female-husband:

For reference, anon is talking about this post, I think: (x) or at least I assume so b/c it was the first post I saw on her blog about this topic?

Neat-dyke, if you see this, I’m sorry for this and am not trying to be confrontational, I swear I wouldn’t have responded to your 7 note post from literally a month ago if I wasn’t prompted and didn’t take adderall today, lol. I first & foremost believe we’re just coming at this from 2 different places.

So… firstly, I do not conceptualize butchness as PRIMARILY a feminist, conscious, political, liberating choice that every woman can and should be making under patriarchy. I’m not saying that it can’t be liberating or that it is antifeminist (obviously). I think it is one of MANY reactions and strategies of surviving as female. I do not believe that it is possible to reach some kind of androgynous unmarked-woman nirvana. I am not simply not doing femininity, I am also doing butchness. Its not ONLY absence-of. 

I have a lot of respect for lesbians who do dykehood, like, rejecting everything they experience as gender forced upon them. For me,  it sounds like it would take a great deal of being self-conscious, and honestly, I am trying to live, and I think that there are more than enough standards for women to have to keep up with and put themselves through as it is, let alone adding a new one called feminist androgyny. I’m not saying that I think that thats what it feels like to them, I’m saying thats what it would feel like to me, and I’m not willing to suffer for my feminism and I don’t think femmes should have to either. And it doesn’t sound like that’s what they’re doing, so, like I said… a lot of different strategies.

I believe, first & foremost, in *harm reduction.* Do you feel like you physically can’t leave the house without dying if you don’t do X thing (makeup for instance)? That’s a problem and it *hurts*. And you know what, I’m butch, not feminine, and I think it to be patently obvious that I have a different psychological affect from having to do something feminine than most other women do, and I’ve STILL had those *behavioral patterns* in my life – binding comes to mind. Talk about body punishment and self harm through presentation, alright? That isn’t femininity but it comes from the same fucking gender system of female self-policing. Its something to work through and it hurts us & women in general… and it doesn’t always look exactly the same as each other. The truth is that gendered pressures DO affect different women differently.

Meanwhile – are you doing something specifically to signal and communicate with and attract *other women*? Uh, I don’t think you have to stop doing that, and I don’t think that it would make a political difference for you if you did, because I very strongly do not believe in individualist lifestyle politics.

What I’m saying – does female socialization harm every woman? Yes. Do you have to make your body a battleground more than it already is? No. Gender sucks and it’s horrific and it’s responsible for a lot of gruesome death; existence and resistance underneath that kind of pressure is bound to be messy and imperfect.  While I think that we should always be trying to heal from what’s happened to us, I do not think it is a worthwhile feminist project to interpret gender abolition (etc) as a personal goal for your own body if it makes you overly self critical. We’ve all had enough of that for several lifetimes, I think.

The simple truth is that these two lesbian gendered experiences *DID* develop side by side in community context, though that does look different today. I believe that butch and femme are two lesbian specific reactions to the traumas of female socialization under patriarchy, and that they are both modes of surviving, often surviving *together*. This kind of lesbian community could not have happened without the context of a homophobic and misogynistic world. I’ll grant you that. But to be perfectly frank with you, I’ll give it up the second I can undo a lifetime of growing up in a homophobic and misogynistic world. For now, I feel a VERY DEEP sense of JOY and mutual understanding when sharing culture with femmes, and I point blank REFUSE to pretend that’s not true because these connections would not exist in another world.