Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (50 page)

The more egalitarian day-to-day living arrangements that feminism brought to the parent culture were also reflected in butch/ femme relationships. By design (and not simply by chance, as may have happened in the 1950s), in most aspects of their lives, such as household responsibility or decision making, there were few clear divisions along traditional lines between neo-butches and -femmes. Neo-butch/femme often boiled down merely to who made the first move sexually, and for many women that was its primary value. To other women it meant not even that once they began exploring roles such as “butch bottom” or “femme top.”
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Too much had happened for history simply to repeat itself. The male hippies of the 1960s had challenged the old concept of masculine: a man could wear his hair to his shoulders and be opposed to violence and wear jewelry. The feminists of the 1970s had challenged the old concept of feminine: a woman could be efficient and forceful and demand a place in the world. Except to the most recalcitrant, there was little that remained of the simplistic ideas of gender-appropriate appearance and behavior. And lesbians, who have historically been at the forefront of feminism (in their choice to lead independent lives, if nothing else), could not easily accept the old fashions in images and behaviors. Most would have had a hard time taking those notions seriously. For that reason, butch and femme existed best in the ’80s in the sexual arena, which invites fantasy and the tension of polarities.

One woman who identified herself as a femme in the 1980s explained that being a femme sexually meant playing off of feminine stereotypes—the little girl, the bitch, the queen, the sex pot—and making those images into your sexual language. For her it was primarily camp and fantasy and did not necessarily have to do with other aspects of her personality. Nor were those roles limited in themselves, she pointed out. In the ’80s one could, for example, be a femme who was the sexual dominator and “ran the fuck” or a butch who submissively acted out the femme’s desires.
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Lesbian fiction of the 1980s reinforced the notion that while butch/ femme roles were useful to lesbians, it was important not to take them literally. The stone butch, for example, who was so popular in the lesbian novels of the 1950s and ’60s such as Ann Bannon’s Beebo Brinker series, was passe as a figure in the 1980s lesbian novel. In Ellen Frye’s
Look Under the Hawthorne
(1987) a stone butch is told by a character who functions as a spokeswoman for the author, “You’ve got to let other people love you, too. Loving’s got to be both ways. It won’t last long if it’s always one way.” While butch/femme roles were seen to be sexually healthy, to be rigidly fixed in those roles was unhealthy. Lee Lynch’s
The Swashbuckler
(1985) offered a model for flexibility. Frenchy and Mercedes, two butches, fall in love with each other. Mercedes observes, without the shame that was requisite for a “flipped” butch in the 1950s, “I see all of a sudden that every butch is a femme; every femme is a butch. I know the lips of my friend could get me hotter than the lips of any femme in the room.”
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Autobiographical writing generally reflected the same view. Authors suggested that when the roles were taken with great seriousness—for example, when butches felt that the entire weight of being the sexual aggressor was invariably placed on them—the butch/femme dichotomy could become counterproductive. As Cherrie Moraga, who called herself a “post-feminist butch,” observed in a 1980s article:

It might feel very sexy to imagine “taking” a woman, but it has sometimes occurred at the expense of my feeling, sexually, like I can surrender myself to a woman; that is, always needing to be the one in control, calling the shots. It’s a very butch trip and I feel like this can keep me private and protected and can prevent me from fully being able to express myself.
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“Post-feminist butches” were free to accept the notion that female sexuality was more complicated than the 1950s butches openly admitted and that they sacrificed something important to their own emotional and sexual pleasure if they maintained a “stone” role.

The concepts of butch and femme became so flexible that, unlike the ’50s when women who chose the roles were enjoined by the subculture to adhere to a certain code of behavior, their meaning was totally subjective in the 1980s. The terms were often used as catchwords to describe relationships that were far more complex than “butch” or “femme” would seem to denote. One lesbian writer, for example, who called herself an ’80s femme, claimed that her sexual life was “entirely involved in a butch/femme exchange. … I never come together with a woman sexually outside of those roles. I’m saying to my partner, ‘Love me enough to let me go where I need to go and take me there…. You map it out. You are in control.’” She admitted, however, that her interest in such a dynamic came from “much richer territory” than simply that of roles, but the terms “butch” and “femme” had come to connote in the ’80s all manner of complex dynamics.
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The most important aspect of butch/femme in the 1980s was that it created roles that were sexually charged in a way that would have been unthinkable in the sexually tame ’70s, when erotic seduction was considered a corrupt imitation of heterosexuality; but the actors who indulged in these roles in the ’80s, femme as well as butch, were frequently cognizant of the feminist ideal of the strong woman, even in the context of sexuality. The femme fantasy image could be a lesbian Carmen rather than a Camille, as one woman suggested; in her favorite sexual fantasy she would appear at a lesbian dance in a “sleazy” black silk low cut dress with hot pink flowers on it:

I would come in, not, I repeat,
not
like a helpless femme-bot [cf. robot], but like a bad-ass-no-games-knows-her-own-mind-and-will-tell-you-too femme. First I would stand there and let my lover wonder. Maybe I would just stand there altogether and let her come to me. Or maybe, while all the heads were turning … I would stride across the dance floor in a bee-line for that green-eyed womon [sic] I love, so that everyone could see who the one in the black dress was going to fuck tonight.
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As expressed in the 1980s, the roles became both a reflection of and a feminist expansion of the socialization lesbians had undergone in the parent culture. But the goal was for women to use those roles for their own pleasurable ends, to demand freedom and sexual excitement as lesbians seldom dared before.

The roles, styles, and relationships of butch/femme in the ’80s often appeared to be conducted with a sense of lightness. As Phyllis Lyon, co-founder of Daughters of Bilitis, who has been active in the lesbian community since the early 1950s, characterized neo-butch/ femme, “women ‘play at it’ rather than ‘being it.’” Other lesbians testified to that sense of play. One writer said that she, a butch, and her femme lover complemented each other in the roles they played, but they recognized it as play, as a pleasurable game: “She really can find a spark plug, she just prefers not to. Feeling that I have to protect her is an illusion that I enjoy. She allows me my illusion for she enjoys being taken care of like this.”
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The resurgence of butch/femme was also a reaction to the “drab stylelessness” of the lesbian-feminist community in the 1970s that was “anaphrodisiac,” as one woman described it. Her friends in the ’70s, she recalled, were philosophically appealing, but they created “the most unerotic environment…. No make-up, denim overalls, flannel shirts. I compared it to Mao’s China. Plain and sexless.”
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In contrast, butch/femme roles in the ’80s opened to lesbians who wanted to explore that avenue the possibility of fashions that were signals for the erotic in the heterosexual Western world in which they grew up. Though such fashions would have been disdained by lesbian-feminists in the 1970s, neo-butches and -femmes felt free to deck themselves out in high heels, leather, lace, delicate underwear—whatever emblematized sexuality to them.

All of this erotic play that was at the center of neo-butch/femme mirrored Michael Bronski’s definition of “gay lib” as it related to gay men: “At its most basic, [it] offers the possibility of freedom of pleasure for its own sake.”
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During the 1970s when lesbian-feminists, who dominated the visible lesbian community, were busy defining the very serious tenets of their movement and living by them, the idea of pleasure for its own sake was alien. In fact, it had never been a comfortable concept among lesbians, since they had had to battle so hard against the stereotype of homosexuals that saw them as nothing but selfishly pleasure-oriented. While the AIDS crisis in the gay male community made Bronski’s definition problematic for homosexual men, the lesbian sexual radicals in the 1980s (when AIDS was still considered largely a gay male disease) decided that it was time for them to compensate for the seriousness of the past. The openly erotic statement made by their butch/femme styles was one signal of their determination.

The lesbian sex wars of the 1980s between those lesbians who were cultural feminists and those who were sexual radicals reflected the conflicting perceptions of the basic meaning of femaleness and lesbianism with which women have long struggled. The arguments centered on such related questions as: Are there natural differences between males and females, or are the apparent differences simply induced through socialization? Does women’s “moral superiority” create in them a disinterest in certain pursuits, or has their negligence of those pursuits been to their social and personal detriment? Can women will themselves to be a particular way sexually, or is their sexual makeup involuntary and inescapable?

Such philosophical splits between cultural feminists and radicals were apparent from the beginning of the century among women who loved women, although they did not lead to the same kinds of confrontations that have been so prevalent in recent times. For example, Jane Addams’ view that women were better than men and thus had the responsibility to behave better fueled her efforts to establish institutions that reflected women’s morally superior nature (see pp. 24–28). M. Carey Thomas’ view that women had been kept socially inferior by accepting the notion that they were different from men, and that they would become equal only by claiming male prerogatives, fueled her visionary academic leadership in female higher education (see pp. 28–31). Behind Addams’ position was a philosophical stance similar to that of the cultural feminist lesbians of the 1980s who said that the male pursuit of sexuality was corrupt and beneath women; Thomas’ stance was similar to that of the more radical lesbians of the 1980s who said that until women were as free as men to pursue anything they wished, including sexuality, they would never be really free.

The century-old debate between lesbian essentialists and lesbian existentialists may also be seen in this conflict of the 1980s. In a sense, the cultural feminists were essentialists, believing not only that by essence women were different from and better than men, but also that lesbian culture, which was made up of nothing but women, must be doubly different and doubly better. The sexual radicals were existentialists, at least in their beliefs that not only was sexuality morally neutral but also that lesbians could consciously create for themselves any kind of sexuality they found desirable.

On the surface it appears at this time that the cultural feminists were more accurate than the sexual radicals in their conviction that female sexuality is very different from male sexuality. The sexual radicals’ attempts to convince lesbians that they must wrest for themselves male sexual freedoms have to date failed to alter much of the lesbian community. Although they have managed, as the San Diego psychologist suggests, to free up sexuality to some extent for lesbians who do not feel they must be guided by the tenets of political correctness, nevertheless lesbian pornography and sex ads could not escape from the influence of interpersonal values that have been considered characteristically feminine; lesbians quickly lost interest in strip shows and bathhouse impersonal sex once the novelty wore off; and serial monogamy remains the dominant pattern of lesbian sexual relating. The encouragement of the sexual radicals was not sufficient to counter the greater forces of their female socialization. Thus lesbian sexual radicals have remained a tiny minority within a minority.

But so short a period, particularly one in which a sexually related epidemic is raging, is not enough time to prove or disprove the possibility of altering female sexual habits. Therefore, the facts must be treated with caution. They do not demonstrate that lesbians in general will never be as baldly sexual as men because it is not “natural” to them as women; rather, they may be seen to reaffirm to what extent sexuality is a social construct. Lesbians obviously have different object choices from heterosexual women but they were raised as female no less than heterosexual women, and they cannot easily overcome the effects of what has been so basic to their upbringing.

Their ability (or inability) to do so still remains to be seen. It is impossible to generalize at this point about what can or cannot be consciously created with regard to sexual appetites. Nor will the remainder of the twentieth century render any definitive answers, since the recent increase of AIDS outside the gay male community has already begun to put a damper on free sexual experimentation among lesbians. What is predictable, however, is that lesbians’ sexual freedom will be closely tied to the ethos of the parent culture in which they have been socialized. If the parent culture becomes less sexualized or the women’s liberation movement loses its momentum—as has happened in other eras—the push toward more aggressive sexual expression by those lesbians who have been in the forefront of sexual radicalism will be halted. If, after the AIDS epidemic, the parent culture becomes more intensely sexualized (as it may in response to the relative aridity of the present) and females continue on their course toward greater social equality, more lesbians, along with more heterosexual women, will alter their sexual habits to resemble those of men—to the dismay of the cultural feminists and the delight of the sexual radicals.