ariel? ariel!

So I just wrote a 531 word comment (edited down!) about butch/femme and its limitations on Sinclair’s blog. Clearly, I am having some feelings.

Last weekend I had what I can only term a lot of gender experiences:

• Being asked to be a butch go-go dancer — or peer pressured into it? — only to not, in fact, be invited to be a butch go-go dancer;
• Spending a lot of time at a conference that was run/headed by a lot of High Femmes who seem to date primarily on the masculine spectrum;
• Feeling totally erased by all of this butch butch butch on one side and all this femme femme femme on the other, neither of which resembled me;
• Having so much angst over this that I left a party, only to get mad at myself and go back (”fuck it, if they don’t think I’m hot, it’s their problem, not mine, and I am going to just go be fabulous despite it!”) — and then explain it all to a friend of mine, a high femme bottom friend of mine, who totally did that thing you hear about in books of validation and ego stroking my fragile self that was getting no love from the rest of the world;
• I don’t even remember what else.

I just throw up my hands. I love gender. I love the game, the art, the construction, the way you put together symbols to make a message. And the people I am attracted to have a lot of gender. I think femmes are hot. I think butches are hot. And here I am watching people crow on and on about the butch/femme dynamic and honestly it breaks my heart.

Where does it leave me? I am some weird in the middle. No lover has ever looked at me and said “Ariel, you just have this kind of energy.” I have never gotten that feedback. And I hear again and again about these butches, these femmes, finding each other and seeing each other’s essential soul and having hot sex and complementing each other perfectly and zigging and zagging and yinning and yanging and holding doors and arching eyebrows and all I feel is despair.

I am not either one of those people. I am something else, something parallel maybe, or to one side, at some other stop along the way. It is a sexual economy I want to participate in but I don’t know how much of myself I am willing to sell along the way. I don’t seem to fit in that world — I am not exuding some essential quality of one side or the other that makes me marketable. And so I don’t get to do that.

I am interested in the homosexual and heterosexual as “same” and “different” rather than “gay” and “straight.” There are homosexual queers and heterosexual queers. I think I am  a heterosexual queer — I get off on difference, not similarity — but the differences I get off of are these two that seem to fit so well together. And then there’s me. I can play femme; lord knows I have before. And I think I am learning how to front butch, too; it’s a different skill and I find it scarier, but it is one I am trying for. Learn to embrace that which terrifies us!

But every time I hear people go on and on about their natural gender, their comfortable essential femme self, I get a little sick. Because I do want a lover to put me in a box. I do want someone to look at me and say “Ariel! You fit here!”

Sometimes I wonder about all of this mouthing about how butch/femme is so subversive and whether it is just a front for another kind of gender normativity that at least in my case is not experienced as liberatory at all. I do not want to look at ads on Craigslist or look at people in a bar and think “oh, she’s talking to the femme girls, she wouldn’t want me” or “oh, she’s so high femme, what would I ever do with her, I’m not qualified.” And of course, I know; there’s no way to know for sure until you try. But this is how gender systems and systems of power work — they shut you down and make you feel impossible for not living up to expectations that you didn’t even ask for. Sometimes I wonder, here in this system that is not aping heterosexual norms but is at least in dialogue with them, how much that gender brutality can be avoided. How many people worry about being “not femme enough” or “not butch enough” or “the wrong kind of femme” or all these other things?

I love my ridiculous life but some days I just want to have a straight path to what I am after. I want to not feel impossible. I want to feel like my desires have a place, and a time, and a validity. Maybe this is sour grapes at my own inability to put these things together, but maybe it’s more than that.  I just do not want to feel like I am a fool, a ridiculous fool, because I want to sleep with that person but I wear pants and button-down shirts and ascots. I do not want to feel like a fool because one day I’m in a tie and the next I’m in a pleated skirt. Gender norms are gender norms, and that’s how it is, and maybe I just need to wheel my shopping cart to a different aisle.

But it’s hard to do that without a sense of loss.