Call Me She-Stuff

Minstrel Boy’s sister, who’s working on a novel, needs help. She’s looking for an affirmative and non-disparaging word to describe a woman who excels in skills traditionally associated with the feminine, like cooking and sewing—a word she describes as the female equivalent of the descriptor “macho,” which one might use to describe a man who’s good at traditionally male-associated skills.

I thought about this for awhile, and I realized that I don’t think macho is really used that way. I mean, it can be used to describe a man who’d good at traditionally male-associated skills, but only a particular type of man. Mr. Shakes is a genius around the house in “traditionally male” ways—he can retile bathrooms and lay hardwood floors and build shit—and he’s physically a big man, tall and broad-shouldered, but there are parts of his personality—shyness, warmth, introversion, bookishness—that just make calling him macho seem ridiculous, because our use of macho hasn’t been totally extricated from it’s origin machismo, which has associations with sexism, braggadocio, and a lack of humility.

So, okay, macho is decidedly flawed, but, once I’d started thinking about, I wanted to see if there maybe there was a word, even if equally flawed, for the purposes of describing a female character. I couldn’t think of any off the top of my head, and the Spanish equivalents to macho are feminista or hembra, which make sense in Spanish, but in English, we’d say “feminist,” which isn’t right. So I looked up antonyms for macho in the thesaurus, and I found female, woman, feminine, effeminate, cowardly, weak, impotent, unmanly. Ha. That’s a whole other post.

So then I looked up feminine, to search for synonyms, and the first entry was “feminine napkin.” Ha. That’s a whole other post, too.

The main entry for “female” provides these synonyms: changeable (?!), child-bearing, delicate, effeminate, effete, fair, feminine, fertile, gentle, girlish, girly, graceful, ladylike, maidenly, matronly, modest, muliebral, oviparous, petticoat (?!), pistil-bearing, pistillate, pure, refined, reproductive, sensitive, she-stuff (???!!!), shy, soft, tender, twisty, virgin, vixenish, weak, womanish, womanlike. Okay, that’s about six whole other posts, including one titled: According to the Thesaurus, I Am Not Female.

Anyway, the thesaurus is no help. I don’t know what the female equivalent of macho is. Femme is about as close as I can come, which is just as flawed as macho and doesn’t even have the benefit of being widely used. And I haven’t come up with any words that accurately (and affirmatively) describe men and women who are good at skills traditionally associated with their respective sexes that don’t have negative or othering connotations, either—which isn’t a bad thing; there’s something satisfying about having to describe a woman who’s good at cooking and sewing by saying, “She’s a woman who’s good at cooking and sewing.” So I got nothing, and I'm not totally displeased about that, in the end. Shakers?