A friend of mine said something a few weeks ago that I have not been able to quit thinking about.

He is a man in his thirties, raised far from the church and the American scripts I grew up inside. We were talking, and he said, with no hesitation, that my wife Gina is one of the most feminine people he has ever known.

I brought his words home to her like a small gift. I expected her to be pleased. And she was, but then she went quiet, the way she does when an idea is worth thinking about, and she asked me the question that became this essay.

“What makes me feminine? What do you think he is seeing?”

I thought I had an answer. I have known Gina for fifteen years in the Biblical sense and twenty years prior in a platonic friendship, and I could have told you a dozen things I find feminine in her. But the moment she asked, I realized my answer and my friend’s answer might be nothing alike. What he sees when he says that word, formed where he was formed, is almost certainly not what I see, formed where I was formed. And what Gina would say about her own femininity might be a third thing entirely, unlike either of ours.

Three people. One woman. One word. And three completely different meanings hiding inside it.

I have been writing about masculinity and femininity for several weeks now, wrestling with the words and concepts. And a man in his thirties handed me a sentence that piqued my curiosity, and it made me ask a question I had never once asked.

When we say a woman is feminine, are we describing her? Or are we describing something in ourselves?

What He Might Be Seeing

Start with my friend, because our backgrounds could not be more different.

He did not get the idea of femininity I was handed. He was not raised inside a religion that taught him a feminine woman is quiet, covered, submissive, and small. He was not formed by the American decades that taught me. Whatever he means by the word, the ideal, he built out of other materials. So when he looks at Gina, seventy-one years old, powerful, comfortable, afraid of no one, and calls her the most feminine person he has known, he is pointing at something my conditioning might never have let me name with that word.

Is he seeing her wholeness? Her warmth that asks nothing back? The way she is so entirely at home in herself that being near her feels like rest? A younger man hungry for that kind of steady, unanxious presence would recognize it instantly, and he might have no word for it but the oldest one he owns. Feminine.

That is my guess. I could be wrong. That is rather the point.

What She Built

Then there is Gina’s own answer, which she has spent a lifetime earning the right to give.

For most of her seventy-one years, the men closest to her treated her as a lesser thing. She was belittled inside her own home, in front of the children, until some of them grew up and learned to do it too. A family member she cared for two decades once told her he was proud of her, and she brightened, then he finished the sentence: because she was so skinny, because she had not gotten fat. She never forgot it. It crushed her.

And inside that machine built to convince her she was nothing, she started her own business, out-earned the man she was married to, led armies of volunteers, and chaired the personnel team of a megachurch with thousands of members and more than a hundred staff. She was powerful while being told daily that she was not. And now, in her eighth decade, she is rewriting the old scripts in real time, catching the triggers as they fire, healing and blossoming.

So if you ask Gina what makes her feminine, I do not think she will point to anything soft or small. I think the truest answer is that she refused every patriarchal definition of femininity that was ever forced on her. The woman she is now, she developed herself in a furnace most men would not survive.

She is not the only woman who showed me the vastness of the feminine. My dearest friend Melissa walks into rooms and transforms the atmosphere, speaks better than any man I have heard in a lifetime of churches, and walked away from a pulpit rather than shrink to fit a frightened boss’s comfort. Michelle Obama stood beside the most powerful man on earth and was never once diminished by him, only multiplied. Sophie Strand writes of a feminine that is fierce and generative and rooted, nothing like the demure servant I was raised to expect.

Every one of these women is large. Every one of them is bold in the way that matters. And every one of them personifies something different by “feminine” than the men who tried to cage them. This fascinating word keeps bending depending on who it describes.

Which sent me asking why. And the questions I found were not out in the culture at all. They were inside the one doing the wrestling.

The Woman Inside the Man

Carl Jung had a name for the feminine that lives inside a man. He called her the anima: the unconscious feminine half of a man’s own psyche, his inner image of the soul. Jung teaches that every man has one. The only question is what he does about her.

He believed a man’s deepest work, especially in the second half of life, is to turn toward this inner feminine and develop a relationship with her. To make the unconscious conscious, to know her, to let her make him whole. A man who does this becomes capable of feeling, of depth, of real relationship and creativity. A man who refuses does not escape her. He gets ruled by her, from below, in her most primitive form.

This helps clarify everything I have been writing about for weeks. Jung described the man who denies his anima as becoming moody, touchy, petty, vindictive, brittle, and above all irrationally reactive. A man possessed by sulking rages he cannot account for. Read that list again. Who comes to mind? A clinical description of the manosphere? Is it the fighter on the White House lawn? Is it the pastor intimidated beside a woman telling the truth? Could it be that the rage these men mistake for strength is the feminine they exiled? Could it be that what they fear is not the powerful woman in front of them? It is the woman locked inside them, fighting to get out.

And it raises Gina’s question better than anything I could have told her. Maybe my friend and I see different femininity in the same woman because each of us is reading our own anima off of her. Maybe the word “feminine” never described the woman at all. Maybe it describes the soul of whoever is doing the looking. That would explain why no two people ever draw the same picture. We are not painting her. We are painting the woman inside us, and using her face as muse and model.

I know this because I spent fifteen years doing exactly that, and did not understand it until one fateful day in my Florida atelier.

The Self-Portraits

For two decades I have painted the female nude. Garment after garment stripped away, canvas after canvas, searching for something I could not name. I used to wonder, idly, why I had no desire to paint men. It never occurred to me to ask what the question meant.

Then one ordinary afternoon painting, it hit me like a ton of bricks. These were not paintings of women.

They were all self-portraits. (See more below)

Like Rembrandt turning to his own face again and again in the mirror, I had been painting the same subject the whole time without knowing it. It was my own buried feminine, the soul-image I had been taught my entire life did not belong in a man. Every nude was me, trying to see the parts of myself the church and the culture had told me to amputate. The women on those canvases were the window. What I was straining to look at was inside the painter.

And it had taken me fifteen years to notice.

A Little Sympathy, and Not One Ounce More

Here is where something I did not expect crept in. A little (very little) sympathy for the men with the swords.

Because I had every advantage. I was raised by a loving mother whose presence gave me a secure foundation to build my life. My whole vocation as musician and artist pried my feminine open and called it a career. I had a song in my heart and a paintbrush in my hand and decades of permission to use them. Yet it still took me until my fifties to see my own anima staring back at me from my own canvases.

So I do the arithmetic, and it humbles me. If it took me that long, with all of that going for me, how unreachably far away is the anima for a man who was taught from birth to fear her? A man with no brush, no permission, no loving and secure beginning, who was handed a sword as a boy and told the feminine was the enemy?

These men love to watch other mostly nude men fight in a cage. They will pay anything to see a man wrestle another man to the ground. But why have they never found the courage to wrestle the woman inside themselves? What if this were the only fight that would set them free?

That is the whole tragedy. The fight they are terrified of is the one that would heal them. So they keep swinging the sword at her shadow in every powerful woman who walks past, and they never once suspect she has been living in their own heart the entire time.

It is sad. It is not an excuse. The weapon is still a weapon, and the people it cuts are still cut.

What I Am Still Wrestling With

I told you at the start that I would not define femininity, and I have kept that promise, mostly because I no longer believe I can. The closer I look, the more the word stops describing the woman and starts describing whoever is looking. So I am going to do something else instead. I am going to ask you to join my wrestling match.

Picture the most feminine person you have ever known. Take a moment with it. See the face, the way they move, the thing about them that made the word rise up in you. Hold the image.

Now ask a friend to do the same. Compare what you see.

The pictures will probably not match. And sit with why. You were not describing a fact out in the world. You were each describing something wrestling inside yourselves, wearing a stranger’s face.

My friend sees one thing in Gina. I see another. Gina, I suspect, sees a third. And after twenty-five years at the easel I still cannot paint my anima the same way twice, because she was never one fixed thing. She was a living relationship with the deepest part of me, and she keeps changing as I do.

That gap, the space between your picture and your friend’s, is the whole thing. It is the most honest result of my wrestling, and it only raises more questions. What if femininity was never a single fact waiting to be defined, and assigned, and bolted into a cage, or wrestled into a corner, or pinned down in one final painting?

What if it was always a mirror? And every one of us has been gazing into it, certain we were finally seeing her, when all along we were only ever beginning to see ourselves.

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Self Portraits Over 25 Years