thelesbianlifestyle.com

This is to be one of my devices less poetic. Those of you who have been following the style of my posts… This isn’t quite it. I was inspired by the previous post, and when commenting, felt I should just take up space on the main page instead. So this is the “butchfemme not quite andro but people find it easier to call me that than butch since I’ll rip them a new asshole if they call me a femme” perspective. LENGTH AHEAD, but enlightenment awaits. Or something like it.

I am going to take you through my discovery journey on my personal thoughts of butch and femme. Originally, I honestly thought such things didn’t exist anymore, when I came out. However, that was sophomore year in High School and let us say I am no longer quite in that manner of thinking. I used to think women were women and lesbians were simply women who liked women, regardless of appearances — at least as much as our humanity allowed us to be as such.

As time progressed, I started to hear this label thrown at me — “femme.” It left a dirty taste in my mouth. Tossed about like baseball in the City streets where the grass isn’t quite as green as on the other side… of the bridge. Girl’s got long hair, better be a femme. Which got me to thinking, of course, as most things lead me to thinking, which of course in turn leads me to being indescribably analytical and dangerous. Did I mention criticizing human tendencies as a past time is a favourite hobby of mine?

At any rate.

I soon came to terms with the fact that obviously I wasn’t enjoying identifying as femme because I didn’t feel I was. Okay, wonderful, let’s get comfortable. Let’s talk boxers and beaters. Let’s talk twice-tattooed, six-time pierced rugby-playing tough-as-nails poetess. Let’s talk 30×30 boys’ pants. Let’s talk ties. Let’s talk lover and fighter. Let’s talk professional skirtchaser. Let’s talk no makeup, let’s talk personal set of 10-25 lb. freeweights. Let’s talk about cliff jumping, reading, writing, painting, romancing. Let’s talk sex in cars… but let’s also talk moonlit walks and hand-kissed dinners. Let’s talk music. Let’s talk living without withholding. Let’s talk about me.

Let’s talk… about how I don’t look good in hats, or how I don’t play any other sports. Let’s talk my black stilettos — that I can dance in, and am rather fond of given the opportunity to wear them. Let’s talk my dresses I keep for special occasions, like weddings, since I can’t have my own. Let’s talk about long hair [midback, thanks]. There is a line I drew between my comfort and my visibility. I accept the fact that I look good with the length on my hair. I accept the fact that my braids suit my personality far better than most short styles. I accept — at times — that yes, I have curves, and they look damn good in a dress. And yet, even for the personality that doesn’t quite fit, and the clothes that bite at the ankles of butch but keep to androgyny, still I am called the F-word by those who take the glance and don’t know me.

Which, unfortunately, presents me with an interesting irony. The general kind of girl I am attracted to — certainly not in my history of girls I’ve dated, just the kind I am vicerally, pelvic-jumping attracted to — tend to be soft butch kind of women. The girls who are girls in the face, and you can tell they’re hiding curves beneath the clothes we both know how to wear. But as I’ve said, I am the one with the balls. It’s who I am, it’s the “role” I know — not for any laundry list of predefined ceremonies, but because I still believe in holding the door open for a lady.

And this works nicely to a degree. “Butches” enjoy me on sight, I’m not too bad on the eyes, but they don’t see me. They see the F-word. Once I give them a run for their money on “their territory,” most usually they are too confused by the “androgyny” that doesn’t really match the “package.” I’m no longer an interest, I’m a threat to a way of thinking. I can’t even be a friend because they’re not quite sure what to make of me. And yet, I am often told I am a hard grrlboi to make out. In whatever sense you want to take that phrase.

So I found it very interesting to read the prior entry, the flipside to my coin where her lament was:

“I just wish that others would realize that you don’t have to be a pretty, sassy, girly haired girl with a skirt and stiletto’s to be a lesbian.”

When I say, I don’t need hair short as the devil and a devil-may-care smile to match in order to be one, either.

So faced with this conundrum, I often threw my hands into the air. A friend who looks butch and is a closet femme. Me, a closet butch at heart. But what of these words we bandy about like gradeschoolers?

Well, what of them?

Thus, the next branch of my discovery came to fruition in the form of helping my friend with her Queering Desire paper [Yes, that was a course offered]. I had to leaf through all sorts of genderbending queerifying articles and novels, and somewhere within them I got a better understanding. I even wrote a poem on it [P.S. I'm a poet... if any of you really care to read the poem spoken about, let me know. I'm surprised you're still with me thus far.]. I have found…

That the butch/femme [not necessarily S/M, that's a whole other deal to me] is actually a beautiful concept. Step outside the idea of our oh so liberated mindset and don’t think of them as roles. Within those words are locked the romanticism of an era and a time when we weren’t as free as we would have liked to be. I read perceptions of out-and-out femme-identified and butch-identified women.

I read what it meant to be femme. That it meant being something to another person that I feel I barely have the words to describe. It’s just that… high. It’s like a near-god status in the eyes of a butch woman who needs a religion in a different sense. It really is like being a princess.

I read what it meant to be butch. To be truly butch. Everything that makes me go, I am not that. For me to be able to say, I am a closet butch, but that… to be that enigmatic, to be that soulseeking, to be that… mystery, that wonder — I am not that. I am not that beautiful.

I have a newfound respect for these words that I think we should all appreciate a little more and condemn a little less. I respect those of us for whom these words no longer work, girls after my own heart who I described in my previous entry. I look for the moldshakers and the rulebreakers. I like to apply to fill the vacancy for girls who don’t apply to the stereotypes. But there is still something that needs to be loved about the roots of our existence, the whence from which we came. There is still something in the beauty of it that should be cherished.

And so, from that newfound respect, from the inability to be andro [yeah... hair not quite short or shaggy enough for that fence sitting mental image either] or butch or femme, comes my new definition, my better sense of self. A “beauty in the breakdown” moment, if you will. A moment when breaking down doesn’t mean shattering self, but perhaps a dissection of terms of self. The realization that in the comfort of my personal response to being andro, the ability to switch sides through the gate in the fence, that I am a butchfemme, or what I merely prefer: Dyke. The best of two wor[l]ds.

by toni riot