18 responses so far ↓

• 1 G // Nov 12, 2008 at 12:32 pm

  this was one of my favorite (and one of the most painful) pics.

• 2 xJane // Nov 12, 2008 at 2:51 pm

  that is a fantastic shot—I just went through an internal monologue (strangely, one not posted to my twitterstream /shameless self promotion) about the use of the word “segregated”.

  “It should be ‘separated’, the legal term for not-divorce. Or ‘divorced’. Or…no, ‘segregated’ fits the bill perfectly. Unfortunately.”

• 3 Chandelle // Nov 12, 2008 at 4:04 pm

  Wish I could be there, John, but we are all standing together in spirit.

• 4 Craig // Nov 12, 2008 at 6:23 pm

  I can’t believe how many protests are going on in CA. I’m really glad so many others are as outraged as I am.

  For those who live here in SLC, there’s another protest this Saturday 15. Nov in Salt Lake City at the City/County Building on 400 S and State Street at 11:30 AM.

  The smiling faces are a weird juxtaposition with the message on the t-shirts.

• 5 Nathan // Nov 12, 2008 at 6:45 pm

  Not totally unrelated to the picture in the post (while inspired by sincere curiosity)…

  Maybe someone can shed some light on why lesbians tend to mimic the traditional masculine appearance when they are attracted to women. Wouldn’t you think they would try to attract women by being hyper feminized?

  What is the source of throwing off traditional gender traits along with traditional gender attraction?

  I guess what I am getting at is, I think they mimic masculine traits because deep down they are attracted to men, though I don’t think the inverse is true for gay men.

• 6 Chandelle // Nov 12, 2008 at 8:01 pm

  Wha…? Nathan? Are you serious?

  First of all, these two women are not really examples of a very “butch” look. The woman on the right dyes and arranges her hair deliberately, plucks her eyebrows and wears makeup. The woman on the left has a pretty standard “pixie” haircut seen across a whole spectrum of women regardless of their sexual partners.

  Secondly, queer women of all stripes are just like straight women of all stripes. In my experience, the polar opposites of femme and butch are not as common as women who happen to appear somewhere more neutral-to-feminine (if you define feminine as dressing in women’s clothing, wearing makeup, perhaps dying one’s hair, walking like a woman, and so on), just like straight women. There are a lot of straight women who appear quite masculine in their dress and manner.

  Third, I would like to ask what you mean by “traditional gender traits.” You seem to be referring entirely to appearance with this comment. Do you mean powdered wigs and stockings? Do you mean the kilt, which is basically a not-all-that-glorified skirt? How about black kohl eyeliner? How about perfume – excuse me, cologne?

  And why would women be automatically attracted to hyper-feminized women? Are YOU attracted to hyper-feminized women? Most women are not attracted to hyper-”masculinized” men, who tend to be, ya know, assholes. I don’t think a lot of people are attracted to hyper- anything. I think most people are looking for something sort of middle-of-the-road, which is what most queer and straight people are like.

  Queer women are not attracted to femininity. They are attracted to women. Who come in all sorts of flavors.

  Here is my theory. I’ve become more aware of my queerness during my marriage to a man. I have become progressively less concerned about fitting in with superficial norms partitioned off for my SEX as my culture has attempted to indoctrinate me into a GENDER. I have stopped shaving, plucking my eyebrows, wearing makeup or dying my hair. I wear what’s comfortable and I don’t care if it makes me look shiny or sexy. I’ve shaved my head and since then kept my hair very short, because I just don’t want to bother with it. IT’S NOT IMPORTANT.

  Of course, I maintain excellent hygiene and I still have my own ministrations, like wearing natural scents and doing funky things with my short hair. But in the process of eschewing these cultural norms for beauty, my bodily attention has shifted away from the surface to what’s underneath. I care a great deal about what I eat and what I do with my body. I’ve come to have great respect for my body’s ABILITY and not for its APPEARANCE. My body has carried two children and birthed both independently of instruments or drugs. I take a man into my body and I bring him pleasure. I have taught this man how to treat my body to bring me similar pleasure. My body carries me even when I am tired and in pain. My body runs like a well-oiled machine when I care for it from within, and it has made less and less sense to me that showing care for it should include pasting fake colors on it that are full of dangerous chemicals because of some incorrect notion of how intrinsically ugly my skin is on its own, or harming my body through starvation for some incorrect notion of the appropriateness of being thin. (Fitness is one thing, skinniness is another.) As I’ve released these bonds, these boundaries of acceptance and propriety, I’ve become more confident, which has made me more sexy to my lover. I’ve felt free of constraints that previously prevented me from knowing more about who I was inside and what I should be doing outside. This is an ongoing process and like most women, I still harbor deep insecurities about the fact that I will never be a thin or pretty person, and by default, the fear that I will never be “good enough” because my appearance won’t allow it.

  Nathan, you seem to define women appearing “masculine” by an absence of makeup, fancy (and most likely uncomfortable or complicated) hair or dress, or signs of the aforementioned painful and unnecessary processes. So my theory, Nathan, is that perhaps some queer women appear more, as you say it, “masculine” because in their lives with other women they don’t need to impress them with such shallow depreciation. Queer women accept other women as-is because that stuff, all that dieting and shaving and painful ministration, is utterly and completely unnecessary to being really known and loved by someone. In fact, these actions may present an obstacle to such intimacy for some people. My male partner has never appreciated me more since I dropped most of that “stuff.” Previously, it saddened him that I would do these things in submission to cultural attitudes about the insufficiency of women’s bodies. Perhaps this is something that queer women know because men know it, too, by and large, and when women aren’t competing with other women for men, all of that “stuff” becomes just that – stuff, easily cast aside.

• 7 Chandelle // Nov 12, 2008 at 8:02 pm

  And…wow. That was pretty much a post in itself. Obviously an issue I feel passionate about. Sorry for that, John and xJane!

• 8 Chandelle // Nov 12, 2008 at 8:06 pm

  I should also say, however, that nothing I said was a judgment on women who like to wear makeup or do their hair or wear fancy clothing. As a feminist I affirm every woman’s right to choose how she dresses and what she does with her body. This is only my experience and my theory based on that experience.

• 9 John // Nov 12, 2008 at 8:52 pm

  Chandelle, thanks for you passionate input! No need to apologize!

  Nathan, the vast majority of the gay women and men I know would be difficult to distinguish from a crowd. This is not to say that some lesbians don’t deliberately portray themselves as more “masculine” (especially in the mid-20th century working class American lesbian scene, when butch-femme pairings were the norm), but things are definitely much more diverse today. I think that gays are more conscious of the fluidity of gender norms and stereotypes and are more willing to twist or subvert them. (I also find gender stereotypes to be harmful and try to work the boundaries myself.)

  I do want to focus on your comment that “I think they mimic masculine traits because deep down they are attracted to men.” This seems insensitive, to question the sincerity and sexuality of an entire group of people based solely on a broad (and overapplied) generalization about appearance. That said, I believe that you mean well and are genuinely curious; but this comment is difficult to distinguish from more trollish ones.

• 10 xJane // Nov 13, 2008 at 8:49 am

  Nathan, don’t you mean that they mimic “masculine traits” because they want to attract women who are attracted to men? That seems to be the only reason to “mimic” being a man—otherwise, all women who dressed like women would be lesbians, right?

  I think the main problem with your argument is that you assume a gender dichotomy: masculine/feminine; attraction to either male or female. Personally, I’ve discovered that I’m a geekosexual and managed to be attracted to everyone I worked with when I worked at Apple (regardless of gender, although definitely regardful of ability to use a computer). I don’t like makeup and, thankfully, neither does my husband. Does that make me a masculine mimic? What about the wearing of pants (which many conservative Christians think is “wearing the clothes of a man”)?

• 11 nathan // Nov 13, 2008 at 11:11 am

  For now, my comments are 100% in regards to physical appearance.

  Traditional dress = modern/post-modern American commonly accepted gender appearance, i.e., longer hair, some form of makeup, clothes that tend toward more corporeally-enhancing features—men are more visually stimulated, right?, different shoes (less laces?), skirts/dresses/etc. I think that everyone in America can tell you how to look more or less like a man or a woman.

  Yeah, yeah, I know Egyptian men wore makeup and American revolutionaries had ponytails, and Plato wore a toga/dresse. Not applicable here—different times and locations. I am not concerned about lesbians in other times/places.

  I think that you have to look at the big picture here. Yes, I know lots of women don’t wear makeup (my wife often doesn’t, my sister-in-law never does, etc.), and they wear pants, etc. I am not crazy—I know that dress standards are becoming more confluent. What I am interested in is nailing down the elusive practice of 1) many lesbians looking less feminine than the general public, and 2) some lesbians going WAY OUT OF THEIR WAY to purposefully make themselves look more like men than women.

  Faced with lesbians saying they are physically attracted to women, why don’t they make an effort to look like women? Instead, many lesbians go out of their way to look like men. It seems that lesbianism necessitates undermining (the) societal norms (of gender representation). If that is the case, shouldn’t we be concerned with that? Don’t we have a pretty good society? (yeah, I know it has some flaws…) If a selected behavior fosters subversion, who draws the line, and where?

  Chandelle: “Queer women are not attracted to femininity. They are attracted to women. Who come in all sorts of flavors.”

  I don’t know what lesbians think of this statement, but it seems to counter-intuitively support an anti-lesbian worldview. Isn’t the whole point of being a lesbian that you are attracted TO femininity (the inherent characteristics that make women different than men), not women (the individuals that one might meet in the world). If lesbians are attracted to individuals, than couldn’t they be attracted to individual males? Isn’t that bisexualism?

  John: “This seems insensitive, to question the sincerity and sexuality of an entire group of people based solely on a broad (and overapplied) generalization about appearance.”

  I don’t know if it is a broad generalization. Rather, I didn’t bring up other reasons that I think support the idea that lesbians don’t exist. Briefly: 1) the correlation between early childhood sexual abuse (by men) and lesbianism, 2) the chic pop culture trend toward lipstick lesbians (read: girls that want boys to think that their kissing another girl is ‘hot’), 3) the correlation between dating/relationship disenfranchisement and lesbianism, 4) the degree that lesbians practice bisexuality, 5) the degree that a lesbian’s attractiveness influences opposite-gender attention (see #3 above), 6) the distinct female sex drive (women more likely to live as companions with less emphasis on sex), and finally, 6) the aforementioned lesbian ‘presentation’ habits (cologne, ball caps, no shaving, boy clothes, hair, makeup, etc).

  I think that the lesbian experience is DRASTICALLY different than the gay male experience and I think that (as a general rule) it is not rooted in the same inherent and strong same-gender attraction as male homosexuals. Rather, it is a complex result of multiple layers of both positive and negative desire, experience, abuse, sexuality, frustration, femininity.

  In other words, I don’t think that lesbians are born, I think they are created.

• 12 John // Nov 13, 2008 at 12:44 pm

  Nathan said:

  It seems that lesbianism necessitates undermining (the) societal norms (of gender representation). If that is the case, shouldn’t we be concerned with that? Don’t we have a pretty good society?

  You’re talking to the wrong crowd. This is a feminist blog. Both xJane and I are pretty critical of how gender is defined, portrayed, dichotomized and in the imbalance in gender relationships.

  I think that the lesbian experience is DRASTICALLY different than the gay male experience and I think that (as a general rule) it is not rooted in the same inherent and strong same-gender attraction as male homosexuals. Rather, it is a complex result of multiple layers of both positive and negative desire, experience, abuse, sexuality, frustration, femininity.

  I agree with the complexity, but I disagree with you when you make the broad claim that there are no biological lesbians. I would argue in part that there is a range of sexuality on between women that is explicitly suppressed by society between men. My experience is that men tend to be placed into binaries in terms of expressing male-male affection: there are acceptable straight forms of expression; if you fall outside of these boundaries, you are labeled gay. I think that without these powerful social constraints and hang-ups, we would see a wider range of acceptable sexuality and intimacy between men (social standards are fluid: for example, it was socially acceptable for men in 19th century US to sleep together in the same beds and hold each other affectionately).

• 13 xJane // Nov 13, 2008 at 1:26 pm

  nathan, you raise some interesting issues. I agree with you that “lesbianism necessitates undermining (the) societal norms (of gender representation)” although I would argue that lesbianism is in no way the only thing that necessitates this. I also think that undermining social gender is a very good thing (speaking as a het-identifying woman who has been attracted to women who does not wish to have children and sports short hair). I do not fit the social gender norm of “female” and I’m very glad about that.

  I presume that you are a heterosexual male; if that is the case, are you attracted to femininity or a particular person? I have noted above that I am much more attracted to someone’s personality than their physical appearance. Sure, I’ve had my head turned by a well-sculpted specimen, but often, as soon as I interact with such a person, I realize that I’m not attracted to the personality. I love my husband’s body (often), but I fell in love with his personality, not his penis.

  The world-view that indicates that lesbian women somehow are not “really” sexual beings because they happen to be women underscores the fact that even het women are not socially allowed to be sexual except within the confines of het relationships and your “#2″ above.

  If gay men are born, not created (as lesbians are by “early childhood abuse”), why do gay men wear pink, a (social-) traditionally female color, or speak with a higher voice? Is it just because all men are obsessed with sex (and women don’t care about sex) that gay men can exist but lesbians cannot?

  I have often been mistaken for a lesbian (usually by lesbians) because I live my life for myself and don’t conform to gender norms. I find this to be a good thing and take it as a complement. Does this mean that I was sexually abused as a child? Or that I simply don’t buy into the ladies-should-stay-at-home,-embroider-and-have-children view of gender?

  (belated dittos to John)

• 14 JohnW // Nov 14, 2008 at 12:26 am

  nathan, I think that you have an assumption that is incorrect: lesbians tend to dress more gender neutral or masculine.

  While it might be the case that some lesbians do react against or don’t feel as constrained by traditional gender appearances, I think the much better assumption is that most lesbians one meets are not able to be visually distinguished from their straight peers.

  As for all of your assumptions which you think support the idea that lesbians are “made” not born, I’m … Well, I’m deciding not to feed the troll. Too late.

• 15 Craig // Nov 16, 2008 at 4:15 pm

  I am very troubled by the apparent lesbophobia Nathan seems to be evidencing.

  Why do you think that lesbianisn is any less of a combination of genetics and biology than male homosexuality?

  Why does it even matter?

  What are the bases for these assumptions and conjectures?
  I would specifically like to know about the supposed ” correlation between early childhood sexual abuse (by men) and lesbianism”, and why you think that correlation implies causation, as we all know, the decreasing number of pirates in the world is the cause of global warming…

• 16 xJane // Nov 17, 2008 at 4:00 am

  yarr, Craig, I be doin’ me part, but wonders what place there be for lesbian pirates. Mayhap they’re the real cause…

• 17 Craig // Nov 17, 2008 at 10:54 am

  No doubt they’re the real cause. I mean , every gay man’s a pirate already, so it has to be the lesbians that aren’t doing their part.

• 18 xJane // Nov 17, 2008 at 4:12 pm

  ahahahaha! That reminds me of a bumpersticker I saw that said “Arrr”, which made me wonder if that meant the car (or the driver) was a trunk pirate…

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