Words by Giulia Carbone // Photo by Jas Rolyn
We love to pretend misogyny is dying. We parade slogans about progress, share statistics of the ‘diminishing pay gap’, celebrate women in parliament and convince ourselves we have evolved. But the moment a man dares to look or act slightly feminine, the facade cracks. The laughter starts. The discomfort surfaces. The hierarchy reveals itself.
As a woman in her early 20s with eyes and ears, it’s impossible not to notice how much of our identity and the expectations wrapped around it still stems from an unspoken logic of misogyny. As a society, we like to think we have outgrown this. We repeat mantras proudly about ‘breaking the binary’, ‘letting men be emotional,’, ‘women can do anything’. But beneath the surface, the value system that sorts masculinity and femininity remains unmistakably hierarchical. No matter how progressive we claim to be, femininity still occupies the bottom of the social hierarchy.
Gender stereotypes themselves are not new, and I am not naive enough to argue that we can simply erase them. People find comfort and meaning in gendered expressions. Some people enjoy bending and blurring those lines, others prefer the traditional script. That’s fine. The problem is not that gender roles exist. It’s the value we have assigned to them and how harshly the consequences fall on those who violate them.
That truth is painfully simple: a man stepping towards femininity is judged far more harshly than a woman stepping towards masculinity. These two acts do not carry equal weight, equal stigma or equal risk. They are not mirror opposites. Our culture has made femininity something a man must avoid; masculinity, meanwhile, is something a woman is often praised for adopting.
A woman without makeup is considered casual. A man with makeup raises eyebrows. A woman browsing the men’s clothing section is “tomboyish” or “practical”. A man browsing women’s clothing is “confused” or “in crisis” or “weird”.A woman liking action movies is normal. A man liking “chick flicks” is somehow emasculating. There are no superficial differences; they reveal a deeper truth. Masculinity, even when subverted, is socially neutral. Femininity, even when harmless, is socially radioactive.
People love to tell me that I’m being dramatic, that ‘men can be feminine too now’, that society is far more accepting. They point to Harry Styles in a dress or the boy on Instagram with painted nails. But these are exceptions, not examples. Their femininity is allowed precisely because it is packaged as ironic, fashionable or aesthetic. It’s femininity made digestible, femininity diluted. Put the same femininity on an ordinary man without fame or charisma and watch how quickly the public tolerance evaporates.
The “performative male” trend exposes the core of this problem. We can only imagine a man drinking matcha or listening to Clairo if he’s doing it for attention or to attract women. The idea that a man might share women’s interests without irony is so unthinkable that we turn it into a joke or a dating strategy. That is not progress, that is blatant misogyny wearing a trend cycle.
Simone de Beauvoir famously wrote that “to be a woman is to be the Other”. She meant that women exist not as full subjects, but as a deviation from the male default. Her argument is old, but it still lives in our reflexes. If masculinity is framed as the neutral human position, femininity becomes the departure. The downgrade. The risk. When a woman embodies masculinity, she is seen as stepping into power. When a man embodies femininity, he is stepping away from it.
This is why the stakes are so uneven. This is why ‘let men cry’ hasn’t solved anything. This is why men still fear softness, fluidity and gentleness, not because these traits are shameful on their own, but because our culture attaches them to women, and women are still perceived as lesser.
This isnt about individual bigotry. Most people aren’t consciously thinking ‘femininity is inferior’. They don’t need to. The idea is already baked into our backbones, into the billions of tiny signals we absorb without noticing. We inherit misogyny the way we inherit language: through immersion, repetition and expectation. Acknowledging this doesn’t mean we abolish gender or demand everyone practice androgyny. It means we confront the real reason masculinity is treated as stable and femininity as fragile, because our culture still believes women sit lower on the social hierarchy, even if we’d never dare say it aloud.
We won’t fix this until we recognise it. We won’t recognise it until we stop pretending the stereotypes affect everyone equally. And we certainly won’t dismantle it by applauding a woman in a power suit while quietly mocking the boy holding the sparkly shirt. The asymmetry is the evidence. The stigma is the proof. And the hierarchy, no matter how politely disguised, is still misogyny.
