I am not surprised by this at all. In high school, people were incredulous that I was in the weight room three times per week and threw shotput. Or that I could beat my brother at armwrestling. I worked in retail and people were incredulous that I could collect carts as well as the guys (I always had to volunteer for this duty, since girls were never asked to get carts). I don't know why people refuse to see a woman as physically strong, but plenty do. Oh and then if they do accept that you're strong, you're seen as undesirable. Fun.

Well, that's quite the discovery. Could it have anything to do with the fact that men are generally stronger and women are weaker, physically speaking?

Of course, we also associate men and masculinity with the active pursuit of sex, while women are supposed to be the objects of pursuit, not actively sexual.

Also, asexual people and people with low sex drives for whatever reason = weak.

I almost believe that "male" was purposefully tacked on after "power" by someone who had an axe to grind, because not only is it NOT a synonym for power, it's the only word that isn't in alphabetical order.

I'm looking at my Roget's and the entry is "Power, Potency". "Potency" has its own sexual connotations that "power" doesn't necessarily have, so the entry includes "virility" and "Viagra" (yeah). But even then, it doesn't appear to include "male" or even "masculine."

("Effete" isn't directly connected to gender—'lacking force' is its original English meaning. The fact that it has feminine connotations in present-day English is an example of the reverse of the process being pointed out here: a word that means 'weak' being treated as if it means 'feminine', not a word that means 'feminine' being treated as if it were a synonym for 'weak'. Of course, the fact that "effete" sounds similar to "effeminate" makes this association easier.)

Anyway, it’s a great example of how language is gendered in a way that privileges masculinity and men over femininity and women.

I don't think this is an example of language being gendered. It's the association which isn't actually the language. After all, some of the related words are only related, not synonymous. The fact that "manly" is associated with "power" is not a fault of the language. I think the only real example is effete, according to a word note in my thesaurus "effete derives from the Latin effētus, which meant "worn out from bearing children" and thus had an obvious feminine connotation."

Not disagreeing with the clear Male/Female association... but I would suggest you have to be careful when jumping to conclusions by overtstating the PURPOSE of a thesaurus.

A thesaurus provides RELATED words -- not definitions.

Language is nuanced and words are not interchangeable. Each of the words on the list have a particular meaning, in particular contexts.... and X doesn't necessary mean "power" or "weakness" in a given context and may or may not be appropriate.

I don't want to dismiss the issue here, especially because I know that many people do use dictionary.com. But I think the issue here is less the language and more the compiler of this list. I mean, it includes "cryptodynamic" ("having hidden power"), a word whose web hits are primary lists of random words and someone using it as a handle on gaming forums; and "cervicose" ("having a strong neck", for pity's sake), which gets about fifty hits on Google, half of which are in Latin.

Which is to say: I don't think that this list actually reflects the way people use language. It's taken from Roget's descriptive word finder: a dictionary/thesaurus of adjectives by Barbara Ann Kipfer; you can see the tail end of the list at this Google Books link (the page with the bulk of the list isn't available for viewing). If you skim the book, a few things are clearer. First, she gives definitions, so as not to suggest that all of these words are interchangeable or equally associated; so she defines "virile" as "strong like a mature male", i.e. she explains that this word is associated with "power" for a particular reason. And second, Kipfer is engaging in a kind of free association, and some of it goes past "free" and into "insane"--so a few pages later, "cynical" and "homeless" are under the heading "Privacy". dictionary.com, a source I personally consider just slightly more reliable than urbandictionary, took Kipfer's list as it was, without thought and without the explanatory definitions. (If you look up "privacy" on dictionary.com, sure enough, there are "cynical" and "homeless" as related adjectives.)

There's a lot to be said about the way language is gendered. There's also a lot to be said about not using lousy reference works.

Synonym for weakness = laid on one's back??
Missionary position, anyone? :)

We create language, language creates us!

There was a report on CNN this week (couldn't find a link) about women in Irak not being put in combat position and therefore not being promoted. It's surprising to me that even a generic position as a soldier is treated according to his/her gender.

The biggest irony I see in your post is that men write dictionaries and women teach them to kids...

I want to point out that it's not "weakness => feminine." It's "weakness = feminate" or "effeminate".

The distinction is that feminine-ness is something that can be inherent to a female, but a male who exhibits femininity is doing something unnatural and thus it is an adopted characteristic--"effeminate."

The issue is the crossing of boundaries, not just the categories themselves.

emasculate is not an adjective.

Now, don't be so politically correct. Men are naturally made for being powerful and intimidating and women are made to be weak and fragile.