Member
How Do You Identify?: Stonefemme lesbian
Preferred Pronoun?: I'm a woman. Behave accordingly.
Relationship Status: Single, not looking.
Join Date: Jan 2010
Location: NYC
Posts: 1,467
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Embracing my Femmeness? Well, I suppose I have, but it's been a journey. Some of my experiences might sound familiar to other femmes, but one significant part of my life is about as alien as an ET abduction to most.
I was born in 1962, and I learned early that being female, feminine, and/or physically small meant being weak and vulnerable. I remember the moment when I decided to be none of the above. Though it may sound like a contradiction, my experiences turned me into an ardent feminist by age 6. That was a year after my sister and I started working as professional models/dancers/singers/actors. If you watched TV, went out to the theatre or the Metropolitan Opera in NYC, listened to the radio, or looked at a magazine or catalogue from the mid 60s through the early-mid 70s, you would have seen or heard me. My mother and sister seemed to looove it, (particularly my mother), but no one bothered to ask me how I felt about it. The often sexualized attention from mostly male people with the power to hire me, made me deeply uncomfortable. Line the girls up. Choose the prettiest girl to get the job/money. To be honest, it didn't feel much better to be the one that got hired than the one that didn't. Adult women don't usually have good tools to deal with that kind of bald objectification, and no child's psyche is equipped to process it. Any child WILL become seriously fucked up in that environment. Since I had already been sexually abused at home, I was even more deeply traumatised by all that unwholesome body judgement.
I had always liked to rough house and get dirty, but once we stopped working in the entertainment industry, I self consciously became a tomboy. I studied the boys and tried to walk the way they walked, carry my books as they did, and be tougher, faster, smarter and meaner. I played football with them, even when they didn't welcome me. I refused to take Home Ec and demanded to be allowed to take shop classes. I refused to wear dresses. I rejected anything feminine and female because that was clearly less good than everything male. For years, I actively chose to reject femininity because my femaleness had, thus far, been the source of nothing good.
I gleaned the rest of my lessons on how to be a woman from my grandfather's huge collection of Playboy magazines that had somehow ended up in the basement of my parent's house. Yup. I devoured them. My mother was not equipped to give me much reliable information on the subject of womanhood, but those magazines provided a wealth of information about sexual passivity and the proper place of women in the world. I took it all in, along with my strong, combative feminist consciousness. I was a mess by the time I started to dress in tight, very revealing clothing as a teenager. Did I become promiscuous with boys? You bet. I had been the object of overwhelming male sexual attention from my earliest memories, but by my mid teens I had become a magnet for the kind of relentless male sexual attention that would have frightened a Navy Seal.
During all this time, I alternately projected and supressed my femininity. I always had a very ambiguous relationship with my feminine body. The sexual attention it brought always freaked me out, but I had learned early that it was the only measure of my worth. My hips naturally swivel no matter how hard I tried to tame them in the past. I have a slim but curvy body type that's very much fetishized in our culture. I've spent a lifetime fending off unwanted male sexual attention that has ALWAYS felt threatening.
I left my parent's house early and eventually got my own damned apartment when I was 17. Unfortunately, I followed myself there. I was soooo ill equipped to deal with the relentless street harrassment all young women without a male escort were forced to endure in the very poor neighbourhoods where I could afford to live. At least I thought all the women experienced what I did. Nope. All these years later, I've learned that other women simply didn't catch the same volume of hungry hands, catcalls, crotch grabing, disgusting sucking noises, and daily verbal rape that I did. I ran the gauntlet every day, even in better neighbourhoods. Even on the job. Everywhere. I projected the kind of toughness that was designed to repel the wankers, but I now know that it wasn't anything I was doing or not doing. The men were the ones doing it, and I had a target on my forehead. I was much safer when I rode my motorcycle, but that brought a whole new level of alarming attention.
Like other femmes, I got the loud, clear message from other lesbians that I didn't look right. I also IDed as bisexual until my early 20s. Yikes! I was NOT welcomed into the sisterhood. There was simply no safe place for me.
One day in my mid 20s, a beard magically sprouted on my chin. I swear it seemed to grow overnight. Just as magically, the sexual attention stopped. A few near sighted men still made lonely cat calls, but for the first time in my life, I was mostly free of male sexual attention! My body had provided me with effective man repellent, and it was glorious. I'm a 70's era lesbian feminist, deeply influenced by Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch. Of course I let my beard grow. Whenever anyone questioned me I would belligerently snarl, "This is what a woman looks like". Sprouting a beard was one of the most positive things that could have happened to me at that time. I could wear the beautiful vintage clothes and heels that I loved, and I could just walk out in the world like anyone else. It felt like breathing fresh air after being locked in a stifling box for years.
During this time I had stopped working as a scenic designer and began to earn all my money as a carpenter/stage hand with a sideline doing some general contracting work. I look at the single surviving picture of myself at work during that time, and I'm astounded at the angry face glaring back at me. I had a huge chip on my shoulder born from working with the same horrible men that liked to harrass and humiliate women like me whenever they could get away with it. I was working with the same men who grabbed their crotches as I passed by, and who would have grabbed mine if given half a chance. I was half their size, but they were wary of my smart, angry mouth. They were all quite sure that I was the butchest thing they ever laid eyes on.
I didn't ID as femme back then, but I was very much a femme outside of work situations. And I sought out butch women. I had been wearing my beard for long enough to have recovered some of my personhood by the time I met my long-ago ex. Unfortunately she wasn't nearly as accepting as my previous hippie-feminist girlfriends, and I found out that she really hated my beard. I was 30 when I decided to start shaving. By then I was much better at dealing with the attention, and the volume of street harrassment was slightly diminished from its peak in my early 20s. I had also stopped working as a carpenter and was making a living as an artist. Artists are far less likely to say something crude, or to make a grab for some T and A, than carpenters and stagehands. What a relief. It started to feel more and more safe to be a femme, and to claim it fully. By the time I left my ex, I didn't really feel like letting my beard grow back in. Dick-head men still hounded me until last year, but I'm far better centered now. I just don't need to wear man repellent on my face anymore.
I still don't feel perfectly safe expressing my femme nature in any work situation, but my ID is far better integrated in my life now. My co-workers are far less likely to react with shock when they hear me self ID as femme, but I still confuse many. I don't care at all, but I do sometimes have irrational fears that I'm simply not femme enough to attract butch women. Don't bother telling me how crazy that is. I already know it, but it doesn't stop me from thinking it.
I have closets and dressers full of sexy, high femme outfits and high heels. I may have been a professional model/performer, but I stopped modeling and became a strident feminist before I was of an age to wear make-up. I sometimes wore eyeliner eye liner over the years, but I had NO IDEA how to properly wear make-up until a few years ago. The idea of going into a bastion of femininity such as a giant make-up store really freaked me out. A wonderful femme friend accompanied me into Sephora to hold my hand while I got good make-up advice. I still clench a little, but I'm comfortable enough to go to Sephora by myself now. I can still get totally freaked out sitting in the chair and looking at the mirror while the hairdresser talks to my image from behind me. Especially of the hairdresser is a dude. (I'm never going back to THAT place.) It would be nice to no longer battle with myself about my own femininity, but this will probably be one of my life-long struggles.
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Cheryl
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