my eyeliner is a tool of the patriarcy

Ok, so this was not at all the blog that I anticipated writing as my introduction to blogging at The Femme’s Guide, but well sometimes life gets in the way. I’m so excited to be here and I really wanted my first blog to be something uplifting, but I’m just going to roll with this. This is the sort of blog that required a hot bath and freshly painted nails in order to be written, and this is the sort of day that reminds me how very, very, lucky I am to have found my own little femme community.  I think what it comes down to is that I have been spoiled, I have been incredibly, spoiled by finally having a social circle of femmes who understand me.  It might be having recently come off of a summer full of performances with The Femme Show, and being involved with tons of femme art, but today when I was faced with people going on about how makeup was a symbol of misogyny I was shocked, angry, and ultimately very sad.

When I first came out as a lesbian I didn’t see femmes. The few femmes I would come to see over the next couple of years were routinely the punch lines of jokes, and their clothes, accessories, and everything else “feminine” abut them was publically ridiculed.  It took me years to feel comfortable in my own skin to realize that adopting masculinity was not the only way to play with gender transgression, and that all those years of failed butcheness, was really about emulating what I desperately wanted to fall in love with.  Perhaps my experience is uncommon but I have never really felt a great deal of societal pressure to conform to norms of femininity, I did however experience intense sub-cultural pressure to emulate maleness to prove that I was dykeish enough.
I think one of the things that stuck with me in this afternoon discussion was the fact that there are * still * people in the world, that fully and truly believe that femmes are nothing more than patriarchal tools, that we are fooled by an oppressive society, and deploy femininity as a means to gain cultural acceptability.  First of course it makes me angry and I had a nice long pouty processing session with two of my good femme friends to get through some of that, but I was still left really angry at the thought that I (and femmes in general) could be so misunderstood as to leave people with the impression that we were clueless, and that we lacked agency to make decisions about how we chose to perform our gender and sexuality and the ways in which we exist in the world. Furthermore, the thought that my life and gender could in some way be reduced to an article of clothing is not only shocking but incredibly insulting.  Is an androgynous dyke nothing more than the baggy jeans that are worn? Is a butch nothing more than a pair of boots or leather jacket? I can’t imagine anyone honestly making an argument like that, however when it comes to femmes as much as I hate to admit it, sometimes it’s still open hunting season.

Other posts by Sassafras

• September Femme Writing Prompt! - September 1st, 2010
• Rebel girl, Rebel girl, Rebel girl you are the inspiration to my femme gender - August 25th, 2010
• Trust Your Love... - August 18th, 2010
• August Femmes Guide Prompt - August 4th, 2010
• Femmepop ! - July 31st, 2010

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