[blueflow]

Keep in mind that masculinity and femininity are constructed - they only exist because some properties associated with each other. Because of its construction, its an opinion, not a fact. What one considers masculine or feminine is basically arbitrary and random and everyone is free to disagree.

An evil spirit could claim that none of the mentioned archetypes is gender-specific at all and they would not be provable wrong.

[DarkNova6]

How could it be a construct of our modern times if their themes are consistent throughout history of humankind? Delving into mythology and legends which explore the nature of our kind, the description of male and female is fairly consistent.

You might as well say "everything is subjective, there is no truth".

[rsynnott]

Depends what you mean by consistent. You don't have to go back too far before things get, well, different enough that they can be confusing to the modern observer. Obvious example: early 19th century dandies. These tend to get read today as kind of effeminate, unmasculine, because that's kind of the _modern_ view of a man who's obsessed with fashion, grooming, etc (or, at least, it was the late 20th century view; this one's actually beginning to swing again), but they _absolutely_ were not seen that way at the time.

[DarkNova6]

To be fair I should have been more precise. I was implicitly referring to myths, legends and epics which are way older than just 2 or 3 hundred years.

Particularly the Epic of Gilgamesh is a fascinating view into a society that could not be further away from modern times and yet is perfectly recognizable. Perhaps it is when humanity is the most stripped down and naked that fundamental motives become most clear.

[rsynnott]

> I was implicitly referring to myths, legends and epics which are way older than just 2 or 3 hundred years

I think this only works, if at all, if you stick to surface detail. Maybe not even then. Zeus, say, was quite keen on shagging men (and women). This would definitely have been coded as very non-masculine, say, 50 years ago, and still is today, though to a lesser extent, but the Greeks wouldn't have seen it that way.

Also, there's a bit of a filter here. To some extent, the ancient stories that you're likely to be exposed to are the ones which are most comprehensible to a modern reader; if a story requires a deep understanding of an alien society to make sense to the reader, then it's not a _good_ story for a general audience, and you're unlikely to be exposed to it unless you go looking.

Even taking something as simple as this: https://lettersofnote.com/2016/07/22/what-do-you-take-me-for...

The world's oldest known letter of complaint. On the surface, it's kind of relatable, but if you read it in full, there are some pretty weird details which don't make that much sense without further context.

[ctrw]

To quote a Canticle for Liebolitz:

To survive the Church's slow sifting of the arts, you have to have a surface that can please a righteous simpleton; and yet you need a depth beneath that surface to please a discerning sage. The sifting is slow, but it gets a turn of the sifter-handle now and then– when some new prelate inspects his episcopal chambers and mutters, "Some of this garbage has got to go." The sifter was usually full of dulcet pap. When the old pap was ground out, fresh pap was added. But what was not ground out was gold, and it lasted. If a church endured five centuries of priestly bad taste, occasional good taste had, by then, usually stripped away most of the transient tripe, had made it a place of majesty that overawed the would-be prettifiers.

[hackable_sand]

This is the basis of gender fluidity. An individual is free to balance both as they see fit.

From all of the ancient mystic philosophies that I've read, gender is always abstracted from sex and biology is unidentifiable at that abstraction. Regardless, those two gender identities exist as an inseparable harmony; a yin and yang.

[hk__2]

> How could it be a construct of our modern times if their themes are consistent throughout history of humankind?

OP didn’t talk about "our modern times".

[blueflow]

That something is widely popular for millenia does not prove its truthfulness. Mythology and legends are still fiction.

> You might as well say "everything is subjective, there is no truth".

Strawman. I'm criticising this specific kind of thing as fiction, not everything in general.

[DarkNova6]

Fictional on a surface level. A depiction of fundamental human archetypes if you see beyond it.

And it can't be a strawman as I misrepresented nobody.

[blueflow]

If you want to find out what the human archetypes are, you have to measure real people for specific properties and look if there are patterns. Myers & Briggs did that in 1944, their ideas got popular but are not uncontroversial.

"Seeing behind fiction" is a bad excuse, the only thing you will get is your own imagination.

[HelloNurse]

Gender is an opinion, but it is a sufficiently coherent opinion across different people and different times that it can be studied and discussed from an almost objective historical and anthropological perspective; the "evil spirit" cannot claim that, for example, typical blacksmiths in stories are not male.

[blueflow]

The word "typical" sort of turns it into a tautology. Whatever your idea of gender is decides which blacksmith is typical and which isn't.

[HelloNurse]

The gender that blacksmiths in stories are described to be is typical or unusual with reference to stories, not to my ideas or yours. Do you recall any fairytale with a female blacksmith?