Butch and Femme

In which I explain, as best I can, how butch/femme dynamics works, for lesbian visibility day.

One of my favourite poems is “Pied Beauty” by Gerard Manley Hopkins. It is all about the fact that in the world, so many beautiful things are patterned, dappled.

Glory be to God for dappled things –

   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;

      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

                                Praise him.

Hopkins contrasts the wonderful, various, fickle, freckled dazzle that is the world with God, whose “beauty is past change.” I’m not religious, but I love the poem. I love dappled things. The sun on the water, the shadows of clouds moving across the grass, the moss on the tree trunks. Everywhere in nature, dappled beauty.

Butchness is like that to me. Dappled. Masculine presentation over feminine curves. Strength and gentleness. High boundary walls, protecting a deep well of vulnerability. Masculine enough to get incorrectly sexed, but all woman under her work gear.

A very masculine way of holding an audience when she tells a story, and a brilliant, uproarious and completely female laugh, when somebody tells her a joke. That spot between the curve of her chest and the strength of her arms, where I want to stay forever.

And you can play with it, can’t you? Play with gender? Somebody on TV was on about finding their ideal man, so I looked at her, grinned and said, “found him.” I did it because I knew it would make her do that laugh, which no man in the world could ever do, rich, female, warm.

It is all dapples. Light and shade, still water under the trees in the sunshine, and when you kick through it, it’s warmer in patches where the sun as been on it. She’s not aping being a man, or role playing being a man. That’s not a thing at all. She’s a strong woman. My woman.

She likes clothes and activities stereotypically associated with the male sex, but her masculinity, if you want to call it that, is filtered through her female form, straining out the nasty bits, and leaving me with a dappled pool to bathe in.

I spoke to her whilst drafting this piece, and she said something that surprised me. We have been together for eighteen years and she still manages to surprise me. She told me, “do you know you’re a dappled beauty too?” I asked her what she meant, and here’s what she said to me.

She said, “you’re made of gentleness and compassion, but you have a backbone of cold, rolled steel. You’re kind and lovely to children, but fierce in your protection of them.” She said, “you’re dappled because your strength and courage were forged from broken things.”

I’m dappled too.

Butch femme dynamics gets talked a lot of shit about, frankly. Particularly in America, I think there are sections of the lesbian community who play up to the stereotypes and are limited by them. But in my house, both butch and femme are dappled things.

To quote a phrase, butch is velvet, wrapped in steel, and femme is steel, wrapped in velvet. Butch and femme, light and shade, shadows and sunshine on the water, and two women, swimming.