Life & Wisdom Quote by Andrew Cohen

Cohen is side-eyeing one of culture's most seductive shortcuts: the idea that personality comes pre-sorted by sex. By saying he's "not convinced", he uses a deliberately mild register to smuggle in a fairly radical claim. He isn't just disputing a stereotype; he's questioning the category system that keeps stereotypes feeling like common sense. The phrasing does a lot of work. "Traditionally considered" flags the inherited nature of these labels, as if "male" and "female" qualities are museum tags we keep reattaching out of habit. "Energies" adds a New Age gloss that often makes gender essentialism sound spiritual rather than political, and Cohen punctures that too. If these qualities are just "energies", why are we so confident they map onto bodies?

The subtext is a critique of how gender talk gets used as a proxy for moral and social order: assertiveness becomes "masculine", care becomes "feminine", and suddenly everyday behavior is policed with the authority of biology. Cohen's line pushes back against that moralizing. It suggests that what people call "gendered traits" may be better understood as learned scripts, situational strategies, or simply individual temperament.

Contextually, this sits neatly in a late-20th/early-21st-century shift where writers increasingly challenge binaries without needing to announce a full manifesto. The quote's restraint is tactical: it invites readers to reconsider their assumptions without triggering immediate defensiveness. The intent isn't to erase difference; it's to loosen the grip of categories that turn human range into a two-column spreadsheet.