Q & A – IV

Q & A this dazzling Monday morning brought to you courtesy of PBD, one of my favorite baby femmes!

Speaking of femme, I got my pedicure this weekend and am absurdly pleased with my white-tipped toes. I keep rolling my chair out from under my desk to admire them. Yes, I’m a geek.

There are a lot of girls my age who say they are femme, and that’s cool, but why aren’t there a lot of butches, AG, Domms and studs my age? It seems they are always older, and most lesbians now are into the non-label thing. Thoughts?

Nothing like starting my week off with some broad generalizations! Where to start, where to start?

First, sweetie, you’re a baby. (Don’t throw things at me.) Getting into the groove of life takes a lot of work for most people. Add being different in any way, much less being gay-different, and you’ve got a lot to deal with. 95% of the population, be they gay, straight, or other, are also wimps. Being “non-label” is easy.

Well, as easy as being queer gets, anyway.

Keeping that in mind, think about what kinds of people you see as you’re driving down the street. Most of them are fairly easily lumped into groups, right? (Yes, I realize that I am really, really into gross generalization territory now. Bear with me.)

As a species, humans try to blend in. Standing out is scary – it makes you more easily targeted.

No, most people don’t consciously think that way, but the animal in our brains still talks to us. Even when we don’t know we’re listening.

So, in my experience, it can (doesn’t always, but can) take us a little longer to evolve an intentional identity of otherness. Most lesbians, bois, butches, whatever, don’t come out young, even now, in this psuedo-age-of-visibility. remind me later to rant about L-word “visibility.” So you have the first step of admitting who you really are, which takes place for a lot of people at your age now. They’re trying to wrap their heads around being gay, or being able to act on their gay-ness for the first time, or just trying to figure out why they think their roommate is cuter than their boyfriend.

For the “lot of girls who say they are femme,” I’m going to say something that might get my femme card revoked. Or my throat slit.

Femme is different for everybody. I know that, for me, for a very long time, it just seemed like another label in a host of labels that “we” (the gay community as a whole) tried to slap on ourselves to make who we are make sense to everybody else. I didn’t want to be categorized by my appearance. I wouldn’t even claim the label “gay” for a long time. I insisted that “I just love who I love” rather than taking up a stand on one particular patch of identity. (For the record, I look back at that younger Jolie and roll my eyes. A lot.) But I have seen, and talked to, a lot of (especially young) women who use femme as a general descriptor for traditional femininity as opposed to androgyny in the lesbian lexicon. This bugs me some, because it implies that there’s only two kinds of lesbian. Girly-girls, and androgynous females. We all know how I love a butch woman, so this implied dismissal of their presentation drives me to the left of bugfuckingnuts.

I think I’ve wandered away from where I was headed with this, but I’m not sure.

So to summarize, it’s my belief that you see more “older” masculine women because there’s a full-on two-step coming out process for them. Once as gay, then again as masculine-identified. We’re finally approaching a point in our society that gay isn’t the death sentence it used to be, but there seems to be this dumbass push back against the male among us. We can be gay, sometimes, in some places, but we still must be traditionally feminine because we can’t be too different all at once.

Because the world would suddenly stop rotating on its axis or some equally stupid shit.

It takes guts, to be different, to be that different, in this Barbie-doll society. It takes a resolve to walk out the door each morning knowing you will be stared at, and that most of the stares won’t be terribly friendly.

So you gotta give your group a chance to get their sea legs, so to speak, in this big ocean of adult sexuality. They may not know yet, that there are other options than the good old-fashioned boy/girl binary.

And, as my last two cents in this dollar-twenty rant, I gotta point out one more thing.

I’ve never, ever dated “someone my age.” My current is as close as I’ve ever gotten, and she’s almost five years older than I am. So I may not be the best indicator of what’s going on in the heads of your cohort!