“masculine privilege” harms women
It’s a bullshit framework. It constructs a narrative that implies masculine women are not women and don’t experience misogyny. I’m so tired of it. Stop alienating other women from womanhood. Just fucking stop.
It silences women, it builds barriers that do not need to exist. It misrepresents structural power. It frames certain kinds of women as inherently predatory and violent. It’s queer liberal bullshit and it fails to address the social positions that these women occupy and how the world actually treats them. Just because butches may not be objectified in exactly the same ways femmes are does not mean that they have men’s approval or respect. It does not mean that they are not targeted. Getting read as a man occasionally does not equate to male privilege. Getting misgendered is actually really fucking dangerous. People will flip on you in a heartbeat. Every moment of acceptance is conditional. Men hate gender nonconforming women for not being men, for beating them at their own game. They hate seeing a woman succeed in “masculine” areas where they do not. This often incites violence–and it’s shockingly socially acceptable to swing at a butch. Women (especially straight women) vilify gender nonconforming women and exclude them from womanhood, sisterhood, solidarity, mutual protection & care.
Lesbians don’t have the male gaze, are not inherently predatory. Grow the fuck up and stop rehashing the same old homophobia and pseudo-feminism. Stop imposing heterosexual frameworks on relationships between women. Stop misrepresenting power dynamics to turn women you don’t approve of into ~basically men. Femmes are not damsels in distress, doubly marginalized & victimized for being feminine and for being women. That is the other side of this coin, that’s what is implicated by this framework–and honestly that’s just plain offensive. Just because men try to “bro out” with butches by roping them into objectifying women with them doesn’t mean that they’ve been granted access to the boys club–it doesn’t mean that they are like men. Stop shaming women-loving-women for their sexual desire for other women. Just because femmes are treated as trophies and prizes doesn’t mean that butches are not. I’ve seen it. Women tend to pounce on the hottest butch in the room. That kind of visibility may be useful, but it’s not always wanted and it certainly isn’t a privilege. There are a lot of fucked up sexual expectations that go along with that kind of desirability. We’re all capable of mistreating each other, but that discussion doesn’t need to involve constructing yet another misleading privilege/oppression framework.
Masculine, androgynous, and gender nonconforming women experience misogyny in different ways than feminine women do. Just accept that. Accept that you cannot know all experiences of womanhood. Build the room for more narratives, more theoretical frameworks. I’m writing this as a femme. I’m writing this as someone who is dog-tired of seeing women I love being treated like men and not-women. This is close to my heart, but it isn’t mine in the truest sense. I’m just trying to start a conversation. Some of y’all need to be reigned the fuck in.
Gender nonconforming women are not privileged over other kinds of women. I don’t know how many times someone has to say “hypervisibility is not a privilege” before it sticks.
