you can talk all you want about tiktok, but worth watching about butch/femme dynamics
also here's a link they put in the comments if you want to read more about it. Some about that is also present in "the persistent desire: a femme-butch reader" in which you get to read the perspective of femmes and butches that were harshly criticized by that movement.
Transcript for those who prefer to read:
Okay but he's right, they're so right. This is going to be sort of a long video, I have a lot to say on this subject.
I really wish that more young lesbians and sapphics on this app would take the time to research and learn our history, because there's so much- there's so much that the people who came before us laid for us, and we can also work to not repeat their mistakes.
With regard to the take that I stiched, which I 100% agree with, I wanted to talk about the rise of lesbian feminism in the 70s and 80s, and the way that it was a backlash against butch/femme bar culture.
So lesbian feminism was a group of 2nd wave feminists who were lesbians, who were responding to the fact that mainstream feminism at the time was largely ignoring and excluding lesbians. So far so good. However because they were trying to appeal to the mainstream, they did a couple things in order to make lesbianism more palatable to heterosexual women.
The first thing, they worked to strip sex away from lesbianism, because that kind of freaked the straight feminists out. One of the kickers though, was that they really turned against butch lesbians. The lesbian feminists viewed butches kinda similar to the way that some of y'all do. They viewed butches as having male privilege, as being a tool of the patriarchy. They thought that the femmes who were with these butches were self-hating women, and they thought that butch/femme relationships were just "replicating heterosexual relationships". Which, y'know, they thought was inherently immoral. And if you've ever heard of lesbian separatism, that's also associated with the lesbian feminists of the 70s and 80s.
A lot of the conflict between butch/femme bar culture and the lesbian feminists was also racialised and based off class divides, because butch/femme bar culture was mostly made up of working class lesbians. A lot of butches had factory jobs, where they might pass as men in order to get them. And in addition was also racialised against a lot of lesbians of colour in those communities, whereas lesbian feminists tended to be (as a lot of 2nd wave feminists were) mostly white, mostly middle- and upper-class.
So if you're a young lesbian or sapphic, and you're gonna start, y'know, going "Oh, it's so hard being femme for femme", or "I just don't really like h- butches", or only "I just don't like hey mamas": just think about where that's coming from? Butches were absolutely villanised by lesbian feminists. They were pushed out of their circles. There are quotes from butches saying it was very hard being both butch and a feminist back then.
And another thing that's kind of- that bothers me about seeing those like, "It's so hard being a femme for femme" type thing, is that to be a femme- femme and butch are two halves of a whole identity. You don't have to like butches romantically, but to be a femme lesbian means to support us, the way that we wanna support you. And it's really hard when self-proclaimed femme lesbians have such negative view of butches.
I'm going to put a link to an article on lesbian feminism in the comment, if you'd like to read it, I just really want us to learn our own history.
