Marie R. Badaracco

I am a human being. I am a female human being. My femaleness is based on and evidenced by certain anatomical-biochemical-physiological conditions and certain biological capacities. Those are facts indisputable, accepted by me and evident to others, part of the whole complex of what I identify as of me and mine. That is my femaleness. It is similar to that of other female human beings, although how I use those structures, conditions and capacities may distinguish me from at least some other female human beings.

Besides femaleness, however, I am daily confronted with femininity. If femininity were simply a more euphemistic synonym for femaleness, I would find no problem in referring to myself as feminine. That is not the case. Feminine or femininity refers to a whole set of very diverse characteristics and qualities of character, morals, attitudes toward myself, as well as sets of attitudes toward (a) men, (b) women, (c) children, (d) animals, (e) things, (f) work, (g) play, (h) politics, and (i) the rest, and behavior toward myself and (a) through (i). That is to say, because I possess an invaginated pouch instead of an outpouching, two ovaries instead of two testicles, two developed breasts instead of the male's two undeveloped breasts and the possibility of lactation through these breasts, because I have a larger amount of certain hormones than men have, because for a twenty year period of my life I have at least the potential or option of carrying a child in utero, because of these all the parameters of my life are shaped and determined in a particular fashion. Not only that, but, depending on whether my breasts are too small or too large, I am less or more feminine according to the fashion. If that slant were not enough, there is the other, at least equally important if not more so; if I dress, walk, talk, think, feel and do “femininely”, I am a “real” female. If I do not, I am not just unfeminine, but warped in my foundations.

Thus femininity entails the condition