In answer to G’s questions about femme invisibility, and a result of a lot of pondering. Among other things, why others’ experiences on this particular subject feel so generally out of line with mine – though some of the particulars are familiar.
I think it is notable in this case that femme is new to me. More, femininity is new to me. I didn’t grow up feminine. I didn’t grow up gay, or questioning. Though i did grow up queer, in the much more general sense that my grandmother uses the term.
Femme invisibility took me rather by surprise. I spent most of my life ’till college being mistaken for a boy fairly regularly. When my hair and breasts grew out, that sort of morphed into an assumption that i was a lesbian, which at the time i was not. I started dating a girl, to which everyone said, “well, yeah?” And for years after that, while i did slowly move towards “more feminine,” no one ever questioned my gayness. Basically my visibility status moved from “dyke!” to “huh, wonder if she’s gay?” or at least “oh, you’re gay? figures.” which, really, was not a notable change.
And then, suddenly (it seemed), one day a [femme dyke, if it's relevant] was taken aback to discover, after spending a day together, that i was a big queer too. Mind, that was in a fairly queer context, where assuming i was straight pinned me as “ally,” not just as one of the many straight folks. And that was the first time that ever happened to me. It confused me, but mostly because it made me aware that my internal image of myself was not in line with the image i was projecting to people.
I wasn’t really upset that she had mistaken me; i was upset that it had taken me so by surprise, essentially because my self-image was lagging – it was stuck back when i didn’t wear skirts (and, if that failed, had a butch girlfriend).
I’ve gotten over that. I’ve been femme (and the girly kind of femme) long enough to be self-aware of it. With that inconsistency out of the way, i really don’t care.
I don’t think there is anything upsetting about being mistaken. Perhaps this is just habit; i have been commonly, publicly mistaken for things i am not for a long time, starting, i think, long before my memory gets reliable. Mostly mistaken for a boy. I was not a boy and i did not want to be a boy, but it certainly never bothered me. After all, boys were not a bad thing to be, even if it was not true. I still feel this way. I’m not straight, but there is nothing wrong with being straight. So, if i am mistaken for straight, i might correct someone, given the opportunity (as it is not true), but i would never find it offensive or upsetting (as it is not a bad thing to be). I suppose i fail to see how one could be offended by a mistake unless it is because of negative feelings towards the group you are assumed to be a part of.
Less specifically, it just doesn’t matter most of the time. If i’m at a queer event i just assume that people are assuming i’m queer. I don’t find that it affects much either way. In most situations it is just a non-issue, either we are not talking about personal things, in which case being gay is not relevant, or we are, in which case my girlfriend is almost guaranteed to come up (right after the puppies).
As for the positive side of femme invisibility, i like the spy aspect. When i came out, the one thing that really upset me about being gay was that i could no longer be an ally. Because allies are really important in getting people who are not friendly to even listen to your side of the discussion – essentially because it seems more credible to be able to say “i have no vested interest in this, but still support it.” Well, now, on occasion i get to play that part again, though slightly differently. I get to be the unintimidating queer.
In my favorite example, the woman who abruptly changed course and walked across the pavilion before resuming it to avoid my butch-dyke girlfriend while campaigning to take our rights away, and five minutes later came up to me to ask about Dog. We had a fairly long dog-related conversation, after which i really hope she saw me kiss my butch-dyke girlfriend. So, it was funny and a little snarky, but i really like that i have the option to do that. I mean, i’d rather things were such that people don’t avoid interacting with people who look too gay. But ’till then, i am fully interested in my ability to normalize gay. I can hope that it was eye-opening to that woman that lesbians rescue dogs too, and shop for vegetables and smile at strangers and wear skirts and long hair (and kiss butch girls. well…). That option is only open to me because of my femmeininity. And i think every time someone is surprised that i’m gay that is just a visible expression of their picture of “gay” broadening. Which won’t solve anything by its lonesome, but it’s a step in the right direction.
But of course there are times when being more visible would be cool. The main obstacle i found with being invisibly queer was picking up, of course, because that’s when you really want queer strangers to recognize that you’re, you know, an option. But i made me a nice – not tacky – rainbow necklace as a “what’s up.” (i gave it away two weeks after i started dating Jamie, to a friend-of-a-friend who complimented it profusely – i didn’t need it anymore.) The other, less slutty version of this is simply that recognition is cool, like alphafemme said:
To be recognized as gay makes me puff out my chest and stand up straighter. Really. I just want to belong here. I want people to know that I’m a member of the club. Sometimes, I do get some sort of signal, a wink maybe, and I just about die, every time. Especially when it’s the older, butch lesbians, in their late 30s and 40s. A wink from them is so gratifying. Not transgressive, not presumptuous, not inappropriate. Affirming.
Either way, i found that people tend to be receptive to flirting. She may have thought you were straight at first, but if you think she’s cute, and you’re smiling like you think she’s cute, i guess that’s convincing enough. I’m not sure if i define flirting broadly or if i just have a bad habit of flirting with everyone, but i think the same basic idea holds with the simpler recognition-seeking interactions. That is, it totally makes me happy to see visibly queer people in public – especially couples and cute butch girls. And since it totally makes me happy, i find it really easy to smile like, well, like seeing them makes me happy. And, come on, how gay is that? Not that it always works, and not that you can always smile at strangers without looking like a creep (but even if i mush the smile down, it tends to make my eyes wrinkle up happy-like), but it makes me feel more visible to visibly acknowledge others’ visibility. Right.
Oh, and having a girlfriend in hand is a really handy way to look more gay.
Lady Brett
"The Negotiation Limerick File" - The Beastie Boys
I got an email of the “forward this to your entire world and then some” variety – complete with 24-point font in 12 colors – on the subject of keeping your (female) self from being serial-killed. For whatever reason, i actually read through the whole thing.
So, okay, the visual issues with the formatting really, really bothered me, but that only scratches the surface. To be clear, i am in full support of being careful, and i’ve got no general problem with safety tips, but this really rubbed me the wrong way.
For one, focusing on serial killers is just weird to me – but weird and stupid. Seriously, of all the terrible things that are likely to happen to you, where do serial killers rank? I know this kind of crime is more exciting because you can chalk it up to crazy and evil, and, therefore, not have to think about the deeper causes. But even if your tips work and we all managed to elude all serial killers forever…oh, right, people would still be getting “just” shot and mugged and robbed and raped and beaten pretty regularly. Would there even be a blip in the statistics? Can we perhaps go back to useful tips to reduce the risk of all those things just mentioned that happen to people every day? Take, for example, these sexual assault prevention tips.
My second complaint is common to most advice i’ve seen on these more relevant subjects as well, though it was far more shrill in this particular example. This email included, at the end of one of the bits of advice, the comment, “better paranoid than dead.” At first, i though my reaction was simply “good lord, that is so over the top,” but, no, that line caught my attention because i disagree.
I deeply disagree with that statement; i find it dehumanizing. I don’t disagree that dead is bad, but i think it is terribly anti-social to say that dying is the worst thing that can happen. It discounts that anything could be more important than “me,” to the detriment of society, and promotes the idea that nothing is more important than being alive, to the detriment of living.
Socially, it seems that promoting complete lack of compassion as a safety measure can only make our life less safe in the long run. The logic goes, in the short-term, that anyone could be a criminal, just waiting to…(in this particularly paranoid example, kill you), so you had better not ever help anybody (see, they might just be trying to lure you in) or interact with suspicious characters (did we mention that everyone is suspicious?). In the long run, this equates to “anyone i don’t know personally is a non-person at best; a potential serial killer at worst.” Which is the same sort of anti-social attitude that begets criminal behavior, or at least ignores crimes committed against others.
Personally, how unhappy would you be living in that sort of a bubble? I like to hope that interacting with other people as if they are people makes them a bit happy as well. And i can very simply say that if something awful happens someday as a result (god knows i hope it doesn’t – but i also don’t believe it works that way, which i’ll get to in a moment), i have had a pretty great life so far, in large part because of such “reckless” behavior. Or, from a less depressing perspective, if i could guarantee nothing bad happen to me by means of paranoia, there is simply no way i would do it; what is the point of living forever if you can’t enjoy doing it?
To continue my parenthetical: this sort of advice is also a side-effect of our blame-the-victim attitude towards crime. The idea that that steps x, y, z will result in total safety is – well, a total fallacy, but also – detrimental.
It is a fallacy because, while there are steps you can take to increase your safety (being careful and/or not stupid, which i generally support), there isn’t a damn thing you can do to guarantee that nothing bad will ever happen to you. This is, essentially, the law of diminishing returns, and there is a point somewhere where the safety output per precaution taken falls to a point that it is not worth the sacrifices you make for it.
It is detrimental because assuming action x, y or z can prevent harm implies it is your fault if you come to harm, because you didn’t take that action. And there is always some action you didn’t take. Of course, there are no actions you can take to completely control someone else’s actions. And that is the part that this entire thing ignores: this whole safety thing is, in large part, a matter of other people’s actions.
So, better dead than paranoid, but i’ll take neither, if i may.
Lady Brett
goddamn wordpress.
Suffice to say, then, that camping was lovely, just what i needed, and ought to happen more often.
Lady Brett
"The Hideout" - Sarah Harmer
More lost than down, actually. Which is new to me – down is sort of my default form of discomfort.
Lady Brett
"Falling Down" - Charlotte Taylor p.s. i'm clearly overdoing this layout/editing stuff. it's beginning to piss me off that i can't have an em dash here. p.p.s. also, em (the femme), it seems strange to admit, but your name always makes me think of em dashes. that's a good thing, i promise; i have nothing but fond feelings for em dashes.
I got to see one of my intellectual heroes, Marion Nestle, speak last night. She is the author of Food Politics, which was among the first books i read on food geekery, and certainly the first really good one.
Her presentation was great. She is totally as awesome as her book – maybe more so. She is really quite funny; i find it notable that she is often both more lighthearted and more academic than most of the other well-known (in that super-niche way) food politics authors i’ve read. My favorite quote from the evening was “practicing sociology without a license, as I am.” Of course, along with some really amusing pictures and product labels and such, she had some very interesting graphs and info – you know how i like charts and graphs! I’m hoping she puts the slides on her website at some point; i haven’t had a chance to really poke around it and see how much is there. But i have been reading her blog, which is a great way to keep up with the most recent in nutrition and food labelling, such as:
Italy’s new food label: “Mafia-free”
Thanks to Anulu Mass of the Global Post for telling me about the latest front-of-package foods labeling initiative, this one from Italy. I’m just back from lecturing in Rome, Milan, and Vicenza, but didn’t get to Sicily which must be why I missed seeing Libera Terra labels on wine, olive oil, pasta, and tomato sauce. Libera Terra labels guarantee that the foods were produced with no mob connections. I’m so relieved.
I learned her name is not pronounced Nestle, like, 
, but nestle, like, .jpg)
.
I also got suckered into the book-signing. So, now i have a copy of What to Eat, which i had successfully talked myself out of buying and somehow failed to read via library either, although i’ve wanted to do both since it came out. Not so bad. And it’s signed “Eat well and change the world!” Really, that’s as cool as my signed Miss Mallard Mystery (written by Quackenbush, whose signature was a duck. In a shrubbery. Teehee.)
It’s good advice, i think. So, “enjoy, eat well, and change the world (for the better, of course).” And, if i can recommend a book i’m on page 28 of, i do.
Lady Brett
What to Eat - Marion Nestle
I would like nothing more right now than for life to slow down.
The really sad thing about it is that, excepting breakdowns and shut-downs, most everything is going well. It’s only, while going well is better than going badly, i would rather most of it not be going at all.
I’m currently pinning my hopes on camping this weekend.
Lady Brett
"Bright Light Of Day" - Anne McCue
I realized last night that i’m terribly sheltered.
We went for drinks and snacks with a buddy for his birthday last night. It was a bit strange in that there was no one else there that we knew, but that isn’t generally unsurmountable. And everyone was nice enough, but it ended up being awkward and we left fairly early.
On the drive home, we were trying to figure out why it had been so surprisingly bizarre. The main thing that stuck out in my mind was that i’m so sheltered. My friends, work and whole community – online and at home – are all fairly progressive (the main exception to this is people i know through Jamie’s work, who are unabashedly anti-progressive). Three or four times last night i heard people say these sort of stereotyped, racist – but minor and subtle – things that just made my jaw drop (inside my head). But they were all in the vein of “acceptable” bias that no one else seemed to notice, and that i can’t remember any of the details of.
The people i know simply don’t say things like that, so i was totally oblivious to how perfectly acceptable it is. It’s kind of appalling to me. The other think about it, though, is that it’s almost impossible to call someone out on. If someone is going about talking about “ragheads” it is perfectly simple to be clear that that is fucking unacceptable (i’ve always been pretty comfortable interacting with assholes). But when they’re propagating untrue, culturally supported stereotypes, you can’t say “that’s inappropriate” and leave it at that. Because people will genuinely not understand why (and thus write you off as crazy oversensitive). The only way to counter that is to have the opportunity for an in-depth discussion, which is hard to get.
Jamie pointed out that the people last night were all white, seemingly middle-class and straight (though, of course, we don’t know for certain), which means that they probably haven’t been put in a position to have to think critically about our culture.
We bandied back and forth about why it was so strange, though. Especially considering that in a lot of respects, we grew up in the same culture they did. Final Jamie said, “they were all…normal.”
Also, this feels strange to write, because it feels very othering – i know there is kind of a lot of “us” and “them” here (it feels like writing about “those people”). And i really don’t think it’s any better to talk shit about the dominant culture than about minority groups. But there are really two parts to this.
One has to do with people who i am not particularly adept at interacting with (or, at the least, which i don’t tend to enjoy). This is the bubbly personalities and discussions of bad christian pop from middle school that made the night fairly boring and a little awkward for me. And this is about us not being very comfortable around “normal” people. But this part is also perfectly fine (i just don’t think we’ll be hanging out with his new posse much).
The other part has to do with privilege and entitlement, and with being completely unaware of those things. This part is a significant part of the dominant culture, and it is not fine. And i don’t feel like i’m talking shit in this regard, because this is the part that is real, serious critique.
Lady Brett
"This Place Is A Prison" - The Postal Service
I regret to inform you that there will be no costume this Halloween. It just didn’t work out. Mostly, i don’t have any plans for Halloween, and, well, you know about “all dressed up with nowhere to go.” There were discussions of hosting a Halloween party, but this is just not the year for it. The house is not really prepared for guests. Which brings me to my Happy Halloween post!
Spooky, huh?
The plastic is the result of walking in two days ago to find that “leaks under the window rather a bit” had been joined by “Oh, fuck! Who turned the faucet on in the blinds?!” Oh, and the rotten wood in the corner is the siding. Well, there is aluminum siding over it, but you can see that from the inside. hmm. On the bright side, wherever that water was coming from is sealed up – that, at least, is just old damage.
This is, in an immediate sense, spookier than the first picture. That last one? That is all mold – everything that’s not wood (or crowbar). However, this is the kitchen floor, which you may remember my mentioning previously is done. All that terrifying stuff? Gone.
As such, the first picture is much, much scarier. Because it’s kind of way beyond me. Oh, and for added Halloweeny goodness, the roof leaks too. I don’t think i’ve mentioned my newfound antipathy for rain.
Anyhow, while i don’t have much in the way of plans for tonight, i will be donning my glow-in-the-dark skeleton shirt (when i get out of my pj’s) and giving out candy to tricker-treaters for the first time. I’m kind of keen on that idea. I’ll show y’all our pumpkin once it’s dark and lit up, too. It’s really cute. You didn’t think i’d scorned Halloween completely, did you?
Lady Brett
"Sad But True" - Metallica
Okay, i’m sorry in advance for cheat-blogging with YouTube videos.
Also, i am embarrassed to admit…i’m kind of really into Glee. Yeah, that new tv show that’s all popular and stuff. Or, at least, i get the impression, via the internet, that it’s popular.
The fact that i don’t have friends who tell me about this sort of thing – or that my friends have given up discussing television around me – might totally invalidate my use of the word popular. Or cool. Which, actually, is the perfect segue.
But i’m embarrassed to say so because…well, two things. First is that it’s just as shitty as most tv shows. I don’t mention it much (so as not to be that girl), but i don’t just “not watch television.” I fucking hate most television. I hate drama in my real life. Drama inclines me to stop talking to friends i love. It kind of makes me long to live in a cave (a common euphemism for those of us who didn’t watch tv as kids, as it happens). So drama in fake life, for entertainment? Oh, hell no! Right, but, second: Glee is as full of stupid, crappy, generic stereotypes as it is of stupid, crappy, generic drama.
My favorite so far.
To make up for these things it has hit pretty much all of my soft spots. I love music, and i don’t think they’ve played a bad song yet. I love stereotypes (when used for good and fun). Everyone is cute. The football-lead-guy wouldn’t really be my idea of cute, but he has the best smile on earth (when i was a kid, i used to practice having a half-smile – i really do think they are all that). Plus, i identify. Not with the preachy, kumbaya crap. But i did go to high school with those kids, because most of us really were walking stereotypes at 15 (except my high school didn’t have sports or cheerleaders).
And, more recently, i find the dance-practice aspect kind of inspirational. I did Odyssey of the Mind in 4th and 5th grade. Then i didn’t step foot on another stage until i started drag. Now we (sometimes) do choreographed group numbers. Which are awesome. I really, really dig it, and watching this silliness reminds me of our silly practices and makes me want to try new shit and see how much we suck at it until, suddenly, we don’t anymore.
So, okay, i kind of wish it just skipped from number to number, but to get them you have to watch that plot thing, and now i’m invested and have to watch the rest to make sure all the inevitable shit actually happens, and keep myself properly irritated between music.
One of my favorite songs on earth. Singing along to this in the car with the windows down is a guaranteed cure for anything. And they’re cute here.
Oh, and i’m in love with Jane Lynch.
Lady Brett
"Bust Your Windows" - Jazmine Sullivan
