The Politics of Desire

Note: I wrote this a while ago, when I was in high school. However, I still agree with a lot of the conclusions I drew here, so I haven't deleted it.

Recently, I've been reading Jane Sexes It Up: True Confessions of Feminist Desire edited by Merri Lisa Johnson. I picked it up on a whim from Barnes & Nobles - thinking that it might have some gems inside it's pages. Instead, it's totally changed the way I think about desire and relationships.
I've never had sex, I've never had a long-term relationship - so it's hard for me to figure out what I think about a lot of stuff. It's nice to read essays by women who are much closer to figuring life out than I am.

The first essay that caught my attention was titled "I Learned From the Best: My Mother Was a High-Femme Whore" by Paula Austin. Paula Austin is a black femme lesbian who's mother prostituted herself to support her family. She explains that gender expression is on the most basic level a performance. She acts feminine to manipulate a situation and gain control because in our society - that works. By using her femininity as a tool, she is reshaping it into something that helps her instead of hurting her. I'm not the most feminine person in the whole world - I don't wear make-up or high heels, I don't shave my legs. But I can see something beautiful in it. I like that for her, femininity is about how she views herself instead of solely about how everyone else views her. On the other hand, I'm not a lipstick lesbian. I don't want to be. And there's nothing wrong with that - it doesn't make me less of a woman. I have taken charge of my femininity in a different way, by rejecting the parts that don't fit me and accepting the parts that do.

Since I tend to go after butch/androgynous girls (keep in mind that not everyone I've dated is butch and that I'm not attracted to every butch girl I meet) - my classmates always tease me that I'm a closeted heterosexual (or a "heterosexual homosexual" as Kayte coined it).
Before reading this book, I could never explain why I like girls who look like boys. I couldn't explain why I didn't think there was anything wrong with using a strap-on. I couldn't explain why that didn't mean I "actually wanted to be with a man".

In "A Cock of One's Own: Getting a Grip on Feminist Sexual Power" by Sarah Smith, this exact dilemma is examined. Sarah Smith owns a sex toy shop and (perhaps surprisingly) sells the most dildo harnesses to straight couples. It's so easy to put sex into categories - anal sex is gay sex, vaginal penetration is straight sex, and clitoral stimulation is lesbian sex. But that's not the way it works at all - there's not one type of sex that only one group of people participate in. Sexual orientation isn't about what type of sex you like - I always forget that. It's about who you're attracted to, it's about who you want to spend the rest of your life with. I could have the same type of sex with a man as with a woman - but it wouldn't feel the same. I wouldn't have the same feelings towards the person, so it would be a completely different experience. I could "experiment with straight sex" but that's exactly what it would be - experimenting. That's why I can make out with boys and it doesn't mean anything - it was never going to mean anything in the first place.

Now that I think about it - there's no reason for me to be offended by people who experiment with lesbianism. The gay community is so anxious to prove that they're legitimate that they forget sexuality is fluid. Sexual identity and sexual behavior don't always match up. I might be attracted to butch girls, but that's not because I'm "trying to find a man" - it's because I'm attracted to women - butch girls aren't wannabe men. As Sarah Smith writes, "Cross-gender identification does not diminish one's biological girlness, I am coming to see; it expresses playfulness rather than poor self-image. In fact, integrating the 'masculine' parts of one's erotic identity may be a sign of good mental health despite a culture that would deem such thoughts perverse". I like the idea of playing with gender - of fucking with the binaries and figuring out who I want to be instead of who I'm supposed to be. I don't even know what it means to be butch/femme. Is it the way you look/what you wear? Is it a dynamic between two people? Is it a game?

Interestingly, there are no essays by butch women in this anthology. There is one essay by a gay man - everyone else is a feminine woman (ranging the sexual orientation spectrum).