Meaning: A lesbian (or queer woman) who presents in a traditionally feminine way—makeup, dresses, styled hair, jewelry, and other markers of softness or femininity.
Vibe: Feminine, but not necessarily submissive. Many femmes are assertive, confident, and outspoken. The term describes presentation and energy, not personality or power dynamic.
Analogy: The older term “lipstick lesbian” came from this idea, though “femme” is broader. It isn’t limited to conventional beauty or fashion standards—it’s about how someone chooses to express their femininity.
🧥 𝐵𝓊𝓉𝒸𝒽
Meaning: A lesbian who presents in a masculine or masculine-of-center way—short hair, men’s or androgynous clothing, and a physical or emotional presence that leans strong or protective.
Vibe: Grounded, confident, often protective. Butch identity can involve pride in strength and care, without rejecting emotion or tenderness.
Note: Historically, “butch/femme” described a visible pairing within lesbian culture, especially in the 1940s–1960s, when strict gender roles provided recognition and community. Today, butch identity is more flexible—it can describe presentation, gender, or energy, not necessarily a specific dynamic.
💎 𝒮𝓉𝓊𝒹
Meaning: A Black lesbian who presents in a masculine way. Similar to “butch,” but specifically tied to Black culture, language, and community.
Vibe: Confident, masculine-presenting, often protective or dominant. The term reflects cultural style and energy—hair, fitted clothes, jewelry—but also a sense of pride and grounding in identity.
Note: Because stud is culturally specific, it’s best used by people from the Black communities that created it. Using it outside of that context is appropriative.
🪐𝒮𝓉𝑒𝓂
Meaning: A mix of stud and femme—someone whose style and energy blend masculine and feminine traits.
Vibe: Balanced and fluid. A stem may dress or act more masculine one day, more feminine the next. It’s not about switching identities, but about being comfortable moving between both.
Origin: The term stem (sometimes spelled "stemme") originated in Black lesbian communities and has since gained wider usage; however, it remains rooted in that cultural context. Similar to the term "stud," it should not be applied to non-Black lesbians.
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🖤 𝒮𝓉𝑒𝓂 𝓋𝓈. 𝒮𝓉𝓊𝒹 𝓋𝓈. 𝐵𝓊𝓉𝒸𝒽
Term | Presentation | Cultural Roots | Vibe
Stud Masculine Black lesbian culture Cool, confident, protective
Stem Androgynous mix Black lesbian culture Fluid, balanced, adaptable
These labels are self-chosen. They describe how someone identifies—not how others should label them.
They can refer to style, energy, or gender expression, but not necessarily personality or attraction.
There’s no hierarchy between them. Femme doesn’t mean submissive, and butch doesn’t automatically mean dominant.
Many people move between or outside these terms—identity is flexible, and language evolves.
📌 𝐹𝒾𝓃𝒶𝓁 𝒩𝑜𝓉𝑒
This post is for surface level educational purposes only. It's meant to inform and provide context, not to define anyone’s personal experience. If you disagree, that’s your prerogative. Identity language evolves. What won’t happen here is hate, harassment, or bad-faith arguing. You’ll be blocked and reported without discussion. If you have something useful to add or clarify, do it respectfully. Otherwise, move on.
That said, my biggest pet peeve lately that I see even people with generally good politics on this website do sometimes is not understanding what "gerrymandering" is. It's not just a catch-all term for any electoral thing that benefits conservatives (and in fact, gerrymandering is used by Democrats sometimes too when they're in power - take it from someone living in an extremely-gerrymandered blue state). The Electoral College is not "gerrymandering." Because what "gerrymandering" means is "drawing representative districts specifically for the purpose of benefiting one political party over another, in a way that doesn't accurately represent the population but still technically falls within rules about each district having a similar population." U.S. state boundaries were not drawn for those purposes, and a big part of the issue with the Electoral College is that states vary in population and the construction of the E.C. doesn't apportion votes fairly to account for the vast differences in population in 2024 between the least and most populated states. Ergo, the Electoral College is not gerrymandering. Elections that are decided by counting the total votes in an entire state - like Senate or gubernatorial elections, or each individual state's E.C. votes in a presidential election - are not gerrymandered.
Gerrymandering primarily refers in the U.S. (there are other countries that do their own versions of it, too) to elections to the U.S. House of Representatives, or to state legislatures.
Here is a video that explains how it works, and how you can ratfuck this hard while still technically having each district have the same number of people in it:
Please learn this and get this right, it's one of those things that ends up discrediting your entire take when you don't understand it.
Here is a nonexhaustive list of terms you might want to know to interact on Tumblr! It doesn't include everything under the sun but sets you up with a pretty good baseline to be able to interact with users and understand some old inside jokes.
Basic Terms
dashboard - Your homepage. Is the first thing you see when you log into your account and displays posts from people you follow.
reblog - Repost.
tags - Hashtags.
text post - A post that is entirely text. Usually short and funny but can be long.
GIF - Formally: Graphics Interchange Format. Informally: a moving picture without sound.
trending - A section of the search page that shows the top 9 most popular tags on Tumblr at the moment.
DMs - Private messages.
ask - A message, anonymous or not, that is sent to a user's inbox. Can be answered in a post.
askbox - The place where asks are sent.
TL;DR - Too Long; Didn't Read. Used to summarize a very long text post.
fandom - A group of people that enjoy a certain piece of media.
fanart - A work of art drawn by someone who is a fan of a certain piece of media depicting characters or settings from that media.
OP - Original Poster.
queue - A system that, when set up, will automatically reblog posts onto your blog for you.
Inside Jokes
Out of Touch Thursday - A clip of the opening of "Lucky Star", a popular anime, set to "Out of Touch" by Hall & Oates.
Ides of March - March 15th, the day Julius Caesar was assassinated. A Tumblr "holiday".
Do You Love the Color of the Sky? - A Tumblr post that is an extremely long graphic with gradients to show the colors of the sky shifting throughout the day/night cycle. Notorious for making users scroll endlessly to reach the end.
None Pizza with Left Beef - A viral meme of a Domino's order that is baked pizza crust with no sauce, no cheese, and sprinklings of ground beef on the left side.
"I like your shoelaces." - An old way that Tumblr users were supposed to identify themselves to suspected fellow Tumblr users in public. The appropriate response is, "Thanks, I stole them from the president."
Dashcon - A failed Tumblr convention that took place in 2014. Most known for the image of an empty convention room with a small ball pit in the middle.
SuperWhoLock - A combination of the Supernatural, Doctor Who, and BBC's Sherlock fandoms that were extremely predominant on Tumblr.
bots - Automated blogs that posted adult content and were notorious for mass following Tumblr users before a purge on said adult content in 2017 slowed this massively.
Mishapocalypse - An April Fool's prank users pulled on the site in 2013. Users changed their profile pictures to the same picture of actor Mischa Collins, who played Castiel on Supernatural.
4/13 - The anniversary of infamous, but extremely popular on Tumblr, webcomic Homestuck.
TikTok by @relationship_anarchy, In response to the comment: "What is the difference between solo poly and casually dating multiple people? Sorry I'm new and learning..."
[beginning of transcript]
Yes, this is such a common misunderstanding and I'm so happy to dig into it. I really appreciate the genuine curiosity and compassion with the way this question was asked and I encourage folks to keep bringing that curiosity and compassion because I love answering these questions.
This is such a common misconception and it's not anybody's fault because we're all indoctrinated into a mononormative society. In order to understand how solo polyamory does not just mean you're dating people casually - we actually have to leave the paradigm of mononormativity behind and step into a paradigm of abundance. So I'm about to invite you to step into that paradigm of abundance with me right now.
Culturally, we have all been fed the narrative that in order to prove your commitment and your love to someone, you must ride the Relationship Escalator with them. If you don't know what the Relationship Escalator is check out my previous videos, I made a few videos about it.
The truth is that there are so many ways to show your love and your commitment to someone without marrying them and without having their babies and buying a house together and doing all of the Relationship Escalator stuff with them.
What I love about practicing solo polyamory is that it gives me the freedom and the spaciousness to create my own narrative around how love and relationships look like in my life. And it's based on what my gut is telling me, and my body. Not based on this pre-formulated script that society has given me. What I love about solo polyamory is that I get to make my life work for me and I get to keep my autonomy. Not in a way that has me disconnected from other people, but actually keeps me in balance. I have such a deep intimacy with myself because I balance it out that way. It is so intentional, the way I structure my life.
To me, practicing solo polyamory is acknowledging my capacity to have deep levels of intimacy with multiple people. I look at my life and say; "What needs are not getting met? Where can I meet those needs?" So for example, right now not all of my sexual needs are getting met, and that's okay - I'm glad to know that. So I made a dating profile and I said "Hey, all I really have capacity for right now is a play partner - who else is looking for a play partner?"
But the thing is, in my life, I also have these deeply emotional, romantic relationships and my sexual relationships are not always mutually exclusive from my romantic relationships. It ebbs and flows with who is in my life and what needs are getting met for me and what I have capacity for.
Love and intimacy are not scarce. People do not need to compete for it. Love is the fabric of the universe. I can have love and intimacy with one person and it takes nothing away from my other relationships.
Now, I’m not sure if I correctly understand what the cotton ceiling is yet, but it’ something that’s popped up here and there in the discourse, and I thought it was something we could look into.
According to some articles (warning to the second article: contains transphobia), the cotton ceiling is a term to describe the limits of what people will consider trans women to be women. So far, I haven’t found much information on the idea being applied to trans men, but I get the feeling that again, transphobia plays a part in its exclusivity to trans women.
Source:
The cotton ceiling is a theory proposed by trans porn star and activist Drew DeVeaux to explain the experiences queer trans women have with simultaneous social inclusion and sexual exclusion within the broader queer women’s communities. Basically, it means that cis queer women will be friends with us and talk day and night about trans rights and ending transmisogyny, but will still not consider us viable sexual partners.
So, basically, the glass ceiling is the ‘ceiling,’ so to speak, that women reach where they’re essentially stopped and can’t go much higher in the workplace. In a sense, it’s a roadblock, created by societal standards of what women are capable of.
The cotton ceiling (cotton, meaning cotton underwear) applies to how trans women are seen amongst women in sexual situations.
Essentially, the argument is that even when we respect trans women’s identities, there’s is blatant transphobia in the dating scene, when someone makes the claim that they’d never date trans people.
When I was against the big F (feminism), I made the same claims too, and got into pretty debates. I didn’t see how it was transphobic and it took a few heated debates before someone finally addressed it to me in this way:
How can you know someone is trans? You’re going by what you see, and what you think they have as in parts. If you fall for a person prior to learning they’re trans, and you found out later that they are, does that make the attraction any less valid? Chances are that no: you still care about the person, because emotional investment comes before the body parts.
People say that sexuality is fluid and highly dependant on the connection between people, not on the parts that people have.
And this isn’t an argument to get people to sleep with trans women. This is an argument asking to look at what we’re really saying when we say we won’t date trans people.
We’re equating trans people to their genitals, and that idea is harmful. I understand that having a preference is a thing and that’s fine, but we also need to be very critical in the ideas. Just like it’s racist to say “I wouldn’t date Latinx women,” it’s also transphobic to say “I would never date a trans person.” There’s no way of you know ever knowing with 100% accuracy, and it’s working on dangerous assumptions and stereotypes of what the woman’s body is supposed to look like.
That being said, did you guys hold this ideal too, like I did? What made you realize it was wrong? How did you find out about the word? If you didn’t know it before: do you understand it?
What is Solo Polyamory? Let's start by talking about what it's not.
The opposite of Solo Polyamory is Hierarchical Polyamory - meaning you've got Primary Partners, Secondary Partners, etc etc. What Hierarchies try to do is they try to create Secure Attachment by holding a boundary of "Okay, you're my Primary Partner so you have Veto Power over my other relationships."
So for example, let's say that I'm dating someone new, but my Primary Partner is jealous or maybe they don't want me to date cis men - maybe they only want me to date women so then they have Veto Power to say "No, sorry, that's not cool with me, you can't do that."
Hierarchical Polyamory is inherently dis-empowering because people at the bottom of the Hierarchy are disconnected from the people who are making decisions at the top that actually impact them.
When you have Secure Attachment, you don't need the Hierarchy to help you feel secure. You'll just negotiate each relationship on its own terms.
From Mark Michaels' & Patricia Johnson's Designer Relationships
[Text ID:]
RELATIONSHIP ANARCHY: A RADICAL APPROACH TO POLYAMORY
I practice relationship anarchy--where each relationship has the ability to grow organically into whatever the best arrangement for it is, without being hampered by artificial definitions or constraints. Thus, for me the line between friendship, romance chosen family, etc. is very fluid.
This works for me because it means that I can have a wide social net that can grow and shrink with the level of energy that I have available at any given period of my life and the people in my life don't feel stifled by the need to fit into some kind of definitional structure. What matters is that we care about each other and will provide what we can for each other, and we can set boundaries ourselves.
I love that I can give the energy to people in my life that is proportional to what I have available and those in my life don't feel slighted if there's less at any given period of time. We know that we care about each other, and that's what matters. It is freeing to be able to renegotiate things as life moves along. And in general, it's wonderful to know that I have SO many people in my life who think highly of me-this isn't limited to what's traditionally seen as romantic relationships; I have close friendships that are just as meaningful (or often more meaningful) than romantic ones, and the relationship structure I have can ascribe that importance to them without constraint.
