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

[amadi]

If womanhood were something innate I'm pretty sure we wouldn't see the exhortations that "real women" do X, Y and Z or that life as a woman doesn't "begin" until you do something, typically related to being married or more frequently, and very frequently, having children.

I fall back on the idea from the book "The World According To Garp" wherein, like Jenny Fields, I am a Sexual Suspect, not inhabiting the world of "regular" women by virtue of my queerness, my size, my race, my barrenness. It's probably in response to that Suspectness that I'm moving into a realm of uberfemmeness, in an effort to assert who I feel to be inside no matter how society tries to erase me from it.