About Butches Q & A

[Skittlesluver]

Originally Posted by CherylNYC

Great thread, ALH. I have two questions for the butches. Several of the previous butch posters mentioned feeling somehow inadequate. It sounds as if many butches feel like there's a standard that defines what it means to be butch, and they feel they don't live up to it.

I certainly have those feelings as a femme. I can clean up and dress up pretty well, but my everyday look, as well as my passions and work life, are not at all congruent with feminine standards of dress and behaviour. Feminine standards are broadcast from every billboard. We all know what they are, and I know that in many ways I don't fit them. Most of the time I don't give a rat's ass, and as a feminist I applaud myself for breaking stereotypes on a daily basis. BUT, in my less confident moments I can still be made to feel insecure in my femme ID. Every movie, every commercial and every magazine holds up some impossible ideal of what a feminine woman is supposed to look/act/be like. I know it's a bunch of photoshopped crap designed to sell us products we don't need, but some of it sinks in anyway. Even for me.

There are no TV ads that tell us how a butch is supposed to look and behave, (Thank the Goddess!). So where does the butch standard come from, and how does it happen that butches feel like they are inadequate to it? I'm guessing that even for the most feminist butch, some of that standard is probably based upon expectations of how a man should act. I hope there's a lot more to it than that. Do/did you have role models? Was/is there someone in your life who told/tells you that you aren't butch enough? (I confess to a very unfeminine urge to kick the ass of anyone who would do that, by the way.)

My second question is a related pet peeve. I have a feminist outlook born in the 1970s. Back then all the smart, feminist girls paid their own way on a date. What happened? How on earth has it become expected that the butch pays for the date? It makes no sense to me. Who would have imagined that I would have to re-establish those ground rules as a middle aged woman dating butch women? Is there a reasonable explanation? Please help me out with this.

As a butch, my personal opinion on your first question is that there is so much more to being a butch than dressing or acting a certain way..its a state of mind if you will. I had no role model growing up as a butch. I knew I liked girls and not boys. I knew that I got along great with boys and they considered me "one of the guys". I played touch football, climbed fences, got dirty and even got kissed by a girl who thought I was a boy lol I think it's an all around persona one embodies and its definitely different with every butch. It's very open and vast..the spectrum of it. Maybe I am more butch to someone (in their opinion) than to someone else. It's all personal perception of an individual.

As for the second question, I think most butches want to be chivalrous or gentlemen by treating their femme like a true lady..which would include paying for their meal, opening the door, pulling out their chair etc. Once again, it's a personal choice. I have no problem paying for dinner or going dutch. Compromise seems to be of the norm these days..and rightfully so with the feminine movement having advanced so far and pushing the boundaries each day.