emasculate = less manly

effeminate = more womanly

???

Emasculate originally meant to castrate so a feminine equivalent wasn’t necessary.

The word we’re looking for, from a linguistic / cultural usage standpoint is infantilized.

The uplifting side of this community is super nice, the “men suck let’s hate men let’s compare ourselves to men” part is real Icky.

Only if you ignore that the word emasculation originally meant castration, and the modern use is still a metaphor for that. There might not be a female equivalent term because hysterectomy is a more modern procedure and much less common or acceessible.

Julia Serano in Sexed Up and I believe before that de Beauvoir in Second Sex both discuss how generally femininity is almost defined as an absence of masculine qualities. In Serano's case, it's even about how we quickly judge a person's gender or sex based on certain characteristics and the way those are unevenly weighted - a beard / facial hair is more weighted as a gendered characteristic, and more likely to make someone see a man than breasts would make someone see a woman.

If I had more time I would pull out the relevant quotes from those works, but I do think if we are comparing the way we discuss emasculating in relation to castration and removal of genitals, I'm really not sure what similar concept or word we would have for when this is done to women, e.g. genital mutilation to remove the clitoris is not generally seen as removing female essence, whereas removing a man's testes or penis is more likely to be interpreted or understood as removing his masculine essence, or at the very least reducing how masculine he is.

Maybe part of this is even more practical: a man's sex hormones are produced by external organs that can be removed and which literally would make him less masculine, whereas a woman's sex hormones are produced by internal organs that are harder to remove. (Not to naturalize the social and political perspective, there are clearly arbitrary cultural values getting exposed here.)

Defemistrated?

Just start using the word emasculated to mean the undermining of anyone's identity, and it will lose its gendered connotations. You can't be emasculated if you are secure in your identity. Classically it has been used to re-enforce "masculinity" in those with insecurities by those who are insecure. Maybe this is a reflection of the fact that one of the tenets of masculinity is self assurance and security, which hasn't been as true for femininity. Femininity has different standards which get challenged through other kinds of social re-enforcement.

I hate to say this, but I think the closest equivalent would be "de-flowering." A perceived loss at the value society expects from you.

There's "defeminize" or the more recent "defeminate."

If we take the other meanings of "emasculate":

In the sense of literal castration, there's "oöphorectomy"; in the sense of complete neutering (removal of penis and testicles) there's "spay."

In the sense of weakening or sapping energy... well, the meaning isn't gendered, but the morphology does follow the "male-as-norm" principle. I couldn't find a feminine gendered variation (at least, not in English), but this also doesn't appear to be the meaning that OP is referring to.

What would a hateful shit call a woman who can't have kids, or is less "graceful" or "put together" than the "standard woman exemplar"?

Mannish, a harsher version of tomboy. Also, emasculate in a modern sense relates to taking away of power owned by men, by a woman. So it is a term that only has meaning that way when it is assumed that the man will be in charge merely because of socially assigned sexual roles. Same gist as calling a woman mannish or a tomboy, their sexual role, i.e., their social power, is removed when they try to act like something they're not. The advent of women being allowed to own property and handle their own finances removed a large amount of the traditional underpinning, leaving the term "mannish" as a dig towards a lack of desirabilty. Still traditional sex role based. So the female terms that seek to reinforce those sex roles do exist for women.

Oops, my sidebar was collapsed and I didn't notice the community name. Go ahead and ban me.

I mean women can make people, you guys are like little gods. Men have something to prove because we don’t have magic like that.

Defeminization...

Masculinisation is certainly a thing, but it carries a different social role.

Wouldn't the word just be 'defeminize'? It's in the dictionary right their, either divestment or robbing of feminine qualities. Been around as a word since the late 1700s.

EDIT: also as mentioned, emasculate originally meant 'castrate', and we've just used it as a figure of speech so much that it means the same as 'feminize'.

If we want a word for giving someone a penis, I'm sure I we can come up with it easily. we could make it sound old-fashioned like 'enphallize' or something, or we could be modern and worldly and use something like 'futanize'

I always thought, emancipation is the better word

Still, etymological it's about young Roman (men) reaching adulthood

Why don't fucking take over the word?

At least, I think, being emancipated, means to be able to stand for oneself

Not sure what emasculate even means - especially as another user posted it was meant for castration.

But maybe I'm missing the point/topic and I'm not sure, if I'm "allowed" to post in this community anyway, so I gonna shut the fuck up ;⁠-⁠)

You can only lose that which is considered a privilege.