What does the word 'butch' mean to you? Is it more about gender or sexuality?

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

Just trying to figure out answers to this question for some work I'm doing. It's absolutely nothing relevant to MN - I'm researching historical ideas from 500 years ago, but finding myself wondering what words we'd use to describe certain women today. As a break from work, I watched Hannah Gadsby's 'Nanette' where she says someone wrote to her saying she had a duty to identify as transgender rather than butch, and it made me think. What do you think being 'butch' is? Could you be butch without being a lesbian, do you think?

Please ignore if this is boring or intrusive!

Sorry. Gosh that was long

But where it gets problematic is that others, like Leslie Feinberg, do think butch is a trans identity.

My first thought was that you can simply disagree, the way I disagree with the assertion that 'woman' is an identity rather than a sex. But I suppose the butch identity is more contestable in the sense that it is built on preferences and presentation rather than biological fact.

Although I wouldn't choose to use the word, to me one aspect of being 'a butch' is considering oneself a woman who wants to have sex with other women - it's a subset of a lesbian identity. So if you think you're a man then you can't be a butch.

However, I can see how a someone might argue there can be butch lesbians and butch transmen and that the two are different, if they simply define it as a way of presenting. What would be impossible to defend, in my view, is claiming that butch lesbians are transmen. I don't know about Leslie's views, so not sure if that's what you meant by problematic?

It's not tricky though really surely?
I agree. I can't see the overlap in definitions.

velour, great post, exactly something I have been trying to express (to myself mainly).

Hair length: Long hair can be very 'masculine'. Many men wear long hair and it doesn't make them the teeniest little bit feminine. They are not expressing their 'feminine side'. There is nothing about long hair that is intrinsically related to 'female'. As soon as men choose to wear long hair, long hair becomes one way of being male. Just like short hair is one way of being female.
Same with colours. Pink is for girls blabla, no, a man wearing a pink shirt is not 'feminine'. Wearing pink is one way of being a man. Just like wearing work trousers is one way of being a woman.

I have a feeling though that in the last 10 - 20 years or so, things have become more, rather than less, attached to sex. Especially for children, in that toys and clothes and even books have become very distinctly coded for either girls or boys, making us and our children believe that when a boy plays with a pink pony, he is playing with a girl's toy, not just a toy. My children, if they wear trousers to school, they wear boy's uniform, not just uniform (my daughter would be breaking the uniform policy; all primary schools here restrict girls to skirts/dresses and boys to trousers). If I get a book about strong women, it may actually say in the title that it is 'for girls'.

I then find it not very surprising that teenagers who are working out who they are and have learned throughout their short lives that certain things - lots of things actually - are 'for girls' or 'for boys' (e.g. due to school uniform policy of 'boys must wear their hair short' they will rarely, if ever, have soon a boy with long hair) get confused. If pink is for girls, and I love pink, if I am a boy it is easy to be confused and perhaps conclude that I am not a boy after all.
It is a bit late then to start explaining that pink is for everyone, and it is perfectly fine to be a boy and like pink, and that wearing pink doesn't make you feminine, because there is nothing intrinsically feminine about pink. This has to start way earlier, with toys, the clothes we put on our children, the school uniforms, the activities we encourage our children to do. The things we praise them for.
But I worry that individually doing this right is not enough - our children learn from their peer environment, and for us at least this is incredibly strongly gendered (as in, all manner of things are associated with a sex - e.g. pink is a gendered colour because it is associated with the female sex, it is this association with sex that constitutes 'gendering' IMO), so no matter how many times I say to DS that colours are for everyone, he can't fail to notice that no boys wear pink clothes and no boys play with pink toys (they - and he - used to, up to about age 5 or so, but no longer, except perhaps in private/secret).

So it requires a wider movement, IMO. If 'things' (clothes/colours/personality attributes/interests/...) lost their association with a sex, then men wearing dresses and boys liking dance and girls doing engineering and women dressing in pragmatic workers clothes would be just that, and have nothing to do with gender-nonconforming nor with trans-gender.

Far from 'gender does not exist', I think that, sadly, in our society gender is stronger than ever, with more and more 'things' becoming gendered, not less.

It's not tricky though really surely?

It's incredibly tricky!

Lebsians are women who love other women and may dress in a variety of styles. On the "scene" and historically certain styles have additional meaning within the lesbian comminty.

Sure, but what does 'women who love other women' mean to an outside observer? Has sex with them? Has a specific kind of sex with them? Is intimate, but non-sexually, with them? What about if that women doesn't consider herself to be a lesbian? What if she's married to a man, never had sex with a woman in her life, but would always have liked to? Etc.

I can't go back in time and ask Joan of Arc, or Anne Lister, what they think. I've a much better idea of Anne than Joan, but it's still tricky.

Plus, I think a difficulty here is that not all women know whether they're lesbians or not, do they?

Triple post, and I will stop, but velour, that's really interesting and useful. Thanks.

Ugh, and I said that, but ... batteries, totally agree about us seeing our mums/other women in practical clothes.

Plus, I think a difficulty here is that not all women know whether they're lesbians or not, do they?
Fair enough, I had taken the lesbian bit as a stable characteristic! I was going to say it's perhaps more likely when you're younger and still figuring things out, but actually I suppose I don't assume I will never want to have sex with a woman, despite the fact it hasn't happened yet - I think it could be more fluid than that. But if that did happen I guess I would consider myself bi, assuming I could still imagine wanting to sleep with men.

I do think sex has to be involved though, even if it's only the potential or lapsed desire for sex, otherwise it's just a close friendship. I'm not specific about the kind of sex and I suppose the exact things would depend not the relationship, but I think for most people either the activity or the feeling behind it would distinguish it from things they did with a non-sexual-partner friend?

Is lesbian something you identify as or something you just are because it describes a pattern of desire? I've always thought of it as the latter.

I don't know (though I love the phrase 'a pattern of desire' - do you mind if I steal that?!).

I guess what interests me is it's so complicated when you're looking from the outside. If you look at a woman who has a hugely intimate, tactile friendship with another woman, an unhappy marriage, and an interest in wearing men's clothes ... is that enough to make you think 'hmm, that might be something'? Or is it pure coincidence how those things come together? It does seem remarkable, when you think about it, that dressing or presenting in a 'masculine' way seems to have been related to having sexual desire for women for such a very long time.

Oh, and ... I was wondering about 'potential or lapsed desire for sex'. Yes, absolutely, but how would someone know? I'm thinking about, say, the kinds of women in even quite recent history (like Call the Midwife recent) who didn't seem to know much about sex before they were married. Would they even know sex with a woman was a possibility?

You are welcome to 'pattern of desire'

I'd forgotten we were talking historically and it is hard to know what they would have known - and hard to imagine what we would have felt if we hadn't known what the 'options' were as teenagers.

But I would point out that very small children are quite able to find their own genitals and stimulate them without any culturally communicated knowledge of what sex is, if only as a solitary activity, so that part of the desire is inbuilt. It doesn't seem a massive leap to think that women would have had the wherewithal to experiment with each other without knowing the name for what they were doing. Unless they were brought up in a very unusual environment (like the Romanian orphanages we used to see on television, for example) then their template for care and affection will still be based on physical proximity and touch because of how they were handled as babies and small children.

There is also something about sexual desire being quite flexible about its target, depending on the circumstances. I'm thinking of all male institutions where men might have sex with other men without considering themselves gay. "Any port in a storm" as one my friends once cheerfully referred to it!

And is it not the case in cultures which limit sexual contact before marriage that you see more physical intimacy between friends of the same sex? I'm sure I've read that somewhere.

"
Sure, but what does 'women who love other women' mean to an outside observer? Has sex with them?"

I would question whether it's any of the outside observers business

Well, you got me there, nothing. We'll all revert to being happy apes with no interest in anything else.

witch, yes, you're probably right, and I can believe that about cultures that limit contact before marriage. Certainly I know places that are quite 'strict' (and especially strict about homosexuality) are also very kissy and huggy between members of the same sex. My mate says Saudi men hug each other masses, and I know Russians do.

I think the men in prison thing is different, though. It's the stereotype that men do that, so there's precedent. Maybe a bit like the Navy - you'd go into it with all the innuendos in your mind already to prompt you.

I’m quite skeptical about the ‘women not knowing about sex before marriage’ trope. I feel like it’s a very male view - the Madonna side of the Madonna / whore thing.

Women talk about sex. Teenagers talk about sex. The mechanisms of getting pregnant might be open to misunderstanding but not knowing about penis plus vag? Nah. I don’t buy it.

Even more so in history when people lived more closely with animals. Everyone who’s been near a farm / a dog in heat / any animal in close proximity knows about sex.

But 'in history' not everyone did live more closely with animals. There are real, documented cases of women who claimed they honestly did not know what sex was going to involve.

Also, TBH, I don't buy the 'if you live on a farm, you know'. I grew up with farms on all sides, and I can't recall ever seeing animals mating in a situation I recognised as mating. Add to that the fact that what I did see a lot was bullocks mounting each other, you can imagine the confusion!

But I know what you mean - I do wonder how much we get a distorted view because of what people wanted to believe women believed. And likewise, I bet there were women who were all 'ooh, no, no idea how you'd have sex with a woman, la la la, just off to see my good friend Janet for some wholesome talk about knitting and prayer'.

Actually, the more I think of this the more I think it doesn't make sense.

Unless you live in Game of Thrones world, seeing one animal humping another isn't going to give you the slightest idea what humans do, not least because if you're talking sheep, you can't see a bloody thing anyway. You'd be forgiven for imagining that energetic spooning got you knocked up.

I grant, horses are a different matter, and you'd struggle not to notice an equine erection, but it mostly looks like bumsex unless you're up front and centre, and I cannot imagine many sane people would be, because it's dangerous. Same goes for cows, at a slightly less dramatic penile rate.

To the best of my (granted: limited) knowledge, it's really only recently that anyone has thought of wanking off pigs a la Rebecca Loos and doing AI, so for large tranches of history I don't think the mechanics were really widely discussed. Add to that the fact that cow farmers have, from time immemorial, used the back passage to check on the progress of a labour, and you would emerge one confused teenager if you'd used analogies to farm animals to teach you about human sex. Especially if you depended on it to teach you about human heterosex as opposed to homosex.

Reading that makes me think we’ve argued about this previously on another thread so I shan’t derail anymore!

Sorry! And you're not derailing at all. I'm just picking away at this in my mind.