#< i say that but Dee exclusively wears the same outfit everyday...

[dol-dee]

No worries! I just didnt expect anyone to reblog it :D If it was just about stylization I'd also go with the third one, top row. But my issue is mostly that I don't know how to handle the boob sizes on that body. I need to balance some amount of detail i feel, or the chibi won't read as fat/chubby to me anymore.

rrrraaaaaaaaah try to actively stylize something and suddenly everything looks like shiiiiit and doesnt work grrrrrrrrrrrrr

[a-diary-for-the-ages]

What being butch/femme means has piqued my curiosity more and more as I’ve been settling into my identity as a lesbian. Am I butch? I present myself in a pretty masculine way, short haircut, I go by a male name, I like being “gentlemanly” or “roguish” which is associated with manhood. I don’t bind everyday like I used to, but I still would for some outfits, to get the best silhouette.

But I’d like to grow my hair out into a bit more of a bob (my hair is too short to display its full wavy glory), maybe even longer. I wouldn’t be averse to wearing a dress or other feminine clothing in some situations. I’m pretty anti makeup culture*, so I’m against cosmetics like foundation and concealer, but like feminine clothing, I wouldn’t be averse to wearing eyeliner and/or lipstick in some situations. I’m not very strict in my sexual preferences— provided my partner is female, obviously.

None of this is to say that butches have to dress 100% masculine, 100% of the time. Vice versa holds true for femmes. The same goes for sexual roles, and other means of self expression. But there are distinctions, it’s self evident; we wouldn’t have separate words if there weren’t separate concepts. My theory is that butch and femme are like linked clusters of traits. Butch contains masculine style and a more dominant role in the bedroom, and femme contains the counterpart. One can be butch and sometimes dress in a feminine manner. One can be femme and take a more dominant role in the bedroom, or top her butch. A butch can exclusively date other butches, same for femmes. One needs to have some/many traits from her cluster of attributes to belong to said cluster, but not all.

I think that I have too much flexibility, and have too many traits from both clusters. Not all lesbians are butch or femme— even taking into account culturally specific but similar subcultures like studs (Black American) and Tom and Dees (Thai). Some lesbians are simply unaligned, and there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s a big world of lesbians outside of those subcultures. But even though it seems like I’m the only lesbian in my corner of the world, I’m fascinated with and attached to those subcultures from how most of my lesbian “community” is literature featuring or documenting lesbians in the butch/femme subculture, and I’m inspired by the ways in which butches and femmes subvert gender roles. And I have too many traits to really fit into either. I’m not an androgynous hybridization, I’m… both? That’s not really possible, they seem very mutually exclusive, but that may be what I’m experiencing.

This is all even further complicated by how I’m mixed race, and the cultures I come from cause me to be masculinized in some ways, and hyperfeminized in other ways. Don’t even get me started on being intersex too.

At the end of the day, while I can write paragraphs about this, it really doesn’t bother me at all. Im intersex, I’m female, I’m homosexual, I’m a lesbian. I don’t care about what gender related labels get put on me as long as it respects those parts of me, and me as a whole by extension. He/him, she/her, what pronouns I’m referred to with don’t matter to me, of course being labeled as butch or femme doesn’t really matter to me either.

*im almost certainly going to make a post about my opinion of makeup, but I’m leaving my views simple for now