We know that many things (such as items of clothing, eyeglasses, perfumes, designs of notebooks, designs of bags, designs of wallets, even cars!) can be described as masculine and feminine, and we can very easily identify whether certain eyeglasses for example are for men, for women or unisex.

Yet, if we had to describe what is it that all feminine (or masculine) things have in common, what is it that makes them feminine (or masculine), it would be incredibly hard to put it in words. So I'm wondering if femininity and masculinity are valid concepts at all when applied to objects?

When I go to Wikipedia, under the articles "femininity" and "masculinity", only traits of people are described. Not of things.

And yet we describe things as feminine or masculine in sense of being suitable for men or women.

But really, what is it that a "feminine" car, perfume, notebook, and pair of eyeglasses have in common?

What is it that makes them feminine and that allows us to very easily recognize them as such?

For example when it comes to perfumes, it's often said that floral scents are more feminine, while woody scents are more masculine. But perfumes typically have very complex formulas and sometimes "masculine" ingredients go in "feminine" perfumes and vice versa. Yet, in spite of all that complexity, we can easily tell, based on smell, whether a perfume is for men or for women.

And now, if perfumes are about smell, and if smell is what makes something masculine or feminine, how can we use the same words to describe pairs of eyeglasses?

Eyeglasses typically don't have any smell at all. They have shape. And we can attempt to say that certain shapes are more masculine and certain more feminine, but it's just statistics. Statistically more angular, more rugged eyeglasses are more likely to be for men. Yet, it's perfectly possible to find woman's eyeglasses that are angular and rugged. And yet, we can easily and without much doubt tell that they are for women.

So, it seems that femininity and masculinity are a bit deeper concepts. It goes beyond mere combination of scents or mere shape. Seems like there's something elusive or emergent quality that makes certain combinations of smells (or shapes) feminine, and certain other combinations masculine.

I feel like it's perhaps impossible for us humans to tell what is it exactly that makes something masculine or feminine, so these concepts seem very fuzzy to me.

I feel there could be 2 potential solutions to that problem:

1. Perhaps our concepts of masculinity and femininity, when applied to objects, are the result of "training", we learned by example what is feminine and what is masculine, and after being exposed to enough examples our internal neural networks have been trained to recognize what is masculine and what feminine. We don't know how we do it, we just do it. It's like a black box. Certain configuration of neurons that gives us this ability. But the inner workings of it are mysterious to us, just in the same way as we don't know why exactly a large language model gives a certain response. This seems to be the most logical solution to me. The only counterargument is that it seems that we can sometimes learn to tell masculine and feminine apart based on VERY short training, much shorter than neural networks. We typically didn't study eyeglass shapes in any depth, but it feels like we have almost innate ability to tell which are for men and which for women.
2. The second option (which I don't support, but I mention it anyway, just as a food for thought), is that there's something metaphysical or transcendental about these concepts, in sense of masculinity and femininity being like different polarities of some universal energy, or some similar woo mumbo jumbo... Like there's in the Universe a feminine principle and masculine principle, and that all our objects that I described are easily recognized as masculine or feminine, because they are indeed manifestations of such universal principles.

What are your thoughts on this?