I was writing a paper last night-for that class where the professor ignores my insightful commentary-and I was trying to find a word for the female equivalent of emasculate. Turns out there isn't one. In fact, what the word should be, effeminate, also applies to men. What we have is the gender specific root words, masculine and feminine, with the suffix -ate added to each, creating a verb in the male case, masculate, and an adjective in the female case, feminate-neither of which are words by themselves by the way-and then adding the e- prefix to each to create the meaning of diminishing or lessening the root, thus emasculate, a verb meaning to lessen a male, and effeminate, an adjective used to describe a male showing less than masculine qualities. So in this case both genders are used to describe male actions. The implicit meaning in this-or at least how I'm interpreting it-is that women can't be lessened or, in other words, they're already as low as it is possible to get. . That's pretty damned messed up. I know there are a lot of little things in language that neutralize and ostracize women, prescriptive rules like using 'he' as a pronoun for an unidentified gender, words like mankind, but this is one of the more offensive ones I've come across.  Not only that, but it also implies that a lessened man is akin to a woman; that it's insulting to a man to have feminine qualities. I'll admit I'm guilty of saying that to people-Travis-but the underlying core of what's being said is really damaging on a large scale. I feel like I'm running off the rails here, but this is just something I thought of that I wanted to talk about.