Changing last names

[Martina]

Originally Posted by honeybarbara

What makes me irked is people not aknowledging what they are investing in, denying it and then saying it's a traditional butch-femme ritual "dance" and so there and we all get to act like best suits us, we should be proud.

that, to me, is like sand paper. And I know where that issue of *mine* comes from. It's the assumption that heterosexual norms are what I'm *supposed* to be doing and *that* is called the true "butch-femme" dance. And I'm bastardising it.

When I was coming up, at the very beginning when I heard about and was exposed to the butch-femme dynamic, it wasn't about gender roles or norms. Also, while I am not butch and can't say what privately went on among butches, there didn't seem to be a lot of competition around who was more masculine. Same with femmes re femininity. There was competition around who was more good looking and who had a partner and whose partner was happy or straying. That sort of thing.

Butches would posture, but it was in the service of impressing a girl. It wasn't an identity thing. When I was coming up, a butch was cool if she 1) had a girl who was crazy about her and 2) had a reputation for being a really good lover (therefore was popular among femmes). It was sometimes very Rico Suave -- I put a spell on women -- that kind of thing. Femmes would roll their eyes, but lick their lips.

Being known for being able to please a woman -- that was the rep butches sought after. That was almost the core of butch identity. If you asked someone what made her butch, after being surprised at the question, I bet most of the time she would have answered because she could make a woman come back for more -- beg for more. That kind of thing. There was a lot of arrogance and trash talk about that. Very little about markers of masculine gender presentation.

The dance was more about sex than it was about gender. I don't think it's just because gender roles were a given or because people lacked the language to talk about it back then.

Our history is not well-documented, and we project our current preoccupations onto the past without much thought. But I recall. I was not femme when I met some of these women. Just a baby dyke. But I recall.

From the stories I heard, there wasn't a lot of policing of gender or how people ran their relationships. Everyone struggled, and everyone was at risk to one extent or another.

That incredible self-righteousness and tendency toward intense self-examination -- that came with my generation of dykes. I think that older folks had enough serious economic and physical threats to their well-being that they didn't look for silly reasons to exclude.