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This question betrays my poor beginner's Spanish, but what the heck...
Do native/fluent Spanish speakers regard masculine/feminine nouns as possessing intrinsic "male/female" qualities, if only subconsciously? For instance, is a bed somehow feminine over and above its grammatical gender?
Am I completely off track here?
In Spanish, gender does not translate to género in the sense of sexual characterisation. Gender is translated to sexo. Género is purely grammatical, or was until English influence in the last couple of decades gave it the second meaning of sexo.
So no, the only difference between el leopardo and la pantera is their coat, not their sexual organs or traits. It is not a case of personification or animation, it's just grammar. It could be worse, ask the Zulu with their 15 genders!
As Fundéu explains in género y sexo, diferencias de significado:
Los términos género y sexo designan, en la lengua general, realidades distintas: género se refiere a la categoría gramatical de las palabras y sexo alude a la condición de los seres vivos por la que se distingue el macho de la hembra.
In 90% of the cases, grammatical gender has nothing to do with male/female qualities. It should be enough proof to point out the fact that there are multiple words that are almost perfect synonyms and are of different genders:
Silla (f.) y asiento (m.)
Gafas (f.) y anteojos (m.)
Cara (f.) y rostro (m.)
Computadora (f.) y ordenador (m.)
Obviously, those words don’t differ in their male/female qualities. They mean almost the same thing and are interchangeable in numerous contexts, so how could one be masculine and the other feminine? Another example would be words that change their gender after adding a suffix:
Cabeza (f.) y cabezón (m.)
Furgón (m.) y furgoneta (f.)
Tecla (f.) y teclado (m.)
Cuerno (m.) y cornamenta (f.)
Again, if someone feels “tecla” sounds feminine for some reason, I don’t think the fact the word becomes masculine after adding a suffix will change that. And what about words that have changed gender over the course of history? An example is sangre (blood), which was masculine in Latin and is still masculine in other Romance languages such as French sang, Italian sangue or Portuguese sangue. Was Spanish blood not manly enough? I don’t think so.
So grammatical gender has little to do with male/female qualities, except for a couple of cases:
Now, you’re asking if grammatical gender can affect subconsciously the way we regard different words. I think there’s no way to tell, and unless someone carries out a well-thought experiment or can link one, all we can do is sheer speculation. Bur sincerely I really, really doubt grammatical gender can affect the “manliness/girlishness” of a word. If I say “Pepe es una buena persona” no one would feel Pepe is somewhat more feminine because I used the word “persona”. And if I say “Sofía es un sujeto en mi experimento” Sofia hasn’t become masculine because I said “sujeto”. So there is a link between the grammatical gender and the natural gender of a word that is patent in some cases, but that doesn't affect most words, and treating masculine words as male words and feminine words as female words would be to make a distinction that just isn't justified and that, as far as anyone can know, no native speaker does.
1: This is generally truth for animate objects. Some inanimate objects can be inflected for both grammatical genders too but that doesn't affect their perception as masculine/feminine: charco (m.) and charca (f.), farol (m.) and farola (f.), or cesto (m.) and cesta (f.) are some examples. For more on this topic, see Meseguer, Á. G. (2002). El español, una lengua no sexista. Estudios de lingüística del español, (16), 8.
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There have in fact been studies into the effect of grammatical gender on subconscious stereotyping of inanimate objects, and there does indeed seem to be some carryover. Here's one "pop sci" write-up based on this academic write-up¹, which reports on various other studies.
¹ Boroditsky, L., Schmidt, L., & Phillips, W. (2003). Sex, Syntax, and Semantics. In Language in mind: Advances in the study of language and cognition, ed. D. Gentner & S. Goldin-Meadow, pp. 61- 80. Cambridge University Press.
