Why I Love Butch Women
I don’t like smoking, but I’ll put up with cigarette breath to watch a woman curl a lit butt into her palm like the Marlboro Man.
I like femaleness—the curves, the wet spots—and I like femininity displayed, lace and lipstick and manicured nails, but they don’t turn my head like worn Levi’s and rolled T-shirt sleeves, a stance like James Dean hustling on Forty-Second Street, the kind of womanness that isn’t taught in school.
Simone de Beauvoir mused in The Second Sex that lesbian desire is related to desire for the mother, and that may be so, but honey, my mother was never like this:
Strong, I mean physically strong. Sexual, with a look in the eye that caresses and undresses. With attitude that comes from never fitting in, maybe never even having tried.
Butch.
What is butch? Rebellion against women’s lot, against gender-role imperatives that pit boyness against girlness and then assign you-know-who the short straw. Butch is a giant Fuck YOU! to compulsory femininity, just as lesbianism says the same to compulsory heterosexuality. I do not associate respect for compulsory anything, in fact, with butchness, though perhaps some butch bottoms will disagree. My first gravitation toward butch women happened because they were the easiest female allies to recognize in my war against the compulsory world.
In the seventies, when I came out into the dyke community, butch was dead and androgyny was practically an imperative. I didn’t mind at first; girliness as a way of life hadn’t worked out for me, and though I had always exhibited distinctly femme sexuality, I wasn’t presenting myself to the world that way: I hadn’t really grown into the image. I was young; the men I had fucked played “Me Tarzan, You Jane.” I couldn’t figure out how to get them to play the game by different rules. As soon as sex with them was over (or even while it was still going on), the whole thing felt stupid. Men who didn’t play Tarzan were fine, but I couldn’t figure out how to get them to fuck me. No doubt they were contending with their own straight-(or-not-so-straight)-boy version of femme sexuality and were waiting for me to make the first move. Some men don’t play Tarzan so as not to appear sexist; others just want you to do it, grab their neckties and put them where you want them—but I didn’t know that at the time.
With some relief, then, I retired the Jane I never wanted to be, reconstructed myself as an androgyne and forsook my vain attempt to present my femininity to the world. The uniform, actually, was Butch Lite. Jeans or chinos, flannel shirts or tees, sensible shoes—either boots, athletic shoes or Birkenstocks (it turns out the latter were incredibly subversive if you wore them with scarlet toenail polish, but that’s another story). Almost the whole dyke community dressed this way: If a woman didn’t, her politics and her sexual orientation were automatically open to debate.
The butches who were left over from the era before the purge also dressed this way. We had renamed the identity, it seemed, but kept the look. That way we could say we’d vanquished it even as we kept it around to turn us on.
The unschooled eye couldn’t tell the two sorts of women—butches and androgynes—apart. Butchness had been so thoroughly declared passé that an entire generation of dykes could dress in what was essentially butch-woman drag and evoke defensive responses only from conservative straight people (and very straight-identified “gay women”).
At first I believed the mythos of the Vanished Butch (and her symbiotic sister-species, the Vanished Femme). But certain women wearing the Uniform made my nostrils flare, my tongue tie, my skin prickle like an electrical storm had passed. They filled the clothes differently. It took me some years to begin to understand why I wanted to chew on some women’s thick brown leather belts and not on others.
Non-butch women wore the uniform like librarians who had just come in from gardening. It was not clothes that made the woman. It was stance. It was attitude—it was impossible to picture one of the librarians wearing a tux, or myself dressing in silk or lace to present myself to her. It was impossible to think of presenting myself to her at all, to offer her that mixture of allure and willingness that I desired to give a butch woman.
The missing ingredient, I see in hindsight, was eroticism, worn on the sleeve and there in the step: Where political dykes would don a baggy flannel shirt and think, “No one will sexually objectify me if I wear this,” the butches were tucking their shirts in knowing that some little gal would love the softness of the flannel under her hands as she ran them up over the butch’s pecs.
In that decade of butchness diluted and femme reviled, I had two lovers. Well, more than two, but only two who deserved Lover as a title, the way Radclyffe Hall called Una Troubridge Wife and Una called Radclyffe (whom she knew as “John”) Husband. There were not then and are not now enough words to name what we wanted to do differently, or wanted to do the old-fashioned way, but queerly, with each other, like John and Una. We were lovers, not wives or husbands, living yet-unnamed relationships that had not fully evolved (though we tried so hard to speed the mired-down process of that evolution).
One lover was a butchette; how can I describe this? A femmey butch, I guess. Remember, we didn’t talk this way then. Even reading Mary Daly together did not get in the way of our sex life. She was the most opinionated and assertive woman I’ve ever known, and though she did not fill out her clothes and went shopping the instant the Uniform lost its hegemony, she could lay me on my back more swiftly and skillfully than any woman has since. Though the seeds of my femme sexuality may have lain in abortive Tarzan and Jane scenes, it did not begin to blossom until our games of Sultana and captured princess. My lover oversaw that flowering: My own womanness had frightened me until the night we did Quaaludes and I arched back off the bed, dizzy with drug and a kind of power I had never relaxed into before, and purred: “I feel like Marilyn Monroe!”
To which she replied, hands full of me, “You are Marilyn Monroe.”
A truly androgynous dyke could not have said such a thing.
She had committed quite a breach of lesbian-feminist etiquette (as, obviously, had I). Marilyn Monroe was a faggot’s heroine, not a dyke’s. We were not supposed to swoon over or identify with a woman whose femininity was her appeal and then her downfall, though Judy Grahn had already reappropriated Marilyn’s thigh bone (by way of a poem) to bash in her enemies’ heads: Hubba. Hubba. Hubba. (We didn’t know Grahn as butch, thus privy to a more intimate vision of Marilyn than any self-respecting dyke was supposed to have, in those years before it came out that Marilyn had spent the early fifties getting her pussy licked by Lily St. Cyr.)
In celebrating my choice of Marilyn Monroe as spirit guide, my lover allowed my uncomfortable post-girly androgyny to cook away in the crucible of her arms and let me reconstitute as Femme woman. It was a very butch thing to do. And it was very brave, because she was telling me I had her blessing in stepping off the path of political correctness; she was telling me that the wet truths of sex had our allegiance more fully, more instinctively, than the dry truths of lesbian feminism.
I love butch women because no one else would ever have reached into that flannel-clad bundle of inarticulate erotic yearning with a mirror that reflected a sex goddess. I love butch women because no one is quite so deeply affected by femme: I felt my sexual effect for the first time, and grew and grew like Alice in Wonderland drinking her magic potion. I love butch women because it was the synchronicity of butch sexual response that gave me my body.
She created a monster, of course. I could no longer be considered a right-thinking dyke. I was a lesbian crossed with a transvestite, sporting lingerie underneath my 501’s. Oh, I know that’s normal now, but then it was heresy. She bought me crotchless panties and untied the bows like I was a present that had been wrapped just for her, and before I melted into mindless throbbing waves of orgasm, I had a political epiphany: Women who decried being objectified had never had the opportunity to feel like this. They were an emblem of our sexual difference, those panties: We sinned, and shared our secret, together.
No one before her had paid such keen attention to my arousal, swooping down on my response like a claws-out hawk. In return I let her seize me, filled as full by her desire for me as by her cunt-slicked fingers.
What is butch? Sexual power of a kind that no woman is supposed to have, active power. Prowess. The calm eye of a whirlwind of pleasure, getting from giving. Learning the pure skill of giving a woman pleasure like no other soul can.
My next lover did “androgyny” so well that the night clerk at the first motel we checked into together winked at her and said, “Have a good time, Slim,” never once thinking she might be a woman. Thinking about her reminds me of the injustice of the seventies’ claim that butch women were trying to ape male behavior to get “male privilege” (whatever the hell, in the hands of a woman, that is). This woman, like a lot of her sisters, couldn’t have pretended much of anything on the feminine side of the gender scale. People like her made the nineteenth-century German sex scientists name homosexuals Sexuelle Zwischenstufen (“sexually intermediate types”). And though there exists a photo of her at five with bows in her hair, by the time she was in her teens such affectations of girlishness were forever past: She had graduated to fast cars and drugs.
She had a low voice like honey mixed with whisky, not immediately recognizable as female, especially on the phone. She had muscles. She’s the one who gave me my cigarette-curled-into-the-palm Marlboro Gal fetish. She was a loner who worked on cars. Getting her painfully turned-inward attention seemed infinitely precious, for she was a woman who did drugs, took apart engines and studied alchemy to forestall the need to dwell upon where she fit into the world.
Butch-femme, perhaps especially when unnamed, is a secret world. The basis of my powerful attraction to her was mysterious to me then, was chemical, and all the stronger for my inability to understand it. She was not the most devoted lover I ever had—far from it. There was too much sad-eyed stranger in her to ever get to know. She was barely domesticated, like the cat that spent its kittenhood wild; like simmering young Brando, ready to rebel against anything, even love.
My lover, so deeply Not Feminine, came into her difference in a decade when what made her truly different from other dykes—real androgyny, perhaps born in the body, but certainly not politically chosen—was unnamed and less understood than it had been in any lesbian community in this century. To say her butchness was unsupported profoundly understates how alone she was in it; there was no discourse about it (except “It’s dead”), and so the way she wore her lesbianism was denied, even—perhaps especially—by other lesbians. She had no mentors to teach her how to wear her difference—except men. But men could not teach her how a woman relates to another woman.
I knew I could never have the kinds of experiences she had had, never know what it would feel like to go through life in her body. I wanted to reach out to her difference and honor it, and I could do that by wanting her, I could do that by giving myself to her. No one in my world had fit in less and still survived, and I loved that in her. I saw her as my shadow-sister, given an even more difficult path to walk than mine. But part of my difference lay in my willingness—no, my need—to love her.
Loving masculinity in a woman differs crucially in one way from loving it in a man: In her, it is a badge of standing out, not of fitting in. It is grown into through pain or at least a sense of separation from those less different.
What I love about butch women is their profound inability, or at least refusal, to be “normal.” They stand as living proof that gender is more fluid, its imperatives more socially contrived and less innately rigid, than our conservative culture wants to allow. I love butch women for the same reasons the enigmatically gendered are revered in more enlightened societies than ours: Their very existence says that boundaries can be crossed. Like the spiritual and cultural respect some indigenous “American” peoples accorded the berdache, when I’m with a butch woman I feel awe at being allowed to see that the dualistic world is not as big as it gets. What I love about butch women is the way they stand as sentries, maybe even guides, to expanded possibility.
I’m aware I’m making this sound pretty existential, and for me it is, but I don’t want to forget the sexual charge that surpasses respect and recognition, that moves my spiritual awe right to my cunt. When I’m sexing with a butch woman, I’m consorting with a changeling, off mundane ground like Wendy suddenly learning that all it took to fly was reaching for Peter Pan’s outstretched hand. What makes me able to give myself like a precious gift to a butch woman, I think, is her understanding that I am a gift; what makes her know this, when other women miss it entirely, is part of the ineffable, the alchemical resonance between butch and femme that begins to heat the crucible. Standing far outside of traditional femininity, she finds in my femmeness a representation of the un/familiar, which is just what she represents for me.
Yet if she were simply unfamiliar, there would be less basis for the gift of self, less grounding for our passion; Tarzan and Jane don’t recognize each other, and their desire emerges from their difference. Heterosexuals often face this obstacle: making cross-cultural attempts at intimacy without the knowledge of likeness-in-difference in which homosexual pairings, especially butchfemme ones, are grounded.
I believe we know too little about heterosexual love to know whether butch-femme relationships draw upon its premises or mirror it in any realistic way (I am not referring here to compulsory heterosexuality, which provides far too stifling an atmosphere for love and true fellow-feeling to flourish—real heterosexual love, a profound bond between socially constructed “opposites,” is rare). Twin assumptions are that butch-femme mimics hetero bonding or, conversely, that it could have no relation to heterosexuality at all (since two women by definition are not heterosexual). I suspect that both butch-femme and hetero relationships share a sought-for balance between what is different and what is not, and difference is often eroticized. Butch and femme, though, experience their difference in like bodies; heterosexual difference is experienced through bodies, embroidered to a greater or lesser degree by the cultural differences mandated by sex roles.
Above all else, a butch-femme couple is queer. They do not meet social expectations even if they live exemplary role-differentiated lives—lesbians from Leave It to Beaver. In fact, the more gender differentiation in their relationship, the queerer they are. In a heterosexual coupling, situated in this culture of hetero-hegemony, partners often live out their given roles unless mindful to do otherwise. In a butch-femme relationship, the eroticized un/familiar exists not in the context of the normal but of the forbidden.
What’s considered normal is so fenced off from the multitudes of realities that confront and beckon us with their rich differences; the rigid boundaries that define “normality” have left it cut off and arid. The question “Am I normal?” has thwarted more orgasms, more wet cunts, more stiff dicks than any other single impediment to erotic bliss. Is it any wonder that I should embrace and adore those “not-normal” ones, the ones who wear on their sleeves their departure from the narrow, socially sanctioned path? I feel both inspired by their difference and safer in my own.
I love butch women because, in their big black boots, they step squarely across a line. I love butch women for the same reasons I love sissy men, the transgendered, the slutty, the outrageous queers of every stripe; the women and men who sell sex, and the ones who use sex to heal; the fetishists whose eroticism is more complicated than anyone ever let on to us eroticism could be. I love butch women because, in the face of ridiculously constricting gender imperatives, they have the balls to say “Fuck it”—and to carve into our culturally empty space a different and powerfully confrontive way to live as a woman.
And that turns me on. Though I still can’t altogether explain why my lover’s “masculinity” was what aroused me, it’s clear that I like masculinity better in women than in men! (Just as I love femininity better in men than in women.) My second lover’s tales of teenaged fast-car adventure, the kinds of adventure I was never likely to have, got me incredibly hot. Hearing that she’d once driven a car through the wall of a house was not a stunt I wanted to repeat: It just made me want her to fuck me. The manifestations of our greatest difference, in fact, called up that response in me, as if fucking was the one way I could bridge our disparate experience. I think part of my sexual attraction to men stems from the same desire—to connect with that which I don’t experience. But butchness is not the same as masculinity—it’s a version of masculinity reflected in a wavy mirror, masculinity where our culture tells us not to look for it: in women, or in “macho” gay men, where a very male presentation throws a curve ball—a fey lilt to the voice or a hungry, up-raised butt. Loving butchness amounts to an attraction to what’s not “supposed” to be there.
“Female maleness,” “female masculinity”: These simplistic ways of reading butch energy do not entirely miss the mark, but they do mislead. Maleness isn’t male on a female, honey—it’s something else again, a horse of another color, something our gender-impoverished language doesn’t offer us words to describe.
I love butch women even if their butchness is nothing more than cussedness: “If there are only two ways to be in this world, I’ll pick the other one.” I love butch women because the alluring, unsettling power of their presence displays contempt for simplistic gender imperatives. I love butch women because they make straight people nervous. I love butch women because they resist. And even if I’m decked out in Frederick’s of Hollywood fluff, if I’m on the arm of a butch woman, you can see that I’m a gender-resister, too.
