Forgive me for posting the full article. I’ve lost the link.

FEMME FADE OUT

Femmes are out of fashion.

So posits my friend Coya, and I wonder if she might be right.

When she says “out of fashion” she means that feminine lesbians are now being marginalized in a new way. The gold standard, of course, has long been butch. Since I came out 13 years ago most lesbians try to be butch, especially when they first come out.

Some women were just always tomboys and the lesbian community welcomes them the way they are. But even women who love lace and frills often try out butchness. Partly I think that’s because being butch, even for a little while, is a good way to shake off the many chains that women wear. It’s a good way to learn that you don’t have to be vulnerable to be valuable,
that you don’t have to be pretty to be attractive, that you can be smart and strong and loud and women will not only be OK with that but they’ll want to sleep with you.

Also, short hair, a boyish way of walking, an eschewing of make-up, jewelry and high heels, makes us more recognizable to each other, and so it is not surprising that single lesbians might aim to proclaim their lesbianism as loudly as possible.

But for the first time that Coya or I can remember, not only don’t most younger lesbians want to be femmes but they don’t want to date them, either.

The butch-femme dynamic is all but dead for women under 30. I’m not crying about that. I myself always felt trapped when I was the femme half of a butch-femme couple. It’s not easy being the one who is always expected to be weaker, more emotionally savvy, less able to protect herself, more easily moved to tears. It was hard to keep my temper when women called me “Bambi” or compared me to various porn stars just because I happen to be well endowed.

These things are cyclical, of course. Another friend who came of age in the androgynous 1980s says she was horrified when she returned to Chicago to find butch-femme couples dominating the lesbian scene. It seemed to her an aping of heterosexual conventions, a trend that bought into the idea that only masculine people could be paired with feminine ones.

Yet with the demise of the butch-femme couple comes the general idea that femmes aren’t dating material.

Young women who once called themselves butch now call themselves tranny bois — and these tranny bois are mostly dating each other. This is interesting and I wonder why.

Are femmes not trangressive enough in our new gender queer era? Are they not playful enough with gender roles? Are tranny bois and androgynous lesbians worried that femmes are a trap that would force them into more traditional butch roles? Or is it really that young lesbians are simply not attracted to women who are feminine?

Coya says every time she brings her theory up, her friends shake their heads. They point to the rise of burlesque in Chicago. They point to the femme girls who coo over the Chicago Kings on stage. Clearly, they say, lesbians think curvy women, femme women, are beautiful. Clearly they are admired and desired. Look at how they cheer when they take their clothes
off!

But Coya says that this is not at all the same, and I agree with her. In both burlesque and drag king shows, femme lesbians are merely there as foils to heighten the masculinity of other lesbians.

No, when it comes to curvy, feminine women, lesbians may preach acceptance. We may pay lip service to it. After all, we have been acculturated to accept all body types, at least theoretically. We celebrate thin women, boyish women, curvy women, chubby women, stocky women, butch women, femme women, androgynous women. Every woman’s body, every woman’s gender identity, is OK with us.

Only it’s not. Neither Coya nor I are immune from this general social pressure. Coya, a self-described femme, prefers boyish women. I tend to date more androgynous women — usually women with boyish bodies who wear lipstick, or who slide easily between femme-ish and butch-ish. Think Alice on “The L Word.” Or really, any of the women of “The L Word,” who are too butch to be femme and too femme to be butch.

We might say that any woman’s body is OK with us but what we say is not who we date. We might have an aesthetic that says that curvy women are beautiful, but we are attracted to women who don’t have curves or who play them down. The gender queer contingent of the lesbian community are our current taste-makers — where they go, so go we all.

I myself have often dismissed women as potential dates by saying to my friends, “Nope, she’s too femme for me.” I look for a kind of toughness that I associate with being butch. But that’s just a lesbian cultural thing, because I could just as easily find toughness in a dominant femme, if I were looking for the right signals in the right places.

Femmes, I’m sure, will come back into fashion some day. But until they do, I wonder if our community will continue to make room for all the ways we express gender.

– – – – –

Jennifer Vanasco is an award-winning, syndicated columnist.
Email her at vanasco@chicagofreepress.com

We’ve lost Sue’s post on Jennifer Vanasco’s FEMME FADE OUT, which sucks! I know I enjoyed it, and I hope most of you did get to read it during the short time it was up.

I want to re-visit FEMME FADE OUT and share my reaction to it. Honestly, I was angry after three sentences. As soon as I watched the word femme turn into feminine lesbian I wanted to stop reading (but I did make it through the whole thing). It wasn’t because of the lesbian label either. Shockingly enough (to me, at least), I think I may be more comfortable with simply being called a lesbian than a feminine one. In fact, you can call me a carpet muncher if you must but I really do wish you’d stay away from feminine lesbian, especially if you see feminine lesbian and femme being one in the same.

Feminine lesbian puts me under a large umbrella. It puts me with women whose gender expression and sexual orientation match mine without giving regard to our desires. It places me with girly couples that lingerie shop together (for each other!). It puts me with women who “love all women.” I do not love all women. If fact, I love very few. I’m more than a little picky and if I don’t feel your butch will balance my femme, I’ll move right on. My gender orientation is an important part of me. Placing me with all feminine lesbians is insulting. It makes me even more invisible. Who would have thought that was possible?

It’s obvious that Jennifer Vanasco isn’t a femme from this piece. I don’t even know what she’s talking about when she goes into feeling trapped when she was the femme in a butch-femme couple. Maybe I just don’t understand the when I was a femme part. It’s not a part in a play. You don’t become a femme because you are with a butch and then it’s over when that relationship ends.

Near the end of FEMME FADE OUT, she discusses the characters in “The L Word” and women who slide between butch and femme or butch-ish and femme-ish. Again, I’m lost. Is her view on identity all about looks or clothes? That’s not what my identity is about. What am I missing? What’s butch-ish and femme-ish?

I will say she’s dead on with one thing. On femmes not being dating material, I agree that is the opinion of the majority of the lesbian community. Lucky for me, I don’t want to be with the majority of the lesbian community.