#or women and femme presenting

[arinmoss]

women and femmes is like. what the fuck r u talking about lol.

like ppl will be talking about shit that effects me but postulate it as something that effects only women and femmes, two things i am not lolol

[sapphicsparkles]

Mando and Mando adjacent sapphics

[androgynousevilqueen]

Guaranteed turn-off seeing men post shit like "women love to be tickled - it's in their nature!" and "Tickling brings out the feminity in all of us", indicating lees only. Speak for yourself!

If you're going to equate feminity with submission / vulnerability / powerlessness/ diminishment / being reduced, recognize that your kink is being informed by misogyny. Even if you think of that as something positive about feminine people.

It leaves no room for anyone into being tickled who isn't into being feminized. It leaves no room for those who like to feel feminine AND powerful/dominant.

There is nothing inherently submissive in the feminine, just as there is nothing inherently dominant in the masculine. We need to stop perpetuating this nonsense. It harms people by denying the complexity of their existence.

Have whatever fantasies you want, but don't oversimplify the rest of us to make us fit into them.

I know there are a lot of us cultivating our tumblrs for pure fantasy, I get that. But you dehumanize women, anyone who expresses themselves as feminine, AND those who want to feel masculine in their submission by making these bold statements that gender is a sure indication of someone's relationship to power in the bedroom.

Seriously, F off with that shit.

[tyrianludaship]

i once saw a guy say in the tags that my mutual's medic/femme oc ship made him uncomfortable "because he is a gay man" and in that moment i was like. yeah so many people in this fandom are very self absorbed and don't even try to look outside of themselves. i am just tired of watching my friends get hurt because people are so careless with what they say.

Medic isn't even canonically gay; let femme selfshippers do what they want.

[darkangel0410]

As someone who's been through multiple iterations of people finding out about rpf and then immediately making life worse for those of us here, I have two pieces of advice for hockey fandom in the wake of the booktok stuff:

Lock your fic if you haven't already. Regular hockey media and fans are picking up on this now so it's only a matter of time before they stumble into rpf and most of them are not going to be kind about it. Expect lots of pearl clutching and screams of disgust, and they will pull copies of fics they find to use as examples of why rpf is disgusting and bad and morally wrong. They won't bother to censor the writer's name either.

Go download your favorite fics if you haven't already. Especially Kraken fics. People will delete their fics and profiles because of this and I don't even blame them.

[bellhopping]

Oh yeah I'm a lesbian now I think. B

[yourdailyqueer]

Jay Hunt

Gender: Female

Sexuality: Lesbian

DOB: Born 1965

Ethnicity: White - British

Occupation: Entrepreneur, producer, stylist, presenter.

[edwardallenpoe]

man I sure do hope people who say that trans people don't have to present hyper-binary or be passable are normal about masc/butch trans people, including trans women who don't want surgeries or hrt or use she/her pronouns. Man I sure do hope they don't just mean femme trans men and exclude trans women and nonbinary masculine people. Man I sure do hope that they aren't super fucking weird about masculinity, especially when performed by trans women.

[sovaghoul]

I have a question for anyone attracted to women/femme-presenting/woman-aligned people. Do...do y'all really like full bush and hairy pits and leg hair, and are scars and cellulite and stretch marks and loose jiggly skin really ok? Like are those things not deterrents or detrimental to your attraction? Like have I really been lied to for the past 40 years when I've been force-fed the messages that those things are bad and ugly and gross?

...I mean, um, asking for a friend

[cruelsister-moved2]

btw the fact that butch/femme relationships arent 'replicating heterosexuality' doesnt mean you as a feminine woman are incapable of having desires+expectations rooted in internalisation of the male gaze & then projecting that onto masc women. it means masc women dont "have a male gaze" & are in no position to actually benefit from it, it doesnt mean that you as a feminine woman fantasising about being a tradwife and regurgitating tiktok divine feminine bimbo nonsense needs no further exploration as long as u construct an internal voyeur in the shape of a masculine woman rather than a man

[tricornonthecob]

My body decided that my 30s was the perfect time to flesh out my girl beard and now I have *six* genuine facial hairs instead of the one I've had since 18, and NOW ONE IS GRAY.

[strywoven]

yes , happy pride , just so you're all aware 100% of my roster are ( sigma ) CHRONIC WOMEN ENJOYERS , and will - without fail - always decide to pursue a woman over a man ; that's the tea , i don't make the rules.

[blood-choke]

Thanks for saying the bit about butch being identity more than presentation. I'm aware it is, like I'm not dumb, but I never feel like I show the fact that I'm butch enough, even if I'm soft butch. Like wearing androgynous clothes means fuck all in modern day since women's fashion is androgynous at a base line currently, plus I have very long hair and tend to keep my nails somewhat long so my identity doesn't show at all and it makes me constantly feel like I'm appropriating the label. But like if I were cis, I'd probably take testosterone for a bit like she/her Lea did; that idea is super enticing. As is I like being trans because it gives some masculinity to my physicality. If it were the past where women wore dresses, I'd definitely wear men's clothes (probably mixed with some parts of women's stuff). Just modern day doesn't let me visibly defy social norms as much as I want. My leather jacket and boots just isn't enough to show my identity.

Sorry for the ranble. Just made me feel way better, seeing confirmation that it's largely identity. Even if I don't have anyone to truly express it with.

you're welcome!

it was definitely something i had to unlearn; especially now with so much of lesbian bar culture having been pushed out and forgotten, a lot of younger people just.. don't know what these words mean, and when i was their age, butch and lesbian both were Bad Words that you never said at all except to demean someone.

reading older lesbian literature helped me overcome that and learning about all of the people that came before us; both about butches and femmes. digging through archives and putting myself into butch/femme spaces online has been hugely beneficial to me. i used to feel the same & like i could never "claim the label" because i didn't look a certain way, but that's just simply not true.

and this is especially not true for lesbians and other women who are already having other labels forced upon them by society; for not being white, for not being skinny, for not being hyper feminine, for not being cis, etc.

one of the things that made it really click for me was picture archives, specifically these kinds of pictures:

(pride, nyc, 1977 by meryl meisler)

this one is nancy tucker & her partner, and the two of them would switch shirts throughout the march. (1970 by kay tobin lahusen)

you can see how similar butches and femmes can look, and this is also what i mean when i say femmes are just as sanitized in popular media. butch and femme can be adjectives, but they are also nouns, they are genders and they are roles that people fill within lesbian relationships and within their community; how they move through the world, interact with society and how they interact with other lesbians and other women romantically and sexually.

this quote is one of my favorites:

“Butch is a trickster gender—and so, in a similar way, is femme. Lesbian gender expressions do not emulate heteropatriarchy, they subvert it. Femme removes femininity from the discursive shadow of masculinity and thereby strips from it any connotation of subordination or inferiority. Butch takes markers of “masculinity” and divests them of their association with maleness or manhood. Butchness works against the gender binary—the masculine/feminine paradigm—and reclaims for women the full breadth of possibilities when it comes to gender expression.”

— Caroline Narby, “On My Butchness”

[divinekangaroo]

I clipped this from your post because it’s easier than trying to inaccurately summarize! But I was wondering what you think about this dynamic. Whether you see it as a core part of his characterization and what you think it says about him, or whether you see it as kind of a visual shorthand in the series that isn’t indicative of anything about his approach to sex? It seems to me to be very consistent over the years and I’m curious about your take.

Yeah I think the repetition/consistency in how they show this makes it a super deliberate and very core part of his character, at least in how I read it – wouldn’t be nearly as fascinated with the story if it wasn’t.

And I don’t think it’s an accidental visual shorthand because of that repetition. I remember reading somewhere CM said that in S6’s TxL hotel sex scene they actually filmed two full sex scenes, one on the sofa and one in the bed – but in the end they only showed the last few seconds in the bed focused on the faces, as better articulating the purpose of that scene. I think they are very particular about how and what they show about Tommy having sex.

The particularity does add to this sense of overly-performative sex (EVERY sex scene feels performative and slightly contrived to me, even Tommy with Grace, even him using passionate sex with Grace in S3 to distract her XD, even him drunkenly/passionately sealing the ‘transaction’ with Lizzie in S5’s My Property scene) but I think they manage to stay on the side of the line that it feels like Tommy being consciously performative/contrived, rather than feeling like I can see the director’s hand. It’s the same sense when looking at Tommy’s various desks: yes his desks absolutely reek of being a contrived stage, but it’s *Tommy* being conscious about setting the stage, not the set designers/directors.

My reading / what I think the sex says about his character:

his ‘thinking mind’ constantly tries to frame sex as a transaction because he sees himself/his labour/his work/doing killings/offering sex – basically any act of his body as the fundamentality/essentiality of labour – as a unit he can trade for something else he wants. There’s some kind of less thought-out complex/trauma background thing here, where he believes that his worth is only what he can bring in and do for the family – labour, killing, smarts, sex, whatever. Mostly that’s his intelligence/schemes/business smarts, or his ability to push through risk/stress for high stake outcomes (stretching to do things they won’t out of fear), but sometimes that’s also his body (if combined with intelligence - trade your goods smartly, not stupidly, for advantage worth more than the momentary loss of bodily boundaries).

his ‘unthinking mind’ does actually want sex physically because it feels good. Physical release/oxytocin/endorphins etc? libido? I assume this, because otherwise they just wouldn’t bother showing him seeking out prostitutes; he’s not doing that for ego because he was satisfied in S1 that people thought he wasn’t having sex even though he was. But he is also sort of scared of sex because it leads to an intimacy that he can be used or hurt through it, hence why he defaults to prostitutes (S1, S2, S4 - or even the Zelda fling/no possible relationship) when he’s most wounded. Could theorise this is due to actual sexual abuse, but seems more like it’s because he hurts so deeply every time he’s connected deeply with someone – he loved Greta and was broken when she died, he loved Grace and was broken when she died - so, this supports his transactional approach because transactions are conditional, negotiated up front, well defined and ‘safe,’ they can’t get intimate or personal. He can use the transactional approach to justify himself seeking sex, while at the same time netting him something which feels good.

But whatever’s in the middle of the above two, is actually madly desperate for personal connection and intimacy. Despite him trying to apply sex transactionally or as a feel-good-only thing, he falls into some kind of intimacy and connection with the people he has transactional sex with, so frequently it’s a definite pattern. (I could write absolute buckets about May right here)

Even when he tries to avoid intimacy/connection – prostitution - returning from war, he sticks with one prostitute and has a very intimate connection with her? All right that's not typical?? And between S3 and S4 when the family’s shunning him, instead of just being promiscuous and anonymous, instead he has a relatively small rotation of regular prostitutes, knowing their names by preference to anonymity? Even the scene we see where he insists on someone new that he doesn’t know, this sparks from Lizzie pushing him about family/intimacy/connection. I read that almost as a “look at me Lizzie I don’t NEED connection stop pushing me” in front of her to try to make a point (to her, who used to be his intimate sexual connection, in a way that hurts her too to put her in her place? to himself?), immediately followed by him handing Lizzie cash/emphasising transactional approaches.  And this is then followed by that absolutely hysterical fail of a sex scene with the ‘someone new’ prostitute, which I swear is filmed to show Tommy did not, in fact, have any sex, or if he did, it was so lame they didn’t even muss the bed.

Even S6 and the prostitute in America, it’s fascinating they make the effort of showing that having happened, but then focus so much on all the intimacy/connection in the phone call with Lizzie/kids. He needs sex but he's hungry for connection and made vulnerable by intimacy.

(And I could go on about the number of ‘woman on top’ scenes and why that particular position, or specifically the filming/dialogue with May which is one of the more fascinatingly filmed and verbalised transactional relationships because of her class, or why I think Lizzie, the actual prostitute, has the least amount of flesh/nudity showing at all from all his women while he's often MORE naked/exposed in their scenes -- I’ve only been able to watch properly the once through, but had so many thoughts on how they dealt with the framing/camerawork.)

But all up, it feels like it’s trying to show him as a character who performs sex to get something out of it that’s not sex (transaction/treats self as a fundamental labour unit of exchange), but still needing/wanting/enjoying sex (because otherwise why would he pay for prostitutes/why even put sex on the negotiating table men don't do this??), but also constantly he cannot shut down this tendency/urge of his to more softly want/need personal connection almost more than the sex.

It’s just not a common way to portray a guy ruthlessly heading a gang, and that’s why I think it’s so deliberate. They take the expected image of how a guy heading a gang would approach sex (prostitutes, seduction, sexual prowess etc) but it feels like they’ve turned that expected image/action well on its head (cares for prostitute/s, suffers the Mosley-threat and Diana-rape, sexual prowess is mostly in service of women, attempts to depersonalise himself to a unit of trade), and then they use camerawork and the pre-post conversations to show this intriguing drive for intimacy instead of sex.

I hope that’s answered the question? It’s tricky; some of these thoughts more suited to a conversation/branching dialogue than a single post or I get repetitive XD

Tangentially, there’s more thoughts too on how they weave prostitution through as a theme, or the way he’s often in conflict between those motivators of ‘transaction/physical/intimacy’ -- he trips himself up; he gets hurt by trying to lean into one or two of those, and forgetting the other/s, and can’t really ever get them in balance.

[thicc-mint-cookie]

1880's book wives (Aziraphale is a couple decades behind as per ususual)

[gothducky]

why does butch = top surgery? genuine question

Short answer: It doesn't! Hope this helps <3

Long answer: I'm gonna ignore the fact that this is probably an inflammatory bait question of someone who did not even bother to check my blog and see the diversity in butch bodies that I draw. So far only 2 of the butches I've drawn have top surgery, while the rest don't <3

So! First of all I have never said anything of the sort n_n it's a term of how one identifies, you know? What a butch woman does with their body is no one's business, some butch women take T, some even get top surgery. Butches explore masculinity in their own way and that's just how THEY embody butchness.

I'm a butch woman and I don't take T nor plan on getting top surgery, yet that is how EEEEEYE embody my butch identity and it doesn't invalidate neither mine or another woman's butchness. The way I identify as a butch doesn't mean I won't draw other ways of butchhood, I aim to draw every type of butch woman I can think of! I love butch women! I want them to be loved in every way they choose to present! I want other butches to feel handsome with my art and for femmes to see a dashing handsome woman <333

I want to draw fat butches, thin butches, buff butches, trans butches, butches who go on T, butches who choose not to, non-binary butches, etc!

And before you or anyone else asks because I know they will, no, this has nothing to do with trans men. Butch women can choose to take T and get top surgery and it won't make them men, on the same slot as trans men can choose NOT to get it and it doesn't change the fact they're men. It is an individual way of presenting that at the end of the day doesn't concern you! I hope this helped you a ton!!

I LOOOVE talking about lesbianism and the diversity of butch women! Ask again soon and have a good day!! <333