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

[snippy]

I'm not sure how to construct my response.

When I was a child I knew I was a woman and never questioned it, but I was misled into behaving like a man because I thought that would give me the same privileges men have.

Other people question my womanhood (both femininity and adulthood) all the time on the internets. And sometimes I think they're right, because I don't feel womanly by the definitions of my culture (because the culture is wrong, but it is still there). And I struggled mightily with not feeling like an adult any longer when I had to sell my house, because that is the strongest marker of adulthood I held important and yet have lost (still have my job--that would be another strong marker). (Raising kids doesn't make you an adult. I know this from personal experience: my mother was not an adult until long after I was.)

[snippy]

Somebody recently tried, rather gently, to explain to me how awful it was for liberals under Reagan, that zie could remember it and it was horrible. I tartly responded that I doubted they were so much older than me as I voted in Reagan's first election. No apology, just a response that they'd bet wrong, as I was older than LJ's usual population. !!!