Complements, parallels and divergences

Jack Donovan's powerful book The Way of Men --and Ex Cathedra's similar but more scattershot ruminations-- assert that the qualities a man needs to really be a man are three or four fold: strength/power, courage, skill/competence/mastery, and honor. These are the amoral baseline qualities that a male needs to exhibit, in some degree and combination, for him to be considered a man by other men, rather than a mere boy or a freakish kind of pseudo-woman*.

Strength/Courage/Skill/Honor

As Donovan makes importantly clear: to be a man and to be a good man are two different things. You can be bad and still be a man. (Take 3:10 to Yuma. A good guy and a bad guy, yet both of them clearly real men.) But a male who is weak, fearful, inept or disloyal will be judged deficient precisely as a man. A woman can be fearful, but while others may judge her character for this, she will not be therefore thought less of a woman. This is ground-level archetypal stuff, ancient and universal.

I wonder if there are characteristics which females must acquire in order to be esteemed as women --rather than just girls. Well, there must be. What are the archetypal, cross-cultural, ancient and pre-feminist "virtues" that a woman needs, in some degree, failure at which would cause her to be judged deficient as a woman? And by whom?

?

It is tempting to search for a list opposite or complementary to the masculinity quad, but that may not be the right way to go. Maleness and femaleness are opposite, but that's not all they are. How males achieve manhood is not the same as how females achieve womanhood. Rites of initiation, for example, are vastly more present and more complex for young males than for young girls. Complicated turf.

I'm curious, though. Any thoughts?


*This is the primary challenge faced by homosexual men: are we really men? (And when you see homosexual males like Magic Johnson's son parading down the street looking like Judy Garland's aunt, you see what the problem is.)
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