Society has cognitively dissonant relationships with masculinity and femininity. These characteristics didn't appear in a vacuum or on a whim, nor were they (originally) a conspiracy. However, it's a gigantic falsehood to assert that women should always strive to be feminine, and men should always strive to be masculine.

But even today - if you go against your apparent sex and adopt different gender characteristics, you're going to be punished. Sometimes it's by family, sometimes by friends, or mentors. But you know what? Often it's by the people you're romantically interested in.

I truly don't care if a guy calls me a pussy. He just sounds like he doesn't realize he's giving me a compliment. He sounds like a fool. Maybe that's just me. I like feminine, a lot of the time. You think I'm feminine? Why thank you!

But when it's obvious someone I feel I'm in love with (it's a feeling, ok? I don't have to justify it, share it, keep it totally quiet, or feel ashamed of it) thinks I'm not really a man, certainly not one of interest, even though she was clearly intrigued by me at first, or I see that she's now actively, though quietly, disgusted by my femininity/shyness, that really ends up hurting a lot. Like almost nothing else, sometimes.

Let me make a wild guess: I'm not the only one.

When men are telling women how they ought to be, that's wrong. But when men prefer a woman who is more feminine, and leave a woman who shows more traditionally masculine characteristics hanging, sad, rejected, as part of a depressingly consistent pattern, then that isn't any sort of malice, but it certainly has an effect on people. And the same goes the other way around.

As I said, I don't care if a guy thinks I'm not manly. But the pressure to be manly enough that someone I like sees me as not pathetic - that's kind of intense.

And I mostly ignore it. Mostly. But that's a little unusual, and I don't feel it's understood. (This kind of "being yourself" doesn't seem to work out well for men who like women. There's a mating ritual of sorts that women respond to, and it isn't about showing off your femininity.) You can mostly ignore this and be how you prefer, but it results in more pain, probably, not less.

There's natural selection and there's artificial selection. In the second category, you have sexual selection. Men's tastes in women and women's tastes in men are an enormous presence in how we think about what it means to be a man or a woman. And some of that stuff - for the same reason that being gay is not a choice - is not a choice. Men believe they ought to be a certain way partly because that has helped men in the past find women they liked who liked them; being sufficiently different from that may well have led to that person's genes disappearing from the gene pool. The same goes for women and how they believe they ought to be.

This isn't a claim that stereotypes are good or right or a-ok. Nor does it make any assertion about what traits are "masculine" (because they turn women on naturally) or "feminine" (because they turn men on naturally), versus what traits are attractive or unattractive for purely socialized, cultural reasons.

I don't need an opinion on any of those specifics to make the point that there probably are such specifics.

And I can tell you about one: being relatively shy and getting anxious and a bit tongue-tied when you like someone is generally perceived as neither attractive nor masculine. You might feel that the way you feel would be totally understandable and is itself a sort of (or a really major) compliment to another person. How you feel feels like a very positive thing, the discomfort or jitters of not knowing aside. But many women seem specifically on the lookout for any such signs and find them gross. At least, if they are anything beyond momentary.

That's one repeat experience that I can vouch for with a lot of tears.