Because the sexual play of s/m seemed both to produce catharsis and to create stimulating polarities, its appeal among lesbians spread for a period of time. Even those outside of cosmopolitan cities were instructed in the techniques in workshops at the huge annual wornen’s music festivals all over the country, and they imported what they had learned into their communities. Lesbians in Austin, for example, recall that several of the leaders in the Austin lesbian-feminist community were introduced to the ideas of s/m at the workshops of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival at the beginning of the 1980s and brought those ideas back to Austin. Consciousness-raising groups met to talk about it. Support groups were formed. It felt almost “religious,” the Austin women say. Those who didn’t do it were considered inhibited. It went on for about five years. But none of those groups exists anymore.26
However, while not many women chose finally to make s/m a major part of their sexual repertoire, it has fostered changes among some by demanding that they understand that sexuality, even for lesbians, may be far more complex than loving sisterhood and that it is sometimes connected with deep, dark aspects of the psyche that are not always “politically correct.” The publicity of the debate around s/m served to liberate sexuality somewhat for lesbians who were not tied to the dogmas of cultural feminism; it made them want to experiment with their sexual repertoire, as one woman enthusiastically observed:
I’m not really into S and M, but what I read about it was a wonderful opening for me. The theory gave me the right to practice things I’d thought about, play out fantasy roles I couldn’t before, do penetration. It led me to explore sexual things like being in control and not being in control, to sometimes be a top and sometimes be a bottom. Those aren’t ways to live; they’re not social roles. They’re just sexual. But they’re a part of me and I like to look at them.
One San Diego psychologist who sees many lesbians in her practice believes that bondage and related light s/m acts have become common even among women “who could think no further than vanilla sex in the 1970s.” She attributes the change to a freeing up of sexuality for which the lesbian sexual radicals have been responsible: “It’s curiosity, innovation, playfulness—a desire to know oneself in different ways. And it’s more socially acceptable now.” To the extent that she is right the sexual radicals have been at least modestly successful in their goal of liberating lesbians.27
The resurgence of butch and femme roles in the 1980s can be seen in part as another conscious attempt to create sexual polarities in order to enhance erotic relationships between women and break away from the limiting orthodoxies of lesbian-feminism and middleclass lesbianism. Many young women who claimed butch or femme identities in the 1980s saw themselves as taboo-smashers and iconoclasts. They were no longer primarily working-class women who chose those roles because they were their only models, as happened in the ’50s and ’60s; butches and femmes in the ’80s were just as likely to be intellectuals whose roots were in the middle class and who had carefully thought out the statements they wanted those roles to make. They had been fed up with the “proprieties” of lesbian-feminists, cultural feminism, and conservative middleclass lesbians—all of which seemed to them aimed at molding lesbians into a single image and standard of behavior. In their view, lesbian “propriety,” which even swept into women’s bedrooms, was detrimental to the lesbian pursuit of happiness and an absurd contradiction of their conception of the lesbian as bold and original. In reaction to that propriety they now flaunted the tabooed roles: “I like being a butch,” they said. “I like being with other butches with our nicknames and ballgames—women with muscles and pretty faces.” The newly proclaimed femmes expressed resentment that they had had to “trade in our pretty clothes for the non-descript lesbian uniform of the 1970s.” “Let’s face it,” they said disdainfully of the ’70s style, “feminism is not sexy.”28
Working-class lesbians and some lesbian essentialists tended to identify as butch or femme in the 1980s with the same deadly seriousness that characterized many women of the ’50s. They sought to discover the sexual role most “natural” to them and to stick to it. But some neo-butches and -femmes chose their identities out of a sense of adventure, a longing to push at the limits, a desire to be more blatantly sexual than the doctrinaire lesbians of the ’70s had allowed. They found themselves in conflict with lesbian-feminists and cultural feminism, but even for them neo-butch/femme roles and relationships maintained the lessons of feminism that lesbians had learned from the 1970s.
There were, for example, few butches in the ’80s who would entertain the notion that they were men trapped in women’s bodies, as butches in the 1950s sometimes did. For many of the neo-butches or -femmes the roles actually had little connection with the idealized butch and femme behaviors of their predecessors. While some lesbian historians have convincingly argued that even in the ’50s butch/ femme roles could be very complex, in the ’80s they could be even more so, because they reflected the new complexity of sexual roles in the parent culture. Just as heterosexual roles, through the influence of feminism, ceased to be universally two-dimensional and could legitimately take on all manner of androgynous nuances, so lesbians who wanted to identify as butch or femme in the 1980s could choose to express themselves in a larger variety of images. While distinctions in dress in 1980s butch/femme couples were not unusual, it was also common for both women in the couple to dress in a unisex style or to combine styles. For example, one woman who said she identified herself as a butch admitted that she also liked to wear long dresses occasionally. Her sartorial flexibility was dramatized by her dress at a function in the lesbian community: “a tuxedo with a matching shade of eye shadow, and a necklace along with a bow tie.” “Butch” and “femme” in the 1980s, much more than in the restrictive 1950s, came to mean whatever one wanted those terms to mean. A woman was a butch or a femme simply because she said she was and that self-conception helped her to enhance her sexual self-image. The Random House Dictionary of the English Language definition of “butch” as “the one who takes the part of a man” in a lesbian relationship lost whatever inevitable truth it may have once had.29
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.”30 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.31
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.”32
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 “postfeminist 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.33
“Postfeminist 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.34
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-nogames-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.35
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.”36
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.”37 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.”38 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 aca
demic 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.
Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers Page 35
