Butch and Femme Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
Butch and femme are terms often used in the lesbian and gay subcultures to describe a person's approximate adherence of traditional masculine and feminine gender roles respectively, within a same-sex relationship, or to describe an individual generally.
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2 Butch and femme in history 3 Today 4 See also 5 Source 6 External link |
Butch and femme attributes
These terms often describe lesbians, though the term butch is also used for gay men also. Butch can entail short-cropped hair, overtly masculine clothes including posibly military dress, attitude involving deliberate machismo, chivalry, or sometimes rudeness. Femme can entail long or femininely styled hair, feminine clothing and/or attitude.
Gay men who adopt typically butch roles may be termed "bears". Those who may be more "femme", may be described as "flamers". Femme lesbians are sometimes described as "lipstick lesbian", and conversely butch lesbians may be described as a "bulldyke" or simply just "dyke", though the latter usage has widened to encompass lesbians generally.
Despite this, lesbians or gay men are not always strictly beholden to being nor do adopt strictly butch or strictly femme roles. Some may adopt elements of both. Relationships are not always butch/femme either, though these forms of relationships of course do exist. Many butch gay men will only date other masculine men, though others prefer femme men. Among homosexuals the practices of 'femme on femme' and 'butch on butch' sex preferences are sometimes repressed by cultural mores.
However, "inherent to butch-fem relationships was the presumption that the butch is the physically active partner and the leader in lovemaking....Yet unlike the dynamics of many heterosexual relationships, the butch's foremost objective was to give sexual pleasure to a femme. The essence of this emotional/sexual dynamic is captured by the ideal of the "stone butch," or untouchable butch....To be untouchable meant to gain pleasure from giving pleasure. Thus, although these women did draw on models in heterosexual society, they transformed those models into an authentically lesbian interaction." (Davis and Lapovsky, 1989)
Women involved in Aristasia have been described as "not so much butch and femme as femme and femmer". They associate themselves with one of two feminine "sexes" - termed blonde and brunette (though are not related to hair color). A "brunette" is femme but includes elements of sensibility and less typically traditionally feminine, while blondes are fluffy, ultra-femme, and may be more typically traditionally feminine. Accusations that they are promoting stereotypes are usually met with cheerful acceptance ("Stereotypes - we love 'em", wrote one Aristasian). However the blonde-brunette role-models are in practice very subtle and flexible, and the real rationale behind the idea is an assertion of femininity among women who prefer women: not a femininity defined in relation to masculinity, but femininity within a feminine ambience.
Some femme men and butch women regard themselves thus as genderqueer for that reason, but most others do not.
This is an Article on Butch and Femme. Page Contains Information, Facts Details or Explanation Guide About Butch and Femme Butch and femme in history
Among lesbians, the butch-femme pairing in relationships was more common among lesbians of older generations. In Debra A. Wilson's documentary The Butch Mystique an older woman named Matu says that this was because in the past a woman was in physical danger if she was obviously with another woman in a romantic capacity, and butch women felt that being tough was necessary to protect themselves and their female companions.Today
Many young people today eschew butch or femme classifications, believing that they are inadequate to describe an individual, or that labels are limiting in and of themselves. Some people within the queer community have tailored the common labels to be more descriptive, such as "soft stud," "hard butch," "gym queen," or "tomboy femme."See also
Source
External link