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By: JENNIFER VANASCO
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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 lesbians welcome 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 by how butch-femme couples dominate 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?
Let’s face it: 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 among lesbians are our current taste-makers; where they go, so go we all.
Femmes, I’m sure, will come back into fashion some day. But until they do, I wonder if we will continue to make room for all the ways we express gender.
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