Given the terminology alone, it can be hard to think of feminine and masculine as being separate from gender. And in some ways, they're not.
They are separate from gender in pure concept. To view them with more neutrality, consider yin and yang. But while every gender has within them the qualities of the archetypal feminine and masculine, and while any gender can be more dominant in either, there are ways that the qualities relate to how gender is socialized into us.
If you believe gender to be a construct that takes sex and adds sociological assumptions of personality, preference, responsibility, and behavior, then this might make a lot of sense. The same things that make us assume a young girl would want a play kitchen set and a young boy would want a football are the very things that keep us culturally, stubbornly locked into masculine principles over feminine ones, as well as a binary at all.
But that might still seem confusing. So if you've seen this table outlining archetypal feminine and masculine qualities and read about how to balance the two in your personal life, but something still feels confusing about how these archetypes do and do not relate to gender, let's try another way of comparing the two.
The questions below exist in polarities on purpose. You might not do all of one or all of the other, but the point is to demonstrate how these different archetypes occupy us.
When you're making a big decision do you pull together data, make Excel spreadsheets to stay organized, and crunch the numbers to reach a logical conclusion or do you quiet the mind, ground yourself in nature, and make space in yourself to hear what your intuition has to say?
When someone you love is upset and reaches out to you do you try to search for solutions, explain the hardship through logic, and attempt to quell the display of emotional discomfort or do you validate the emotional discomfort, listen in with empathy, and hold space for the unknown depth of another person?
When you're learning something new is it easier to understand if you think critically and gather research or lean in experientially and feel into your understanding?
When you have sex is your only goal the marked success of an orgasm or are you really in it for pleasure and connection without any pressure of completion?
When you're hungry do you measure how long it's been since your last meal, consider what you want to eat now in relation to what you'll want to eat later or tomorrow, and use caloric needs to determine your choices, or do you ask yourself what you're in the mood for and eat until you feel full?
When you're in therapy are you more comfortable exercising behavior modification techniques, repeating new coping skills, and tracking changes in thought and behavior patterns to measure progress or are you more curious about that which can't be named and engaging in an exploratory process where progress is more subjective, subtle, and fluid?
I'm curious: did you have any judgments toward any of these possible actions? Did certain responses remind you of someone in your life? Did some of them seem ridiculous? Those unfiltered reactions can provide some insight on your relationship to feminine and masculine qualities, as well as the people in your life who've demonstrated them to you likely without you realizing it. This could offer a glimpse into how these qualities live within you and how you might respond with judgment to yourself when you act from them, leading to a self-repressive experience that mirrors how American culture represses the feminine collectively.
But more to the point, did you notice any gender-related biases? Assumptions that a man would be more likely to execute all of the first options, a woman more likely to do the second, and a non-binary person more likely to have a different or varied outcome?
And even more to the point, which actions did you most often take? The first options were made up of masculine light-influenced behaviors while the second were made up of feminine light-influenced behaviors. You can see that the behaviors themselves have nothing to do with gender but we may have been socialized to enact and expect these behaviors from certain genders because of how our culture implicitly treats gender. While we are in the midst of a cultural evolution regarding gender, we can benefit to remember that many of us were raised in a binary culture with heavy social expectations placed on us because of it. We are still undoing the effects of that, even as we strive to become a more gender-inclusive world.
These experiences don't have to be a bad thing but rather something worth being aware of so we don't paint ourselves or others into a corner based on sex or gender. These archetypes are capable of so much more, and their binary nature actually allows space for a whole world to exist between them.