturity that men do not.

Which isn't to say the quote isn't bunk. It is, in no small part because it conflates femininity with physical maturity (and for other reasons that my head hurts too much to unpack right now).

[boxofdelights]

I've heard the notion that wet dreams are the concrete, relatively unambiguous marker of physical maturity for young men. And then I've heard all too many men go on to explain that reproductive capacity is not enough to turn a boy into a man, even though it does of course turn a girl into a woman.