Thursday, 13 August 2009
A little ray of gay sunshine
I realise this alternative video for Lily Allen's 'Fuck You Very Much' might have been around for a while, but I just stumbled over it and think it really needs to be shared. Much, much better than the official video. Kudos to Lily for the track, though.
Right, now I'm off to jump gleefully round my lounge to it for the 10th time today.
Wednesday, 5 August 2009
From the heart of an eloquent butch
Following on from my previous post, I wanted to share the following link with you about femmes, from Ivan Coyote at xtra.ca.
Now that is what the love of a good butch feels like.
Btw, Ivan ranks number 6 in the 2009 Top Hot Butches list.
Not so damn extinct, huh?
Now that is what the love of a good butch feels like.
Btw, Ivan ranks number 6 in the 2009 Top Hot Butches list.
Not so damn extinct, huh?
Thursday, 30 July 2009
In honour of the butch
Ever read something so smack-you-between-the-eyes stupid that you wonder how the hell you and the writer exist in the same world? Especially when you both allegedly live in the same small niche that the rest of the world ignores, denigrates or uses for titillation? There’s supposed to be some solidarity in those circumstances, right?
Yesterday I was chatting with my beloved and she clued me into an article printed in g3, a free monthly lesbian magazine. Now, I have read this magazine over the years, and can appreciate that, with an estimated readership of approximately 140,000, such a magazine cannot be expected to truly represent every single queer woman out there. But from a quick scan of their data about their average reader, I was the walking embodiment of that average reader.
Until I became a poor student again, of course.
My beloved is still smack dab in the middle of the average reader category. But according to the offending article, she does not even exist.
You see, my beloved is a butch. A short-back-’n’-sides, big-boot-wearin’, checked-shirted butch. She has more pairs of jeans than a Levi’s museum and channels a glorious Jimmy Dean-esque charm and quiet charisma. And the leather jacket is somewhere between her uniform and her armour.
According to the g3 article, butches under 40 do not exist, so sorry, darling, you’re an impossibility. Not only is this article just plain wrong, it was so poorly argued with no internal logic that the writer and the editor should be ashamed to have published this shit. The writer manages to both note that butch represents gender fluidity that increasingly no longer exists and to argue that butch is no longer necessary because we have enough gender fluidity. Yup, I can’t get my head around that one either.
Another beautiful piece of circular logic suggests that we don’t need to dress butch any more because you can just go to a gay club or check out a profile to find another queer woman. But at the same time, straight women are increasingly dressing like queer women, who are increasingly dressing like straights, so it can be hard to figure out who might be up for a Sapphic encounter or two. Damn it, why can’t you just tell by the way that women dress? It’s all too confusing!! Oh.
Of course, butch might just be about being in yer face political, opines the writer. Because walking down the street every day taking the random abuse and rudeness that people hand out to butches is absolutely about being political. These dang women are just being difficult and you know there’s just no need for a nice lesbian to do that any more!
I hope you note the liberal dose of sarcasm laced through the preceding chapters. Please don’t miss it.
I am a butch-loving femme. A smile from a butch makes me go weak at the knees in all sorts of good ways. So I am absolutely biased. I am also apparently invisible as well. Those gay clubs that are allegedly the obvious places to go to find a fellow queer woman are not particularly helpful places for me. I get read as a fag hag and dismissed by most queer women. In clubs for gay women, I get treated like I do not belong, unless I have a woman with me to validate my credentials. I walk down Old Compton Street with my beloved and she gets cruised whilst I am blatantly ignored as irrelevant by most queer women. Butches, on the other hand, always recognise me for who and what I am. It’s like we speak a language other queer women cannot or do not want to understand. And I can tell you that there are butch women out there, including butches under 40.
It takes a lot of courage to be a butch, because it means being yourself. It means knowing who you are and refusing to hide or pretend, just to make other people feel less challenged. It means holding your head high every single day and rejecting all the judgement and insults that the rest of the world might throw at you today. It means being prepared to fight to be treated like a human being just because the cut of your hair, the clothes you wear and the way you move are not the way that you have been told to behave. Being butch means being brave.
So when a community magazine declares butches extinct, whether due to gender fluidity or rigidity, lack of political need or just plain fear, my heart bleeds for the butches that I know and my own beloved butch. To me, this article smacks of an internalised misogyny and homophobia . And I know that there are butches out there who feel now even more isolated, since even their own community does not recognise that they exist.
Believe me, butches, there are women out there who love you just as you are and would be devastated if you disappeared.
Yesterday I was chatting with my beloved and she clued me into an article printed in g3, a free monthly lesbian magazine. Now, I have read this magazine over the years, and can appreciate that, with an estimated readership of approximately 140,000, such a magazine cannot be expected to truly represent every single queer woman out there. But from a quick scan of their data about their average reader, I was the walking embodiment of that average reader.
Until I became a poor student again, of course.
My beloved is still smack dab in the middle of the average reader category. But according to the offending article, she does not even exist.
You see, my beloved is a butch. A short-back-’n’-sides, big-boot-wearin’, checked-shirted butch. She has more pairs of jeans than a Levi’s museum and channels a glorious Jimmy Dean-esque charm and quiet charisma. And the leather jacket is somewhere between her uniform and her armour.
According to the g3 article, butches under 40 do not exist, so sorry, darling, you’re an impossibility. Not only is this article just plain wrong, it was so poorly argued with no internal logic that the writer and the editor should be ashamed to have published this shit. The writer manages to both note that butch represents gender fluidity that increasingly no longer exists and to argue that butch is no longer necessary because we have enough gender fluidity. Yup, I can’t get my head around that one either.
Another beautiful piece of circular logic suggests that we don’t need to dress butch any more because you can just go to a gay club or check out a profile to find another queer woman. But at the same time, straight women are increasingly dressing like queer women, who are increasingly dressing like straights, so it can be hard to figure out who might be up for a Sapphic encounter or two. Damn it, why can’t you just tell by the way that women dress? It’s all too confusing!! Oh.
Of course, butch might just be about being in yer face political, opines the writer. Because walking down the street every day taking the random abuse and rudeness that people hand out to butches is absolutely about being political. These dang women are just being difficult and you know there’s just no need for a nice lesbian to do that any more!
I hope you note the liberal dose of sarcasm laced through the preceding chapters. Please don’t miss it.
I am a butch-loving femme. A smile from a butch makes me go weak at the knees in all sorts of good ways. So I am absolutely biased. I am also apparently invisible as well. Those gay clubs that are allegedly the obvious places to go to find a fellow queer woman are not particularly helpful places for me. I get read as a fag hag and dismissed by most queer women. In clubs for gay women, I get treated like I do not belong, unless I have a woman with me to validate my credentials. I walk down Old Compton Street with my beloved and she gets cruised whilst I am blatantly ignored as irrelevant by most queer women. Butches, on the other hand, always recognise me for who and what I am. It’s like we speak a language other queer women cannot or do not want to understand. And I can tell you that there are butch women out there, including butches under 40.
It takes a lot of courage to be a butch, because it means being yourself. It means knowing who you are and refusing to hide or pretend, just to make other people feel less challenged. It means holding your head high every single day and rejecting all the judgement and insults that the rest of the world might throw at you today. It means being prepared to fight to be treated like a human being just because the cut of your hair, the clothes you wear and the way you move are not the way that you have been told to behave. Being butch means being brave.
So when a community magazine declares butches extinct, whether due to gender fluidity or rigidity, lack of political need or just plain fear, my heart bleeds for the butches that I know and my own beloved butch. To me, this article smacks of an internalised misogyny and homophobia . And I know that there are butches out there who feel now even more isolated, since even their own community does not recognise that they exist.
Believe me, butches, there are women out there who love you just as you are and would be devastated if you disappeared.
Thursday, 18 June 2009
Wednesday, 17 June 2009
Tuesday, 16 June 2009
Advert rage
Ever deconstructed the messages and language within adverts?
Sometimes there's fun to be had (see the weekly column at the beginning of the Saturday Guardian's Guide section). Sometimes there are pure head-desk moments. And sometimes the red mist of rage descends.
At the moment, amongst others, I am feeling pretty pissed at the relatively recent appearance of adverts which assume that plastic surgery will be an eventual and necessary choice for every woman.
Firstly, Juviderm, a feather will never convince me that the needle you are hiding behind it will not hurt. Of course it frickin' will. And no, I do not have an aesthetic practitioner. And hiding the word surgery does not change the realities or the risks of undertaking even so-called simple procedures.
But putting all that to one side, the other thing that chaps my hide about all of this is the limited and restrictive idea of 'perfect woman' that these kinds of adverts promote at an apparently increasingly urgent fashion. These women are almost universally white, definitely middle-class (both by accent and by resource measures for these things to be matter of course), absolutely not queer, not differently abled, without doubt cisgendered, etc. This woman that we are all supposed to be and to spend money on being as 'naturally' as possible ignores the realities of the vast majority of women in this country. I realise that advertisers target the market that will buy their product, but when all the adverts make the same assumptions, I have to come to the conclusion that to a capitalist system, I am invisible and therefore irrelevant.
On the other hand, when I think about who I am invisible to, maybe I am better off existing in their blindspots.
Sometimes there's fun to be had (see the weekly column at the beginning of the Saturday Guardian's Guide section). Sometimes there are pure head-desk moments. And sometimes the red mist of rage descends.
At the moment, amongst others, I am feeling pretty pissed at the relatively recent appearance of adverts which assume that plastic surgery will be an eventual and necessary choice for every woman.
Firstly, Juviderm, a feather will never convince me that the needle you are hiding behind it will not hurt. Of course it frickin' will. And no, I do not have an aesthetic practitioner. And hiding the word surgery does not change the realities or the risks of undertaking even so-called simple procedures.
But putting all that to one side, the other thing that chaps my hide about all of this is the limited and restrictive idea of 'perfect woman' that these kinds of adverts promote at an apparently increasingly urgent fashion. These women are almost universally white, definitely middle-class (both by accent and by resource measures for these things to be matter of course), absolutely not queer, not differently abled, without doubt cisgendered, etc. This woman that we are all supposed to be and to spend money on being as 'naturally' as possible ignores the realities of the vast majority of women in this country. I realise that advertisers target the market that will buy their product, but when all the adverts make the same assumptions, I have to come to the conclusion that to a capitalist system, I am invisible and therefore irrelevant.
On the other hand, when I think about who I am invisible to, maybe I am better off existing in their blindspots.
The need for sleep
3 hours of sleep a night, in two 1 and a half hour batches, is simply not enough.
I can only hope that tonight is at least a smidge better. Fingers crossed
I can only hope that tonight is at least a smidge better. Fingers crossed
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