[1] Sissy is, approximately, the male converse of tomboy (a girl with masculine traits or interests), but carries more strongly negative connotations.
Research published in 2015 suggests that the terms are asymmetrical in their power to stigmatize: sissy is almost always pejorative and conveys greater severity, while tomboy rarely causes as much concern but also elicits pressure to conform to social expectations.
The term sissy has historically been used among school children as a "relentlessly negative" insult, implying immaturity and gender or sexual deviance.
[11] By the 1930s, "there was no more damning insult than to be called a sissy" and the word was widely used by American football coaches and sports writers to disparage rival teams and encourage ferocious player behavior.
Among members of a Detroit, Michigan youth gang in 1938–39, sissy was "the ultimate slur" used to tease and taunt other boys, as a rationalization for violence against rivals, and as an excuse for not observing the dicta of middle-class decorum and morality.
For example, in 2018, official Chinese state media derided "sissy pants" young men (who use makeup, are slender, and wear androgynous clothing) as part of a "sickly" culture that threatened the future of the nation by undermining its militaristic image.
[19][20] In 2021, the National Radio and Television Administration of China added a ban on "sissy men and other abnormal esthetics" to its rules using the offensive term niang pao.
[23] Sissyphobia has more recently been used in some queer studies;[24] other authors in this latter area have proposed effeminiphobia,[25] femiphobia,[26] femmephobia, or effemimania[27][28] as alternative terms.
[30]Eguchi added, "I wonder how 'sissyphobia' particularly plays into the dynamic of domestic violence processes in the straight-acting and effeminate-acting male same-sex coupling pattern."
[30] In the BDSM practice of forced feminization, the male bottom undergoing cross-dressing may be called a sissy as a form of erotic humiliation.