Well, I believe there are probably more femmes who use cosmetics and wear dresses than there are butches that do. Do femmes do this to act like traditional heterosexual women/for heteronormative reasons, or do they have their own reasons and preferences for their appearance and how they express their gender?

We are different because the material reality of our lives as lived over generations has been different from the lives heterosexual couples lived. We are different because none of us truly was raised with male privilege. We are different because there still are not the institutional rewards and sanctions imposed upon us that most heterosexual couples benefit from/contend with.

But are we plagued by unexamined sexist expectations and beliefs? Yes, we are. As a group, in general, it is safe to say that we are. And it's a problem, IMO.

Having said that, I do not think that any given behavior functions in a heteronormative way in any given relationship. As you say, it depends on the couple and how self-aware they are. And I agree with Anya, at some point you gotta just live your life in the best way you know how, being happy and doing as little harm as possible.

More thoughts.

We can't change gender norms over night. We understand sex and gender via the current construction of them. It's the world we grew up in and still live in.

So what would you have us do? We all repudiate some parts of heteronormativity. We reconstruct other parts of it, and we accept others -- because they work for us. Are the parts we accept perhaps reinforcing heteronormative expectations in our community and outside of it? Yes, probably.

But we don't live outside of history and culture. We live in it. We are all doing the best we can. There are people who support and endorse male/masculine superiority . . . well they are here but sorta marginalized. And there are people who kinda like it but are stealth or coy about it . . . seems like there are quite a few of those around. And then there are a lot of femmes and butches (more femmes) who are so hot for the dynamic that they try to enforce their version of it in an unexamined way -- because they want to find what they want out there. They want a world that makes them feel hot and validated to be real and populated. They want it to seem inevitable/natural. They do harm (e.g. femmes making fun of butches for wearing clothes made for women), but it's more that they are narcissistic and immature than deeply committed to some version of butch-femme that isn't even the status quo (never was, in fact).

And then there are people who do not believe in gender inequality, who understand that in the real world it's a human rights issue. However, these same people, some of them, may live lives and have relationships that look heteronormative. They are working it out for themselves in this world, where they grew up and learned what it means to be (insert ID) and what is sexually hot for them.

I am not all that alternative. I may be leather and may have been poly, but in most ways I am pretty conventional. I expend thought and energy to address sexism in my relationships and in my communities. I do. But I also choose to live the life that works for me. What else can I do? What else can anyone do?

That's not true. I was failing to include transwomen. Many feel they benefited from some male privilege at some point. My apologies for that exclusion.

When I was coming up, at the very beginning when I heard about and was exposed to the butch-femme dynamic, it wasn't about gender roles or norms. Also, while I am not butch and can't say what privately went on among butches, there didn't seem to be a lot of competition around who was more masculine. Same with femmes re femininity. There was competition around who was more good looking and who had a partner and whose partner was happy or straying. That sort of thing.

Butches would posture, but it was in the service of impressing a girl. It wasn't an identity thing. When I was coming up, a butch was cool if she 1) had a girl who was crazy about her and 2) had a reputation for being a really good lover (therefore was popular among femmes). It was sometimes very Rico Suave -- I put a spell on women -- that kind of thing. Femmes would roll their eyes, but lick their lips.

Being known for being able to please a woman -- that was the rep butches sought after. That was almost the core of butch identity. If you asked someone what made her butch, after being surprised at the question, I bet most of the time she would have answered because she could make a woman come back for more -- beg for more. That kind of thing. There was a lot of arrogance and trash talk about that. Very little about markers of masculine gender presentation.

The dance was more about sex than it was about gender. I don't think it's just because gender roles were a given or because people lacked the language to talk about it back then.

Our history is not well-documented, and we project our current preoccupations onto the past without much thought. But I recall. I was not femme when I met some of these women. Just a baby dyke. But I recall.

From the stories I heard, there wasn't a lot of policing of gender or how people ran their relationships. Everyone struggled, and everyone was at risk to one extent or another.

That incredible self-righteousness and tendency toward intense self-examination -- that came with my generation of dykes. I think that older folks had enough serious economic and physical threats to their well-being that they didn't look for silly reasons to exclude.

Hey Martina great post. I excerpted this one section because "serious economic and physical threats" still exist many butch/femme folks. It feels silly to say that; it's such a given. I must have misunderstood something but still, here's my comment. Scout

I would have been this kind of straight woman: I keep my own name; we have shared resources but I also have my own money; my career matters as much as his; neither "defers," but we make decisions about our life together, together, etc.

And that's the kind of femme partner I would have been.

Red would not take my last name nor would I take hers.

That’s not how I remember it.

I grew up in a poor and working class neighborhood with the usual variety of society’s throwaways. In the projects it was all families on welfare but the surrounding tenements were a mish mash of fringe. I learned a lot about alternative life styles. I learned a lot about a lot of things really. I was always a watcher and I processed what I saw in depth even as a kid. I saw queens tormented and beaten for fun. I watched homeless guys get beaten for fun. I watched drunks get rolled and beaten for fun and profit. I watched junkies on the nod get left alone. I watched bull daggers get tormented and sometimes beaten, but much differently than queens. Kind of like one would poke a junk yard dog, carefully and always with a back up plan. There was this one butch everyone talked about how tough she was, how she could kick any guy’s ass. They despised her because she was different, queer and masculine presenting, but there was also reverence and grudging respect because she was dangerous and tough. She was impressive looking that’s for sure.

I identified mightily with the neighborhood butches called bull daggers or diesel dykes. I wanted to grow up to be like them. They were tough and they lived like men. As I got older I watched the butch/femme couples in the neighborhood. They may not have said gender roles or norms but they sure as shit acted them out. Butches didn’t cook and do laundry or go grocery shopping and they sure as hell did not do housework. They drank in bars, worked manual labor and fixed their own cars. And when their femmes got home from working in factories they took care of the house and their butches. When I got old enough to get away with drinking in bars I had occasion to see butch-femme dynamics a little closer and it sure looked like heteronormative behavior to me. And without any of the accompanying examination or soul searching to water it down that we see nowadays. No nod to gender equality or angst over misogyny. How I processed what I saw led me to deny that I was a butch who loved femmes. I often dated and/or partnered with women who were attracted to female masculinity, but like me they did not identify with the butch femme dynamic. I refused the dance. I thought it was sexist and misogynistic and not at all in line with the person I wanted to be. It was a long road home. And I’m happy to have arrived a proud butch woman married to a proud femme woman. It’s our dance and sometimes I lead and sometimes I follow. And I’m happy either way. I do not live the butch femme relationships I grew up seeing, I don’t share the ideals of the butches I knew and listened to as a kid. They may not have spoken about gender roles or gender norms but they lived them. And they did so unapologetically without any thought to what they were perpetuating. So personally I’m glad we do some naval gazing nowadays. At least there are alternatives to the hyper masculinity I saw growing up. There may have been then too, but I never saw it and nobody talked about stuff like that. So I’m glad we talk about it now.

Masculinity has always been revered. It didn’t just happen with gender conversations. Roles were always a part of the butch femme dynamic, at least in my part of the world. They weren't thought about they were just done, just lived. But now we have an awareness of what it means to play that way. There are many of us who don’t think femmes equal hetero women and butches equal men. Just like I'm sure there were many who never thought that way when I was growing up either. But nobody talked about that. It was assumed to be exactly how it looked. Examining stuff is empowering. Masculinity has been separated from men and patriarchy. Femmes parse femininity in their own image. It’s not perfect but it’s better.

I am talking about the 70s not the 40s or 50s so that might make a difference.

Of course that's not true. Plenty of sexism and misogyny going on everywhere and these boards are not immune. Reverence of the masculine absolutely.

You always have a great perspective. It’s not that I don’t agree with what you are saying because I do. I just don’t feel I have to cop to engaging in heteronormative behaviors in order to give my name to my wife. It was not a reflexive decision on my part.

And I don’t think I can make that call for anyone else.

If there was widespread expectation that a femme should change her last name when marrying a butch, then I think that could be an indication of unexamined sexism and heteronormative values in this specific type of situation. However, I don't see that. Some people may disagree. There do seem to be more femmes who consider changing their names than butches, so perhaps there is something to it. However, any femme I have ever known who considered changing her last name to the butch's, it was totally her choice and one that appeared to be very well thought out. Same sex marriage is very recent, so yes most of our traditions surrounding marriage do come from traditions that have long been established by heterosexuals. I do think most queers when they do marry put a lot of thought into it and try to make it their own, but we are still working with the traditions that have gone before us.

I doubt it. I think it's all true, what I am saying AND what you are. I think a lot of those femmes had a lot more power than it may have looked like from the outside, as did some straight women. There was not much social reinforcement of the power of butch women in their relationships. And no economic or state. I definitely saw women adopt roles in their relationships. Of course they did. But it was different from heterosexual relationships, and their understanding of it was very different from what we imagine it was like.

Yes, gender roles were a given, and some folks were pretty entrenched in them. Probably some of those relationships were made miserable because of that. And some worked well. But I think that folks worked out all kinds of variations on a theme. Straight people did too, but lesbians had less social pressure on them and therefore more freedom to do what worked for them.

And it looked way different to me. So much emphasis on making the femme happy. And not just from stone butches. And not just in the courting phase. That was kind of the center of the connection, not the butch's masculinity or the femme's femininity. Yeah, people grooved on that. That was the source of a lot of the heat. And of course it was part of people's personal identity. But it wasn't as defining as it is now. Nor was it defining of the dynamic. It just wasn't.

I will say that the women I knew at the time were older. Older folks in long-term relationships work things out and mellow. Plus times were already changing.

What I was reacting to was the statement that the dance was somehow first and foremost about gender roles. We emphasize some parts of these identities and interactions more than they did. They emphasized others. Pleasing the femme is still important. But if you watch some unreflective young butches now, you'd never get that. It would seem to be ALL about gender performance. It was about gender performance then too. There were codes of dress. But it WAS different. Every social construct changes over time, and if it is maintained, people later in the timeline assume what they experience was always the case. Not so.

I will add that -- not just to you -- but can you imagine how brave femmes were at the time? How incredibly brave. These were not, in general, people who were thrown out of their families for being dykey-looking. They stepped away from privilege and safety by choice. And while the old ethos was that butches "protected" their femmes, it seemed to me that in many ways, it was the other way around. Femmes patched up butches up emotionally and physically, but they also stood with them side by side and took all the social disapproval and some of the violence meted out to such couples.

And the butch and femme women I met -- mostly through politics -- were on the left, members of unions and long-time fighters for social justice. They believed in the equality of women. That had to have affected the way they lived their personal lives.

I will also add that I sure never denied the degree of violence and hatred directed toward gay people from the outside. So that part of your post puzzled me.

I didn’t mean to make it about violence directed toward gay people. There was violence directed toward lots of people. Violence was part of the fabric of people’s daily lives. It still is I’m sure. But violence directed toward gay people was not the point I was making. I can see I do way too much meandering when I write a post. Sorry. It was about how butches dealt with the violence that I was talking about and how that affected me as a kid. It was impressive to me at that time. I wanted to be that. I wanted to be a dangerous butch when I grew up. And then I talked about how as I got older I moved away from wanting to emulate the butches I knew because of some of the things I saw in their relationships. And then how I worked through that and back out the other side.

And for me it still is about making my wife happy. Even though I know I cannot be responsible for another person’s happiness, I just make damn sure I am never responsible for her unhappiness. That seems to work pretty well.

And I was very young when I become aware of butches. I barely registered femmes until I got a bit older. My interpretations may be skewed by my limited understanding of what I was seeing. But we interpret the world the way we see it and form our personal beliefs based on these experiences, even though they may be skewed for a variety of reasons. I have no doubt it isn't as simple as my 10 year old brain imagined. And just like now, there is no one way of being butch or femme or being in a butch femme relationship. Your original post that i responded to just struck me and brought up some deeply entrenched memories. So i was like, that's wasn't my experience. I don't think entrenched is exactly the word i'm looking for. Deeply moving, deeply important, deeply personal, deeply affecting, damn I hate it when I can't find the right word.

Really interesting and thought provoking thread!

As a child coming up in the 60's, 70's and 80's I strongly knew I would never get married and if I did...I would keep my name.

Older now. For me, if I think of things in a heteronormative sense, it would make more sense to take the name of the Butch I love, rather than have that of my abusive father, though I have made peace with that
name.

I don't know if I ever will be in a marriage situation, at 50 it seems unlikely, though not out of the question. I'm really not sure what I would do.

everyone is still, even though ive said it four times now doing this

heteronormative ritual = bad.

yes of course I got my feminine rituals from a white middle class heteronrmative culture. duh. I didnt grow up in a vaccume. I had to do years and years of work to understand which things I was doing because I adored them and which things I did because I was afaird not to, or which things I did because I hadn't thougjt about not doing them.

it took me a good 8 years of pretty full on self deconstruction.

if I took someone's name I would be doing it by choose but its *still* a white European heterosexual ritual. to say it isnt is like saying you got it from matrians or made it up yourself. do I own that it is (acknowledge this where I borrowing it from?). YES.

why is that so hard? I took some Jewish dutch heterosexual rituals too, cause that was my wife's back ground and her upbringing.

I dont see people really grasping what I'm saying yet.

who is saying this? where else would it come from? I do think when material conditions are different, the same "content" can look the same, but not BE the same. But I've beaten that dead horse too.

I was thinking about your arc and how mine is kind of the opposite. Less intense, I think, but kind of sad.

I had no problem identifying with older femmes. They kicked ass. I did not myself ID as femme for a while after I came out. But the femmes I had met impressed me. When I came to ID as femme, it was uncomplicated and somewhat liberating. Now, I do not like what it conjures in others when I say I ID as femme. I do not like the assumptions they make. I know as many or more kick ass femmes, femmes to respect. But the identity seems less liberating. On the contrary. And as a result, over the last five years or so, I have felt myself become less attached to it.

I liked when HB said in one of her posts something like yes, she is femme and beyond that "meh." I am not the kind of person that people now think of when they hear the word femme. And I am way too old to be educating. I am still quite happy with lesbian and dyke. It's nothing that I have done to change. It's more that the world has changed and the understanding of the ID has changed. It really no longer fits me.

i thought it was a given that we adopted this practice as most of out other ones from straight folks.

Not sure what you were exactly looking for, but for me, it was just a given.

Please don't stop. Your voice is needed. Your voice is appreciated. People are listening. We need femme voices that carry our butch/femme history. I have loved reading every one of your posts on this thread and I bet I am not alone.

Thank you for being here, Martina. We have lost voices here (and there), for a number of reasons. Let us keep you.

Keep talking. Keep educating. We need it. We appreciate it.

The youngins' are absorbing it. I promise.

Not trying to derail....just for clarity
 

I'm sorry but I feel like I'm missing a huge point here: how has the understanding of femme changed?

I, personally, can't deny my identity because of others assumptions.

I still view femmes as kick ass, brave women worthy of respect. I still see these women as liberating. I am still stepping outside of lesbian norms to be who we are.

I am asking out of clarity, because your post comes from Personal I space, but you say the word educating in there.

From my I space as a young femme, I prefer to share experiences rather than be educated. I love to learn about b/f history, but I do reject that somehow I've lost some original concept of femme.

Maybe this is for another thread?

I don’t think I said I had trouble identifying with the older butches I knew/saw growing up. I identified pretty strongly. And by the time I could get away with getting into bars I followed them around like a puppy dog. But there were other mitigating factors for me that caused me to question if this was a road I wanted to go down. One was my inability at that young and impressionable age to understand as you explained “material power differences are what maintain oppression, not ideology alone.” So what I saw from the butches at the bar looked to me like macho behavior and I translated that as a belief in their inherent superiority over their femmes and women in general. I have no doubt it wasn’t ‘exactly’ like that and there was much more going on, but I could not understand that yet.

Then I had this insane period where I married a man or should I say boy, because we were both still teenagers. I came to my senses rather quickly and realized there was never any doubt that I would partner with women. How this partnership would look was up for negotiation. I would always choose women to love, nurture and support. I had no interest in wasting energy on men. And the butch/femme dynamic, as I was wrongly interpreting it, looked like it had no place in my ideology. When I was wrestling with my identity and trying to decide if I was a butch or a lesbian it was the 1980’s and gender theory was still a thing of the future. I had no idea yet that being both a butch and feminist were not mutually exclusive. I became very interested in feminism and feminist theory. Looking back over butch femme history it is clear to me now that the butches and femmes of the 40’s and 50’s could easily be considered early feminists. They certainly took sex, a pretty much male focused act, and made it about women. All about women, but in a very hot queered version of opposites attract. Pretty cool that. However, I missed that point too as a young feminist lesbian.

One thing about the butches of my youth, they were all she’s. Nobody was male identified. In that time frame being butch was just that, being butch, it was about carrying female masculinity. It was liberating and uncomplicated, end of story. A much simpler time. There was never the question of an end game, of the possibility of transitioning. Fast forward twenty years and once again I find myself confronted with another challenging and very complicated twist. Big changes. I am still pulling apart and examining my place in the new butch femme world. I will say this much about butch femme culture, it is never boring.

And there have been times when I wondered if butch really fits me anymore. But I took such a long difficult road getting here, I fought my female masculinity so hard, I confused owning female masculinity with maleness. I had so many issues surrounding men/male to work through I didn't think i would ever be able to hold masculinity comfortably in my body. What I failed to realize is that it was there whether I chose to honor it or not. Masculinity is not owned by men or by patriarchy, femininity is not exclusively reserved for women. Femmes can hold femininity and masculinity, butches can hold masculinity and femininity and all the mixtures you can fathom. Now that i have worked that part out, at least most of the time, and made peace with it, I don't want to give up butch. It's a part of me and one I will fight for, just like I fought for woman as an identity that was mine, that no one could take. It was funny as soon as some family members adjusted to my butch identity they wanted to take away my female one. Like they can only handle one at a time, like identity is a singular sensation. Perhaps it's cognitive dissonance for them if I am a butch woman who holds female masculinity. They would be much happier if i picked a side. That's why I enjoy dressing in both men's and women's clothing. It's why I wear both men's and women's underwear. Not at the same time of course. I think I wandered way off the point of this thread. Sorry.

I'm not going to speak for Martina, because, well because I can't, not being her and all, but I just wanted to say that when I read her post I took it to mean that she did not want to educate people on what SHE means personally when she says she is a femme. And not on what femme in general needs to mean to everyone. She said "I am not the kind of person that people now think of when they hear the word femme. And I am way too old to be educating."

Maybe I took it wrong.

I said, "I know as many or more kick ass femmes, femmes to respect." I was referring to the present time.

I would refer you to HB's many good posts about what it is like to say you are femme and be met with stereotypes that are so off the mark that you have to address the issue.

And, yes, I meant educating about me. Thanks, Tick. Educating in the sense of helping someone realize that femme isn't only . . . whatever they were thinking. When that stuff comes up alot, it makes you think. Plus I look around and in a way, it isn't me anymore. It could be generational. If so, I am not saying femme has lost anything. Just that it may no longer fit me well enough to claim it.

That totally answered my misunderstanding. Thanks

to be honest Martina I I'm.starting to feel to tired to claim it since I came home. it feels more like a constant frustrating argument here than it did in London..

I may decided to ID as it as I have dome the past 10 years: mostly privately. then I can avoid all of the boo hah I can deal with anymore.

I used to be big into the hoo ha. but I can't be arsed with the assumptions nor the tiring "no I'm not a femme like that" or "no I'm not looking for a butch like that" assumptions.

I dont happen to think the butch femme way of being in a relationship is anything more special than the other ways my friends are in relationships. I hear from all kinds of groups ive joined (then quit), how extra queer we are, how special we are, Ive recently heard of butches being "basically like men - feed em and fuck em" in one if these groups, another trotteted out the a tired old Bullshit of "the femme rules" ( that used to be men-women written but over a decade ago someone changed the word "woman",to femme and its still going around) and I I try to date butches from Seattle but all I hear is "my butch this" or "cause you are a femme" that.

and after having been relatively free of that for 10 years it feels really suffocating and tiring to come back to.

I think maybe I'm just done with it.

thanks Martina xx

I remember crap like femme rules on email lists waaaay back when. And on the dash site stuff from that kind of mind set often found its way on a thread. On the lists I never heard much push back but there were voices on the dash site that spoke out. I notice we don't get too much femme rules/feed and fuck your butch kind of crap here. We don't get a lot of stuff here that we used to see on other sites and probably still do see on other sites. Well, obviously, since HB mentioned seeing it, often. I think we can credit Admin and the Mods for that. Of course you can't stop it all. People are allowed their opinions and as long as it isn't against the TOS they can post this stuff. But people are allowed to voice dissenting opinions here without fear of being attacked in ways that are against the TOS, which is what often happened on other sites. I remember having conversations with long time members of b/f forums back when the dash site was still in it's spider web like configuration(or whatever they call it, i'm no techie) about all the misogyny and sexism we were seeing but we didn't feel we had any recourse really. It was so prevalent it didn't feel safe to speak out. It wasn't very welcoming for those kinds of conversations. Or maybe we weren't bold enough yet and not aware that there were plenty of people who didn't view butch as hetero man and femme as hetero woman. I had some deep and meaningful conversations concerning misogyny, sexism, gender and all sorts of stuff on the dash site. But there was always this uncomfortable feeling for me of knowing that people were pretty much charged with policing themselves and if things got ugly somebody was going to bleed. I, personally, speaking from my ME place, noticed a real difference when I first came to this site as darkgazer and felt more comfortable talking about misogyny and sexism than I ever have before. It might be a mixture of having grown more open to examining stuff as a community over the years and being on a site with mods and admin who are very invested in keeping this place as cushioned from personal attacks and as civil as possible.

Over the years I have been told more than a few times to get a sense of humor when responding to one of those butch/man femme/het woman type of jokes. I don’t even find them funny before you change it to butch. I can’t believe that if I was a man I would only want to be fed and fucked. And as a butch I certainly would like a little more in my life. If you believe masculine beings are empty shells that only need to be filled with food and sex I can’t imagine how you will raise your man children. Or how you would explain to your girl child that she should be content partnering with someone whose needs run no deeper than eating and fucking. Or how you think it’s funny that you chose that kind of person for your life partner. There will be no end to this if you perpetuate it and pass it down to your offspring who in turn do the same. There are things like self fulfilling prophesies and if this is all you expect from men that’s probably all you will ever get. It is difficult to break the cycle. We as women have all been taught to participate whole heartedly in our own oppression. And many of us do, whether straight or gay. Expect more. Don't settle. Strong and silent doesn’t mean deep and mysterious, it usually means dumb and closed off with a pinch of bully thrown in. And if your man or your woman only wants to eat and fuck stop laughing and find another partner.

We changed ours
 

My wife and I changed our last names by way of hyphening them together. It gave us the feeling of formally coming together, as part of being married. My last name went first and hyphened my wife’s last name. There was a lot work involved in formally changing our names everywhere and on everything. It is worth it in the long run. We have only been married 2 years, as it only became legal in Australia in 2018. I’m still having to change my name, like when I had to do a COVID-19 test at our base hospital; they still had my old name on file. I keep a copy of our marriage certificate in my handbag just in case I need it.