Day: August 31, 2008

Semantics Sunday: Fagette

On August 31, 2008

One of my new favorite words, one which I’m even considering adding to my long list of labels up on the masthead, I’ve already added it to my gender description. I first encountered the term in the Fagette video by Athens Boys Choir which is absolutely lovely, hilarious, wonderful, and perfect.

Doing a search on google for faggette brings up over 18,600 results which are a mixture of pages with the Athens Boys Choir video on them or linked, personal profiles like myspace or digg, information for people with the last name of Fagette, some is information about La Fagette, France, and random other things. Aside from the video I’m interested in the Urban Dictionary definition of fagette which reads:

A lesbian or a woman that displays either a masculine or feminine attitudes, mannerisms, and dress depending on their whim at the moment.
At the Lesbian Club, Cheri was such a fagette that she was receiving looks of interest from both the Butch and Femme crowd.

As opposed to the simple other definitions: 1. A gay frenchman. Derived from “faggot” and “baguette.” 2. A female homosexual/lesbian. I would say I prefer the first definition of fagette(s) from UD instead of the other for fagette.

Further, I would propose my own definition (as that’s what this post is all about, right?) which brings it slightly away from sexuality, though I would say queer is a necessity as I believe queerness and gender have some sort of link together but queer doesn’t always have to do with who one sleeps with. I really like the “depending on their whim at the moment” part of the definition, and I think that is key for my own feelings and adoption of this label.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my boi side, especially since reading The Leather Daddy and the Femme since it is so amazing and is a queer femme who also dresses as a boi, who has both aspects (genders) within her and plays with both and in between. I have been feeling more of my boi side lately, but also enjoying and analyzing my femme side, yet another “switch” label for me to inhabit, perhaps, switching from boi to femme and back again and everywhere in between.

It’s often difficult to not have a definite place in this gender galaxy, or to be circling around more than one sun. At the same time it’s very freeing, because through embracing these specific labels I am able to then open up my own gender expression to fit inside or outside of the gender lines as I see fit. Just like I feel it’s sometimes necessary to restrict something or go to one extreme in order to find where you really feel comfortable, and I’ve had to do that.

Back to my definition of fagette. Basically I think of it as a queer who mixes masculinity and fem(me)ininity and creates their own version of both, whether their biology is male or female. I know it’s a rather open-ended definition, but I think gender is open-ended in some ways, a lot more open-ended than society would like us to believe anyway. A fagette can look like Athens Boys Choir: a boy with a vagina, or a bio-female drag queen, or like Miranda/Randy of The Leather Daddy and the Femme, or all sorts of other configurations. There’s something about femme masculinity in it (not to be confused with female masculinity), which seems contradictory, in any way but I’m talking simply gender and not biological sex.

There’s a type of femme which can only be achieved by mixing a little masculinity in, I think, the drag queen is a drag queen because it’s putting a feminine gender on the socially “wrong” body, but a similar gender is difficult to achieve when you are putting a similar gender expression, drag queen, on the socially “correct” body. Fagette is recognizing that wrongness, that queerness, and embracing it.

It doesn’t come out as femme drag queen for everyone, that’s just my experience of fagette, having to map it onto my identity in order to have it fit. It’s similar to what I mean by “femme drag queen,” the purposeful combining of femmeininity and masculinity in order to create a new gender all my own, an androgyny that doesn’t come out looking primarily masculine as most androgyny does.

Fagette is not limited to the gender expression “drag queen” as some drag queens are not fagettes, but some fagettes are drag queens. Fagette can encompass any gender which is a mixture of femme and fag (I believe).

Relationships End and Other Fears

By Tai Fenix Kulystin

On August 31, 2008

In a Love: Onyx

Everything I know about relationships means that Dominus’ and mine will never last. At some point we will find that we no longer fit together like we once did. Is it logic or fear that is telling me that? Sometimes I’m not sure. I don’t completely believe it, but I don’t not believe it.

Part of me can’t imagine a reason for ever needing to leave, and that in and of itself scares me. We are both solidly committed to the growth of the other, of bettering the life of the other, and we are both poly, so I can’t see myself ever needing to leave him for someone else as there are other wonderful poly people out there and I’m sure some or many of them are compatible with me/us.

I read about people who have been together for long periods of time and I wonder how they do it. Maybe it is because all of my immediate examples of relationships just tell me that things don’t always work out the way they should. I’ve grown up with the idea that people fall apart and love isn’t always enough replaying over and over in the relationships I’ve witnessed. My experience of relationships is such that I question commitment.

I know this is typical, I do have a degree in Psychology after all and I’ve read about attachment theories and imprinting of relationship patterns and all of that. I can point out the way that this is both logical (for my brain) and fear-driven but it wouldn’t necessarily be logical for anyone else, because it’s the way my brain works. I also continually compare my relationship with Stian to my sister’s first big relationship, because in some ways they are eerily similar and even though in other ways they’re worlds apart it’s easier for me to see the similarities… that is a bit of a side-note though.

I feel like I’ve been running hot and cold lately, and I’m not sure what to do about it. There are some days when I can’t imagine my life without him and there are others that I can’t imagine being with him forever or even for long. My sex drive has been rather diminished lately, and I’m not quite sure of the cause. I’ve been playing with toys for reviewing, and we’ve had sex just not a lot recently, and not as much as I have been before.

It all comes back to my preset ideas about relationships as well as my general unhappiness with my bodily health and living in SLC. I’m working to change the two big things I’m unhappy with, but for an instant-gratification junkie like me it is difficult to have the two big things making me depressed both not being able to be fixed quickly. In order to change my unhappiness with my bodily health I’m having to change the way I think about everything regarding what I put in and do with my body, but the big changes will take a lot of time. In order to move out of SLC we have to wait until we have the money to do it.

As for my preset ideas about relationships… well, we’ve been living together for two years, we’ve been together for over three, and I’ve been thinking about that a lot, since we just had two of our anniversaries within the last month or so. My relationship fearing brain tells me that we have been together for a long time and that means our time must be running out. I worry that because we’re not having sex that means he no longer desires me, which means he’s growing tired of me, which means he may reject me, which means my fears about relationships ending are somehow validated. When in reality I know he is tired from working so much and that if I initiated sex we would have it, I’m usually the one who initiates and I haven’t been lately first because I haven’t been feeling very sexy, and now because I don’t feel very desired.

The catch, of course, is that because I feel he doesn’t desire me as much I’ve been pulling away from him. I’ve been not initiating sex even when I want it, I’ve been waiting to see if he will take the initiative while at the same time knowing that he’s tired from working his butt off most of the week and that he’s feeling me pull away which makes it less likely he will initiate anything, and my pulling away means that he pulls away because I’m pulling away… basically it’s a cycle that is never-ending until we talk about it and it’s hard to talk about when we’re in the middle of it.

That’s what this post is for, though. This is my way of processing the situation and getting to a place where I understand it enough to bring it up and talk about it. This is the first step towards change: realizing the problem on my side so that we can talk about it and come to a resolution. We talked a little the other night about things that have been bothering us, but we didn’t get to the heart of the issue. Most of our problems come down to the same things: we both have a huge fear of rejection and we both have highly developed defense systems. Put those two together and we get into these cycles which will go on until one of us brings it up. One of us meaning me.

Basically what I’m saying is: I need to go ask him to come into the bedroom on our new red satin sheets (which we have yet to fuck on) and play, touch, tease, flog, and fuck our brains out.

Kinky Sex Link

By Tai Fenix Kulystin

On August 31, 2008

In Power Play, Sex Blogging

As I’ve mentioned before this has been my summer for collaborative projects. Coming into the summer I wasn’t involved in any, but now I’m in three different ones, all with their own allure. I’m really excited to be part of these group blogs. I’ve already talked about the other two projects, and so it’s time to talk about Kinky Sex Link.

From the info page:

Kinky Sex Link is a collaborative effort made up of the best BDSM and Fetish Bloggers and Authors we could find. So you get to read different kink bloggers on just one site.

And that is not all! There is a monthly KONTEST too! The top 6 commented post of each month will be republished on the KSL Kontest page. Consider it the Kinky Cream of the Crop Listing. Out of that list of 6 posts I WANT YOU to comment on your favorite. At the end of each month 1 commenter’s name will be drawn randomly and he/she will win the prize provided by FunseXXXtoys.

There are lots of fantastic kink bloggers who are participating in KSL, some of my favorites as well as many I didn’t know until this project began. You can peruse the list of bloggers on the KSL Bios page.

I’m sure all the other KSL bloggers are fantastic as well, I just haven’t taken the time to read -all- of them (there are quite a few), but a couple fellow KSL bloggers that I just started reading and I really have been enjoying are: Dark, Deep, & Deviant by Amber, who I have gotten to know a bit on FetLife, she’s a fellow greeter and simply fantastic, and I’ve been enjoying reading her since I found her blog; the other is Princess by Day… Slut by Night by VioletX. I actually found her blog via FetLife before knowing that we would both be contributing to KSL, her blog is fairly new, I’ve read most of her entries and have enjoyed them.

I’ve only posted once to KSL, a cross-post from here, but I have many more posts up my sleeve, as always. Some posts I will cross-post from here, some I may cross-post to here, and some may just be KSL exclusives.