LipstickGirlyGirl

Oh man, I hardly know where to even begin on this one, because your questions touch on so many hot topics within the girls-who-like-girls community (whatever their specific labels may be). The first ones I saw were the issues of femme invisibility—expounded upon by Sinclair of the Sugarbutch Chronicles, Essin’Em, and writers right here on Femmes Guide—of the “lesbian sheep dance” aptly named by Nadia the Kinky Librarian and an issue very close to my own heart: that of tracking down those rare femmes who go for other femmes.

Sadly enough, it’s true. Femmes who like other femmes (whether it be exclusively or in addition to liking butches and/or those who fall somewhere in between) are not anywhere near as numerous as the femmes who like their women a little more masculine. Obviously I’m one of them, and I’m willing to bet that more than one of my fellow FG writers is also at least partly a femme’s femme, but out there in the world of gay bars and queer neighborhoods, they’re not exactly as concentrated as they are here. So chances are, you’re not doing anything wrong. There’s no one method of attracting another femme to you, so long as you’re making your interest clearly known (which goes back to the aforementioned “lesbian sheep dance,” a hilariously named but frustrating phenomenon to be avoided at all costs). Chances are, you just haven’t come across a femme’s femme yet.

Now, as far as approaching said femme, once you have her in your sights. In my experience, my flirting tactic doesn’t change much between butches and femmes. I could tell you that sometimes I have to be a little more aggressive with other femmes since they’re used to being actively courted and wooed by those bold butches, but how stereotypical would that be? I have had to be aggressive with shy butches too, so being bashful is definitely not solely a femme phenomenon. Just go with your instincts, which are probably a lot more spot-on than you realize, and tone your approach up or down in strength as you feel is necessary. Your main goal is get your message of interest across, and then the ball is in her court to either respond favorably or not, depending on if she is into other femmes.
As to your question of where to go to meet other femmes: well, where do you go? Or perhaps the better question is, where would you go to meet new people of the queer variety? It may happen in a gay bar or it may happen at the grocery store, or at a concert, or a flower nursery, or… the options are really endless! The real trick isn’t in going somewhere special; the trick is to always keep your eyes open and to never give up the search. Being a femme who likes femmes, you have certainly got a more difficult path ahead of you as far as finding a partner (either short- or long-term), but it’s not impossible. Sure, femmes don’t stand out as much as a butch usually does, but you said it yourself: you can usually tell. There’s just a certain energy about a femme that makes her stand out from the rest. And someday, probably when you least expect it, one of those femmes will see that same energy in you.

Now! Fellow FG writers and dearest FG readers, what have you to say to LipstickGirlyGirl? Please, chime in with your comments to assist a femme in need! We’ve all been there in one fashion or another; sometimes a few words of advice or support can make all the difference.

I have not always lived in the Bay Area. I come from small communities, small towns– I know what it’s like to be the only femme in an entire gay bar. I know what it’s like to spend a night only speaking to drag queens, because nobody else will even look at you. I know what it’s like to look for others who look like me and come up empty time and again. I know what kind of pressure it is to be told or, in so many ways, shown that if only I’d look and act differently, I’d be more attractive and more accepted. Conversely, having also lived in large cities for a many years, I know what it is to be given the stink eye from other femmes when you entire a room. I know what it is to be excluded from friendship with local femmes because you’re not _______ enough or far too _______ to be allowed into their inner femme circles. I know the pressure (and ultimately, the disappointment) in knowing that some femmes will be competing with everything you do from your hair to your shoes even if you’d rather not play that game with them. In layman’s terms, all of this fucking sucks.

Even though I am now blessed and lucky enough to live in an amazing queer community with an astounding number of diverse, wonderful, beautiful, and amazing femmes, I still often find myself looking to the internet for solace and solidarity just as I did in my earlier femme days. It’s amazing where I end up finding it some of the time. For example, very recently a large online community I belong to (FetLife, a kink-based social networking site) decided to add “butch” and “femme” as gender identities. When this decision was announced, there was an immediate public outcry complete with a full range of internet-based painful stupidity. New wounds were created by those who did not identify as butch or femme dismissively stating that femme and butch were not valid gender identities and then further complaining that adding them to the website as gender options was only serving to be divisive and confusing. Old wounds were reopened when friends of mine wanted to list the gender identity as “femme” but were hesitant, remembering all those times they’d been told they weren’t queer enough or femme enough to claim such an identity. And many folks, myself included, were somewhat annoyed that “femme” had been randomly shortened to “FE” (as the abbreviation “F” had already been taken for “female”) while “butch” was inexplicably shortened to “BU”. In short, the entire affair very quickly turned into a hot mess. I was getting irritated, it was getting late, and the more reactions I read on the website, the more rapidly I began to lose my faith in queer community (again).

The things that settled me down in the end was so simple, and they were the following. First and foremost, I turned my computer off for the night. Yes, they have an off-switch, and I like to make use of it and be among real people for awhile when the electronic personalities of actual human beings are upsetting me. My girlfriend and I had a nice, intelligent chat and then went to bed. The second thing happened this afternoon when I was finally ready to turn the computer back on. I logged onto the site to re-read a post I’d made complaining about “FE” being the new shorthand for “femme”, when I saw that a friend of mine had pointed out, in passing, that Fe is the symbol for iron on the periodic table. This stopped me dead in my tracks.

My brain started spinning in an entirely new series of directions. This statement knocked me out of the virtual and back into the literal. Femme is forged and tough like iron. Femme can be purified or left dirty; molded or natural; sculpted, shaped, re-shaped, made into art; used for tough mechanics; liquefied into something hot and fluid; formed into its own protecting locks and gates; a magnet; simple and useful; complex and decorous, necessary for health and wellness… and when mixed with carbon, the end-all, be-all, femme(FE) can be made into steel. Such a beautiful, but at the same time simple, redefinition of femme had never occurred to me and it all of a sudden made me very, very happy. Every time I am knocked back down to the brass (or in this case, iron!) tacks of things and go back to the basics, I always manage to learn something new. Femme is elemental. It’s so simple, it’s right there. We are a building block of queer life. Our element is iron(Fe), which can be just about anything it chooses, given the right circumstances.

Following this revelation, came another stunning comment from a different friend of mine. As a joke, she began to make light, science-based humor about my femme(FE) identity and ended up saying the following:

“I wish your outer electron shell happiness in attracting and combining with any other elements you desire.”

She meant it to be taken lightly, but I found it to be absolutely beautiful. She is absolutely right. Our outer shell, our femme presentation can be anything it likes, but it should be happy. We should be happy. We are allowed to be happy. And we are allowed to attract and combine with any other elements we desire. It’s so easy. It’s such a simple equation: femme = femme. The unknown is its own solution. We all know ourselves, we are all femme, if the specifics are unknown to others, that’s fine. If we are each, every day, defining “femme” and femme always equals femme, then what is there left to argue about? How can you create a fraction from that equation? Why would there need to be IF/THEN statements? What about femme = femme could ever be unclear?

The simple fact is, femme community shouldn’t be complicated. Loving each other and enjoying each others presence shouldn’t be hard. Planets in their own orbit can come together without colliding and form a entire solar system. Femme love for each other can be our iron-based, plasma sun; the peace of acceptance can be our slow-burning, glittering stars– one for every single one of us, with still an infinite number more that are yet to be named; and those constant, steady lights can guide all of us, new femmes and old, back home if ever we are lost. That is, if we let it.

I’m an author and artist and tour to colleges, conferences, and community groups to read and teach all about you guessted it queer stuff, to queer people. Even the job that pays my mortgage outs me pretty immediately I’m “gay for pay” by which I don’t mean a straight porn actor who will shoot gay scenes for money, I mean I work in the movement of LGBT nonprofits. Confession time: I’ve never even had a straight job! My entire resume is made up of art, and community organizing for local or national queer nonprofits.

Anyway, pride is a season that gets me a little more sentimental that I might normally be about gay stuff. For me it’s not that I feel especially hailed by rainbow balloons, or floats at this time in my life but it’s that when I’m honest with myself and sitting quietly, I think about how much these things meant to the seventeen year old me who was just coming out, just wandering haphazardly and nervously into this great big world of queerness. So, two weekends ago I wandered through Brooklyn pride. Money burned a hole in my purse and there I was buying a tacky (but admittedly pretty) woven rainbow anklet. I put it on and there it’s stayed on my right ankle for the past couple of weeks.

Choosing to wear it didn’t really feel so much like a need to advertise or come out, so much as a lovely little moment of nostalgia where I remember being covered in rainbows the few months after coming out, my backpack that looked like a pride parade threw up on it. All the buttons and patches proclaiming my queerness was the armor that I carried around my very conservative high school I commuted two hours by city/county bus to get to after I was kicked out of home in order to graduate.

When I’m honest, even now seeing a rainbow makes me feel safer. So In the honor of the seventeen year old scared gay teenager I was several years ago I’ve been wearing this anklet, and I’ve noticed the ways in which it’s impacted my visibility which on some level makes me uncomfortable- I don’t want to have to wear a rainbow for folks to get that I’m queer. But I’ve been paying attention to the people who are seeing me that weren’t before I’ve noticed something interesting.

It’s youth- teens who will now look and recognize and smile, and also folks who seem somehow newer and less sure of their safety that this is a beacon to. Last night coming home from work I was ready to get off the train and a gay man – who my highly tuned gaydar had noticed the moment he walked onto the train carrying a shopping bag and plopping down across from me also stood to get off. Quietly so the rest of our train couldn’t hear he said, “I like your bracelet.” I smiled and said thank you. He then asked if I was going to the parade on Sunday, I shook my head and said not this year, and asked if he was. He got a big grin on his face saying that yes, he’d moved here from Texas and that his was his first pride. I smiled and congratulated him as the doors opened and we went our separate ways, both feeling perhaps a little more seen, a little less alone.

I’m not sure where this post is going anymore, it’s about being explicitly out, and also about thinking about ways our community is built and seen and recognized and even though sometimes I can find myself becoming a little jaded about all things gay- criticizing the corporate takeover of pride festivities, wishing people would remember it’s roots- how it was homeless queer kids that started everything off at Stonewall, I cannot ever allow myself to forget how meaningful pride can be, and the way in which that rainbow can be thread that stitches our community together.

I think that underneath it all, I was struggling with the societal norms that had been ingrained in me for all of my life. It wasn’t that my parents forced a traditional outlook on me at all, but let’s face it: the media, literature and just people we see every day in our lives, whether or not we interact directly with them, reinforce the idea that the man or at the very least the more masculine party is always the aggressor, the pursuer. Of course there is nothing wrong with the more masculine person being the pursuer, but the idea that it must always be that way was a sad and outdated concept I essentially had to deprogram out of my brain.

Slowly but surely, I am getting the hang of it. I think it helped discovering that I am kinky and have a Top side that doesn’t sacrifice my femme identity, but what’s really doing it is just becoming more and more comfortable with my own brand of femme-ininity and thus, more comfortable in my own skin. As I have grown more comfortable, I’ve started flirting with those cute butches, or hell, even the cute fellow femmes, and every positive response is reinforcement that no, I do not have to be the wilting wallflower who always waits for the other party to initiate and that yes, I can pursue who I want and still be the femme I am.

Outside of cultural programming, there is nothing inherently masculine or butch about being the aggressor. Yeah, their sexy swaggers and cocked eyebrows certainly lend a little spice to the game of pursuit, but we femmes can absolutely add our own flair and come out on top. Or on bottom. Or however we like it!

I did not feel comfortable and settled into my femmeininity until I started realizing how very much I adore female masculinity. Obviously not everyone who is femme is drawn toward butches and vice versa. Not all femmes were born female. Not all femmes are gay (although I do believe we are all queer, despite various sexual orientations). Masculine women did not make me feel threatened like most men did at the time. They supported my feminine side, did not make fun of me or force me into the cult of true womanhood. Maybe it was the type of butches with which I was associating at the time, but I felt encouraged and valued and seen… That’s how I came out to myself. Little by little, as I became less and less afraid of the attention my femmeininity would attract. As I started learning about how femme and butch are radical rather than conformist (and what if they are? does it matter?). After that, every time I ever came out to anyone it was both at once: my mouth said “I’m gay” and my body, my grace, my curves said “I’m femme.”

I am femme like steel heels
Stiletto
Staccato
Pointed toes
Hard lines
Sharp edges
Acute angles
Punching out rhythm
Down the hall
Across the floor
On your chest.

Femme like sculpted nails
Painted baby-pink
Playing innocent
Stained dangerous
Fuck-me-red
Scoring
Sharp pain
Raged scratches
Ridges down your back.

Femme like complications
Constrictions
Corsets
Tightened
Cinched
Restrained
Holding me back from you.

Femme like perfection
Persuasion
Scarlet lips
Smoldering eyes
Hours spent
Pulling it together
Only to be dismantled.

I am femme like destruction
Disheveled
Disrupted
Smeared mascara
Hair falling damp and undone
Patterns of teeth
Glowing
Circled in lipstick.

I am femme like brevity
Breathless
Slurs
Sentences shortened:
Ma’am
Sweet
Diva
Bitch
Goddess
Cunt
Mistress
Girl
Princess
Dyke
Scorpio
Switch
Doll
Slut
Mommy
Whore.

Now stop. Did you define YOUR femme-ness, what femme-ness looks like to you, and how you embody it? Or perhaps what femme looks like or is in those femmes that you happen to be attract to? Or did you happen to come up with a definition that embodies all Femme?

If you chose the latter, please tell me, because I’m having a hell of a time.

I feel a bit like Justice Stewart, when he spoke of obscenity and said “I know it when I see it.” But it’s true. Femme is just one of those terms that happens to be incredibly hard to pin down, incredibly hard to define, and I’ve been trying for years.

I hate when people define Femme and include clothing as part of it; lipstick, heels and pencil skirts do not a Femme make. Can a Femme WEAR lipstick, heels and a pencil skirt? But of course. But is it a requirement for the definition? Certainly not.

Then I got in the habit of defining it by attitude, by Femmitude if you will. There is just a certain fiesty-ness, a certain sass that Femmes possess. We give it out when we feel invisible, showing people that we have our own identity and please stop grouping me in with the other straight girls/women here, thank you very much. We have it in how we interact with our love interests, our partners, our lovers.

But how do you define that attitude? And what about people full of that sass and attitude and vitality that aren’t Femme/femme-identified? How can attitude be the only definition of an entire identity.

Femme is so many things, and one of the best parts is that it is so many different things for so many different people. I find myself re-examining my own Femme identity all the time, and I’ve identifed as such for a good few years. I’ve identified as being part of a Butch/Femme dynamic, and as a Femme on my own, and as a Feisty Femme and a Kinky Femme, and an Invisible Femme, and a Disabled Femme and so much more. And if I can barely figure out and pin down my own identity, barely figure out out what Femme means to me, and define it for myself, how the heck could anyone ever try to define it as a whole, for all the Femme-identified people out there?

So you – yes you. How do YOU define Femme? For yourself, and for others. How do you definie it as an identity? What makes a Femme a Femme….or is it just the magic pixie dust covering all of us?

-Essin’ Em

***I’ve already written a lot about finding my Femme identity and coming out as a Femme in various settings, so I’ve chosen to write about the struggles I have with the definitions of my own identities on a regular basis***

My biggest issue in coming out? It was coming out to myself. Not because I was ashamed of what I was, but because I didn’t know what I was. My impression of “femme” for the longest time was that best-known faction, the high femmes. It was red lipstick, spike heels and full-skirted dresses. And that certainly isn’t me, at least, not most of the time. I am usually more of a lip balm, Converse and dark wash jeans kind of girl. So surely I didn’t fit in with the femmes, right? But I knew I wasn’t butch. There was no question about that.

I don’t even remember where or how I heard of the idea of a “tomboy femme.” I do remember the feeling I got when it dawned on me though. It was a dawning. A sun had risen in my head and suddenly the gloom was brightly lit and clear to me. That was me. “Tomboy femme” was me. I was no less femme because I preferred Chucks to heels, or because I was more comfortable in denim than silk. I was just a different kind of femme. I was – I am – the kind of femme who takes elements of a more masculine image and incorporates them into a femme identity, making them both into my own. I am the kind of femme who walks with a bit of a hip sashay and a bit of a swagger. I am the kind of femme who pairs a floral blouse with a leather motorcycle jacket. And above all, I am just me, which is something entirely beyond names and labels. And finally I am comfortable with that; I feel like I fit into my own skin just as well as I fit into those jeans that make my ass into a work of art.