If the straight world has defined lesbians falsely, even maliciously, then lesbians have, to some degree, acquiesced, by forgetting the I and playing themselves into stereotypes. Lesbians have labels for everyone, it seems: bull dyke, granola dyke, baby dyke, power dyke, butch, stone butch, soft butch, faggot butch, femme, stone femme, high femme, power femme, soft femme, futch, lipstick lesbian, chapstick lesbian, boi, androgynous, top, bottom, switch. It goes on and on, and these are the same labels that make it easy for straight people to misrepresent lesbians. We, as lesbians, have amassed names, symbols, and behaviors, and they are designed to tell us and the rest of the world who we are.
Some people take these labels pretty seriously. Others like to joke about them.
Can anyone really fit into one box? After all, the right to define ourselves is what we lesbians and feminists have been fighting for for so long! And if people force you to choose, then what does that say about our community and our acceptance of our own members?
These labels we so often put on ourselves generally reflect the dynamics of our relationships. A lot of women who identify as butch will claim that you're not a *real* butch unless you exclusively date femmes. Conversely, a lot of femmes will claim that you're not a *true* femme unless you only date butches. But what about all the butches that don't identify within the butch/femme dynamic? What about butches who date other butches? Why aren't they allowed to be called butch just because their preferred partners in this gender crime are not femmes? Who gives anyone the power to confer or deny whatever label they want?
Why is it assumed that all butches should be attracted to femmes? Maybe you're a faggot butch, did they even consider that? Everyone understands butch/femme because it seems familiar. Faggot butches on the other hand seemed to get scorned and derided and constantly questioned. A person can still be a butch without opening doors for girls or even fucking girly girls.
And what about femme on femme? Otherwise known as a lipstick lesbian. Generally, the term lipstick lesbian is used to describe a stereotypical feminine woman who is attracted to other feminine women. How come the heterosexual world can understand femme on femme? How come no one's threatened by two long haired pretty girls kissing in public? Yet why doesn't it read queer?
What *really* makes a person butch or femme anyway? Who made you (society) the Nazi police?
The concept of butch and femme identities have long been hotly debated within the lesbian community, yet even achieving a consensus as to exactly what the terms "butch" and "femme" mean can be extraordinarily difficult. In recent years, these words have come to describe a wide spectrum of individuals and their relationships. It is easiest, then, to begin with an examination of butch-femme culture and meaning from a historical perspective.
Butch and femme roles date back at least to the beginning of the 20th century. They were particularly prominent in the working-class lesbian bar culture of the 1940s, '50s, and '60s, where butch-femme relationships were the norm, while butch-butch and femme-femme were taboo. Those who switched roles were often the butt of jokes... women held strong opinions, that "role distinctions needed to be sharply drawn," and that not being one or the other earned strong disapproval from both groups.
However, in the 1970s, feminists started pronouncing "butch-femme" roles as politically incorrect, because they believed that all butch/femme dynamics by necessity imitate heterosexist gender roles, leading to butch-femme relationships being driven underground. Many lesbians of this era critiqued butch-femme as capitulation to oppressive patriarchal standards.
Androgyny became the lesbian ideal. Criticism of butch-femme was usually based on the claim that these identifications are an attempt to replicate heterosexuality by designating one member of a couple as male (the butch) and the other as female (the femme). Even today this argument is frequently aired. However, it is highly problematic because of its own underlying assumption of heteronormativity - that is, the tenet that heterosexuality is normal, and that all other forms of sexuality are only weak imitations of it. Butch-femme need not be an imitation of anything; it is a unique way of living and loving.
A resurgence of butch-femme identities and relationships in the late 1980s brought this dynamic back to the forefront of lesbian culture. The resurgence of butch-femme may be due in part to the fact that gender fluidity has become much more acceptable in recent decades. After all, butch and femme are related not only to sexual orientation, but also to gender expression.
In recent years, "pansexual" and "polysexual" have joined "bisexual" as terms that indicate women's attractions to more than one gender. Another indication of that fluidity is the fact that one cannot always tell simply by looking whether a lesbian identifies as butch or femme. Butches are not necessarily tops; femmes are not necessarily bottoms; and butches and femmes are no longer expected to date only each other.
However, in spite of butch-femme's renewed visibility, many women now argue that "butch" and "femme" are labels that oversimplify, generalise, or pigeonhole complex identities into false dichotomies. Femmes have been dismissed both within and outside of lesbian communities as being "too pretty to be 'real' lesbians." And a common refrain among lesbians and bisexuals who do not understand the appeal of butch women is "If I wanted to be with someone who looks like a man, I'd be with a man!"
Inherent to butch-femme relationships was the presumption that the butch is the physically active partner and the leader in lovemaking....Yet unlike the dynamics of many heterosexual relationships, the butch's foremost objective was to give sexual pleasure to a femme. The essence of this emotional/sexual dynamic is captured by the ideal of the "stone butch," or untouchable butch....To be untouchable meant to gain pleasure from giving pleasure.
Stone butches, as described extensively in Leslie Feinberg's 1992 novel Stone Butch Blues, do not permit themselves to be touched intimately. They instead derive pleasure from making love to their partners, who often identify as stone femmes. Some butches may also choose to use male first names and pronouns (ie. hym and hys or ze and hir) because while they do not identify as men, neither do they consider themselves women. Yet often they still identify very strongly with the lesbian community.
Femmes are perhaps best described as lesbian, bisexual, and queer women whose manner and style falls along the lines of what is traditionally considered feminine. Whereas butches are sometimes accused of trying to be men, femmes are sometimes accused - by other lesbians--of donning accoutrements of traditional femininity to pass as straight in the mainstream world. Actually, however, femme lesbians subvert prescribed sexual and gender roles by co-opting conventional "womanly" traits to indicate their attraction to other women.
The label femme is often confused with lipstick lesbian in that femme women also have typically feminine mannerisms and characteristics. The difference is that a femme woman is often, but by no means exclusively, attracted to a typically butch lesbian, characterised by having strong male attributes in their physical appearance as well as their behaviours.
Another major difference is the notion that the femme stereotype doesn’t just apply to appearances; it also encompasses political feminist ideals and rejecting patriarchal values.
I personally think the term femme also describes a gay woman who has feminist ideals. It is about the choice to either abstain from typically feminine principles or to embrace them. I don’t think being femme is restricted to the application of make-up or anything; it is something deeper.
Butches may cross-dress and crop their hair not because they want to be men, but because they are expressing a different way of being a woman, or simply of being gendered. Rather than attempting to replicate traditional masculinity and heterosexuality, butches present a challenge to both in their rejection of how the dominant culture has decided a woman should look and act.
Some young people today (in the homosexual community) eschew butch or femme classifications, believing that they are inadequate to describe an individual, or that labels are limiting in and of themselves. Other people within the queer community have tailored the common labels to be more descriptive, such as "soft stud," "hard butch," "gym queen," or "tomboy femme."
It is important to note that those who identify as butch and femme today often use the words to define their presentation and gender identity rather than strictly the role they play in a relationship, and that not all butches are attracted exclusively to femmes and not all femmes are exclusively attracted to butches, although this was traditionally the norm.
Behaviours not sanctioned by lesbian codes of conduct are suspect in the "lesbian community," because they smack of conformity to straight life, and so called patriarchal (an absurdly over-used word) notions of womanhood. Lesbianism, for many, has become a lifestyle, complete with its own vocabulary, food, clothing, politics, medicine, and psychology. Dissent is no laughing matter. The cause is paramount, goodspeak the lingua franca.
Perhaps it’s part of human nature to stereotype and put people in a box. With the 90's came a genderqueer revolution where GLBTIQ people created new and innovative labels to describe themselves, while older labels were given new definitions. It can be argued that this is a positive step towards evolving language to be inclusive, or that embracing labels is a backward step.
Today, gender roles are a lot more fluid, hence why people may not be comfortable identifying with one label. Who cares if you can fit into a label or not? Most women I know, whether gay, bi, straight, transgender seem to have a little bit of all the gay stereotypes in them. Why should it matter?
