Head and the Genderization of music

In this article Mathew Head focuses on perception of music in the second half of the 18th Century with regard to how characteristics of gender were applied to discussions of music. Specifically, the minuet and rondo genres and gallant style were regarded as having effeminate characteristics such as frivolity, graciousness, tenderness, and delicacy. Masculine characteristics in music were seen in the march and “Bach’s fugal counterpoint,” possessing seriousness, profundity, sublimity, courageousness, and boldness (148). In mid-18th century Germany, from which Head finds such gender based descriptions, “feminine characteristics were discussed not with reference to women but effeminate males” (148). That is, the idea of femininity was more or less derived from what masculinity wasn’t. Eventually, an autonomous (but still negative) idea of femininity was solidified by “idealizing and equally restrictive adjectives” (148), as “German writers constructed an idealized femininity from notions of weakness, passivity, beauty, fragility,” and “obedience,” to name a few (149).
Head’s main point is that such descriptions reveal that music is “a gendered discourse” (144) guided by a value of the masculine over the feminine; this is reinforced by the modern scholarly obsession of form (masculine) over character (feminine) which “alerts us to the possible masculine bias of the discourse” (154). While he notes “the ramifications of beliefs about gender and genre in eighteenth century society and music making” are yet to be determined, it is apparent that the genderization of musical forms, styles, and individual pieces has been arbitrated by the higher value placed on masculine characteristics and resulted in the continuation of a style which openly champions the continuing masculine bias (166). The “ramifications” are not the preference of one style over another, but the preference of one gender over another based on the characteristics attached to them.
Why might the ideas of passivity, obedience, frivolity, and other traits associated with the minuet be viewed as negative in this time? What specific musical terms can we attach to these supposed traits?
Head claims the traits of femininity appear in the minuet, which was done away with in the second half of the 18th century, and the gallant style, which became increasingly more influential. While effeminacy in European culture was beginning to be abandoned later in the century, we see a contradiction in the simultaneous prevalence of the gallant style, which is characterized with effeminacy. Was the notion effeminacy really abandoned in the second half of the century, or were its supposed characteristics devalued in dress, manner, cultural discussion, etc, as its characteristics reemerged in new gallant style? There seems to be a paradox going on here – while men across Europe “put aside their frilled cuffs” and “skirted satin coats,” it seems the dominant gallant style picked them back up and continued such feminine traits as grace, passivity, and non-seriousness (143).