Butch women equals Male, How Original!

From an unpublished comment made here yesterday by a 21 y/o girl.


Butches are men because they "look" like men and therefore cannot be feminist...lol WOW! Did you think that one up all by yourself or did you revert to the same old tired shit spouted by white straight middle class "feminist" from 45 years ago used to dismiss Butch women from the movement? I'm curious, do tell...

Butch women LOOK like butch women BECAUSE we're Butch women. We do not "attempt" to look "tough", thats your hetero patriarchal goggles at work, similar to those rose coloured one's you're wearing underneath, only worse. Butch women are the greatest threat to patriarchy, but I wouldnt expect a girl like yourself whose lips seem securely and tightly wrapped around patriarchays stale cock to understand that.

It is no coincidence that Butch women remain invisible, invisible to each other and invisible to other women. Our very nature is irrefutably more radical than any feminist movement that has ever existed and in all likelihood will ever exist. Our mere existence is an affront to patriarchy and its misogynistic tactics used to control women and girls like yourself. Our natures cannot be subsumed within the "feminine" construct, anymore than can our natures be consumed by the "masculine" construct. Butch women truly are the ONLY women born cage free, and of only a small number of women who lives continue prospering despite the patriarchal difficulties sans cage.

Now if that isnt seditious my dear, nothing is!

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Butch Need and the Construction/Destruction of Butch Identity

I'm not a boy. But I'm in boy space. I navigate boyhood while being a girl. I learn the boy ropes. Boy rules are applied to me. I find myself partly confused, and partly proud by this application. I don't remember filling a boy app. out though, but surely I must have. I forgot is all. I have no girl friends, only boy friends, of them it is a constant sizing up; him sizing me up, me him, him him. "Do you want to wrestle" a boy asks? "Ok" I answer. I take him down quickly. I now understand the game, I'm three years old. "Wrestling" is fighting, without fighting. "Wrestling" tells us both who is stronger, it tells other boys too. If Paris is the toughest boy in 3rd grade and I beat Paris wrestling? I beat Paris, but I'm not a boy. There will be a long line of boys I will wrestle in my youth, I will beat them all, a true Olympian only without the gold or glory.

I also learn from my boy-girlhood that if hurt I cant cry, REAL boys don't cry. I'm not a real boy anyways, I'm a girl, so I cant even afford to wince. Not even while jumping a ramp 5 cement bricks high (the record) and landing on my head sliding onto the gravel road I live on. I didn't cry. Not even while my friend is taking his school ruler (a trick I discovered) to scrape the gravel from underneath the skin in my back and shoulder where it had caught. I still have the scar on my right shoulder.
Fourth, fifth and six grade I have to catch the bus from the elementary school. The winters my best friend and I leave early to catch the bus so we have time to play King of the Mountain. The pile of snow is as tall as the school and as we approach littered with a few dozen boys. We're a team. We take the mountain over right off, only he and I on top, we defend the mountain till the bus comes. We do this all winter, some boys hate us, but they're only peasants, we're Kings! I learn in school only boys are Kings, I'm confused again.

There is a subtle shift between the boys and the girls in about grade 6, something is changing. Boys are noticing girls and girls are noticing boys and boys want girls to notice them. I want girls to notice me too, but they don't. Girl/boy games begin being played, I promptly learn this is a game in which I can only be a lonely spectator, I watch from the sidelines till tenth grade. I'm noticed and I know I'm noticed, I like it, it feels so fucking good, but so fucking scary. She's a cheerleader, I start going to all the football games. She finds me at halftimes, I walk her home from the games other times. She smells sooo good. I find out her perfume (wild musk), I buy a small bottle at the drugstore so I can smell her even when she's not around. I realize my best friend likes her too. He doesnt say, but I know. He tells me I'm hanging out with her too much, I think not enough, every second of every day wouldnt be enough. I realize he's jealous.

One day after football, my friend and I are tossing the ball around, practicing plays, talking. He brings her up in the conversation. He tells me some negative stories he has heard about her the previous year, before we knew her. I don't believe him, then or now. She was a nice girl, but I don't say that. I just listen. As we're throwing the football back and forth to each other, he builds a case against her to me. I'm still just listening. He says "this is what you need to do...." I dont wanna do what he proposes. She'll get hurt. I hurt her, she says she "hates" me. I hate me. I tell myself it was for the greater good of my friendship with my best friend, I know it was really because I was afraid. Too afraid to let her get close me and too young to know vulnerability doesnt equal weakness. Something I still have to remind myself from time to time.

The next year, another cheerleader, another mutual crush, only without the strength of emotion I feel for the first, but a similar situation does ensue. She's in my biology 102 class, I flunked biology 101 the previous year. My nickname at home is "no-good-ignorant-kid", to which I usually respond with a smart alec "I'm not ignorant", I dont deny not being "no good". Sometimes though just to be sure I'm not really ignorant, I have to test myself. So I take the more difficult class than the one I flunked. I apply myself, I'm acing the class, I'm not ignorant. She knows a mutual friend who sits next to me, so she starts sitting with us. I help her from time to time with her homework and tests. She calls me at home sometimes, she calls my best friend at home too. We're surprised when we find out she's calling us both. She invites me to some of her away games, I go. My friend starts talking about her a lot, he's never talked about any girl this much. He really likes her. He's 16 and has never had a girlfriend. I think he wants her for his first. An opportunity arises during a basketball game which I know will cause her to dislike me. I cause her to dislike me, she stops talking to me and sits somewhere else in biology class. My friend and her date for most of 11th grade.

The year after that, again another cheerleader. I have her in one class. Her brother starts playing football with the group of kids I play with. He tells me "my sister talks about you all the time". I ask what she says about me, he's faithful to her and says "only good things", then laughs. Hmmm. She must like me I think. She's thin with short black hair, cute as well as cocky. Being shy myself, cocky is good. I'm not doing well in the class of mine that she is also in. She makes me copy her homework so I'll pass. I could really like her. I do really like her. She's nice and makes mention often to me about how "tough" I am. She says "tough" like she's impressed. She says "tough" and I feel heat in my pants. I dont know what any of it means and wont for years to come. I think she knows I have a bad home life, she alludes to it. I say little and feel ashamed. She's slowly trying to get close to me, and I can feel it. But my shame is greater than my need. I quit school half-way through the second semester. I never see her again, nor do I make an attempt to.

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Stone Butch Blues-Stone Butch Shame

Along with the male-centric, gender fluid, transgender, genderqueer, up is down, down is up, right is left, left is right blanket queer theory has draped over our Femme/Butch community, two works of FICTION were ushered in (Judith Butler's Gender Trouble-1990 and Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues-1993) which have devastated the Femme/Butch landscape making it unrecognizable to older generations of Femmes and Butches as well as littered our landscape with minefields for current and unless something drastically changes, future Femmes and Butches.

The number of shattered lives these two books have produced is inestimable. But among Butch and butch persuasioned women, Leslie Feinberg has been the Enola Gay and her Stone Butch Blues the "little boy" dropped onto our Femme/Butch community eerily meting out a similar devastation, destruction and vaporization of Butch women's lives!

Due to an unchanging hetero-patriarchal skyline streaked with strict gender roles, long after the sun falls from on high revealing the stars that lie beyond, Butch women remain invisible. Despite the blatant and often times violent homophobic reaction to the "queenie" man, he has been visible from the dawn of film. Behind little Mary Pickford in the days of silent film, there he stand or sits with legs crossed just so and today we cannot flip on our TV sets without seeing him hosting his own home repair show or starring in a major film, where the Butch woman has yet to make a single appearance.

Patriarchy may not be crazy about gay-less-than-macho men, but he tolerates them because in the eyes of patriarchy he holds no threat. He is no threat because he is slotted into the same misogynistic category as women. The Butch however is greatly feared by patriarchy! Through the blur of his own gender constructs patriarchy slots Butch women in the category just this side of themselves and so she remains visibly invisible yet invisibly a threat. Butch women are the greatest threat to men!

Butch women like the general lesbian do not desire men, do not need men, but unlike the general lesbian she cannot be twisted to fit into his vile sexual fantasies. If she is however, due to the post patriarchy has slotted her (just this side of male) hetero-patriarchy is thrown into a tizzy! Hetero-patriarchy fears an attraction to the Butch woman because if he can be sexually stimulated by her and her "manliness" then he could equally find himself attracted to an "womanly" man. Insinuating that maybe his "compulsory heterosexualism" may not be so compulsory and the world will go up in flames and he with it!

All this to say why Butch women were and remain invisible. And what does any of this have to do with "stone butch"? Or Stone Butch Blues? EVERYTHING! Because of the why and where patriarchy has slotted Butch women, Butch women have been conditioned, cultivated and naturalized to slot themselves in with males! This misidentification produces a dysfunction varying in degree affecting the intimacy and sexuality of most Butch women. In the past both issues usually got ironed out with a bit of maturity, loving partners and through finding a like community, all of which aided in Butch women learning to love and embrace themselves AS women. But since the dawn of queer theory (early 90's) and its regeneration of strict gender roles, specifically its flood of male-centrism into the lesbian community, what used to be an understandable temporary aberration in Butch sexuality has now become the lifestyle identity we know as "stone butch".

This "lifestyle identity" has largely been born out the fictive novel "stone butch blues" delivered up from the splayed mind of Leslie Feinberg who has admitted to the destruction of some of her own visible femaleness through the use of drugs and cosmetic body mutilation due to her over identification with males. While the novel is fictive I suspect the shame the speaker feels is based in the authors own very real shame and sexual dysfunction.

For those unfamiliar with "stone butch", it is a term that has broad meaning for lesbian sexual behavior/dysfunction not just limited to Butch women. But due to the word "butch" in "stone butch" it is most often associated with Butch women, and my use of it here is in strict association with Butch women. Because Butch girls grow up with a certain division from their female bodies due to Butch invisibility and their identification with the overly visible male, many Butch women feel ashamed and uncomfortable using the parts of their bodies patriarchy has specifically designated FEMALE (breast/pussy) while having sex. This trouble can result in a myriad of ways Butch women experience sexual dysfunction. Some Butch women freak out if their breast are touched but are fine with their clits being touched. Some may freak over any kind of penetrative sex. Some may be okay with a woman going down on them but be afraid of being fingered. Some cannot deal with either their breast or pussy being stimulated and only make love to their partners. There may be a variety of ways to be "stone", but the one constant that flows through all "stone" relationships is the emotional "stoneness" made concrete through a lack of intimacy.

What the novel Stone Butch Blues has done is to give legitimacy to sexual and emotional dysfunction by romantically blurring these issues into a full fledged identity(rather than the identity crisis that it is)! This novel and "identity" gave rise to the nonsensical notions that Butch women ONLY "give" during sex and receive all their pleasure from giving alone and so were a Butch to receive (enjoying the bodies they were born with) they would be blacklisted as not "real" Butches by both Butches and Femmes alike.

The romanticism attached to "stone butch" sexual behavior is by no means an accident, it is a deliberate "look here not there" ploy used to deceive both the Butch herself and those around her. It is a misleading tool devised to mask the sexual dysfunction and shame that surrounds that dysfunction with a sense of "nature", a sense of "I was born this way". So rather than deal with the issues that created the sexual dysfunction and body dysphoria the Butch can merely play it off by saying "me? oh I'm just a stone butch", in truth the "stone butch identity" isn't an identity at all but a copying mechanism.

"Stone Butch" allows women to look no further, but in looking no further Butch women are being shamed and robbed from experiencing the very bodies their mother's wombs created! And it is through experiencing our bodies with another that we develop intimacy, intimacy with our partners but also an intimacy with ourselves. And that's not to say that because Butch women are born with a vagina they are meant to have their vagina's "fucked" in some hetero-patriarchal manner. It is to say that having a vagina and experiencing the natural pleasures of a vagina in no way invalidates the butchness of a Butch woman. But not experiencing all the pleasure our female bodies provide because of a shame in being women, needs to stop. And covering over that shame with a copying mechanism doubling as an identity only aids in continuing the shame Butch women feel.

Disguising systemic gender constructs created by hetero-patriarchy with a little pancake make up and clown shoes is what is at the heart of queer theory and it is queer theory who ghost penned Stone Butch Blues along side Feinberg . But when the curtain closes, the crowd goes home and the make up and clown shoes come off, shame remains staring back from the mirror.

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