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Much of this post is about trigger warnings. Because of this, there might be triggers in the text. Please be advised.
Do you remember when you capitulated? Succumbed to the cultural demand to be feminine, to accept your socially-given role as a female? To accept the trappings of the Essential She? To find the thrill in feeling smaller, more elegant, more emotional and expressive, in need of protection, less capable or wise, but infinitely kinder, compared with the essential man? Fragile-cloth dresses and skirts, shoes with a bit of elevating heel, touches of ruffles and lace, tassels and dangles and bangles and beads, color added to the ‘drab palette’ of your face, fuzz discreetly shorn from those places it ‘shouldn’t’ grow, head-hair grown long for its drape effect or short and perkily elevated pixie-like — do you remember when you accepted this as being the ‘essential female’? As normal? As you?
I’m not supposed to phrase it like that.
No, I’m supposed to pretend that female individual self-identity is both fragile and immutable, not open for question or even consideration. Too personal. Even for those whose mantra was, for decades, “question everything.” (Feminists, in case you’ve forgotten.) Too subject to domineering forces. (Mean, mannish women making you dress ugly: No “pretty girl” shoes, no underwire bras or plunging necklines, no slink, no sass, no sex-kitten allure.) Better left to the individual woman to sort for herself, lest she be ‘policed’ by other feminists. (Especially those without style or taste!)
But what is ‘style’ or ‘taste’ but reinforcement of patriarchal dictates? What is fashion, but a way of moving the bar of conformity frequently enough to force women into declaring loyalty, whereas no similar changeling status exists for men? And what are styles for women except clothing that is handicapping, endangering, marking females as vulnerable to attack? Skirts enhance rapeability. Heels and tight skirts ensure a woman cannot quickly, simply escape. Loose skirts and dresses, though, and other ‘feminine’ flowing fabrics, are vulnerable to tangling and tearing, to rendering the wearer raggedly naked. Long hair, necklaces, dangling earrings provide ready weaponry for attackers, something to hold onto that will cause tearing of skin, and submission, if leveraged.
Whatever happened to sisterhood? To ‘the personal is political’? To understanding the effects of oppressions, as multi-layered or intersectional as they might be? To accepting challenges on our own class-based oppressiveness, with fair focus on its individual manifestations? To accepting that there is a hierarchy within the class ‘women,’ and that rungs of privilege on that hierarchy’s ladder have real effects on real women’s lives? To questioning anything?
I would argue that grass roots, thinking feminism has been replaced by a terribly lazy feminism, wherein someone can mull over a topic for thirty seconds and believe their view is quite equal to someone who has spent three decades pondering the intricacies of the concept in question. And ‘lazy’ got a whole lot more backing with the rise of post-modernism. As Margaret explains, here, it’s
“… the idea that nothing means anything, that a person can identify as whatever they want to without regard to the way they are perceived by others or power differentials amongst different identities. The idea is that the powerless have as much freedom to identify as oppressors as the powerful have to identify as the oppressed. Therefore, oppression isn’t real, just a figment of our imaginations that we’ve all – oppressor and oppressed alike – agreed to make real by acting like oppressors and oppressed. And since anyone can choose their “role” there isn’t anything inherently oppressive about hierarchies.” — Margaret Jamison, AROOO blog, November 11, 2010, Do You Even Have a Black Friend?
Butch and Fem might be mere genderfucking roles within the post-modern framing, but they are real ways of being within a radical feminist framework. Fem is the cultural creation, patriarchy’s darling daughter. Fem is everything culturally female, feminine, fragile in comparison to manly men, thus disempowered but manipulating, not ‘good’ by cultural norms, for ‘good’ is reserved for that which is ‘masculine’ or ‘male.‘ Butch is not male, but is more the essential female, that which is not a creation of patriarchy but rather is fundamental, a female left unencumbered by the burden of proving herself worthy to The Father. Her worth is that of an agent, not an object, in the sense of being centered, self-valuing, capable, adept, confident, and intelligent. Because the framing is still and always patriarchal, and the framing for oppression is always that, power comes from conformity to male standards. Thus, the Fem, by virtue of her greater conformity, adds to and aids the oppression of Butch women; Fem oppresses Butch.
From Dykes-Loving-Dykes, page 148:
Butches are more like what we’d all be if we weren’t subjected
to intense feminization. Butches express femaleness and
Lesbianism more naturally, while Fems’ femaleness and
Lesbianism is channelled through the acquired values of
femininity. Fems share those feminine values with men and
heterosexual women while Butches’ ways of being are furthest
from those of men and het women.
The authors, Bev Jo and the others, continue on to explain the exceptions, the nuances, and the details. It is a wonderfully insightful book, and one I would strongly recommend reading. Given the patriarchy under which we all exist, it is never quite as clear or simple as I’m making it, here. Butches are too often self-loathing; nowhere is there really space to be. If Fem-ness is demanded within heterosexuality, it is most certainly over-valued in lesbian spaces, as well. And no one alive in western culture has completely freed herself of patriarchal influence. It would never be allowed.
Average Dyke Band
I understand that, with the rise of post-modernism, reality is presumed subjective, and ‘gender’ is recast as performance, not reality, not an essential part of identity. I understand that this view has led to an acceptance of the pornographic, the eroticization of inequality, pleasure in power over, and of the technologically artificial, of faux men and castrated-males claiming to be women.
There are no lesbians in this college town; there are only ‘bois’ and genderqueers. That sex as ‘gender’ can be disregarded, even evaded entirely through verbal means, is accepted. And there are a population-disproportionate number of surgically altered females, masculine above the waist, and passing for men, though not at the urinal. The trend throughout the west has been to push dykey young women into seeking transsexual surgeries, or at least to see themselves as male, and leaving them in that neither region as to sex, meaning male or female. This has had the effect of reducing lesbian pride and politicization into personal solutions taken to escape oppression. Female oppression, lesbian oppression, solved. There is no dyke community. The girls have become bois and have joined the boys, gay and queer-friendly het males. But gay and het males have never had feminism foremost in mind. Queer politics has completely undermined lesbians as a group, and has subsumed women’s realities within gay males’ values, even when those are clearly misogynistic. See Sheila Jeffreys’ wonderfully uncompromising book, Unpacking Queer Politics, for a brilliant analysis on this phenomenon.
Locally, this has spawned a particular piece of performance “art” where attendees pass a permeable wall through which are thrust fingers, and tongues, and penises. And where, in an adjacent room a couple is noisily fucking. Or at least that is what you’re led to believe. Are they, in reality? And what if they are?
Since “live sex” and “copious use of disembodied genitalia” are not forewarned, what about sexual abuse survivors who attend?
I tried to discuss the more immediate issue, that of coercion of performers, with a young male friend. If it was heterosexual couple-fucking going on, what about coercion? How does anyone in the participating audience know that the participating woman has freely consented? My friend assured me that theater people are more open, less rule-bound than most, and most likely they brainstormed where someone said, “What if it sounds like fucking?” and someone else said, “What if it is fucking?” and it simply took off from there, all participants equally willing.
That scenario might have happened. But I can also see the situation where a guy volunteers for performing sex, presuming his girlfriend will go along with it. And if she hesitates? How could there not be pressure on her to go along? Or if she simply declines entirely? Does this scenario now consist of a ‘script’ that her real-world boyfriend has an option, or obligation, to follow? What if he acts his part, has “real” sex with another who is simply performing her part, “receptive vagina”? Does that make it all OK? How inconveniently the personal intrudes into “art.”
We are not, after all, considering a kissing scene. And I’d be less inclined to think that actual fucking was occurring, if there weren’t genitalia protruding through hollowed walls. Or extravagant artistic renderings of genitals, next to their real-world, disembodied, counterparts. I’ll accept that intercourse enacted is unlikely, and yet the kinds of questions I raise are made entirely invisible, in the theater space, and in discussions surrounding it. No one is asking, “What about incest survivors? How are they handling this? Are there triggers here that will send them reeling, for the next weeks or months?” No one is questioning whether or not the ‘bits’ actors would be exhibiting their genitalia if their faces were also shown.
I did overhear one young male lamenting that he was now aware of his disproportionate smallness, something he’d apparently not had cause to discover previously. Clearly, genitals-as-art lead to competition. But in combining competitive genitalia with fucking, “sex” is solidified as involving penises, and large penises, at that. This gives potential credence to the urge to prove one’s manhood by penised performance, something done to women, or using women, but done for self-respect and for bragging rights among males. This is not the kind of discussion that is needed in what is already a rape culture!
And, again, if it is in fact fucking, however unlikely, there are other obvious considerations. Is the performance on a time-length basis? Does he simply stop when time’s up? Is he allowed to continue to the act’s ritual endpoint? For him? So then what about her? Does the audio ‘performance’ continue until she orgasms? And still, if it is simply a sound simulation of copulation, is the expectation of mutual and simultaneous orgasm? During copulation? Phallic “sex” rarely leads to orgasm for women; is this fact worked into the ‘performance,’ or is the naughtiness of audibly acted “sex” enough to satisfy the artistic requirements? No matter, it’s far more male fantasy than reality, whether or not it’s legitimate “art.” It is most certainly pornography, sexuality removed from intimacy between level participants, and performed, for an audience of voyeurs.
Given the depth to which post-modernism has removed the female perspective from the culture’s stories about itself, capitulation to femininity seems small change in comparison to this incessant pornographizing, seems insignificant. But it’s not. Because capitulation to femininity is the original yielding which allows capitulation to the pornographic as the next logical step. And it is through pornographizing that social movements are dismantled; sexuality is for the oppressed classes, still something that is deeply individual, personal. Having one’s sexuality deemed ‘wrong’ is immediately divisive. Ask that wave of feminism whose efforts were primarily derailed by the myth of the vaginal orgasm. It seems we have not gotten so far from there.
For more on the repeated return to the focus of individual women’s sexuality with every wave of feminism, read Sheila Jeffreys’ books, especially The Spinster and Her Enemies, and Anticlimax.
Bev Jo has often mentioned, in correspondence, that most transgender people who are FTcM (female to constructed male) are Fems, not Butches. Coming to understand Bev’s brilliance, and repeated rightness of view, I accepted this. But I did not fully understand it until I further researched those mentioned by locals, individuals like Sinclair Sexsmith, who prefers to be addressed as “Mr.” Sexsmith bills herself as a “sadistic kinky queer butch top.” And like Jaclyn Friedman, who raves about holding a room in her thrall, not because of her insights or skill with oration, but because of the “sexual power” of standing shirtless before an audience. Brilliant analysis or bared breasts? Oh, for sure, the real achievement comes not from wisdom, but from skin.
Feminization has never been adequate for patriarchy, and so each wave of feminism has been accompanied by a backlash that removed the class political awareness of revolting women and replaced it with the individualism necessary to bind the minds of those women, and to splinter ‘groups’ off from one another. The reality isn’t that women should ignore differences, valid divides like class and race and sexuality, but that these things can be understood, especially the value inherent in the demeaned categories. Living, creating a subculture, far from the center gives a group a better perspective on the main culture, as it allows for better, alternative ways of being. Patriarchy controls the perspectives, however. Currently it is nearly impossible to get published those analyses that challenge queer theory. Sheila Jeffreys is an exception; Bev Jo and her co-authors had to self-publish.
So, do you remember when you capitulated? I do, in a number of steps across my childhood. I will get to that in the next installment. You might think about it, too.
What would girlhood look like, without the demands of feminization? What would a truly “natural woman” look like? As much as I love and admire Aretha, I’m not convinced this truly “natural woman” would be singing to a man, that she would be heterosexual. What would our concept of real womanhood be? In a world separate from hierarchy, and from patriarchal demands that females remake ourselves into The Feminine: unlevel, diminished, even endangered form, yes, but also the pornographized, fetishized, parted-out form, what would Woman be?
Where the rare man can now love levelly, would he still be able to do so, should his female partner not appear before him in the trappings of femininity? A number of questions arise from this question, then. How “normal” is heterosexuality, since so much of it is predicated on alteration and object-ification? How common would heterosexuality be if women truly had the option to evade the feminization process? How differently would the most natural elements of human organizing be structured, without compulsory heterosexuality? How differently would women, free from the constraints of femininity, act and think? How deeply would humans’ relationship with the Earth on which we live be impacted by this shift from constrained femaleness to full female agency?
Girl names and boy names are separate, with a small amount of overlap, but only where girls can take up boy names. Boys cannot take on girl names without terrible stigma, and where boy names have been ‘feminized,’ used commonly for girls, they are then disallowed as boy names. ‘Beverly,’ which used to be a boy name, is now stigmatized into exclusivity as a girl name. Often boy names used for girls are spelled differently: Bobbi vs. Bobby, Andie vs. Andy, Billie vs. Billy, and so forth. ‘Y’ endings are set aside as male-appropriate, ‘i’ or ‘ie’ as female-appropriate. Only female names are allowed to end with the letter ‘a,’ and I’m wondering how long before ‘ique’ becomes feminine: Think ‘Tarique’ and ‘Monique.’ From the time names are chosen, usually before birth, the unborn being has the mark of sex, male or female, ready to be applied once sex is determined.
Once born, the sex-division and preparation for cultural role continues. Beliefs go beyond insistence that the sexes are different, though. Not only are the sexes supposed to be distinct, but they are supposed to be innately valued differently. One sex, the male sex, is viewed as ‘better.’ Boys carry on the ‘family’ name; girls surrender their identities at marriage, move under the ‘family’ names of their husbands. While this is less mandatory in the US, the expectation remains that all children of the union will carry the father’s, or the ‘family,’ name.
Personality characteristics are split, one side “good” and valued, the other side disdained but seen as still necessary. For the ‘male’ strength, there is the appealing weakness in females. This culture believes that males are: Intelligent, steady, active, wise, leader(s), courageous and other valued labels. There are parallel but lesser characteristics presumed to be feminine, innately; females are: Silly, impetuous or flighty, quiet and chaste, simple, follower(s), timid. Males who don’t live ‘up’ to the masculinist standard are chastised as being “feminine.” Men are expected to accomplish masculinity easily, and if they do not, they are suspect as less than real men. Any female who steps beyond the constraints of female expectations is quickly called “unfeminine,” or said to be trying to act “masculine” or “manly,” which is something she can only wish for, but never accomplish, given her innate lesser status. It is always inferred that masculine is better, and often it’s stated outright.
This overvaluation and yet denial, in females, of positive, ‘male’ attributes reinforces female oppression, and male supremacy. 
It especially makes the deeper oppression of unfeminine women inevitable. There is no escaping degraded status: Women are either ‘like women’ and disdained, or ‘not like women, imposter men’ and disdained. To be disdained for who you are believed to be is oppression. To be “caught” and called out for seemingly trying to evade this “natural” oppression is to invite even greater punishment, even greater oppression.
From Dykes-Loving-Dykes (pages 140 – 141, emphasis in the original):
Butch Lesbians are those who, as girls, rejected feminization, and refused to play the role designed by men for women. Fem Lesbians are those who accepted the feminine role, to various degrees, as girls.
And:
Most Butches who acknowledge being Butch clearly remember hating and resisting femininity when we were little girls. A Butch’s resistance brings down extreme punishment: she’s described as abnormal, queer, a woman-who-wants-to-be-a-man; she’s often beaten, raped, institutionalized, psychiatrically tortured (including being subjected to electroshock, drugs, and psychosurgery), and/or disowned by her family, for not “acting like a woman.” Her resistance does not ever win her the privileges that men keep for themselves. Because men know she’s indeed a female, and a most rebellious one, she’s made an example of for all females contemplating resistance. She has “stepped out of her proper place” and “gotten above herself.” Butch oppression originates with men saying, in effect, “This is how patriarchy punishes resisters.”
If Butches resist feminization, then isn’t Butch what females would look like and act like and live like, without it? The women who co-authored Dykes-Loving-Dykes have written in detail about Butch oppression, both within the confines of patriarchy, and within the Lesbian, even Lesbian-feminist, community. It’s a worthwhile read, most definitely. For the purposes of this inquiry, though, I have broadened the category to include all women. This is about femalehood, about all of it, all of us, within western culture. And I want to discuss what this means for young women, especially, and Lesbians, in particular, in terms of existing cultural expectations.
How innate, then, would heterosexuality be? How common? It would certainly need to shift, to accommodate men loving equals who are also culturally regarded as equals, not simply “allowed” equality within the confines of personal relationships. Doesn’t level love between two who are dissimilar in status require an artificial levelness, a levelness “allowed” which always has the possibility of being removed?
If our innate femalehood would be Butch, and I believe it would be similar, how far are we from this better reality, now?
One of the things that has concerned me, as a feminist who has lived across many decades, and styles, is the cultural mandate for young women to expose flesh, and wear their vulnerability on display, while young men are allowed baggy, comfortable clothing. 
This culture objectifies and fetishizes female youth and its smoothness, its fullness before the effects of aging and gravity set in. The clothing marketed to young women in the US is only occupying a different spot on the cultural continuum that offers up to western businessmen very young girls in Thailand for their sexual consumption. Granted, it is far better to be a young woman in the US who is burdened only by the expectation that she show some high-hip skin and cleavage, wear shoes she cannot run in, apply minerals laced with toxins to her face, amend her hair with dangerous chemicals, and wear fabrics that are vulnerable to tearing and other easy damage, rather than prostituted at age nine, and left raped and battered by the former young woman’s father, or uncle, or grandfather. Of that there is no doubt. And yet how far have we come, even within feminism, when the standard dress is tremendously revealing and creates vulnerability for one sex, and yet offers comfort and absolutely no revelation of physique for the other? Woman-as-object is not liberation.
I notice as I peruse all profile pictures of women born after the Boomer generation that cleavage and signals of sexual availability are everywhere. Head shots always seem to mandate the inclusion of cleavage, or the hint of it in these carefully-arranged partial-profile photographs. Either the torso is twisted a bit to induce the beloved indent or line, or the subject is leaning forward to ensure its visibility.
We are all vulnerable to feelings of inadequacy in physical appearance. Such doubts are induced on purpose. They keep us questioning ourselves and not the power structure. Female concern with appearance constrains females, and in fact the authors of Dykes-Loving-Dykes would say femininity (page 140), creates “a self-absorbed, narcissistic, unnatural state.” Obsession with appearance, care over clothes and meeting the prevailing style code is a part of femininity; in fact this obsession is one of the things that distinguishes Butch women from Fem women. Butch women do not share this preoccupation, this concern. If Butch is the natural woman, the woman not feminized by patriarchal demands, then this preoccupation is not natural, and this mandate to bare flesh and showcase vulnerability via precarious heels, fragile face paint, and easily-damaged fabrics is patriarchal.
How can I say this delicately enough to keep women thinking, without jumping immediately into defensiveness? Can we just ponder this? Femininity certainly looks like complicity in our own degradation. That doesn’t make us wrong, or horrible beings, or unfeminist. It does make sense, though, to examine it and see if it isn’t worth re-valuing. Over time, so that each woman has the right, and the responsibility, for deciding for herself what she can change, and what she should change, if anything. Because complicity has a purpose, it keeps us alive. It also keeps those without the privilege it provides more oppressed than we are. Are you still with me so far?
(Jo, Bev, Strega, Linda, and Ruston. Dykes-Loving-Dykes: Dyke Separatist Politics for Lesbians Only. Oakland: Self-published, 1990.)
A friend recently loaned me a book, most of which I read into the wee hours today. It was that good. I’ve just finished it; it’s good right up to the end, a really good ending, in fact. Enough twists, enough reality, and enough of a kick to ensure I think of this book for a good long time.
The book is called Such a Pretty Girl, the author is Laura Wiess, and the year of publication 2007.
The major theme in this book, that women will choose men over even their own daughters, has been an undercurrent in many an Internet conversation lately. Women receive privilege from being associated with men, from having those men choose them for marriage, and from maintaining that marriage. Even when the marriage is a sham. In this book, the central marriage is far more than a sham, however; it is a delusion enacted at the expense of the 15 year-old protagonist, the chain-smoking Meredith. The book opens the day Meredith’s father is coming home. From prison. He’s a pedophile, a sex offender required to register locally, and is never to be alone with his daughter.
Meredith’s story is well worth the read!
