#strong femme x fat butch

[alphasunpup]

Feedist Kinktober Day 28- Movie Star

The paparazzi swarm you, trying to get pictures of your gut and fat ass. You have your date on your arm as you two walk the red carpet

Her arms are muscular and show off in the beautiful dress she's wearing. As you walk the red carpet, people throw offer you food, begging you to take what they offer.

You take the "offerings" as you and your partner pose on the runway. You start eating as you get to the movie premiere. You're already tailored suit straining against your cumberband sash.

Your partner giggles and begins to rub your belly. She picks you up bridal style and the two of you laugh. That's why your femme liked to work out. She likes being the one able to carry you around.

You two make it into the movie theater without anymore issues and take your seats as the leading actors. Immediately you have a meal prepared for you which your partner begins feeding you.

"Delicate" finger foods like lightly buttered XL popcorn are fed to you. Wings, mini corn dogs (the Korean type cause we bougie), expensive candies all reach your maw. Your fingers don't move unless you to flip off paparazzi trying to get a shot of you during the movie.

Your partner opens your mouth to feed you fruity drinks, cocktails and rich and warm dark liquors. Only the best for their movie star.

By the end of the premiere you're stuffed and dazed. Your partner helps you to your feet to clap. You look down and realize that you're button down opened up. Your purple cumberband dash exposed. Your white undershirt reveals your downward sloping chest. You look slightly a mess

Your partner throws her jacket on you, to shield you from the paparazzi. She picks you up and calls for the limousine. From the little burps you're letting out, clearly you're not satisfied. And whatever the star wants, they get

[yrbutchgf]

It's always so interesting to see people say they feel they can't be butch because they're X but X thing has been a defining aspect of butchness either in my own growing up or in butch culture in general. It feels like a recent internet invention that butches aren't massive softies or you have to be skinny to be butch? I'm sure it's area/community dependant but it makes zero sense to me and I think I will blame Shane from the L word for this.

All the older butches I've known and admired have been fat and deeply emotional people, to the point that's a defining trait of butchness to me as well as a common these in butch literature and historical photographs. A defining, if somewhat dubiously healthy, aspect of femme culture and history has been femmes as emotional rocks and protectors for butches who were regularly having the life beaten out of them physically and emotionally. Femmes are protectors just as much as butches in their own way, we share the burden. Just a sec I'm gonna send you a poem if I can fuckin find it

When butches cry No mountains quake No island form Only to slip into the sea Nor do trees fall Nor lightning strike Nor any other god-done thing When butches cry They weep, they wail They gnash their teeth and moan Strong women's pain It's just the same Except it's mostly done Alone — Bonni Barringer, from The Persistent Desire

oh my god this poem. head in my hands. oh my god fuck. i need to read more of the persistent desire. anyway here's the rest of your ask:

Every time I hear someone say they feel less butch because their feelings are strong and easily accessed it hurts my heart and I can't help but think of Ivan Coyote performing the Femme piece and choking up at "I want you to know that it's not always easy to love me". We go through a lot, I think we're allowed to have a bit of a cry sometimes: even when it hardens us we remain soft, just a bit more like a sea urchin or perhaps a pinchful crab. Signed, a tough looking butch who cried and cried today after listening to Will I? From rent for the thousandth time after getting bad health news. Fuck it. If Butch Tears is good enough for LA/ATX Pocket Expo: The New Rules of Flagging 1. It's good enough for us and 2. They should sell it so we can be aesthetic as we sob please.

you're so right, i absolutely agree -- all the butches i looked up to (who were, unfortunately, historical butches, as i didn't know any older butches in real life in my childhood, there weren't any in my area) were fat butches. that body standard definitely seems to me like a new pressure, an invention of the tumblr (and now tiktok) skinny-white-androgynous-gnc-nonbinary industrial complex/standard.

emotions on the other hand, i think have always been a sort of sore subject for butches, at least from what i've read. barringer says it here too -- "it's mostly done/Alone." i think a lot of butches, modern and otherwise, feel the need to bottle up, compartmentalize, pack away their emotions in an attempt to fill that protector role, so nobody but them has to deal with all of it. it's not healthy, and i think a lot of butches spend a lot of time unlearning that urge, because not for nothing i think a lot of everybody spend a lot of time unlearning the urge to hide their emotions, to make them more palatable to other people.

it takes a very brave person to do what coyote did and hop on a stage and be vulnerable; it takes courage to let other people see that you're soft inside, and hurting, in daily life or otherwise. i think it takes a lot of work to be comfortable with and confident about that. but like i said in that other post, i think learning how to do that in healthy ways, how to share and let people in, can also function in the protector role in a similar sense to what you're talking about with femmes: making it safe for the people around you to open up as well, by extension of yourself being open about your feelings. that's very deeply butch to me.

i think your point about "hardening" is really good, too. you're right, even when butches harden up they're still soft in the center... hardening's just a way to keep the outside from poking in, not a way to cleanse yourself of your emotionalism. the visual of a sea urchin feels very apt.

i'm sorry about whatever news you received -- health is always such a stressful thing. i'm glad you found a way to get it out of you. you're right, sometimes (most of the time in my experience lol) you really do just need a good cry. that's healing

[rustbeltjessie]

“Have you heard?”      That’s what my straight family members kept asking me when the news broke about the Pulse shooting.

“Have you heard?”      Of course I’d heard.      It was the first thing I’d seen when I’d logged onto Facebook that morning.

“Have you heard?”      I’d felt it, woken in the night in a cold sweat with a fist-sized knot in my stomach, right around the time all those people were massacred.      Woke almost screaming: “We have to get out!”      I didn’t know who we were or where we had to get out of, but I felt it.      Some astral connection to the rift that violence created in the world.      I couldn’t fall back to sleep. “Have you heard?”      For days beforehand, my head had already been filled with other traumas.      The Stanford case--a reminder that survivors are never believed, and that if your rapist is a wealthy white boy, he will get away with nothing more than a slap on the wrist.      Amber Heard--a reminder that if you’re bisexual that will be used against you, and that everyone will come to the defense of your abuser because he was in some movies they liked.      Christina Grimmie--a reminder that you could be there, meeting your fans after singing your songs, and someone could just decide to take your life.      And then the Pulse shooting--a reminder that you could be in a place that is supposed to be safe for you, a place where you can celebrate both your queerness and your culture, and someone could be so full of hate that they decide to take your life and the lives of your friends and lovers and family members.

“Have you heard?”      Of course I’d heard. Of course I knew. It was just one more reminder that people like me--women, femmes, queer and genderqueer folks, mentally ill people--are not safe in this world. One more reminder that people like some people I love very much--people of color, trans women, trans women of color, LGBTQ people of color, more outwardly gender non-conforming people, physically disabled people--are even less safe than I am.

“Have you heard?”      Yes. I’d heard. And I didn’t want to talk about it with them--my straight family members, my straight cis dude partner. No matter how well-meaning they might be, there’s no way they could have understood what I was feeling, the mix of terror, rage, and grief roiling in my guts.

***

At Milwaukee Pridefest, no one asked me if I’d heard. We didn’t even talk about it. We didn’t have to, because it was everywhere. There were messages in multi-colored chalk written just inside the gates: We love you Orlando. We are Orlando. I’ll never forget. Say their names. Words that couldn’t express the depth of what we were feeling, but we wrote them anyway, adorned them with hearts and rainbows, because we had to do something. There was a shrine set up, too--more words of grief and prayer written on scraps of paper, kept from blowing out across the lake by roses (both real and silk) in all colors of the rainbow and novena candles in white and red and gold, some in plain glass, others printed with images of Jesus and La Virgen de Guadalupe and various saints. It was everywhere. It was written on our faces, that flick of fear and sadness in our eyes that couldn’t be masked by glitter or smiles.

(Fear and trauma create such powerful cognitive dissonance. Before we could go through the gates, we had to have our bags and boxes x-rayed and our bodies wanded, just like you do when going through security at an airport. I thought of the Pulse shooting and the man who had tried to get explosives and guns into the L.A. Pride parade, and I thought: I’m glad security is so tight here. I feel safer. Immediately afterward I thought: Wait. No. Fuck. Tighter security and policing only makes the most marginalized among us less safe. I don’t want to see cops waving rainbow flags. I want to build a world without cops.)

Yes, the fear and sadness were there, but so were beauty and fierceness. There were short butches with their arms wrapped around their tall femme girlfriends; there were older gay men who may have lived through the AIDS crisis, who brought with them long histories of loss and strength. There were people with curvy hips and flat chests and shaved heads, people with beards and skirts and lipstick. There was a black drag queen in a sequined gown, followed by an entourage of giggling black girls with gold glitter on their faces and fairy wings on their backs. The bathrooms all had signs that said things like: This bathroom is for all genders or This bathroom has been liberated from the gender binary. And there were us poets and performers and workers at the Wominz Spot stage--black and brown and white, fat and skinny and in-between, butch and femme and genderqueer, playing accordions and drums or dancing burlesque or speaking our truths, serving drinks or working the soundboard. All of us so beautiful and strong I could hardly stand it. I love us, I thought. I love us so much.

I wanted to cry a few times during the Spoken Word Showcase. I got a lump in my throat when Destinny Fletcher read her poem “The Children’s Garden,” a poem about the beauty of Milwaukee and the freedom of childhood and how that gets ripped away by violence against black boys, by death and loss. I nearly cried during my final poem, the one I wrote after/for Diane di Prima, almost a decade ago. My voice cracked as I said: “...women are still raped, beaten, killed,” and again as I said: “...work toward the day when love and sex won’t have to be a political act.” I held it together, because I knew that if I opened the floodgates I wouldn’t be able to close them back up. I looked at the lake shimmering in the distance, sipped my whiskey and lemonade, let the breeze caress my arms.      I held back my tears, but other parts of my body had other ideas about release. As I stood on the small stage, I felt a clench below my abdomen, then something warm and sticky on my thighs. Afterward, I ducked into one of the all-gender bathrooms, and sure enough, my period had started. There I was in an all-gender bathroom at Pridefest, trying to clean the menstrual blood off the boy-cut undies which I had on under my ripped fishnets, which were on under my black sundress. I smiled at the bizarre poetry of that, the weirdly perfect representation of my gender/queerness that the universe decided to throw my way.

Blondie was the headlining act that night, and that, too, was synchronous--a decade ago, someone called me The Debbie Harry of Poetry. I thought of staying to see them, but I had no one to hang out with--the friend I was supposed to meet up with had bailed a couple hours earlier. I thought about staying anyway, singing along to songs I’ve loved since I was a child, spending a few more hours surrounded by my beautiful strong queer kin--but I was exhausted, and I wanted to get home so I could start writing down the thoughts I was having, and so I could drink without having to drive anywhere afterward.      I let the tears out on my way home, cried while driving south on Highway 32 with the windows down, listening to Debbie Harry sing: I’m not the kinda girl who gives up just like that.

-Jessie Lynn McMains, from Reckless Chants #23: What Cannot Be Said (available for purchase here)