Somewhere along the line, someone pointed out to me that I was too Femme for my own good. At the time I wouldn’t have dreamed of leaving the house without full makeup… Manicure…
And Pedicure.
I mean even in winter, the boots and socks have to come off at some point. Right?
At the time, I snickered and didn’t give it much thought.

Years later, I was told in a group setting by a well meaning lesbian friend that I needed to “Give up the charade” that I was just a “cunt-tease and nothing more unless I made a committed effort to come out of the closet and give up men forever” because in her words “bisexuality is a myth.” Everyone except me laughed…

Whatever.

But that statement made me shirk labels for years. It was no one’s business whether I was straight, or bi, or lesbian. Or so I thought…but maybe that single statement made me withdraw from a group of women who until that moment had been a source of comfort because they’d accepted me for who I was.

I like to think I know who I am…and since I am a creature who is always growing, changing, evolving…I don’t let labels play a big part of creating who I am. Sure, some labels are necessary; they help us communicate to a certain level of who we are. Today, I’m willing to own a few labels that help identify me: Woman, Female, Wife, Mother, Bisexual, Femme…

But does that mean I can’t step out of the role sometimes?

Roles.

Are we all just role-playing?
Some days, it seems that way. That we are all playing some weird form of dress-up to get across the point of who we are, without saying the words.

A few days ago I came downstairs wearing a consensual-partner-beater, jeans, and my biker boots. I didn’t think about it. I woke up. I got dressed. Came down for breakfast. My husband said, “Wow, we’re feeling a little dyke today.” Of course my first response was, “We are?” But then, after breakfast was cleared, I looked in the mirror. I’d neglected to put on makeup, my hair was in a tight pony-tail, and as in 90% of the time, my wallet and cell phone were in the right hip pocket.

I did an about face and went back upstairs. It bothered me that he saw me that way…too.

Maybe it had just been an excruciatingly long week and I was really too tired to go to the trouble to straighten my hair, put on makeup, and choose a color coordinated outfit…

Or maybe something else was going on. Maybe I’m tiring of wearing my Femme label all of the time. After all, my twenty-three year old daughter had told me only a few days earlier that I was “getting a little too dyke all of a sudden”. What in the hell does that mean anyway? Then the next day, I had a very cute, very femme young blonde in my lap, whispering in my ear all of the terribly naughty things she wanted me to do to her…and in the moment I really didn’t feel very femme at all…

Upstairs, I pulled on a tiny black cropped leather jacket over the white tank, exchanged my biker boots for sexy high heeled black boots, and threw on big hoop earrings and a long necklace. I straightened my hair and applied make-up. When I came back down, I demanded, “Are we still feeling a little dyke today?”

My husband swallowed, shook his head, and managed, “Femme fatale?”

I smiled and said, “You better fucking believe the Fatale part…if one more person says I’m trying too hard to be dyke…”

He grabbed me and kissed me. He said, “I like it when you’re dyke. The girls I catch looking at you when we are out like it too.”

Why was everyone but me noticing that I’ve been less and less femme…and why does it matter, if it matters at all that I “look” butch today or femme? I’m still the same person when I look in the mirror…

And maybe that’s the problem. I am still the same person who hates labels. I don’t want to be trapped into behaving one way or another by a word. Whether I am dressed in heels with make-up or wear my biker boots with a freshly scrubbed face, the bottom line is that my thoughts, feelings, ideas don’t change…I am still who I am. A bisexual woman, mostly femme, but also highly connected to her inner boi.

The thing is, that day, with my husband, I noticed something. When I have my makeup on and I’m wearing heels…I walk a certain way…I smile and tease a certain way…I feel sexy but in a girly way. I try harder to catch the attention of girls who can only be labeled as butch…I’m bolder. Compare that to when I am not dressed femme. I feel tougher, stronger. I swagger more. I smirk more. And I try to not be noticed and by trying to not be noticed, I inevitably am…

But does that mean that if I chose to clip my hair and wear my biker books every day, I’d start feeling less femme? Or if I only wore my stilettos and stockings, cute dresses and makeup, I might actually start to carry a purse? Trust me, the answer to both is no.

I’ve been doing some people watching ever since my own hard look in the mirror…women who dress exclusively butch…and women who dress exclusively femme…even women who are so androgynous that neither butch or femme seems to be an adequate description…and I started to wonder…if we are becoming so determined to express ourselves that we dress a certain way every single day…even when we might want to dress a different way…to fit into another’s definition of a label we’ve accepted for ourselves…are we repressing ourselves and stifling our own unique personalities in deference to what we think others (need) to see in us?

I’ve already admitted to being guilty of this…pulling out my Femme Fatale when all I really wanted to do was spend the day in my comfy biker boots sans makeup…and it wasn’t really even to make someone else happy…just to throw off a label. But all I did was exchange one label for another…so did I gain anything that day? Knowledge, a new look at myself and how whether if I like it or not the labels I’ve accepted ownership of do define me…
But I’ve also gleaned the insight that I am willing to defy convention (convention being the assumed labels we apply to ourselves and allow others to apply.)

I want to be who I am any minute of any day. I want to be able to look in the mirror and see “me” not the person someone else expects to see. And from now on…that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

So this idea has been bouncing around in my head for some time now about the differences between butch and femme, and who’s the protector and who’s the protected. Butches talk so much about how they love to put their arms around a girl and it makes them feel strong, it gives them a sense that they can use their chivalry to protect and cradle her in the ways that she presents her feminine gender. Yet at the same time, femmes talk a lot about protecting and supporting and holding up the female masculinity of their butch/ftm friends and lovers by performing their femme gender in such a way that makes masculine people feel strong. So who’s really protecting whom? Given these two facts, it definitely seems like femmes and butches who purposefully associate with one another are really leaning on each other. When one gets weak, the other is there to lean harder against her counterpart to prevent her from falling down. It’s a delicate balance. Neither is stronger than the other, neither is more capable or ready to meet the world than the other. It seems to me that we face the world together, holding each other’s hand for confidence and balance.

Over the past few weeks I have slowly come to the realization that I am pretty isolated from other gender-conscious femmes. By gender-conscious, I mean queer ladies who are keen on gender theory and the purposeful, thoughtful performance of gender. I am the only one around these parts. I do interact with other femmes when I’m out in the clubs and stuff. There are several burlesque performers and go-go dancers in the area whose gender politics I have discovered. But that’s it. Most other queer ladies I know are either butch, somewhere in between, or just don’t care to define themselves (which is also totally fine by me!). As I was reading everyone’s accounts of the Femme Conference in Chicago I was totally jealous, I found myself longing to be in a crowded room and femmes and femme allies. After Sinclair invited insisted upon my presence at the next one, I vowed to myself that I participate more formally in this conversation about queer femininity. It’s for my own survival, really.

Are any of you isolated like this? My closest friends are butches, and so is my girlfriend. All of my other friends and acquaintances are straight, or bisexual living heteronormative lifestyles. It’s hard to be a soldier in an army of feminine gender warriors when there’s no one around to link arms with for the kick line, ya know? I’m totally grateful to such a very warm and welcoming brigade of femmes in this family, but I sure wish I could go out for coffee with all of you so we could get to know each other’s stories and and histories.

So how do you girls do it? How do you cultivate sisterhood with other femmes when they’re not right there next to you, in the flesh? Where do I go to find other gender-conscious femmes? What if they’re just not there, how do I come to a place of autonomy, and if so, how do I get plugged into the matrix?

ladies, gents, or none of the above:

i have to take a survey.  is anyone else anxious with anticipation for more word on the mr. man dildo or is it just this femme over here whose been up way past her bedtime several nights over the past few weeks considering the crazy joy it will bring?  ever since always aroused girl’s (aag) tantilizing review of mr. man a few months ago it’s, frankly, been hard to shake its image and potential out of my head. a silicone cock that claims to work with the naughty bits of anyone female-bodied allowing for a simulated blow job experience?! oh, *and* you can fuck with it too?? is this too good to be true or what?!

i’ll be perfectly honest. a love of giving blow jobs to cute butches and genderqueer boys of all sorts is what has me so damn excited. there are few things hotter to me than looking up at some handsome, queer butch, genderqueer, or transmasculine folk and locking eyes when your tongue and mouth are on their dicks, i do declare! i mean, blow jobs in the past have hardly been lackluster (can they really ever be?), but the potential for clit stimulation in the midst of hot and heavy cocksucking has me chomping at the bit. …oof! bad phrasing, maybe.

i’ve been so anxious for mr. man’s arrival at my local feminist sex toy shop - lucky for me it will be one of the first stores to stock mr. man - that i emailed the manufacturer, jollies, last week to get more deets about an ETA. i know, i know! i’m a woman possessed! after receiving my note (and the barrage of questions it contained), luze, the ceo of jollies, was kind enough to tell me that mr. man should be “out for production” what would now be later this week or early next week. retail value is estimated at being around $89, though there wasn’t an answer yet to my question of whether or not the first version of mr. man will be harness compatible.  aag’s blog post seemed to suggest that harness compatibility might be a feature only of a future model, while the the xbiz article posted above seems to say that the first version will be harness compatible. i’m obviously hoping for the latter.

i’ve brought mr. man up in conversation a few times lately with friends and while it has spawned interest and curiosity, it has also been surrounded by questions of logistics and whether or not mr. man will fit or take into account the different kinds and sizes of parts we all have in our knickers. so what do we think, y’all? does the mr. man sound too good to be true? does it sound like an absolute dream? do we think it’ll work? have the prayers of female-bodied folks and their blow-job-loving partners been answered?

someday soon, hopefully very soon, i will have the answer and be able to hand them off to you. in the meantime, i’m dying to know if i’m the only optimistic person out here tappin’ my foot for mr. man’s arrival in my hometown.

As many of you may know, particularly from awesomeness like the Team Gina Butch/Femme Music Video, the history of the Butch identity is tied in with blue stars on the wrist.  Because of various reasons that prevented them from expressing their true identity, many Butches got blue stars tattooed on the inside of their wrists to show, in a slightly secret way, that they were queer, and identified as Butch.  Nowadays, many Butches I know and have met (and have oogled from across the room at the local dyke bar) are resurrecting this tradition, tattooing one or more blue stars upon their wrists and arms. I think this is hot, sexy, historical (which IS hot and sexy) and is awesome.

However, I think the Femmes are missing out.  As a Femme who almost always gets read as “a straight, alternative girl,” I’m constantly looking for ways to out myself in conversation, so the cute Butches, bois, transmen, etc, realize that I’m queer and flirting, and just just straight and striking up conversation.  I have a glass rainbow pendant that I wear, I got to dyke bars, I slip my identity into conversations.  But why can’t we Femmes have a symbol of our identity, a symbol that shows others (at least those in the know) a little about our identity.

I propose a spiral (a simple example is above).  There are many reasons; it’s a basic concept, that can be changed and altered to fit the personality of each Femme getting it tattooed.  It’s pretty (I *am* a Femme!). It’s a simple concept, but also slightly complicated (more than a circle, or a triangle, or _____). Just like Femmes; we’re a simple idea, but with a lot more depth and complicatedness behind our hottness.

I mentioned this on Sexuality Happens a while ago. I know several other Femmes that said they’d do this if I could get it off the ground.  So yeah. Who is in? Who would get a small spiral tattooed on their wrist to display and embrace their Femme identity?

-Essin’ Em