Reactions to Embracing Your Femme(ness)

[Leigh]

Originally Posted by mariamma

Big love and hugs to you Leigh for sharing your story. One thing is true, you are strong.

I've never been someone to see myself as strong before, but I've noticed that alot more over the last two years or so. Thank you for noticing and acknowledging it mariamma, its nice to know others see it also

[CherylNYC]

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.

[Kätzchen]

I think, for me, I cannot condense or distill my life experience into simple sets of events… concerning ways that I embrace my Femme identity or how others perceive me as Femme or maybe not even recognize my Femme being. It feels very complicated to me, when I think of my own life and how often fragile I feel about myself but yet simultaneously, I feel incredibly strong, confident, unrepentantly Femme – all in the same breath.

I am 53 years old now. It seems as though it was just the other day when I was in my 20s and 30s. Time does fly, and fast. I have talked about my own journey on occasion in our community and wanted to add toward what I have already shared.

I was aware of my own identity before I ever had a way to name it or own it. Who I am is who I am and I couldn’t renounce one ounce of who I am as I have grown over the years because at heart, I do believe I was born into my own skin of thought, my own skin of identity and my own skin of anything – like a huge genetic marker that cannot be altered by the best of scientific discovery or process, as if it could be dissected that way.

I think what my life looks like to me is one very slow progression of how I bloomed into being me. I seem to remember hearing a well known catch-phrase that goes something along the lines of: A person is the product of their environment. Cliché or not, I sometimes want to believe this strand of thought but find myself rejecting it on a consistent basis because in some ways I might be a product of my former environments and in some ways I might even be the product of my present environment. I want to say that for me, I am the product of the skin of thought I choose to try on or discard or toss into the wash with some dye or see if it survives a fiery furnace and still seems to fit who I feel I am or how I am just as I am (if that makes sense at all).

I grew up second eldest of four siblings, but later on in years mom and dad gave us two other siblings – increasing our familial arrangement to a household of 8 (minus a sister who died shortly after birth). My formative years were spent growing up with two brothers and one other sister. We lived in a rural area on a dairy farm. Our lives were dominated by farm life, church, school and if there was time (which there was little of), we each had our own hobbies and sets of friends. I had the least amount of time to myself but I loved music, piano studies, my very small set of girl friends from school or church and cousins I wrote to who lived very far away. It didn’t matter what kind of clothes I wore. I had and always have had a very large wardrobe. Dresses, skirts, coats, shawls, stockings, socks, all types of shoes, pants, sweaters, boots, trinkets, jewelry, but never really wore makeup until I was almost a young lady of 17 years of age – I love makeup and have to have the best I can afford but I don’t wear it daily. I save it for when I go special places or want to get all dolled up for work or sometimes just because – for no reason. I wasn’t allowed to have makeup or pants when I was young, due to sets of religious practices my family abided by or social customs of the day that my family valued more over other social customs people practiced who were not anywhere remotely like my own family or people we went to church with or went to school with.

I’d say I was a slow bloomer. It’s taken the better part of my own adult life to grow into who I consistently am – minus a few adjustments along the way: Like raising my two sons or earning two formal education degrees or a lifetime career that spanned 20 years of my adult life.

Speaking of which: Embracing my Femme identity.

I was rather quiet growing up and rather quiet in my early work life and even rather quiet as a mother raising her two sons. People knew there was something entirely different about me but they just couldn’t pinpoint what was different. As engaging as I can be socially and publicly on our forum boards, I am rather quiet and private as a woman, but not quite as private these days about the Femme in me. Over the years as I grew up, it was not entirely a safe thing to be out loud and proud. People were locked up for what society thought people like us were: social outcasts because we did not fit the parameter of what current day society back then sought to enforce (heterosexuality). Even as I grew into my adulthood, depending on where a person lived (in the continental US), you could lose your ability to earn a living, be socially discredited to the point that no one would hire you in your community, much less let you live a peaceful life. But my life was a set of complications from the start of motherhood: due in part to my sons being Black and being of a multicultural background which was peppered and salted lightly with characteristics that set me apart socially from groups available to me. My life has never been a cake walk but I do make a nice cake!

So, where was I going with all this??? Oh. To give a current day example of how invisible I am as a Femme, still to this day, I will tell you about an experience I had this summer working on my former job. The job market is a tight one out here and all I could find for a job over the past six months was working at a gas station. How I even got the job, I still wonder about today but I feel probably my unmistakable femininity is probably what helped me to get that job. Anyway, loyal customers of both corporate gas stations I worked at would at times comment to corporate offices and field supervisors about who the “lovely woman was who worked at the station.” People who frequented both places were from a cross section of everyday people to upper-level executives to travelers in our region and other parts of the US and even a small sampling of international guests. I can’t tell you how many times I heard customers say: “What are you doing here? We never see women doing this job, much less look as beautiful as you or smell as pretty as you. You are not the run of the mill worker.” And of course to me, their comments were classic: classic for those who enjoy seats of entitlement, power, privilege and a whole host of other things colliding daily on my tiny little job that was probably more of an education for people who worked with me or came to know me at the gas station and certainly for my superiors. People came to know the Femme in me in a diverse set of situations and I know they will never forget me (they miss me, clients and coworkers do: I miss them too).

I am strong. I am highly qualified to be me. I am Femme.

[princessbelle]

Les Femmes Jolies
Momo Flint


To see as I see,

release thoughts of superficial beauty.

See past the mask of society, ’

and mark individual standards.

For, as a woman,

I see beauty in all shapes and sizes.

Whether it be,

in the sway of robust hips,

the brush of rounded thighs,

the swell of full breasts,

or the calm,

self assured look,

every woman comes to know.

It takes an open mind to accept all,

but a kind heart to embrace.

[rustedrims]

I am sneaking around in here reading.The stories are so different but yet similar.I can see the struggles you have all gone through and came out stronger than ever.I appreciate you all!

S.