#Femmephobia

[princessefemmelesbian]

Not to be rude but a lot of white lesbians on here will see an attractive white(and especially if they're skinny, conventionally attractive, cis, and feminine) woman and go "omg she's so pretty and gorgeous and elegant, gosh, why are women so beautiful! I want her to hold me and hug me and kiss me!" but the second you see an attractive non-white woman(especially if they are fat, trans, dark-skinned, or butch, but lbr y'all do this to femmes of color as well due to how masculinized we are), suddenly y'all's brains short-circuit and you don't know how to complement us without depriving us of our humanity because you still internalized the idea that woc are wild impure animals and so out comes the "omg I want her to step on me and choke me and slap me across the face and make me her slave!!!" and y'all think it's okay because you're making yourself "subservient" to us but really all you're doing is reinforcing harmful stereotypes of woc as more aggressive, sexual, violent, inhumane, and less feminine, sweet, loving, and/or gentle than white women, and you guys think it's a compliment but it's really fucking not and I'm here to tell you that being a lesbian doesn't invalidate your white privilege if you talk about and fetishize lesbian woc this way. 😡

[punkeropercyjackson]

'We need to get weirder about gender!!!'You guys can't even handle femme transmascs who don't wanna be called f*mboys,binary feminine trans women or fucking afab she/theys

[that-butch-archivist]

source: The Femme Mystique, edited by Lesléa Newman

[lacefuneral]

every time i see one of those "there's too much positivity for feminine trans men. too much representation for trans men" i feel like i'm being gaslit

did anyone else live through the height of the truscum era? just me?

did anyone else have to lie to their therapists and show up to court in suits and wear a mask of Impenetrable Masculinity devoid of expression in order to survive. to go on hormones. to have surgery. to not get assaulted in bathrooms.

does anyone else have family members tell them they couldn't possibly be a man because of how feminine they are. or ask them if they're detransitioning every 5 minutes because they put nail polish on

being masculine is what is expected for men whether they are cis or trans. i get that your own internalized transphobia, in addition to unchecked misogyny (stemming from dysphoria) as well as femmephobia (which stems from toxic masculinity) is warping your world view where Big Femme is subjugating the mascs, but the issue here is not femmes.

the issue here is cis people infantilizing and emasculating you.

so instead of throwing us under the bus, next time consider not mentioning us at all. say what you actually mean. "i don't like how cis people depict us" or "i would like to see some more positivity for mascs"

[imhatsunemikurealz]

is it just me or was the moral panic around girly media (the idea that girly media is sexist and teaches women to only care about romance and clothes and it causes eating disorders), a massive example of femmephobia

[thisismisogynoir]

In fictionland(especially, but not limited to, kids media), when female characters dress up as men, it’s almost always to do something heroic while in disguise because the patriarchal society they’re in won’t let them do it as women(Mulan, Polly Oliver, Joan of Arc type characters). But when male characters dress up as women, it’s almost always as a joke and played for laughs. Think about that for a second. Think of all those wonderful, beautiful implications(hint: there aren’t any).

[bijoumikhawal]

Part of the problem with MLM fetishization discourse (mainly found onTwitter, but i see it here too), is that people see effeminacy and femininity in men itself as a fetish, and therefore can't be assed to understand actual issues we face with regard to sexuality

It's impossible to talk about fatphobia, underlying assumptions often related to white supremacist beauty standards, adultification, ageism, etc that feminine men experience because people are too busy getting in a tizzy over a guy wearing skirts in media. One of the big issues for me is hypersexualization- I was getting sexualized at a very young age for being what I am, it's a big issue historically, and a lot of media I could access when I was younger was basically just porn/erotica. And that porn/erotica was often like. Racist, it hypermasculinzed Blackness in comparison to white effeminates, and it only portrayed fem men as submissive bottoms (which isn't itself bad) whose effeminacy was humiliation, and submission was bc they're worth less than "real men"

And like, the joke is people are so focused on wether or not people writing femmes who bottom is bad (it's just a thing that happens irl) that you can't talk about anything else. It's also a form of hypersexualization. The only other thing ppl wanna discuss is "heteronormativity". Fiction where femmes are fucking isn't a bad thing with that being said, and desexualizing us is also a common homophobic thing to do, and tends to loop back to the "less than a real man" thing.

And like, "yaoi"/"BL" isn't the big driving factor in hypersexualization here. If nobody in the US knew what that was I still would've been getting hit on by men twice my age at 16 (who sometimes would loudly advertise their interest in femmes specifically, or more accurately, "femboys" and "tr*ps").

And honestly when you deal with just like- grown ass men looking at you that way, people moaning and bitching that the big concern for fetishization here is basically wether or not the character exists only deepens the shame felt from those interactions. I was made to feel uncomfortable and gross because my gender presentation was seen as sexual when I was a teenager, and all this shit does is go "yeah, it is sexual, when I look at people like you I think about sex and how the sex you have is bad". And part of my Ick with portrayals of femmes is that we're assumed as submissive bottoms because I'm not, but this is still deeply harmful to people that are because you're telling queers the way they fuck is morally wrong and you're instilling shame over it.

And like... actual fetishization for me is more often when femmes as objects of sexual desire are seen that way through a lens of "you're a faggot so you're beneath me, you should thank me when I call you slurs and do xyz, you're trash, shaving you so you have less body hair (so you look more feminine) is a punishment and symbolizes my superiority" because it's just intracommunity femmephobia/effemiphobia with a boner.

Its not that other things are non-issues but cis women clumsily writing a masc/femme dynamic is probably more likely to make me laugh than feel ashamed or disgusted, and instances of feminizing a character for bigotry reasons in fandom are less common than people complaining about effeminacy existing at all (including with femme transmasc characters, especially because usually those aren't being written by cis people). The actual things that have made me cringe with shame and disgust about cis women's view of feminine and effeminate men sexually are more difficult for me to unsnarl because I see it less often, and it's sometimes more visceral because while I was sexualized by men I was actually abused by women, but I'll be frank; those things usually aren't occurring in discussions about fandom.

When I get disgusted in fandom discussion isn't about femme characters existing at all, or top/bottom/switch- they're about people acting like writing romance/erotica about men fucking is the sacred right of cis women and any discussion about equity in publishing means you're attacking fandom when they're two different things, and that that right is more important than the fact that queer men can struggle to get published in romance- and subsequent issues with poverty. Or the insistence that to be fetishized you need to be a woman because fetishization is stored in the pussy (revealing they haven't thought about racism in the romance genre, and don't think about trans women). Its about queer men in fandom writing smut and getting harassed by women who write the exact same type of it because the way they do it is somehow bad. It's about my sexuality being seen as piece of land to fight over, that I'm not supposed to be on, not writing about men in fishnets.

[alexibeeart]

really disgusting to see so-called """fans""" of Our Flag Means Death legitimately and unironically using like Badmintons Izzy Hands Father Bonnet English Navy etc flavored homophobic rhetoric and slurs on this site and the notes aren't all "gross" "what the fucking fuck" "did you watch the show or"

[linuxbian]

[princessefemmelesbian]

I don’t think/know if enough people talk about this but why is most lesbian/wlw representation in media “light-skinned/white partner is more feminine and dark-skinned/Black/poc partner is more masculine” like why tf is that. Give me more wlw couples where the more feminine partner has darker skin/is the poc in the pairing. 😪 Signed, a Black femme. 

[butchyautja]

good ole tumblr...

[punkeropercyjackson]

'Problematic things were considered good in the past so you're puritan for critizing them!'Oh yeah,by WHICH people were they considered good?Quickly🧍🏽‍♀️

[stfudiscoinfernoed]

So, we agree that "queerphobia" is an useless nonsense term that describes what's in reality cissexism/heterosexism, but what are your thoughts on "femmephobia"?

Femmephobia is an actively harmful term. The devaluation of femininity does not mean that all masculinity is valued or privileged. Gender nonconforming women are not privileged for being gender nonconforming.

Femmephobia also ignores the way that certain marginalized groups are not seen as feminine enough. Black women, brown women, trans women, fat women, and sapphic women are all expected to hyperperform femininity in order to be respected. This perceived innate masculinity is not a privilege but a part of their oppression.

Misogyny, homophobia, and transmisogyny are the primary sources of what people call "femmephobia."

[imhatsunemikurealz]

femmephobia (the idea that being feminine is inherently bad, harmful, or weak) is 100 percent real if you think of all the stupid arguments made around girly media

[thisismisogynoir]

The Velma trailer having Velma say she’s the brains of the operation and Daphne’s just the looks, omg. As if their hatred for girly girls wasn’t clear enough. Deadass what did Daphne Blake ever do to them, other than be girly and be fabulous, that is? Why the needless “not like other girls” energy that we should have left behind in 2012? Why the needless shitting on feminine women and erasing all that Daphne Blake represents, Mindy? It’s like they completely missed the point of both characters because not only was Daphne smart, brave, brilliant, and skilled in karate--she just, y’know, also loved shopping and fashion and looking snatched as shit--but Velma would never say something like this! But I guess that’s what to expect from a radfem JKR bootlicker. Sigh. 🙄 

[genetierneysattorney]

See what I mean