Sexism
Sexism consists of negative actions, behaviours and thoughts directed to someone based on their perceived gender. In a much more real sense though, sexism is when a woman is being attacked, minimized or misstreated based on the fact that she is a woman. While this sounds like sexism affects only women, the truth of the matter is that the behaviours that stem from it create a toxic environment for everyone.
Sexism is part of our daily lives whether we are aware of it or not. It resonates with the frequencies of normality and hides beneath a veil of logic that is being perpetuated throughout the ages, starting with the first humans to discover what it means to have power over another.
Gender is an integral part of life even before we are born. This, as with most of the human-made concepts, isn't how it must be. It is how we chose to do it, and each generation past simply rolls with it. Hear the words boy or girl, and colors come to mind, blue for boys, pink for girls. Oh, someone is expecting a boy, can't wait to hear from the father how good his son will be at sports. Oh, it's a girl? Well the dad will let us know that only the best man will wife his daughter, and she will have many many beautiful kids.
While a slight exaggerations in the world of today, those sentiments can still be heard in parts of society, and even in other, more "progressive" spaces, the willingness to classify a child based on their gender is very much present. These values are then instilled to the child in it's early years of developement and further solidify the torn between the genders, confusing the majority of the kids, that simply don't conform to the predefined concepts about them.
These all tie up with transgenderism, but I'll stick to cis people for this essay, so it remains more coherent. Late capitalism has thoughts for everything, so eventually there will be an essay about that too.
Thus two paradigms begin to form in peoples mind, femininity and masculinity. Those terms are meant to describe features and behaviours of humans, which in itself is problematic, but they end up describing the persons themselves. Boys should be masculine and girls feminine. Making things even worse, each person and their lived experiences are simultaneously defining these terms along with the rest of society, so we end up with a duality within a duality, those terms end up meaning a different thing when they apply to us, and another when they apply to others.
And after this short introduction we can begin to look at sexism, as the reality which engulfs as, and not as an action that ones does against another.
Femininity and masculinity
Let's start by investigating the first aspect of femininity and masculinity, the one that I called is meant to describe features and behaviors on humans. I mentioned it's problematic, and that's because these words have inherent ties to the gender they are associated with, and this includes all the prejudices of the society that enforces them.
Etymologically the word femininity comes from the Latin word for female, while masculinity comes from the one for male. However masculinity doesn't have anything to do with being muscular, and while male and female might seem like two words sharing the same origin, their Latin roots had nothing in common.
So, strictly speaking, these words are meant to be used as adjectives defining the verbs or nouns around them in terms of their respective gender. Let's grab some examples from standard English phrases. What is "feminine touch"? Can a man do it? Is it bad if he does? What about a "masculine voice" or scent, is this something a woman can have? Should she? The answer is it doesn't matter. It is just as irrelevant as it would be for any other adjective, it simply characterizes the action following it.
However the aforementioned societal values that everyone of us grows in and learns to live with, dictate some rules around who can "wear" these specific adjectives.