Akiva and Rachel talk exiting the “lesbian sameness doctrine” — one of our key points of departure from much of radical feminist discourse — and how this immediately opens your life to better sex
Just a comment. Not sure it's relevant. Perhaps it's for historical value.
I came out in the 70's. I don't really identify as a femme at this point in my life but I was in a butch femme relationship for decades.
In the old days ('70's) women tried for flannel shirts and jeans but a certain group, not a majority, always gravitated to the butch femme dynamic. It was a bit spicy. It was like a sexy classic car when everyone else was driving a VW Bug. The older generation of bar dykes were definitely in the butch femme pattern. It was a big part of the bar dyke scene.
The upshot is I think this is an authentic part of lesbian culture and one thing I like about this project is that it is about THAT. It's not new age crystals or masc4masc. It's old school.
That's not a bug, it's a feature. If people are not into it, you do you. It's cool. There is no reason for sameness, as I think Rachel has pointed out. There is pleasure and power to be had in connecting to your roots, and a different kind of pleasure and power to be had by doing something without those roots.
One thing that the oldster in me finds truly dreary is that so much of lesbian life is online. As a baby dyke I knew so many dykes, there was so much live action & culture & sports going on, and that is how I knew what lesbian culture was. I wonder if some of the arguing people do over terminology is that no one really has confidence in their lived experience because they don't have as much as used to be the case.
Love this. Especially the last line! It seems like some folks have a hard time believing our thing is real because they're not sure what their thing is. IMO lesbians have wandered far away from comfort with the dynamics that actually unfold between lesbians on our own terms, whose naming conventions aren't based on a gay male or other queer model. The queer world has convinced lesbians that not wanting to wear dresses or lipstick makes you "masc," and that's just another version of misogyny. Lesbians are living under this whole regime that encourages people to mistake themselves in the name of "gender presentation"/superficial internet identity crap.
Shit, my comment deleted lol. Here’s what i said —
This led to hours of discussion with my wife and i, together for 10 years and we are both butch without a transition history. our sex life isnt structureless lol. i respect your framing of butch never standing alone without femme — but i’d never myself call my relationship masc/masc because i only ever hear people use that word if they’re queer/trans. (I personally don’t describe myself as butch4____ anything because i do find it generally socially silly in the way you point out, but i do call myself butch). i thought it was interesting that in this episode and the previous episode (sbb review) there was quite a lot of discussion of butch/butch relationships, yet in your review you never mentioned the bit where Jess has a meltdown after learning 2 of her butch friends are together and needs to literally run away and think before she becomes accepting. It’s not a form of oppression and i genuinely don’t give a shit, but let’s be honest — disgust at 2 butch women together is present in lesbian culture. I’ve encountered it in real life personally not just in this book. i get the sense you’re quite sick of the “what aboutism” of people writing in about “butch4butch” and i have nothing but respect for that. What i’m having a hard time understanding is why your response to that is to muse at length about not being about to imagine what eroticism could arise between 2 genuinely butch women rather than to say “i don’t know, stop asking, let’s move on” or even to have a guest on who DOES know. lesbian women with this kind of life are out here, and we aren’t doing it just to be annoying or because we haven’t found butch/femme yet. I tried for quite a great many years to be femme and one of the big reasons for that was that i was always so into butches. Ultimately you talked quite a lot about butch/butch relationships while claiming you don’t want to talk about them and don’t know about them. Writing with love — the tone of this episode had me feeling you were casting those masculine women who’d love other masculine women as “queer chaos demons.” Some of us are lesbians who really support you and your project.
Well said. I feel uncomfortable with the discussion they’ve been having about this because they present it as a “hard truth” despite also admitting they don’t know anything about it and don’t want to talk about it. I have a lot of thoughts about the topic but why trust them to respect a different point of view when they have already discussed the topic in such bad faith? I appreciate your response because I’ve been at a loss and wanted to speak out but didn’t even know where to start. I know multiple people who have either expressed disagreement with them on this or completely stopped listening because of this.
Hi there, we appreciate your comment and welcome you here to describe your life experiences. The "what aboutism" that dialectical lesbian describes (excellent term) has been a key part of our experience, so we figured we should address where we diverge from aesthetic interpretations of butch. We're going to keep speaking from our perspective that partnership with femmes is constitutive of our own butch experiences (and the corollary we hold, that we have the right to believe femme lesbian desire is a pillar of butch existence), and if it's not speaking to you/isn't interesting to you, we want you to find content that does/is!
We explored the concept in depth simply because it's interesting to us and it affects us wherever (read: everywhere) that the aesthetic use of the term is framed as the same experience to ours. What we're aiming to put out there is that the experience we're having when we use "butch" is specific -- and if anyone has a special claim to historicity, it's us, not those who would claim we're identical to all masculine women. I hope we didn't say anything to invalidate (or cast as "chaos demons") people who consider themselves masculine and are just having the sex they want with a woman who is whatever degree of masculine or feminine she is. The chaos demons are the ones who insist they have the right to claim sameness with us (enforced sameness = chaos producing). We keep encountering the "whataboutism" and wanted to address it. Your comment (and mo's and dialectical lesbian's) are good faith contributions, and ours is also a good faith entry into a discussion about a claimed sameness that feels inaccurate to us. We appreciate the opportunity to create/have/entertain a forum.
Hey, after listening to the newest episode I think we just have a fundamentally different view. I use butch because it is a lesbian first term that describes me as a masculine homosexual female in the world. It is how people see me in the world, it is descriptive only. I fundamentally do not separate feminine and masculine female desire, I am concerned with the pleasure of my partner regardless of femininity or masculinity and those partners will only ever be female because I am a lesbian, which I define as a female exclusively attracted to females. I will never ever call myself a masc because it decenters the fact that I am a lesbian and I don’t believe in gender. People call me masculine because society tells them to, but really I just am living my life as a female and doing what I want to do. I use the language that describes my material reality within our society. I also agree with your relational definition within the historical context and I believe in butchfemme culture within the lesbian community and it’s specificity and I don’t think defining femme as “feminine female homosexual” and butch as “masculine female homosexual” as diminishing the relational dynamics within butchfemme couples. You claim that aesthetic is not relevant but then talk about your attraction to feminine women and then talk about how your partners like when you are bulky—seems like aesthetics to me unless “feminine” and “masculine” are being defined as a set of behavioral traits. I have been in butchfemme relationships and now I’m in a butchbutch one and I’m the same homosexual I have always been. No we don’t rub strapons together. No I don’t secretly want a man. Can’t believe I have to say this to fellow lesbians. Good luck with your podcast, your position is clear and I respect your right to your opinion.
I'm (Rachel) going to start by responding to what you may/may not have felt was a small-ish point (about bulkiness), but I think this whole thing is interesting and really core to the discussion! Our approach to bulkiness isn't to define it as a "proper" trait of butchness, but to rather describe the more curious and beautiful thing happening there, which is an affinity that may or may not emerge from femme desire due to its relation to those deeper "ideal forms" of caring/safety/security that cause femmes and butches to find each other. It's not bulkiness for every femme, but it might be, and one butch's peculiar bulkiness (since we are not all the same, and have a zillion ways of being masculine) might be the very thing that she was taught to hate about herself at a young age because it supposedly distanced her from other women, which butchfemme might have helped her make a beautiful sense out of (i.e., it's no longer distance; now it's tension). A butch might also cultivate or lean into elements of the physical that work for signaling her own butchfemme identity, but even that signal-function requires a femme actively reading them. In sum, observable/physical traits can serve that signal function, but no specific aspect must for any given butch; ergo, there's no physical thing you can point to and call "butch" (because butchness is, quite intimately, the femme's business).
And I did want to address the biggest point, which gets to the heart of what we're saying about the enforced sameness: my wife is definitely not cool with referring to all feminine female homosexuals as femmes; that erases her specificity, in her and my eyes. And referring to all masculine female homosexuals as butches erases mine, in our eyes. So either folks who are not butchfemme need to use "masculine" and "feminine" (which seems to me to make much more sense) in place of using these words that mean beautiful, specific, community-organizing things to people like we hosts, our partners, and our butchfemme friends, OR I need a new word for "butch" in the way that I live it and a new word for "femme" in the way that she lives it. But why should we be drowned out/crowded out of our own terms, which our lives and community and understanding of each other are enhanced by, instead of people just using masculine and feminine when they mean masculine and feminine?
You know what I mean? There's a "there" there. Butchfemme occupies a real place all to its own in the structure of existence. That's why we rely upon those words for describing what's happening in this one (cross-culturally present, really important) thing.
After thinking about this a lot, what i want to say is that different people using the same term doesn’t mean necessarily mean “sameness” is being enforced, and who has a connection to the history of a term doesn’t have to be a competition. I also feel this comment didn’t really address some of the more murky issues i brought up like the butch/butch couple in SBB, disgust towards masculine women together in the lesbian community, and you repeatedly saying you don’t know what butch4butch is but not asking anybody about it, just say it’s not real or not butch. Surely another piece of important history in lesbian culture is internal diversity of how different lesbians understand things. And really this is a pattern i’ve noticed on this pod before: sidestepping or denying things that don’t fit into your thesis.
I won’t claim i’m emotion free on this issue, so i’m gonna take a step back and talk to my older festival lesbian friends about their experiences and beliefs.
It still sounds like your definition of butch is aesthetic; could you clarify? We do have pretty solid theses, and think lesbians need more theses. We definitely don’t like Stone Butch Blues and don’t think it has anything valuable to offer us in terms of analysis — it's a morality play promoting queer/trans ideology. More soon, but wanted to ask about the aesthetic definition of butch first, so we can get a better sense of your stakes.
I’m going to be working on writing a bigger piece about this, but i wanted to say i think i already mentioned quite a few things that are not aesthetic. A butch to me is a masculine lesbian. Masculinity is not simply clothing and haircut, as you’ve mentioned on this podcast many times before, but includes mannerism, personality, presence, and sexuality. How we style ourselves is part of how we present ourselves to the world, so strangers recognize a butch easily by her choice of clothing assigned to men in her culture, and she is assumed to be a lesbian pretty much where ever she goes. I do not think acknowledging this is reducing butch to a costume or “aesthetic “. I’d like to ask how you define stone butch, and is it different than butch? If a butch with a dating history of femmes starts seeing another butch, does she cease to be a butch? was she never a butch? if you find out a butch receives penetration from her femme, do you stop seeing them as butch and femme?
For us, a masculine lesbian is a masculine lesbian. That's really where I think we can make sense of the disconnect. Our femme partners speak aloud our "butchness" to us, and live in partnership with it, as something much more specific to them than "masculinity." And when we call them "femme," we are referencing something much more specific than femininity. The specificity is what we believe merits its own space.
I think we're stuck on the sense that your definition is "aesthetic" because in our eyes, butchness is relational, like it has no proper definition that you can point to and say "that's butch" (as much as it's fun to speculate based on outward masculinity-in-relation-to-femininity, and yes, these are lovely drinking games). In the end, people who take up the word per our definition do so because they're living a specific experience, in which the terms "my butch" and "my femme" make sense and represent a singularity within an exchange. Between us, our femme partners are different people, so what makes us butch in their eyes is different between us, although those things are variations on a cross-historical theme of femme desire (which does have stability/structure/regularity, just like butch desire; sorry, patriarchy). Since for us what is "butch" or "femme" emerges from this living, breathing, real-time unfolding between the butch and femme, in order to "freeze" butchness without that dance happening (without a femme present), you'd have to define butchness as a certain set of observable traits or behaviors. Essentially, you'd have to be able to observe it from without, which for us is where the word "aesthetic" comes up. And yes, both of us hosts could be defined as masculine from afar, but that alone wouldn't make us butches. That's where we need and are open to an explanation -- how can two people "do" butchness towards each other? As you mentioned before, the word itself references femme identity, so what does "referencing femme identity" mean in the context of a masculine-masculine relationship? How could it be other than a set of traits that are frozen in time as observable from without, if there's no exchange between differences giving butchness its shape? Because this is our take, we truly don't understand why one would use the word "butch" when they mean "masculine," and it seems like logically, the only way to do that is to say that masculinity makes you butch (which you've said you support, so I guess this is coming together, or at least we can certainly see where the differences are stemming from). The words "butch" and "femme" are buoys for my wife and I and our butchfemme community, because of the specificity of the terms and the way our mutual use of them interpellates each of us; namely, because of the way in which they enable us to find each other and be together. They are words that mean specific things to us when we talk about and to each other and generally, relate. They are not synonyms for masculine and feminine.
We're also really not interested in taxonomizing people based on their life experiences. Both of us have tried all kinds of relationships, but when we found butchfemme, we became "butch" in relation to the femme we were with. That occurred for each of us at very different times in our lives, and is immaterial when it comes to who is or isn't butch. We don't care who is or isn't butch; we just want to protect our specificity from being synonymized with masculinity. What makes somebody a "butch" or a "femme" -- who knows those words aren't just synonyms for "masculine" and "feminine" -- is that they take up the term in the context of butchfemme identity and the specific interchange it entails on every single day and with every breath of our lives. We believe butch and femme are things people feel and live within butchfemme. For us to protect those words is to defend the reality of butchfemme as something specific, separate, and its own. Asking us to use the word "butch" for anything else is stripping it of its meaning when it comes out of our femme partners' mouths. The stakes are high. If one means "masculine," why not say "masculine"?
I really do need to take a step back, but i appreciate your interest in continuing the conversation. I hope we can pick it up another time, i have some thinking to do on my own.
it seems to me butch women together is simply an exception to the rule of butch/femme, and therefore still references femme identity. i see you only welcome butch as a word to describe those exclusively attracted to femmes. i respect your perspective but have a slightly different one.
your podcast content does speak to me. if the concept of 2 butch women together (or masculine as you’d like to call them) is interesting to you that’s cool, i wish you’d discuss it with a little more care because hearing a long discussion about how eroticism can’t arise between 2 butch women didn’t feel like interest but rather verging on disgust.
looks like a language conflict or a no true scotsman fallacy to me. i think it’s ok if a word has multiple meanings, it doesnt immediately go to postmodern nonsense.
+ my lesbian sex life is not in line with radical feminist doctrine of eschewing all gendered references
+ i am attracted to femmes
+ i seek push/pull in my sex life, which i find with femmes as well as with butches and with other kinds of women
+ queer social nightmare personal history
+ i have the much described “masculine energy” plus i wear clothes from the men’s section, therefore am immediately perceived as lesbian wherever i go except for times when i’m mistaken briefly for male
You all spoke a lot in earlier eps abt the importance of creating a new social reality, which was super inspiring to me!! What this ep and nearly half of the last one says to me is that you can’t possibly imagine a social reality of butch women who are not trans who are butch regardless of their partner. I also don’t completely understand the resistance to the idea of a butch aesthetic and the idea that if that is not present along side a femme it is not really butch? I have a hard time believing that butch women being with butch women is a-historical.
I also agree, you don’t need to talk about butch for butch if that isn’t an experience you’re interested in discussing. I’ve really enjoyed when you have spoken about the explicit butch femme experience!! The direction these last cpl eps has taken has been disappointing to me.
We replied below to CreekWren and it ended up kind of folding in our response to you. What do you think? Perhaps having our written thoughts on this would be easier to debate than the kind of stream of consciousness that results from a podcast, and we're working on that, but essentially, we use "butch" to reference the identity produced by/within/for/around(all prepositions) butch-femme (which we constantly have to assert is a real thing), so a woman being masculine does not make her butch in our eyes. But of course masculine women rule, and exist in many forms.
Well this was interesting. One think I haven’t heard clarity on is in your opinion what defines a “stone butch”?
I also found it strange that you are perplexed by the sexual relationship between 2 women who call themselves butch. Like you said yourselves, the piont of sex is orgasm and there are so many ways that 2 woman can achieve orgasm together.
Hi Carol! We've been nuts busy but I was able to parachute down here to make a couple of responses. I just restacked a comment response from above, with an explanation of "stone butch" appended; can you see that? In short, we're all about sex between all women -- we are just also interested in protecting the specific meanings of butch and femme as butchfemme people live them, and we are likewise resistant to any attempt to make "butch" synonymous with "masculine" or "femme" synonymous with "feminine." Those discursive moves invalidate butch and femme specificity. So essentially, it's a words game. We're not perplexed by the idea that two ostensibly masculine women can be together; we're just wondering why they would call that "butch."
I don’t believe you can strictly define butch as you are doing. The history doesn’t support your position . I don’t see how a butch woman who is into other butch women invalidates any lesbian.
And no, I don’t believe that being butch should and usually doesn’t have anything to do with the kind of sex we like.
The only strict definition we see on the internet is that a butch is a “masculine lesbian” (yours, Creek Wren’s, dialectical lesbian’s) -- or an analog of that definition, like that a butch is a woman who looks so lesbian (from her perceived masculinity) that she can’t hide it.
Conversely, like we’ve always said, we’re not interested in dictating what makes an individual woman butch. Even for us, it’s not singularly about the strap or about the thrust instinct, because we use the word as femmes use it for us, in a dyadic and reciprocal way. There are many ways that butchfemme dynamics manifest in relationships. Sometimes we speak about particular ways it manifests because they are highly taboo and in this social climate, lead to butches being told they are not women. It’s the raw data of butchfemme sexuality that makes us a special target for this.
We don’t want lesbians who identify as masculine for non-sexual reasons to feel anxiety about desiring to be penetrated! What we’re saying is that our femmes use “butch” to mean a lesbian who can have this specific relational experience with them. It means this specific thing when it comes out of the mouths of our femme partners. Using “butch” as a synonym for “masculine” not only pins it down with incredible precision – in contrast to our experience of “butch” emerging as a term of endearment in relationship with femmes – but also pins it down in the least compelling and least beautiful way it can be pinned down; as a synonym for something “gendery” instead of something authentically lesbian. It makes it mean nothing but “masculine.” It takes the lesbian specificity and specialness out of butchness and out of butchfemme and takes away the word that femmes who want butches like us can use to find us.
Side note: We are really starting to perceive that the anxiety people express in response to our words about our identities is freaking people out because they’re anxious about the sex they’re having. We are nothing but “pro” all the possible sex between women, so that’s a projection. Let it be shouted from the rooftops: Everyone, please have the sex you want! “Butch” is going to continue to mean something more relational and more lesbian-specific than “masculine” in our community.
Just a comment. Not sure it's relevant. Perhaps it's for historical value.
I came out in the 70's. I don't really identify as a femme at this point in my life but I was in a butch femme relationship for decades.
In the old days ('70's) women tried for flannel shirts and jeans but a certain group, not a majority, always gravitated to the butch femme dynamic. It was a bit spicy. It was like a sexy classic car when everyone else was driving a VW Bug. The older generation of bar dykes were definitely in the butch femme pattern. It was a big part of the bar dyke scene.
The upshot is I think this is an authentic part of lesbian culture and one thing I like about this project is that it is about THAT. It's not new age crystals or masc4masc. It's old school.
That's not a bug, it's a feature. If people are not into it, you do you. It's cool. There is no reason for sameness, as I think Rachel has pointed out. There is pleasure and power to be had in connecting to your roots, and a different kind of pleasure and power to be had by doing something without those roots.
One thing that the oldster in me finds truly dreary is that so much of lesbian life is online. As a baby dyke I knew so many dykes, there was so much live action & culture & sports going on, and that is how I knew what lesbian culture was. I wonder if some of the arguing people do over terminology is that no one really has confidence in their lived experience because they don't have as much as used to be the case.
Love this. Especially the last line! It seems like some folks have a hard time believing our thing is real because they're not sure what their thing is. IMO lesbians have wandered far away from comfort with the dynamics that actually unfold between lesbians on our own terms, whose naming conventions aren't based on a gay male or other queer model. The queer world has convinced lesbians that not wanting to wear dresses or lipstick makes you "masc," and that's just another version of misogyny. Lesbians are living under this whole regime that encourages people to mistake themselves in the name of "gender presentation"/superficial internet identity crap.
Shit, my comment deleted lol. Here’s what i said —
This led to hours of discussion with my wife and i, together for 10 years and we are both butch without a transition history. our sex life isnt structureless lol. i respect your framing of butch never standing alone without femme — but i’d never myself call my relationship masc/masc because i only ever hear people use that word if they’re queer/trans. (I personally don’t describe myself as butch4____ anything because i do find it generally socially silly in the way you point out, but i do call myself butch). i thought it was interesting that in this episode and the previous episode (sbb review) there was quite a lot of discussion of butch/butch relationships, yet in your review you never mentioned the bit where Jess has a meltdown after learning 2 of her butch friends are together and needs to literally run away and think before she becomes accepting. It’s not a form of oppression and i genuinely don’t give a shit, but let’s be honest — disgust at 2 butch women together is present in lesbian culture. I’ve encountered it in real life personally not just in this book. i get the sense you’re quite sick of the “what aboutism” of people writing in about “butch4butch” and i have nothing but respect for that. What i’m having a hard time understanding is why your response to that is to muse at length about not being about to imagine what eroticism could arise between 2 genuinely butch women rather than to say “i don’t know, stop asking, let’s move on” or even to have a guest on who DOES know. lesbian women with this kind of life are out here, and we aren’t doing it just to be annoying or because we haven’t found butch/femme yet. I tried for quite a great many years to be femme and one of the big reasons for that was that i was always so into butches. Ultimately you talked quite a lot about butch/butch relationships while claiming you don’t want to talk about them and don’t know about them. Writing with love — the tone of this episode had me feeling you were casting those masculine women who’d love other masculine women as “queer chaos demons.” Some of us are lesbians who really support you and your project.
Well said. I feel uncomfortable with the discussion they’ve been having about this because they present it as a “hard truth” despite also admitting they don’t know anything about it and don’t want to talk about it. I have a lot of thoughts about the topic but why trust them to respect a different point of view when they have already discussed the topic in such bad faith? I appreciate your response because I’ve been at a loss and wanted to speak out but didn’t even know where to start. I know multiple people who have either expressed disagreement with them on this or completely stopped listening because of this.
Hi there, we appreciate your comment and welcome you here to describe your life experiences. The "what aboutism" that dialectical lesbian describes (excellent term) has been a key part of our experience, so we figured we should address where we diverge from aesthetic interpretations of butch. We're going to keep speaking from our perspective that partnership with femmes is constitutive of our own butch experiences (and the corollary we hold, that we have the right to believe femme lesbian desire is a pillar of butch existence), and if it's not speaking to you/isn't interesting to you, we want you to find content that does/is!
We explored the concept in depth simply because it's interesting to us and it affects us wherever (read: everywhere) that the aesthetic use of the term is framed as the same experience to ours. What we're aiming to put out there is that the experience we're having when we use "butch" is specific -- and if anyone has a special claim to historicity, it's us, not those who would claim we're identical to all masculine women. I hope we didn't say anything to invalidate (or cast as "chaos demons") people who consider themselves masculine and are just having the sex they want with a woman who is whatever degree of masculine or feminine she is. The chaos demons are the ones who insist they have the right to claim sameness with us (enforced sameness = chaos producing). We keep encountering the "whataboutism" and wanted to address it. Your comment (and mo's and dialectical lesbian's) are good faith contributions, and ours is also a good faith entry into a discussion about a claimed sameness that feels inaccurate to us. We appreciate the opportunity to create/have/entertain a forum.
Hey, after listening to the newest episode I think we just have a fundamentally different view. I use butch because it is a lesbian first term that describes me as a masculine homosexual female in the world. It is how people see me in the world, it is descriptive only. I fundamentally do not separate feminine and masculine female desire, I am concerned with the pleasure of my partner regardless of femininity or masculinity and those partners will only ever be female because I am a lesbian, which I define as a female exclusively attracted to females. I will never ever call myself a masc because it decenters the fact that I am a lesbian and I don’t believe in gender. People call me masculine because society tells them to, but really I just am living my life as a female and doing what I want to do. I use the language that describes my material reality within our society. I also agree with your relational definition within the historical context and I believe in butchfemme culture within the lesbian community and it’s specificity and I don’t think defining femme as “feminine female homosexual” and butch as “masculine female homosexual” as diminishing the relational dynamics within butchfemme couples. You claim that aesthetic is not relevant but then talk about your attraction to feminine women and then talk about how your partners like when you are bulky—seems like aesthetics to me unless “feminine” and “masculine” are being defined as a set of behavioral traits. I have been in butchfemme relationships and now I’m in a butchbutch one and I’m the same homosexual I have always been. No we don’t rub strapons together. No I don’t secretly want a man. Can’t believe I have to say this to fellow lesbians. Good luck with your podcast, your position is clear and I respect your right to your opinion.
I'm (Rachel) going to start by responding to what you may/may not have felt was a small-ish point (about bulkiness), but I think this whole thing is interesting and really core to the discussion! Our approach to bulkiness isn't to define it as a "proper" trait of butchness, but to rather describe the more curious and beautiful thing happening there, which is an affinity that may or may not emerge from femme desire due to its relation to those deeper "ideal forms" of caring/safety/security that cause femmes and butches to find each other. It's not bulkiness for every femme, but it might be, and one butch's peculiar bulkiness (since we are not all the same, and have a zillion ways of being masculine) might be the very thing that she was taught to hate about herself at a young age because it supposedly distanced her from other women, which butchfemme might have helped her make a beautiful sense out of (i.e., it's no longer distance; now it's tension). A butch might also cultivate or lean into elements of the physical that work for signaling her own butchfemme identity, but even that signal-function requires a femme actively reading them. In sum, observable/physical traits can serve that signal function, but no specific aspect must for any given butch; ergo, there's no physical thing you can point to and call "butch" (because butchness is, quite intimately, the femme's business).
And I did want to address the biggest point, which gets to the heart of what we're saying about the enforced sameness: my wife is definitely not cool with referring to all feminine female homosexuals as femmes; that erases her specificity, in her and my eyes. And referring to all masculine female homosexuals as butches erases mine, in our eyes. So either folks who are not butchfemme need to use "masculine" and "feminine" (which seems to me to make much more sense) in place of using these words that mean beautiful, specific, community-organizing things to people like we hosts, our partners, and our butchfemme friends, OR I need a new word for "butch" in the way that I live it and a new word for "femme" in the way that she lives it. But why should we be drowned out/crowded out of our own terms, which our lives and community and understanding of each other are enhanced by, instead of people just using masculine and feminine when they mean masculine and feminine?
You know what I mean? There's a "there" there. Butchfemme occupies a real place all to its own in the structure of existence. That's why we rely upon those words for describing what's happening in this one (cross-culturally present, really important) thing.
Thank you for this response!
After thinking about this a lot, what i want to say is that different people using the same term doesn’t mean necessarily mean “sameness” is being enforced, and who has a connection to the history of a term doesn’t have to be a competition. I also feel this comment didn’t really address some of the more murky issues i brought up like the butch/butch couple in SBB, disgust towards masculine women together in the lesbian community, and you repeatedly saying you don’t know what butch4butch is but not asking anybody about it, just say it’s not real or not butch. Surely another piece of important history in lesbian culture is internal diversity of how different lesbians understand things. And really this is a pattern i’ve noticed on this pod before: sidestepping or denying things that don’t fit into your thesis.
I won’t claim i’m emotion free on this issue, so i’m gonna take a step back and talk to my older festival lesbian friends about their experiences and beliefs.
It still sounds like your definition of butch is aesthetic; could you clarify? We do have pretty solid theses, and think lesbians need more theses. We definitely don’t like Stone Butch Blues and don’t think it has anything valuable to offer us in terms of analysis — it's a morality play promoting queer/trans ideology. More soon, but wanted to ask about the aesthetic definition of butch first, so we can get a better sense of your stakes.
I’m going to be working on writing a bigger piece about this, but i wanted to say i think i already mentioned quite a few things that are not aesthetic. A butch to me is a masculine lesbian. Masculinity is not simply clothing and haircut, as you’ve mentioned on this podcast many times before, but includes mannerism, personality, presence, and sexuality. How we style ourselves is part of how we present ourselves to the world, so strangers recognize a butch easily by her choice of clothing assigned to men in her culture, and she is assumed to be a lesbian pretty much where ever she goes. I do not think acknowledging this is reducing butch to a costume or “aesthetic “. I’d like to ask how you define stone butch, and is it different than butch? If a butch with a dating history of femmes starts seeing another butch, does she cease to be a butch? was she never a butch? if you find out a butch receives penetration from her femme, do you stop seeing them as butch and femme?
For us, a masculine lesbian is a masculine lesbian. That's really where I think we can make sense of the disconnect. Our femme partners speak aloud our "butchness" to us, and live in partnership with it, as something much more specific to them than "masculinity." And when we call them "femme," we are referencing something much more specific than femininity. The specificity is what we believe merits its own space.
I think we're stuck on the sense that your definition is "aesthetic" because in our eyes, butchness is relational, like it has no proper definition that you can point to and say "that's butch" (as much as it's fun to speculate based on outward masculinity-in-relation-to-femininity, and yes, these are lovely drinking games). In the end, people who take up the word per our definition do so because they're living a specific experience, in which the terms "my butch" and "my femme" make sense and represent a singularity within an exchange. Between us, our femme partners are different people, so what makes us butch in their eyes is different between us, although those things are variations on a cross-historical theme of femme desire (which does have stability/structure/regularity, just like butch desire; sorry, patriarchy). Since for us what is "butch" or "femme" emerges from this living, breathing, real-time unfolding between the butch and femme, in order to "freeze" butchness without that dance happening (without a femme present), you'd have to define butchness as a certain set of observable traits or behaviors. Essentially, you'd have to be able to observe it from without, which for us is where the word "aesthetic" comes up. And yes, both of us hosts could be defined as masculine from afar, but that alone wouldn't make us butches. That's where we need and are open to an explanation -- how can two people "do" butchness towards each other? As you mentioned before, the word itself references femme identity, so what does "referencing femme identity" mean in the context of a masculine-masculine relationship? How could it be other than a set of traits that are frozen in time as observable from without, if there's no exchange between differences giving butchness its shape? Because this is our take, we truly don't understand why one would use the word "butch" when they mean "masculine," and it seems like logically, the only way to do that is to say that masculinity makes you butch (which you've said you support, so I guess this is coming together, or at least we can certainly see where the differences are stemming from). The words "butch" and "femme" are buoys for my wife and I and our butchfemme community, because of the specificity of the terms and the way our mutual use of them interpellates each of us; namely, because of the way in which they enable us to find each other and be together. They are words that mean specific things to us when we talk about and to each other and generally, relate. They are not synonyms for masculine and feminine.
We're also really not interested in taxonomizing people based on their life experiences. Both of us have tried all kinds of relationships, but when we found butchfemme, we became "butch" in relation to the femme we were with. That occurred for each of us at very different times in our lives, and is immaterial when it comes to who is or isn't butch. We don't care who is or isn't butch; we just want to protect our specificity from being synonymized with masculinity. What makes somebody a "butch" or a "femme" -- who knows those words aren't just synonyms for "masculine" and "feminine" -- is that they take up the term in the context of butchfemme identity and the specific interchange it entails on every single day and with every breath of our lives. We believe butch and femme are things people feel and live within butchfemme. For us to protect those words is to defend the reality of butchfemme as something specific, separate, and its own. Asking us to use the word "butch" for anything else is stripping it of its meaning when it comes out of our femme partners' mouths. The stakes are high. If one means "masculine," why not say "masculine"?
I really do need to take a step back, but i appreciate your interest in continuing the conversation. I hope we can pick it up another time, i have some thinking to do on my own.
it seems to me butch women together is simply an exception to the rule of butch/femme, and therefore still references femme identity. i see you only welcome butch as a word to describe those exclusively attracted to femmes. i respect your perspective but have a slightly different one.
your podcast content does speak to me. if the concept of 2 butch women together (or masculine as you’d like to call them) is interesting to you that’s cool, i wish you’d discuss it with a little more care because hearing a long discussion about how eroticism can’t arise between 2 butch women didn’t feel like interest but rather verging on disgust.
looks like a language conflict or a no true scotsman fallacy to me. i think it’s ok if a word has multiple meanings, it doesnt immediately go to postmodern nonsense.
reasons the podcast content speaks to me —
+ my lesbian sex life is not in line with radical feminist doctrine of eschewing all gendered references
+ i am attracted to femmes
+ i seek push/pull in my sex life, which i find with femmes as well as with butches and with other kinds of women
+ queer social nightmare personal history
+ i have the much described “masculine energy” plus i wear clothes from the men’s section, therefore am immediately perceived as lesbian wherever i go except for times when i’m mistaken briefly for male
just to be open about what i mean !
You all spoke a lot in earlier eps abt the importance of creating a new social reality, which was super inspiring to me!! What this ep and nearly half of the last one says to me is that you can’t possibly imagine a social reality of butch women who are not trans who are butch regardless of their partner. I also don’t completely understand the resistance to the idea of a butch aesthetic and the idea that if that is not present along side a femme it is not really butch? I have a hard time believing that butch women being with butch women is a-historical.
I also agree, you don’t need to talk about butch for butch if that isn’t an experience you’re interested in discussing. I’ve really enjoyed when you have spoken about the explicit butch femme experience!! The direction these last cpl eps has taken has been disappointing to me.
We replied below to CreekWren and it ended up kind of folding in our response to you. What do you think? Perhaps having our written thoughts on this would be easier to debate than the kind of stream of consciousness that results from a podcast, and we're working on that, but essentially, we use "butch" to reference the identity produced by/within/for/around(all prepositions) butch-femme (which we constantly have to assert is a real thing), so a woman being masculine does not make her butch in our eyes. But of course masculine women rule, and exist in many forms.
Well this was interesting. One think I haven’t heard clarity on is in your opinion what defines a “stone butch”?
I also found it strange that you are perplexed by the sexual relationship between 2 women who call themselves butch. Like you said yourselves, the piont of sex is orgasm and there are so many ways that 2 woman can achieve orgasm together.
Hi Carol! We've been nuts busy but I was able to parachute down here to make a couple of responses. I just restacked a comment response from above, with an explanation of "stone butch" appended; can you see that? In short, we're all about sex between all women -- we are just also interested in protecting the specific meanings of butch and femme as butchfemme people live them, and we are likewise resistant to any attempt to make "butch" synonymous with "masculine" or "femme" synonymous with "feminine." Those discursive moves invalidate butch and femme specificity. So essentially, it's a words game. We're not perplexed by the idea that two ostensibly masculine women can be together; we're just wondering why they would call that "butch."
I don’t believe you can strictly define butch as you are doing. The history doesn’t support your position . I don’t see how a butch woman who is into other butch women invalidates any lesbian.
And no, I don’t believe that being butch should and usually doesn’t have anything to do with the kind of sex we like.
The only strict definition we see on the internet is that a butch is a “masculine lesbian” (yours, Creek Wren’s, dialectical lesbian’s) -- or an analog of that definition, like that a butch is a woman who looks so lesbian (from her perceived masculinity) that she can’t hide it.
Conversely, like we’ve always said, we’re not interested in dictating what makes an individual woman butch. Even for us, it’s not singularly about the strap or about the thrust instinct, because we use the word as femmes use it for us, in a dyadic and reciprocal way. There are many ways that butchfemme dynamics manifest in relationships. Sometimes we speak about particular ways it manifests because they are highly taboo and in this social climate, lead to butches being told they are not women. It’s the raw data of butchfemme sexuality that makes us a special target for this.
We don’t want lesbians who identify as masculine for non-sexual reasons to feel anxiety about desiring to be penetrated! What we’re saying is that our femmes use “butch” to mean a lesbian who can have this specific relational experience with them. It means this specific thing when it comes out of the mouths of our femme partners. Using “butch” as a synonym for “masculine” not only pins it down with incredible precision – in contrast to our experience of “butch” emerging as a term of endearment in relationship with femmes – but also pins it down in the least compelling and least beautiful way it can be pinned down; as a synonym for something “gendery” instead of something authentically lesbian. It makes it mean nothing but “masculine.” It takes the lesbian specificity and specialness out of butchness and out of butchfemme and takes away the word that femmes who want butches like us can use to find us.
Side note: We are really starting to perceive that the anxiety people express in response to our words about our identities is freaking people out because they’re anxious about the sex they’re having. We are nothing but “pro” all the possible sex between women, so that’s a projection. Let it be shouted from the rooftops: Everyone, please have the sex you want! “Butch” is going to continue to mean something more relational and more lesbian-specific than “masculine” in our community.