Confuse-a-Cat: I see “masculine energy” and “feminine energy” used a fair amount these days, but I’m not sure what is meant by it.
Figment: I can’t comment on the meanings because I think they’re very situation-specific. In this case “masculine energy” was definitely the guy in question trying to excuse his own narcissism and misogyny. You should definitely read the “masculine energy” one and its update(s). It was a good one.
Andrew: But keep your Yin and Yang properly balanced, because the letter writer said — based on my joke (someone said you can’t use those phrases seriously, and I pointed to Chinese philosophy… among other dualities, they do encompass masculine versus feminine) — that her ex-boss is actually a fan of Eastern mysticism and might have been referring to that!
Asloan: At the point where people try to explain that lots of women have strong “masculine energy” and vice versa, I start thinking the gendered terms are getting in the way of our understanding here. If we mean proactive or aggressive — traits that all people of any gender can demonstrate — maybe we just need to say that.
Teach: Well-said. My response to such nonsense is that, being female, any way I behave is by definition “feminine.” Unless you’re clarifying ending vowels in a Romance language, I’ve got no use for it.
Medium Sized Manager: It usually means gender roles — feminine energy is soft and caring, masculine is taking action and control. It’s a bunch of nonsense.
Bathyphysa Conifera: If you draw a bunch of squares, give them all two dots for eyes, and then give some of the squares little mustaches and the other squares eyelashes — poof: the squares with mustaches give off masculine energy, and the squares with eyelashes give off feminine energy.
Properlike: Except that some of the lushest sets of eyelashes are on men.
Calamity Janine: To be honest, you’re probably confused by what is meant by it because the definition is sometimes just “whatever the author wants it to be at that moment.” It’s like the technobabble on Star Trek. How does the physics of the warp core work? It works exactly how the writers want it to work.
What people usually mean is related to gender roles inherited straight from, at the latest, 1953 — and nigh inevitably white Anglo-Saxon Protestant upper-middle-class cishet English-speaking Western-world roles at that. The loudest demands tend to come from people who are too invested in their framing to reconsider it, which makes the terms just flexible enough to mean whatever the speaker needs them to mean in any given moment.
