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Out of how many sites, how many threads, how many years (!)*butch* identity gets discussed/analysed, deconstructed (and put back together again!), it goes on and on.
There have been some awesome people who have started great *Femme* threads, but, constantly, the threads that get the most feedback are about BUTCHES (FIB and MIB) /TG/MEN of our community and their identities. What is that about their (butch/female and male dependent) identities that make for the most heated (and most interesting!) conversations when femme threads do not get half the attention? |
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The other thing that just makes me feel good is Dylan pointing out (even though you were whatevered.. major eye-roll) to this femme that she was doing the same thing! I have been in situations like this in which both has happened and someone needed to hear that it is important to use appropriate prounouns for all of us. You might be right in that the FIB just isn't used to this. Hopefully, she will think about it more and develop awareness. And why the femme just didn't get that it is equally respectful to use female pronouns is beyond me! Argh.... I almost (have to say this, as I know I dodged a big bullet!) dated a femme that not only insisted on calling me he, him, etc. (yes, even after I corrected her many times), but wanted to give me a more male sounding first name!!! She even called me with a list of butch names I might want to use!!! I was quite attracted to her (at first), but must say after this, my libido fizzled rapidly... as in flat-lined!!! And I am working on zie pronouns too.... I will get there, I promise!!! |
I've been surprised to meet several butches that refer to themselves as "he" online but as "she" in real life, even among the femme-butch community locally.
As it was explained to me by one couple, "he" was used online to express her bonafides of butchness, while "she" was used in real life because she did not consider herself transgender and in real life she was a "proud dyke" and that online is just bullshit anyway. I don't really judge what people feel they need to do.. okay wait, I guess truthfully I thought that was really weak. It's so much easier to conform I guess, especially if that's the only way to be respected. At least that's how it was explained to me. Long story short, my experience parallels June's and whoever else mentioned it. I agree that holding butch women responsible for their own oppression is a ridiculous meme; however the acquiescence and conformity of women- even butch women- to their own oppression is not a new idea. It's pretty hard to stand up to a tidal wave when letting it pass by seemingly harmlessly may be effortless. Really, people are here not to battle tidal waves but to have fun. The most disturbing thing to me is the number of people posting to this thread- the small number (and please don't take that as an insult because I have appreciated everyone who posted whether I shared their view or not). I guess it's a time commitment to read every post in a thread and respond coherently. I would enjoy seeing more voices on this topic, whatever their view. So many of you "oldsters" have bemoaned the "never-endingness" of the topic of the devaluation of the woman in "butch" but to me this is not a repetitive boring unresolvable conversation but one so relevant and interesting that it requires continued examination. |
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So true and I have wondered the same thing. And I have to mention MtF's as well along with stone. I do know a couple of MtF's that used to post on the old site, but just began to feel too alienated. I think there are many different femme presentations and identifications that are shut out here and on other B-F sites. Although, I think as the site continues this will change as it feels very open to me. Then, again, POC members have brought concerns up that they felt have simply carried over. Maybe because the Planet is fairly new and lots of folks from the old site do not particpate here, these areas just have not developed their voice yet. I hope new folks feel free to begin threads about these, too. Actually, I get really jazzed when I see posts by people I have never seen before. There are so many ideas out there that I have never had an opportunity to learn or hear about. And hell, I'm old! Since I can't go to the ReUnion (:() due to economics, I plan on attending the Femme Conference here in the Bay Area that same weekend. Will be my first and I am looking forward to the topics femmes will discuss. |
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As to the online vs offline pronoun switcheroo thingy... I use both, offline and off, depending on the situation. I'm not trying to pull a fast one on anyone but yes, there are some people in my life that refer to me as she and others that use he, both online and off.
Thinking back on it, there's a slight possibility that I could be the person June referred to in her earlier post (although I don't think I ever would have commented on her using "she" online because it's just not that big of a deal to me). My reality is that I do not exist solely in a queer/bf environment. I have a job. I have family of origin. I have friends that are not queer. I interact, both online and off, with a wide variety of people. (And they seem to all be on my Facebook now!) There are a number of people that I met in queer situations, or online, that know me as "he". That's who I am to them. There are also people that know me as "she" and that's who I am to them. There's even some, such as my partner, who know me as both. Again, this isn't meant to be duplicitous in any way, it's just who I am. I understand that proper pronoun usage is very much a respect issue for some people, and I've seen it used in very disrespectful ways in the past. I totally get that, understand it, respect it. For me though, it's really not that big a deal. Maybe it is because I've spent so much of my life in a community where things like "sir" and "boy" aren't determined by biology and are considered titles of respect aside from gender. /shrug |
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What strikes me first is the idea of transgression: of what it means to be female in the case of butch women, and of what gender means in the case of transgender male butches. Transgression and deconstruction of any sort is a very popular meme in the post modern culture which largely concerns itself with dismantling. Perhaps "Femme" is more creationist than deconstuctionist? Just a thought. :) Or is it pure misogyny? Look forward to more on this. |
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There's been a lot of really good stuff in this thread and I've probably started a good dozen comments but them deleted them because I got sidetracked and went off on tangents. I've learned a lot from the "men with boobs" part and now that we've evolved here, it's given me even more to think about. I have never not been butch. With a couple of brief exceptions, my relationships have always been with women who ID'd as femme. I've been "out" for 30 plus years so it's not something I just discovered about myself when I found a website. During those years I've also been "boy" or "Sir" or "Daddy" so ID'ing in some way that is publicly seen as male is also not something I discovered from a website. I've been "Sir" longer than I've been "hy" and it's a place where I'm really comfortable. I don't think I ever gave it much thought or put any real concrete theories behind it until I found the dash site, ummm, I think 8 or 9 years ago now. It was there, in chat, that I had "hy" thrust upon me. I'm not real fond of made up words so I wasn't sure what to think but then it just became the norm so I got used to it. The theoretical evolution of my gender started there and, to be honest, the pronoun / MID / FID / etc. issues around butch gender are something I've only seen online. With the exception of people I've met through the dash site, I've never had a conversation with another butch about pronouns, ID or any of the other issues we so often discuss here. I also don't know any butches in r/t, again other than those I met through b-f, that use male pronouns offline. But online, on that site, at that time, it was a must. Butch=hy, femme=she and that's how, at least in chat, we could tell each other apart. For so many people, finding butch-femme community online is the start of the exploration and education process. We've all seen it. The newbies who start off at "but we're all just girls" and learn to understand why that statement is so offensive to many of us. We're linear people living in a linear world. We grow, chronologically, along a linear scale - 15 is "less than" 20 when talking about age - so it's easy for me to see how some people can view what they used to be as being "less than" what they are now. Especially when what they used to be was something they didn't like or weren't comfortable with. That process of evolution from "just me" to "butch" to "stone butch" to "TG butch", etc. is very linear for most people so "just me" becomes less than "TG butch" for them. I think the issues come in when people can't see that the process is an individual one and not everyone evolves at the same rate or even to the same place. I've spent a lot of time in the last 8 year's trying to define my own identity. Really, truly, in my heart of heart's I probably fall more into the "just me" category because I do see my gender as a fluid, ever changing kind of thing. I fall more to the male ID'd side of things, and it's where I'm most comfortable on a public level, but there's so much more to me then just that. This got way more rambly then I intended and I don't think I even really said what I thought I wanted to say when I started but.. well yeah. I don't agree with the "less than" theory of things but I can see where it may have come from in this situation. |
Maybe it's transgression that makes this discussion so much more of a focal point than any discussion involving feminine experience, or maybe it's controversy or maybe it's a masculine topic and therefore deemed more worthy of discussion...
Every once in a while, I find myself reading (perhaps imagining?) a certain strain within this type of thread that feels like this to me: The masculine folks demanding more respect from the feminine folks than they already get while at the same time being less than respectful toward feminine folks who get it "wrong." I see masculine folks complaining about femme "laziness" and "apathy" and such for not always getting things right. Most femmes I know have bent over backwards for the butches they know or have known in an attempt to understand and be respectful of them. I even see masculine (and feminine) folks blaming the behavior of feminine folks for the behavior of masculine folks who send mixed messages about their own IDs - which I think is actually the most infantilizing, demeaning assertion regarding masculine community members that I've seen in this thread. I really want to be on board with whatever I need to be on board with to be an ally to every member of this community, and when I read about how femmes are being perceived as so lazy and apathetic, I feel exasperated, frustrated, helpless and disrespected as a femme. It's soooo sexist to call a butch by the wrong pronoun, to misinterpret their gender or to misrepresent them to the heterocentric world, but complaining about how femmes aren't being nurturing, attentive, understanding or respectful enough toward masculine folks - that doesn't hint at misogyny? You know what I don't see a lot of? I don't see a lot of feminine people here in threads talking about how lazy or thoughtless the masculine folks here are for not understanding and respecting the feminine folks enough. Do you think it's because we (feminine folks) feel like we always get respect from the masculine folks? I have been guilty of defaulting to different pronouns in the past. To me there are two different main types of default. There is the default pronoun used in hypothetical situations and then there is using a default pronoun with a specific person, regardless of how they ID. I have mostly been guilty of the first type of default, but I know there are times I have slipped with the second. Guess what? It's freaking hard. It's hard to remember, it's hard to keep track. Some of the masculine folks I've known from this community have even changed pronouns and identities sometimes more than once over a matter of months or years. It's hard to keep track, it's hard to always get it right. To me, it does become a laundry list, and at some point, the amount of psychic energy it takes to remember every single masculine member of the community's preference becomes too much. How much time and energy does a masculine member of the community feel they need to spend talking to an individual femme about their gender experience, identity, pronouns, etc, before they consider her apathetic and disrespectful for not knowing their stuff? Do they know her stuff? Are they invested in her, or do they just expect her to be invested in them no matter how much or how little they respect or even think about her? It seems like many of the masculine folks here want all this "respect" and really sometimes I feel like the respect which is being demanded is actually being confused with male privilege. And if male privilege does exist on this site, then maybe working toward dismantling it together would be the better option than demanding to receive equal share in it. PS. I am mutilating the English language by purposefully using "they" and "them" as gender-neutral singular pronouns in the above post. As odious as this is for my poor English major brain, I think I'm going to make it a habit. I just didn't feel like writing "her/hir/hym/him" a hundred times. Sorry, my dear English. |
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I remember -very- clearly a conversation on the boards at the other site, where some (annoying) Femme was all up in arms about how penetration "emasculates" a Butch - that was her explanation as to why she was a "stonefemme". Fuck That. I kept saying over and over again that her statement implied that she thinks that Butches who -do- like to have their "down there's" played with are less than authentic Butches. And do you know what? SHE AGREED THAT THAT WAS WHAT SHE THOUGHT and tried to defend that it was accurate. I was so pissed. I'm still so pissed. God, had she said that she simply didn't like to do it because she thinks that the stuff between her lover's legs was icky..I would have been less pissed off than what I was. (Although, that would have pissed me off too.) On that same coin / opposite side - what the fresh fuck is it with Femmes who partner with Stone Butches being called "High Femmes"? I'm not liking that particular insinuation of hierarchy. So because I like to do all sorts of things to my lover's "down there" (hee hee, I am refusing to say vagina!) I am less/low Femme. Again - Fuck That. Quote:
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[QUOTE=betenoire;106496]Exactly! And Fuck That. (God, I love to say Fuck That about things I don't like.)
I remember -very- clearly a conversation on the boards at the other site, where some (annoying) Femme was all up in arms about how penetration "emasculates" a Butch - that was her explanation as to why she was a "stonefemme". Fuck That. I kept saying over and over again that her statement implied that she thinks that Butches who -do- like to have their "down there's" played with are less than authentic Butches. And do you know what? SHE AGREED THAT THAT WAS WHAT SHE THOUGHT and tried to defend that it was accurate. I was so pissed. I'm still so pissed. God, had she said that she simply didn't like to do it because she thinks that the stuff between her lover's legs was icky..I would have been less pissed off than what I was. (Although, that would have pissed me off too.) On that same coin / opposite side - what the fresh fuck is it with Femmes who partner with Stone Butches being called "High Femmes"? I'm not liking that particular insinuation of hierarchy. So because I like to do all sorts of things to my lover's "down there" (hee hee, I am refusing to say vagina!) I am less/low Femme. Again - Fuck That. QUOTE] Love your Fuck Thats! :wtf: I am confused, or just haven't heard/read this: On that same coin / opposite side - what the fresh fuck is it with Femmes who partner with Stone Butches being called "High Femmes"? I don't get it. Don't much care for any hierarchy, actually. But, I think I just don't understand what this is all about. How and why this insinuation is even made. Thanks. Also, all of the less than/more of garbage about butches or femmes makes me crazy! Why are we so wrapped-up in this kind of stuff? Has it always been like this in the B-F community? For a community that shouts about diversity being such an important aspect, the narrowness in what is butch or femme and to what degree is astounding. OMG, I'm cussing!! |
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I think the argument that you need to have different pronouns to tell the butches from femmes apart is quite ludicrous. Nat, people have been extremely careful to qualify when they have observed that some femmes refuse to use the right pronouns, etc that it's not all femmes doing it. I don't know how people can be any clearer about that. |
A few more thoughts.
I personally am not looking for femmes to be nurturing and attentive towards me. I am not looking for a mother. I already have one. I haven't seen anyone being upset about honest mistakes in pronoun usage. I've heard several people mention how exhausting it is to have to try and remember or get things right. At the same time I hear so much talk about gender diversity and fighting against the binary. Gender in butch femme communities isn't simple. If you are in favor of gender diversity you are going to have to deal with more variables. Not all butches are the same in their gender expression. Not all femmes are the same in their gender expression. Not all trans men and trans women are the same in their gender expressions. No one is going to simplify their gender because people find it exhausting. I agree with HowSoonIsNow, there needs to be more femme gender discussion. I have always been greatly interested in these discussions and have always participated in them where I felt appropriate. I said in this thread that I feel Femme is a transgressive gender as much as Butch is. I have always believed that to be the case. |
I often wonder if some of us Femme's are SO blind to misogyny and sexism that it doesn't occur to really give thought as to *why* there is an automatic default to He/Hy?
What does that say about how deeply socialized sexism is? Because a lot of Femme's come out later in life after having relationships with and marriages to bio-men. Where naturally that default is He. Then behold the b/f community! I will get blasted for saying this a site/community built on women/women relationships. Which is sad. So let's just go with this is a community built on Queer relations? For me it has been MORE of an adjustment to remember the male pronouns and being made to feel badly for using She/Shy. I think that is odd given the circumstances. Is it some kind of internal homophobia that Femme's default to He/Hy? I have been sitting here for days with this question rolling around in my head. Because I am confused not as to the general He/Hy default but more as to the WHY's of it. Anyone? |
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Do you have anything to add to the conversation, Tiger? (I loooooove your ladyfriend.) |
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I'm just going to start he'ing all the femmes who say 'but it's so hard' and then I'll use the excuse 'eh, he/she, how am I supposed to keep everyone straight?'
And then if I get super called on it, I am just going to say, 'well it's just cuz you look like a man' I'm Sure Femmes Should Just Suck That Up, Cuz It Ain't EZ Having To Remember All This Shit...Oh, And If There's A Fight About It, I'm Then Going To Tell The Femmes Who Don't Appreciate ME Choosing Their Pronoun For Them That It's Sexist To Call Me Out, Dylan |
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Personally speaking... your post is frustrating. "Masculine folks" aren't suggesting or demanding that feminine folks give more respect them than they already do, (or deserve that's how I read it) and hardly in need of nurturing (ironically that feels to me somewhat demeaning and infantilizing of masculine identities). I'm quite a few decades beyond needing a mommy in my life. I have met very few butches or trans people etc. who behave in the manner you've described toward femmes, yes, BUT for the hugely vastly majority I see us having a great deal of admiration and respect toward femmes. So... although I admittedly do feel somewhat personally dissed by your words as far as the generalization of what masculine identities think/need/want... that part about how you feel we perceive femmes role to us bothers me the most. I'm sorry you feel this way, but we're not all assholes, well I can be an asshole but I'd sure as hell hope not in that context. I've always tried to give the same respect that I ask for, no matter the "ID". Asking to be called by the proper pronoun doesn't seem like it should be a big deal to me, I'm always amazed by the resistance to it... not that that is what you're doing, but sometimes the responses are baffling. This post probably isn't all the pertinent to the conversation, but oh well. Metro |
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i soooooooooo do not want to get embroiled in this ongoing battle of the wits (and the wittiest), but i will say that, on the other site, i was the recipient of this line of judgement...that i was less because i get pleasure out of the attentions of my wife to my most private of places. i don't see how that dictates the LEVEL of butch that i am or whether or not i'm a true butch. further, i felt very put off by the notion that, although i see myself as primarily masculinely identified, the things that i share with my wife in the privacy of our bedroom somehow belittle or degrade or negate my identity...specifically my 'trans butch' identity. it doesn't seem to me that anyone but my wife and i should determine this. further, in my simple mind, it seems to me that this should be how it is in ANY relationship...gay, straight, et al. and now, i shall await the inevitable slinging of mud. heh... :formalbow: |
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That's funny. I've always recv'd an inordinate amount of shit over the attentions I pay to MY Beloved's most private of places. The majority of the flack has come from other Femme's but is not exclusive to them. It never ceases to shock and upset me...that my Beloved and I are somehow *other* for the things we do to each others bodies. |
Oh, and I really -really- need to clarify that I don't think that anybody who is Stone is bad. Or lazy or weird or anything else. I need to clarify that before somebody takes it the wrong way and gets their feelings hurts, cuz aside from the rare case that I get a personal vendetta going (and you gotta hurt one of my friends to be on the receiving end of that) I don't like to hurt people's feelings.
I'm taking inventory in my head of the people I've dated, and it seems like I've been with as many people who were Stone as people who weren't. (There's actually only a difference of one.) For me, I'm a pleaser. And by "pleaser" I mean I like to do whatever it is that the person that I'm with would like me to do. I have no boundaries in terms of things that I won't do, and very few in terms of things that I won't have done to me. And that includes not being squicked out if someone wants me to not touch their organic stuff. I'm comfortable either way, and perfectly happy provided that the person that I am with at that time is respected and comfortable and happy sexually. Does that make sense? |
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This is the part of the thread that people get uncomfy with, the mentioning of the vulva and it's many uses, and I know that someone out there is going to drive by read this and wrinkle their nose at the icky thought...:spider:
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I think that's it. |
i have a few questions, they're in black...
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Butches ARE beautiful. How can anyone negate THAT?
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Forgive me for this critical statement, because lord knows I write one-liners and off topic/drive by commentary (because I'm sometimes a huge brat)...
but I'm feeling like we're getting off topic in this thread, and once again we're de-constructing identities within this community and moving away from discussion stemming from the OP. (I'm not a moderator, so if this comment isn't cool, my bad) I realize there's a tie-in of sorts between discussing the dynamics of pronoun usages and general misogyny that exists in the world, but I for one would like to see more discussion about how misogynistic statements like 'short man with boobs' can affect us ALL as human beings, particularly those of us growing up in the female form. |
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I think it almost funny that we are STILL having to do this, you would think as a community we would evolve and not continue to perpetuate the binary. I don't think it will happen unless we are open to listen and put into practice what is being talked about. What chu think>?:balloon: |
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http://www.temeats.com/storage/beef-...lustration.jpg |
I think the more pertinent discussion is "how can we teach others how statements like "she's a short man with boobs are erasing and hurtful"?
Because we all know misogyny and sexism are hurtful. To EVERYONE. |
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