A recent text conversation between me and a friend.
Friend: I hate PC bullshit & lesbians are the worst. God I love femmes who own that shit!
Me: Haha! I know what you mean! I love being taken care of. If I wanted to be the bread winner again, I’d go back to dating girls that looked like me. I’m just being honest.
Friend: You are a helluva femme Sasha. I love that you own it … eve though you didn’t always seem to in the past. i am enjoying your old blogs though.
Me: It wasn’t that I didn’t own it. I didn’t have it yet! I’ve “evolved” & grown into my role and I love it now!
I realize that this opens me up to a lot of criticism but before you yell at me, let me be clear on at least one thing: I am not saying that ALL FEMMES need to be taken care of. I fully understand that is not the case. This was simply a little conversation my friend and I had a few moments ago and if more women were honest and not so concerned about being “politically correct” I think more would admit to seeking out relationships with people that “take care of them” whether it be financially or emotionally or sexually. In my case, it’s all of the above.
Now that’s not to say I don’t take care of Remi just as much as she cares for me. But we do compliment each other in opposite ways. Which is something I think Raye was trying to get at.
I used to date high femmes, girls that literally looked like. So much so that people would mistake us for sisters. I even payed for everything, opened the doors, did all the driving and played that role. I was good at it too! I had a high powered job, I worked hard all week and thought that I deserved to have a beautiful woman on my arm at the end of the day.
But that wasn’t me. It was exhausting and I was always trying to be something I wasn’t. The butch.
You can define “butch” anyway YOU want to. But in my head butch means: security, safety, reliability, taking care of you, loving you, providing for you, taking out the trash, bringing home the vegetarian bacon and being happy and proud to do it.
It has nothing really to do with outer appearances. It’s more about an energy. You don’t have to call it “masculine energy” ….. I prefer to simply call it “strength.”
Sasha, have you heard of the terms Seme and Uke? They are the terms used in gay (yaoi) and lesbian (yuri) Japanese cartoons to describe the couples’ roles. The Seme (meaning “to give”) is usually older, slightly stoic, and everything else you said to describe a butch. The Uke (meaning “to receive”) is usually younger, childlike, and feminine.
100% agree about the PC-ism. I don’t see it so much in my area (most of my straight girly female friends are into it than my scant handful of gay girl friends) so I guess I see most of it online.
I actually can defend political correctness to a minor degree in that it at least assures me that certain behaviors are more or less officially frowned upon by the populace. I just want to be treated decent, and I want everyone else to be treated decent, so things like racism and sexism and xenophobia tend to not sit well with me and I sincerely discourage them.
The sincerity part of political correctness, though, is sort of suspect and that coupled with the opinion that it’s also overreaching and overbearing sort of diminishes the returns on its good intentions.
It lures a gal into jumping to conclusions, making assumptions, and then allows her to omit the information she can receive that runs counter to her pre-fabricated opinion (that’s called cognitive dissonance, y’all!).
It’s like a nagging girlfriend who can never quite ever be satisfied and tends to be really hypersensitive and touchy.
And really, the worst is that it’s guilty of squashing the very ideal of diversity that it’s supposed to encourage and support, and it does nothing to further actual honest dialogue.
Here, Here!!
sidenote: lmao!!! “that’s called cognitive dissonance, y’all!” There is nothing hotter than a girl from the south who uses large vocabulary and punctuates the end of the sentence with “y’all” lmfaooooooo!!! I love it!
Sasha you are a class act my friend. I love that you have the courage to just put it all out there. It’s my favorite trait about you.
well everyone wants to be taken care of. i thought that was the one universal thing we all agreed upon throughout this debate.
….sometimes i just feel like it is so difficult to find like minded people – even within our family of outcasts. And the second you try to talk to someone you get the brand of “PC”. I am SO not a pc person – i’m just a person against the rules. All these stupid rules are somewhat made up from the beginning so I don’t even know why all the fuss.
You’re totally right about butchness not being dictated by appearances and I think more people are coming to realize that too. For example Bette Porter doesn’t look butch to me but she’s the “man of the house.” As for me, I can dress butch if I really want to but most of the time I just look like a young girl. However, as far as personality goes I would say in my head I am very butch. I like being “the provider,” I like being romantic and paying the check or buying roses and in the future I would love to work hard and come home to a “beautiful house with a beautiful wife.” So I would agree that being butch is a state of mind which allows more people to be butch. I do think one can realize that while being politically correct though.
I’ve got to tell you Sasha, this blog was an eye opener for me and this specific post puts everything I’ve been realising for the past months in a nutshell.
I’m just 20 years old, came out 3 years ago, and never in my life I thought that being a complete femme could be something so fulfilling. I live in a small country, so small that everyone knows almost everyone in our LGBT community (the internet has a way of turning any place into a tiny village, go figure), and most of the lesbians I found attractive were either dumb butches or poor excuses for tomboys, both acting like the type that basically goes for everything that moves, especially slutty, one-night-stand-loving femmes. You can imagine how I felt when I wanted to be a proper lady and everyone thought I was a straight faghag just because I always wore skirts and acted reeeally girly and most of my friends were gay guys. Me not acting like a whore didn’t help, either.
So I’ve basically became my hometown’s own madonna/cher/lady gaga/wtv, going to the gay bars in search of my ‘princess charming’ and always leaving the place with one more queer or five completely in love with my fashion sense. I love my boys, of course, but you can imagine how frustrating it was. No one dared to even talk to me and that would put a blow to my confidence if I didn’t get compliments from guys, both gay and straight, and the few proper femmes I eventually got to know. But all this lead me to believe that my girly ways weren’t attractive to other girls, and that I needed to act a little more ‘lesbian’, whatever that was supposed to mean.
So yeah, after denying my true essence and going for unsatisfying one-night-stands and then dressing a bit more tomboy-ish, trying it out with a few femmes and failing at first moves, I decided that I would be single forever. It never came to my mind that somewhere out there REAL butches existed, you know, the ones that weren’t scared of me JUST BECAUSE I LOOKED REALLY HARD TO GET (shocking yet predictable, now that I think about it). So I was convinced that my lovelife had no future and almost started thinking I was asexual or autosexual or something like that. Insert one of the most popular butches of the whole country, NO JOKING, hitting on me.
At first I thought she was dumb and full of herself like all the other butches and tomboys appeared to be. I even used to make fun of her and her youtube videos like, every time someone mentioned her name. So I basically gave her a really hard time, took days to reply her text messages, etc. And all of this because the gay scene had traumatised me. So her fame didn’t impress me at all, it pushed me away, even, but little did I know that one more week of ignoring her and I could be throwing away the opportunity of a lifetime.
And that’s when I find your blog, which basically helped me finding out what exactly I was looking for: someone to take care of me, someone who treats me like a lady, who loves my diva fits and all that but, most of all, who completes me. “”"”Equal”"”" relationships are the only thing my country’s LGBT community knows, but I found that complementarity is what makes me happy.
This realisation helped me to understand what exactly I was looking for, opening my eyes for new chances. And the girl I met was exactly that, not what everyone said she was. I gave her the opportunity to get to know me, the real femme me, and guess what, I was exactly what she was looking for, too. No lies, no faking, just me, in my skirts and heels and pillow princess tendencies. Your posts (and also the other girls’) also helped me to understand that she, as well as any other butch I knew, would give anything to have someone like me, if only they had the guts to do something brave for their lives. My now girlfriend was always very sincere and I could see that what we both wanted wasn’t a fairytale, that it actually could exist, that she wasn’t trying to fool me and that together we could be the kind of relationship I’ve always wished for but never thought it could exist until I started to read your blog. My denial eventually stopped and she went from the top of my ‘to avoid’ list to the unique job of being my girlfriend. Now everyone says we’re the cutest couple they’ve ever seen (the constrast is adorable, I’ll have to admit http://i52.tinypic.com/svtidi.png), even if no-one saw it coming. We’ve been dating for 3 months now, but it feels like forever and, in gay&lesbian-dating years, it’s AN ETERNITY (at least that’s what happens in my country).
So yeah, sorry for boring you with such a huge comment, but I just had to thank you for creating this blog and some divine providence for showing it to me at the right time. Now I read it every day and it just makes me so much happier to know that somewhere in this world there are couples like me and my girlfriend, who complement each other in every way. No one should be denied of this happiness just because of some ‘PC bullshit’
Oh my god, it is so liberating to be around this. My partner and I basically have only straight couples and gay men as friends. Why? No, not a “victim” of patriarchy and straight society, religion, parents…blah blah blah. Just a victim of lesbian uber victimness
Oh how I wish I’d found your site years ago Sasha!
I have a massive case of this cognitive dissonance you mention – I was brought up believing girls can do everything and don’t need to depend on anyone for anything and so have been quite independent and (seemingly) in need of nothing. Add to that being in my first ‘real’ butch/femme relationship (where I am the femme) and trying to allow myself to let my butch take care of me. On the one hand I love not having to lift a finger some days and being the prize on her arm at functions, but on the other hand I get resentful that my only purpose appears to be ‘look pretty and be charming’ (both extreme examples, but it sometimes feels that way). Enter this ‘PC bullshit’. Yes I love being looked after but I still can’t resolve that feeling of being trapped in a gender role that comes with it.