Category: Gender Galaxy Page 6 of 9

On January 24, 2009

I feel like I’m discovering a part of myself I buried away, and mostly just because of a different environment. When just about everything around me is changing I feel the most at home. I thrive on change, as I am always in a constant state of change.

I dressed up last night with my hair in a fauxhawk, in lipstick, a bettie page shirt, and purple pants. To that I added a thick purple feather boa (pic above), and I felt come into myself. My newly cut hair makes me smile when I look at my face. I look like me again.

I was trying to be someone else for a while, someone I thought I wanted to be, or someone I thought Onyx wanted, or someone I thought could be, I’m not sure. I look at pictures of me with long hair and I don’t look right. I look like someone else.

Hair cuts can do that. They have power like that. They can change the way a person looks completely, be subtle or drastic, help mold a new identity. I look in the mirror and I wonder how I tried to be anything else.

This isn’t really a new identity. It’s one I’ve been talking about and theorizing for a while, but I needed a change of location to find it, a change of scenery. I’m still everything I’ve ever been and everything I will be, I just look a little different.

I’m finding the perfect way to meld my sway and shimmy with my swagger, and it’s fun.

I’m in such constant change that this doesn’t feel like change, just discovery. By which I mean, I don’t ever feel like I as a whole changes or my core changes, that always stays the same, but everything else changes, which is lots.

I’ve been waiting for something to kick-start me into discovering these new changes. Seattle is just that.

I felt so stagnant and helpless before we moved, and like I couldn’t affect anything since I had no control over when we moved. Ultimately it was Onyx who decided we should move and made it happen, even though I had been telling him we didn’t have to wait and could do it if we decided to. I’d been saying that for months, and it took him realizing that to make it happen.

Now I’m realizing the possibilities of this city. The possibility of being able to embrace a the side of myself I have been rejecting is overwhelming. I’ve already started introducing myself as Scarlet instead of my given name and I love it.

I can be me here, and that’s what’s most exciting.

I feel especially blessed that I have a partner who is willing and eager to share it with me. Someone who is supportive and excited to watch as I discover and change and progress and who finds me sexy and attractive regardless.

Femme Fagette (HNT)

On January 22, 2009

Yes, yes, it’s not Thursday anymore, but, I don’t subscribe to your limiting ideas of the days it’s acceptable to post a Half Nekkid Thursday post, so I’m posting mine on Friday! Plus, I’ve been moving and I wasn’t really online much at all yesterday, so cut me some slack!

Okay, well, now that that’s out of the way… I’m not sure what possessed me, maybe it’s just being in a new city and thirsting for change of any type that I can get my hands on, or maybe it’s just time that I let my long hair go, I’m not sure, but I cut my hair the other day.

I’ve been changing it a lot lately, as you may or may not have noticed. Not too long ago it was bright red and past my shoulders, and when I wasn’t finding any jobs in SLC I decided to get it to a slightly more normal color.

Shortly after that I decided to cut it to a little above my chin, which is where it remained until Tuesday night when I cut it myself, and then Wednesday I had it professionally trimmed/styled.

It’s been shorter than this before (amusingly enough that picture was also taken in Seattle). I’ve shaved my head before as well, and I used kept it about this length, or anywhere from one to three inches, for many years. A few years ago I decided to start growing it out, and watched it fall to chin-length, shoulder-length, and, finally, past my shoulders.

Maybe it’s something about the Pacific Northwest that makes me want short hair, I don’t know, but something made me desire short hair, and specifically to be able to do my hair up into a fauxhawk.

I wanted a cut that I could have look femme if I chose or put up in a fauxhawk or otherwise spike or slick to be boi-ish or fagette-ish. So that’s what I did. I decided that fauxhawk + lipstick = fagette (though that’s one of infinite combinations, of course).

Femme

Fagette

Examination of Two Queered Genders

On December 4, 2008

Read the rest! It’s fabulous, so go.

Here’s a snippit of my latest post on The Femme’s Guide, though you’ll have to go there to finish it.

Much by accident I just came across this quote:

Marilyn was revered as a tigress, but she was loved (and pitied) as a kitten. In that sense her sexuality did not present a challenge; vulnerability made her manageable–it guaranteed her femininity.

The threat of other lustful man-killers is diminished by intimations of their androgyny. Mae West looked all girl but her style was decidedly butch. “It’s [men’s] game,” she says with trademark smarminess of her multiple, casual seductions in She Done Him Wrong. “I happen to be smart enough to play it their way.” Marlene Dietrich in tux and top hat is also both hyperfeminine and faux homme, a man in drag in drag. –My Enemy, My Love By Judith Levine p. 92

It goes on to talk about the book’s real point in bringing this up: the antipode to the Seducer or femme fatale, The Slave. But, that’s not really what intrigued me about it. I especially love this line: Mae West looked all girl but her style was decidedly butch. It is an angle I hadn’t really contemplated before, but basically Mae West as femme. It’s pretty damn obvious now that I’m thinking about it, but it just wasn’t a connection I’d made before. Though she wasn’t queer in the sense of sleeping with women, but she did have an affinity toward gay men and wrote The Drag.

The two ways used to describe Mae West and Marlene Dietrich are both incredibly queer, while Marilyn Monroe is more of an archetype for traditional femininity. Mae West was femme in look, butch in action, or simply a description of a type of queer femininity, or simply femmeininity. Marlene Dietrich was a man in drag in drag, a queer masculinity on a female body so that it is not the same as masculine because it is also overtly feminine.

The Leather Daddy and the Femme

On November 2, 2008

How do I start a review of a book which speaks to me in such personal and intimate ways, beyond being about sex? How do I begin to describe the ways this book has clicked with me? I guess by answering those questions.

The brilliance of the book is that it delves into theory while still having an element of smut in it, mixing the two together in a true Carol Queen-esque way, because in some ways it’s impossible to seperate the smut from the theory and the theory from the smut. The first book I read of Carol Queen’s was Real Live Nude Girl back nearly four years ago when I was still living in Oregon.

I fell in love with her then, realizing how similar we were, wanting to become like her, to explore my own sexuality and look at it through the lens of theory. She was my inspiration for nearly all that I do now, and all I’m working toward including San Francisco and The Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality.

I found Leather Daddy and the Femme by Carol Queen to be not only wonderful hot get-your-genitals-stirring smut but also an interesting look at gender identities and identity politics. It starts off with the meeting of Miranda/Randy and Jack, then follows their relationship as it progresses, adding in a third partner, Demetrius, and playing with others as well. It is a wonderful queer genderfucking depiction of a gay leather daddy and his boy/femme and the creation of a family.

I found that the identities and relationships within The Leather Daddy and the Femme were some of the closest depictions to what I consider perfect. This wouldn’t be true for everyone, of course, not everyone would have such a personal reaction to the book, dreaming of being in an open and poly-committed relationship or having two different but equal genders that are easy to step into. I found myself identifying in some way with all of the characters and realizing that my dream situation is one very similar to what Jack, Miranda, and Demetrius have, with slight modifications of course.

In some ways the situation in the book is similar to my own, it emphasizes that queerness isn’t restricted to same sex relationships, that there are more ways for males and females to interact sexually and romantically than within a heterosexual model. Something I’ve thought was true for years, but that is difficult for me to describe.

The biggest thing that Leather Daddy and the Femme did for me, I think, was make me think about my own identity, my own desire for a chosen family (as opposed to born family), my desire for multiple lovers, for queer sex, for my own embracing of my multigendered self. It opened me up to looking at my own gender and sexual identity paths, how I got here and where I want to go from here. Oh, and it also made me wet.

I could probably go on for pages about exactly how it touched me, about what part of which characters I would like to inhabit, what I have thought of due to the book, how it has changed my perceptions and desires… but those things are all for posts previous and to come. Instead, I’d love if you have read it for you to give your reaction to the book in the comments.

Identity Musings – Part 3

On October 16, 2008

In Adipose, Gender Galaxy

A follow-up post to Identity Musings – Part 1 and – Part 2, I highly recommend you reading those two first.

For a long time I wondered if I was just trying to make up an identity that isn’t necessary. If I was so transphilic maybe I was just making up an identity so that I wouldn’t be cisgendered. Is that the case? I still wonder that, but reading through Pomosexuals has helped me realize that I’m not the only female-assigned person to have this conflict inside of me, I’m not even the only female-assigned bi-/pan-sexual/queer person to love queer men and women and to have a boi personae as well as a femme personae, as also evidenced by The Leather Daddy and the Femme.

Still, that nagging fear that I’m just trying to not be cisgendered (not that there’s anything wrong with being cisgendered, but as I mentioned, I’m rather transphilic so it’s not as much a conscious desire not to be cisgendered, but one I wonder if I have internalized), that I’m trying to make more of something that’s inside of me and not exactly being true to it, that fear makes me doubt and question, and I hate it. I’m not sure how to prove to myself that this is the case, except to examine it, embrace it, and see how it feels.

I’ve said for years that my embraced drag queen identity was not just about all gender being drag, but also because I identify with a type of femininity that can not exactly be expressed by female-assigned people. It’s a queer over-the-top femininity that I love and identify with, it’s similar to femme but it’s not quite the same. Part of that identification, I think, is being “larger than life” or, larger than society tells women we are allowed to be. My fatness allows me to inhabit a space that non-fat women can’t (pun intended).

In addition to just being fat I’m also tall, about 5’10”, and have always been tall. I was 5’8″ by 7th grade, I’ve worn size 11 shoes also since 7th grade. I remember being proud of that, proud to wear my freak label, proud to be taller than most of the boys in my class, proud to be large and queer and strange and a freak. It was difficult at times, but I embraced and owned my queerness from an early age, because I knew that there wasn’t another way for me to be.

I identify with drag queens, but I also identify with femmes. It’s two different yet similar kinds of fem(me)ininity, and I try to inhabit them both at different times, perhaps that’s another personae I need to adopt a name for, to adequately seperate the differences so that I can analyze them easier, so that I can understand her better.

The truth is I have multiple personas within me, each with hir own voice, each needing recognition, and so I’m trying to recognize all of them, but it’s a long and dubious process. I’m not sure I’ll ever know all of them fully, but I have to try, otherwise I will be out of touch with myself. Each personae has different desires, and I fully intend to figure them all out.

The first step to analyzation is to recognize that which you are analyzing, right? Otherwise you aren’t able to analyze something you don’t know about. These “Identity Musings” posts have been about just that, going back to track the expansion and development of these identities in a new way, so that I am able to recognize these different aspects of myself and therefore come to a greater understanding of them. I have a more specifically queer related one on the way (since these have dealt mostly with gender).

Identity Musings – Part 2

On October 15, 2008

Continued from the post yesterday, Identity Musings – Part 1 I encourage you to read that first if you have not.

I started leaning back toward femme the last year of high school. I didn’t have any serious relationships during high school, the few queer girls I knew either had boyfriends, didn’t seem interested, or I didn’t know them, and I wasn’t attracted to boys in my high school with the exception of very few. I lost my virginity at 16, the day it was legal for me to fuck someone over 18, to a man I didn’t really know. I don’t regret it, mostly I just wanted to get that whole virginity thing out of the way, but I do sometimes forget it happened.

I’m not sure what leaned me back toward femme, and, really, in some ways I had never left it. I was a wonderful mixture of butch and femme: keeping my hair short but wearing wigs when desired, wearing any manner of clothing I felt like, skirts, dresses, pants, capris, suits. I wore a suit to my junior prom: black coat, shirt, and pants with pink tie, socks, and hair to match my date’s dress. I look back on that time and realize in some ways I had my own gender figured out better than I do now.

I had this intense desire to grow my hair out, partially so that I would actually start attracting anyone. I didn’t think I was terribly attractive, but I looked back at myself with long hair and thought maybe that was the issue. I don’t believe that’s the case, but it was one of those non-logical I-really-want-to-get-laid-or-at-least-have-some-sort-of-sexual-encounter-with-someone-to-sate-my-skin-hunger type of things, so I started growing it out.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I love my long hair, but I miss it being short. I definitely had this “boy phase” from middle school to near the end of high school, what I thought was a butch phase, but I really do think it was a bit more than that. I wouldn’t play female roles in plays for a few years (and I was in a lot of plays), and the first one I did rather reluctantly.

I embraced that genderqueer boi inside of me so wholly, and I really was more of a boy than anything, but I was often a cross-dressing boy.

When I have expressed my confusion regarding my gender, my need to have both of these in me, I’ve had people not quite understand what the issue is, why I can’t just be “in the middle”, why I can’t be both, where the confusion is coming from. There are also people who express their own blend of masculinity and femininity when I mention it, they say that they don’t feel that pull, that they exist with a little of both and don’t understand that pull either.

If I feel like a femme, why hasn’t that been enough? If I feel butch, why hasn’t that been enough? I’ve thought multiple times that because I could be butch I should be, because we need more butches around. But then I know that wouldn’t be honest with myself.

In some ways I feel like a transsexual femme, that I used to be a boy and now I am femme. Looking back I really do see the gender trends of my life rather clearly.

I feel like I started as a boy who liked girls things, but who was a boy, we’ll call him Sebastian. I was a queer boy who liked boys and girls, even though I looked like a girl I was still a boy. I grew up to be a boy, and then I decided to change and become a femme. Then I was a femme, I embraced that femme and she felt good, we’ll call her Scarlet. Now I’m realizing that while Scarlet is as perfect as I first thought her to be, that she fits me just like she originally did when I first had that femme-epiphany-moment, that she is not enough for me. I miss Sebastian, but I don’t want to give up Scarlet, I want to be both.

The thing is I’m both boi and femme, both male and female, both masculine and feminine, both Sebastian and Scarlet, and I always will be. I’m also not a mixture of the two. I’m not somewhere in between boi and femme, I don’t have my own planet that is a mixture of the two that I orbit around, no, I am a boi and I am a femme, sometimes completely separately and sometimes at the same time, but they are always to distinct identities. I have two different planets that I orbit around, and sometimes I orbit around both and sometimes I orbit around neither.

I have suppressed Sebastian for quite a while, but he is coming back with the realization that I need both of them to be whole. I am working on regaining that. And, who knows, maybe I’ll find another personae hidden in there as well, someone completely different than Scarlet or Sebastian.

Continue the musings with part 3…

Identity Musings – Part 1

On October 14, 2008

I’ve been reading Pomosexuals for the last week or so, and loving it immensely. I read it while I’m on the elliptical at the gym, and I end up thinking about all these wonderful things that I would like to post about while I’m nowhere near my computer, or even paper to write ideas down with. This post has been swimming around in my head for days, thinking about how I got to the identities I embrace now.

Since gender, I think, is difficult to disentangle with sex and sexuality, I will be talking about all of those in this. It will be as much my general identity progression as it will be my gender identity progression, just focused a little more heavily on gender. Also, since this is turning out very long, it will be in two parts.

Any or all of these memories may not be entirely as they happened, as with all memories, but they are as I remember them.

I remember being younger–pre-school age, so 3 or 4–and taking a bath with my then-best-friend who was a boy, I remember us doing the “that’s weird” thing regarding each others genitals, wondering about the differences. I recall knowing the terms vagina and penis, though that may be that my brain at some point added them, and I remember remarking that my clitoris (I didn’t know what it was called at that point) was like a little penis. It’s not that I expected my clitoris to turn into a penis, or thinking that I was a boy, but I didn’t think there was much of a difference between them. Of course, I know now that they come from the same tissue, but that wasn’t exactly what I was thinking at the moment.

I remember growing up and liking dresses, while my (very 2nd wave feminist) mother did not like me liking dresses. She didn’t discourage me from wearing them exactly, but she would suggest that I did not wear them. The same goes with pink. Pink was never my favorite color (that elusive childhood obsession of a “favorite color” which changed nearly weekly), but I always have loved purple, and I think I would have liked pink sooner if it wasn’t for my mothers “yuck” reaction to it.

I remember my best friend M had a cinderella dress, and I coveted it. I remember liking to wear satiny nightgowns and have sleepovers with friends where we would play by rubbing our mounds together. I remember pretending to get married, and I would always be the preacher, rarely the bride or the groom.

I remember being girly, and I remember loving it. I was a femme, until I hit puberty, but I never “felt” female, I’m not even sure what that means. I think I mean that I didn’t really identify with being female or being a woman, though I did like girly things. I remember having “crushes” on boy celebrities that I wasn’t really attracted to, but that my friends A and T both did, and I was trying to fit in.

I remember hitting middle school and starting to wear all black when I used to wear all sorts of other colors. I came out to my then-best-friend W on the school bus before school in seventh grade, saying “I think I’m bisexual.” We talked about it, and he was cool with it, I’m not sure he quite knew what that meant. I remember having that spread around without my wishes, and then my own firm desire to spread it around.

I was sexual since sixth grade, or earlier maybe, but sixth was the first time I really started thinking about it, I had my first in fifth (October 10th–my best friend’s birthday party, it was a swimming party and I remember having to use a tampon for the first time that very first time I bled). I used to read romance novels, I read over sixty of them (I labeled them with numbers in my own OCD way), I was enamored with penetration, but lusted after the girls more than the guys. I masturbated… a lot.

When I was fourteen (though I certainly didn’t look fourteen) my older sister took me to Babeland (then Toys in Babeland) and bought me my first sex toy, a glow-in-the-dark bullet that I loved until it died (from overuse?).

I cut my hair short (about two inches) freshman year of high school. I started wearing pants more than skirts, though I still wore skirts because I’ve always loved them. I was very much a goth/punk butch fagette. I dyed my hair just about every shade of every color you can think of (ROYGBIV and more), and had all sorts of combinations, including pink with blue tips, yellow with green tips, pink and purple mixed around, red and purple, purple and white, and a very cool looking rainbow.

I was very out. I started the Gay/Straight Alliance at my High School my Junior year, and was the president that year and the next. I organized both high-school and community wide events. I worked with PFLAG and went to some of their meetings. Most people thought I was a lesbian, some of the people in my hometown still do, even though I was very out as bisexual. A friend’s lesbian mothers were surprised when she told them I was with a man.

I’ve been told that I was an inspiration to those around me, that I have helped them discover themselves and not be afraid of doing what they wanted or wearing what they wanted, because I was there to be a little more bizarre so they could go to their own personal extreme.

More of the path it took me to get here in part 2…

Baby Dyke (HNT)

On September 18, 2008

Click for the larger version.

My card reader is still broken… I really must get another one of those! Hopefully I’ll get one tomorrow while I’m in Seattle. Since I’m leaving for Seattle, I thought I’d post this HNT of me in Seattle. This is also a long time ago, 2002, I think? All young and fresh, hence “baby dyke.” This is kind of a perfect example of my femme fagette boi blend, short hair, no make-up, a little butched up but with a corset on. I was a gender genious six years ago and didn’t know it! I’ve gotten away from my butch-ness in recent years and it’s something that is slowly coming back to me. I’ve been reconnecting with my gender map, or the road to my current orbits in the gender galaxy, and so it’s also fitting that this be the image today.

I have many posts in the works, and many toys and books to review for you all, and I have some posts automatically set to post over this weekend. I’ll be in the Seattle area until the 22nd, and then up to my home town in Alaska to see the other side of my family and my friends that are still up there. I’m hoping to have internet access most of the days, but we shall see. There’s also lots going on, so I don’t know how much time I’ll have. I’ll be back on the 1st of October, but I’m hoping posts won’t be too sporadic (does that word make anyone else think of Clueless… just me? Okay.)

So, fear not. I will have, hopefully, a new picture of me not an old one in a week, and I will still be posting, though just from a different time zone!

Cisgender and Getting Rid of a "Safety Blanket"

On September 12, 2008