Programming note: I know that I missed last week. In sha Allah I will post twice this week.
Recently, I made a mistake, and assumed that the feeling of emasculation disproportionately affects men, and that the inverse does not happen to women altogether that much. I discovered that that assumption, like many gender-based assumptions, was pretty ignorant and less correct than I assumed.
I then tried to describe emasculation as it would apply to women. The definition of this term would be to deprive a woman of her female role or identity. This is certainly possible — women do have feelings and can certainly be deprived of their female role or identity. I called it effeminization, but I then realized that that isn't a word. There is a word similar to emasculate that describes feminine traits — effeminate. But effiminate is an adjective, and emasculate is a verb. I even asked ChatGPT, and it had no better ideas than myself.
Strange, I thought. They both come from similar roots. "Effeminate" comes from Latin ex + femina, and "emasculate" comes from Latin ex + masculus. I looked into this deeper — I found a really old dictionary from the early 19th century, which includes a definition for emasculate as an adjective! Hmm, interesting, I thought. I found a usage of it in a sermon which describes Romanist theology as "emasculate." I don't know the context for that, but it is interesting.
I think the reason why emasculate came to its common form as a verb and effeminate remained an adjective is due to their original usages. Emasculate literally meant to remove the male organs, while effeminate was and always has been a derogatory descriptor for someone with feminine characteristics.
Why we don't have a term to describe the deprivation of female characteristics is interesting. Removing female organs is a bit harder (not impossible, unfortunately, people do it!). Perhaps the reason is sexism — people care a lot about the masculine feelings of men, but the feminine feelings of women are less important to society as a whole.
