Femininity
ELI5
This concept is about the way women are often trained from childhood to keep smiling and be pleasant even when they are hurting or being treated badly — and the argument is that this "niceness" is actually a way of giving up on yourself, which is the one thing psychoanalysis says you shouldn't do.
Definition
In Mari Ruti's argument (mari-ruti-penis-envy-and-other-bad-feelings-the-emotional-costs-of-everyday-life, p. 196), "Femininity" names a specific socially scripted mode of self-suppression — the compulsive performance of pleasantness and accommodation in the face of one's own distress — that functions as an internalised response to asymmetric power relations. It is not simply a gender category but an ethical posture, or rather an ethical failure: the habitual renunciation of one's own affect, desire, and legitimate demand for clarity in order to maintain the comfort of the Other. The "age-old female role of staying nice" is therefore a gendered instantiation of what the Lacanian framework would call giving ground relative to one's desire — the very act the Ethics of Psychoanalysis identifies as the only genuine form of guilt.
Crucially, Ruti's move is to show that this self-erasure is not merely a psychological habit but an ethico-political problem. The postwar valorisation of interpersonal opacity — the injunction to tolerate the Other's unreadability as an ethical virtue — can inadvertently reinforce this feminised self-suppression by making the demand for clarity appear morally suspect. Femininity, in this sense, becomes the affective labour of absorbing and neutralising the anxiety produced by the Other's opacity, converting what should be an occasion for ethical demand into an occasion for further self-silencing. The concept thus occupies the intersection of lack (the subject's constitutive incompleteness), anxiety (the dread triggered by the Other's opacity), and the ethics of psychoanalysis (the imperative not to give ground relative to one's desire).
Place in the corpus
Within mari-ruti-penis-envy-and-other-bad-feelings-the-emotional-costs-of-everyday-life, "Femininity" in this sense is positioned as a gendered modality of several canonical Lacanian structures. It relates most directly to the Ethics of Psychoanalysis: where Lacan's ethics condemns "giving ground relative to one's desire" as the only genuine guilt, Ruti shows that femininity as a social script is precisely the institutionalised form of that capitulation — the subject trained to perpetually yield desire in service of the Other's comfort. The concept also intersects with Anxiety and Interpersonal Opacity: femininity is what the subject performs in order to metabolise and suppress the anxiety generated by the Other's unreadability, rather than allowing that anxiety to become the engine of an ethical act or demand. It connects to Lack in that the "niceness" script operates by filling the gap — absorbing tension, smoothing over rupture — rather than allowing lack to open the space of desire. And it is implicitly in tension with The Act, since Ruti's argument is precisely that what is needed is a break from femininity-as-script: a moment of ethical clarity that refuses the social demand to remain pleasant and instead makes a legitimate demand of the Other.
As an extension and specification of these canonicals, "Femininity" here is neither a biological given nor a simple ideological imposition but a lived affective formation — a way of relating to lack, anxiety, and desire that has been asymmetrically distributed along gender lines by power. Ruti neither romanticises nor simply pathologises it; rather, she uses it to expose the limits of any ethics that valorises tolerance of opacity without attending to the power differentials that make such tolerance more costly for some subjects than others.
Key formulations
Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings: The Emotional Costs of Everyday Life (p.196)
I had to admit to myself that I was humbly enacting the age-old female role of staying nice even when I was feeling dreadful
The phrase "age-old female role" anchors the behaviour in a sedimented social script rather than individual pathology, while "humbly enacting" exposes the performative self-suppression involved — the subject is not passively suffering but actively reproducing the very structure that subordinates her; "staying nice even when I was feeling dreadful" names the precise split between the presented surface (niceness) and the suppressed affect (dread), which is exactly the structure Lacanian ethics identifies as giving ground relative to one's desire.