Dagger: On Butch Women
(By Lily Burana)
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| Author | Lily Burana |
What is butch? Rebellion against women's lot, against gender-role imperatives that pit boyness against girlness and then assigns you-know-who the short straw. Butch is a giant fuck YOU! to compulsory femininity, just as lesbianism says the same to compulsory heterosexuality.
What is butch? Sexual power of a kind that no women is supposed to have, active power. Prowess. The calm eye of a whirlwind of pleasure, getting from giving.
"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.
Roxxie: Can straight men learn anything from butches? JoAnn: Sure. Straight men could learn a lot about how to take care of women both sexually and emotionally.
At that time they were having all those Wonderbread commercials, where they said you could build muscles twelve ways. So I started eating tons of Wonderbread, and my parents were saying, "What's this sudden craze for Wonderbread?" I thought if I ate enough Wonderbread I'd bulk up and turn into a guy."
Review from Whole Earth Review, Winter, 1994 by Louise Rafkin”
