Sooo...
I don't really have any stories about always being a girly-girl (I wasn't and still am not...). Growing up, I was always actually a bit of a tomboy and hated wearing dresses or playing with baby dolls. At three, I'm told, I promptly kicked a newly gifted doll down a flight of stairs and, apparently insulted, huffily went back to my LEGOs and dinosaur books. I favoured action figures, climbing trees, and wrestling with the boys, and thought frilly pink tutus and those little play kitchens were stupid. I probably have a lot more in common with the butches growing up than a lot of the femmes. Up until puberty when everyone started acting funny around each other, most of my friends were boys and the girl friends I had were mostly the spunky, mouthy, smoking-behind-the-school, bad influence types (okay, most of my girl friends still are, but I digress...).
I was raised in a family with somewhat feminist-y second wavers who eschewed over the top displays of femininity as frivolous or capitulation or desperation to get a man. Being feminine was a negative. The men in my family never really enforced the boundaries either and to dress feminine in a cold environment like Atlantic Canada was seen as impractical.
I then flirted with the goth and punk subcultures as an adolescent and donned the frilliest lace dresses, pointiest boots, most femme-y shirts, and tonnes of makeup but it was okay because it was mostly black and "edgy" and it didn't feel feminine to me. It was "counter-cultural" and to be conventionally feminine meant, to me, giving in and giving up, conforming and also, frankly, as a girl who was always chestier than most of the others my age, it meant making myself a target. If I could distract or deflect some of the attention off of my body by wearing equally distracting clothes, then win-win. I won't lie and say that I didn't
also get positive reinforcement from the teachers and some of the adults in my life who, through their own internalized sexism, saw me and the other girls like me as girls they were more willing to take seriously than some of the just-as-smart teenage girls in designer gear with perfect hair. I won't say it didn't happen because it did and I played into it.
To be frank, I
did buy into a lot of the sexist messaging which said to be feminine meant a lack of intelligence (and as a girl growing up who was always pegged as "the brain" wherever I went, I certainly didn't want
that). I thought it
was frivolous. I thought that to show my sensitive or feminine side was to show weakness and as often the only girl in a group of boys (and eventually one of only a handful of girls and women in school and university partaking in male-dominated environments and debates, that was definitely something I didn't feel like I
could do). I was already a soft-spoken, quiet, sensitive introvert. To allow myself to be seen as (more) feminine, I felt, would have been intellectual suicide. So, I didn't allow myself to explore that side of who I was and I certainly never felt safe doing so.
There were, however, little blips along the way.
There was this girl when I was in high school, a friend of mine, the only out lesbian in our grade (there were three in the whole school) who had a lovely, punky, baby dyke spike and who played the drums in her own punk band. We got along really well and she was funny, smart, and sweet. She made me feel a little strange inside and the way she looked at me made me uncomfortable and squirm in my pointy boots. I can remember feeling also a little unnerved when in her presence. I can only describe it as feeling naked. I turned into a giggly mess with her. I told the most stupid jokes just to see her laugh. We wrote the worst teenaged poetry and shared it with each other. Hers made me blush. Sometimes I would attend some of her practices after school in the band room and remember feeling transfixed and flustered when she'd take off her button-down shirt or jacket to reveal her athletic shirt and drummer's arms. After class I would gush and go on and on about the latest band or skirt or pair of boots I'd found and would gab her ear off excitedly before realizing that 10, 15, 20 minutes had passed and she'd barely said a word. I would say sheepishly, "I'm rambling again, aren't I?" She would just grin. There was never any judgment and, butterflies aside, it was an easy yin-yang friendship. I would often sneak glances at her in class to see how she had done her hair that day or if she had worn
that shirt with
that steel necklace and
those clunky boots which announced her presence before she appeared around the corner. I thought at the time that I was just admiring her teenage counter-cultural style instead of admiring the butchy figure she struck. I was so far in the closet to even myself at that point that I dismissed the idea of being attracted to her as anything more than a friend. I knew there was something different about the two of us when we were together but I stuffed it down and pushed it away along with my own femininity. For the first time, though, I felt feminine with someone and also felt beautiful.
I thought it was a fluke.
And then I met a few more like my drummer friend along the way and gradually, over a process of years, I noticed two things:
one, I was really, really attracted to these unconventional, masculine, butchy women and
two, I felt safe to be feminine in their presence. This second point was key for me. Butch women helped me to see femininity in a positive light. They helped create a space in which it was safe to explore that. Butches helped me see that feminine could be smart, could be fun, could be desired by someone without in the same breath being hated and denigrated by that very same someone. They helped me see it was okay and helped break down some of the ugliness and misogyny surrounding it which had attached itself to it via heteronormative society. Frankly, I never would have claimed femme as mine if it weren't for those who claimed butch as their own.
I really relate to what honeybarbara and others have said about it feeling emotionally and physically safe to be feminine around a butch. That's something that I don't think more masculine/butch people quite fully
get. It's not always safe or desirable or easy to be feminine. Frankly, it takes just as much courage and fortitude and thick skin to present as an overtly feminine woman as it does to present as a masculine one. There's a lot of shaming and baggage and a huge culturally prescriptive narrative that goes along with that and sometimes against the din of all that messaging it's hard to separate the "I am's" from the "therefore I should's." Even with that backdrop, though, it feels safe to be a feminine woman around a butch when it really doesn't feel safe in any other place. The energy between us is quiet and it's gentle and there's a kind of reverence there that I haven't found anywhere else.
And it feels like finally being able to let down the armour. Sometimes it feels like I've had the armour on for so long that I'm surprised myself by what I find underneath of it.
The ability to be feminine and be seen for it, to be appreciated or, perhaps, even loved for it, and not have to couch it or qualify it, be sheepish or self-deprecating about it, that to me is what it means to claim femme. It's still a process for me and in many ways, I feel like I'm playing catch up with other women... but at least I'm finally here.
I knew I was femme when I met my first butch. It just took me years to find the words and a lifetime to finally say it.