Girl, I am tired of being part of the queer ladies auxiliary. Althea would prefer visibility and respect more than chivalry, and frankly expected better from Butches then they seemed prepared to give.
What would happen, do you think, if femmes started coupling up in such numbers as butches have been, began to reach only for their unique kind of queerness. What if we gave those garter-belted thighs and high-heeled calves pushed-up busts just to each other? And what if we could appreciate each other that way? The only reason we are so frustrated at butches going into the woods together for their drum and boi parties isn't just that we are not invited when the butches climb into the pleasures and privileges of masculinity and begin to fully take hold the joy of being a Real Man, but also that we have not turned around and offered a similar quality of appreciative attention toward each other.
Sisterfemme, you can see, can't you, that the boys have no problem turning away from you, seeking each other out for an affirmation of their masculinity that only another masculine being can offer. Cross-gender relationships are hard – look at heterosexuals. They've been struggling with it for millennia and haven't gotten it perfect yet.
I am tired of how much attention we give to the male of our dyke species - I would like the same sort of adulation for the femme. Not a pedestal distancing, go up there and be pretty while we get some work done down here kind of attention, but something thicker and more real. And I want us to give it to each other.
Femmes seem to play out on one other our worst sort of junior high school Mean Girl, in-crowd bullshit. We don't have to do that. We could appreciate one another without fail, understanding deeply what it takes to put on a skirt in a culture that marks you as prey for doing just that, in a community that believes you have an easier time of everything when you brush on some blush and put your toes into pumps. We know intimately what it's like to be ignored by the objects of our desire, to be read as the opposite of our true selves, and to be asked to leave half of our sexuality on the floor we get into bed with someone because our job is only supposed to be to receive, to take, be pushed into. (Getting fucked is all well and good – as the boys are discovering now with each other. God forbid they should let the girl put her hands up into their dainty boy parts – would that somehow make them less gay? Here we've been cautiously tiptoeing around those parts, trying to offer what little direct pleasure we are allowed to without showing too much fucking enthusiasm because God for bid we also got off on bringing our partners pleasure; here we've been holding our half of the picture, doing like he asked and deeply respecting his stone, leaving our hands and mouth to lie impotent under the threat he needed in order to feel the command, and then boom he discovers what he really needs is another boy to be able to feel like himself with, and suddenly then it's okay to get fucked. Girl, don't get me started.)
The truth is, I'm all for everyone finding pleasure wherever they can find it. But, goddamn, it is completely understandable that femmes are pissed off and scared. Because you know what? We have allowed ourselves to become arm candy and window dressing, so of course we're afraid that will have no meaning if all the butches go off with one another (which of course they're not – but that doesn't change our fear.)
Let them go. What they do is their business – what we do is ours. What if we worked on ourselves for a while? I wonder how many butch-on-butch couples show up to Butch Voices compared to the femme-on-femme loves that descend onto the Femme Conference – how often do femme-identified folks get together and get and give as hard as we can? And what if we stopped compromising our erotic selves in service of being a good femme or a good butch/trans ally? Being an ally doesn't mean we don't get to have the sex or relationship we most deeply crave and deserve, it doesn't mean we deserve dismissal, and it doesn't mean we have to put up with misogyny.
Do we feel left and abandoned? It's only because we allowed ourselves to be set up as pretty frilly edging at the outside of our own community – we have not continue to demand recognition that we too are the soul of the movement, the core organizers and workers, the brilliant minds and beautiful expressive souls, and as deeply erotically competent as any other queer in our community.
Whew. That's enough for now, honey. Somebody get me a drink!
