The culturally relative ideal gender identity for women. Varying substantially from one historical period to the next and from one geographic region to another, femininity is considered by feminism to be an imposed system of rules governing how women should act, look, feel, and even think within a particular society. Femininity is generally portrayed as the weaker, lesser Other of masculinity; a fact that clearly underpins the psychoanalysis concept of penis envy, which supposes that all young girls actually want to be boys on some level. So internalized are these rules and cultural assumptions supposed to be, they define not merely how a woman should comport herself, but what it actually means to be a woman. This can readily be seen by doing a book search using âfemininityâ as a keyword---the plethora of titles this throws up, from works in philosophy and critical theory to self-help manuals (both of the psychological and beauty tips variety) and autobiographies, is astonishing. A similar search for masculinity yields only a fraction of the results and nothing like the variety. That femininity is a constrictive demand placed on women by society has been recognized by female writers throughout the ages, but it was Beauvoir, Simone de who first theorized it. Her argument was that by consenting to play the roles femininity demands, women effectively consent to their own oppression. Recent work on femininity has been powerfully influenced by Butler, Judith, particularly her concept of performativity (which she derives from J. L. *Austinâs linguistic concept of the performative), by means of which she argues that gender roles are paradoxical inasmuch that they arenât fixed and can be varied---women can dress and act like men if they want to and vice versa---but one cannot choose not to have a gendered identity. Further Reading: J. Butler Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990).