(Images in a series were supposed to be side by side, but my tables-o-images in Word won't paste here, so please be patient while I learn. The images were added after the fact and do not necessarily illustrate the text as much as further play with gender roles, so feel free to skip them and continue the reading flow.)
A Butchy Is Born. Can't you tell? Look closer!
I avoided identifying as "butch" for many years, mostly because I didn't like the word. Butch, to me, sounds like a Labrador's name: "Here, Butch! Fetch, Butch! Good, Butch!" Of course, once I engaged in my first so-called butch-femme relationship, I realized that was the point. Butches live for honey-dos precisely to get that "you've been so good, I'm going to let you hump my leg" reward.
I tried to start the “dykely dyke” movement, but it never caught on. I can’t say I gave the term much thought. I was merely following my mother’s example of calling my father a “manly man,” and since I’m tall, broad-shouldered, and golden blonde like my father, dykely dyke seemed butch enough.
Perhaps I should pause and “unpack” (a pun I’ll explain later) what I thought my mother meant by “manly man.” She did not mean someone who checked the oil in the car. She taught me to do that. Nor did she mean someone who did much in the way of mechanical repairs or home improvements at all. A manly man may occasionally paint, but mostly he’s obsessed with his lawn.
My baby brother and I learned at an early age never to ask our father for help putting our Christmas presents together lest we start a scene out of “A Christmas Story,” only instead of the father yelling at the furnace in the basement, there was our father next to the Christmas tree, screaming at our Hotwheels track parts. Reading instructions was entirely the domain of our mother.
A manly man doesn’t hunt or fish, but, boy, does he like to go camping, though we didn’t go often because my mother prefers to read in air-conditioning. When we did, however, it was glorious, foremost because we’d escape the Texas heat to Colorado or New Mexico, and it was the most magical thing ever to wake up in the morning and be cold. “Look, Mom, I can see my breath! In summer!”
What was even more amazing was to see my father suddenly able to do everything because that’s what you have to be able to do to be an Eagle Scout. He put the tent up, he chopped the wood, he washed the dishes, he even—OMG!—cooked! I had no idea they had a merit badge devoted to Spam For Every Meal.
Ironically, as a child I thought my father was a manly man for the very thing my mother had not known he would become when she married him: a hard-assed (and successful) football, basketball, and track coach, whose heroes were Vince Lombardi, George Patton, and John Wayne. “He was only supposed to be a math and science teacher,” my mother would lament as she put his plate in the oven again, another dinner missed. Later, when he became as crazed as the “Great Santini” about my and my brother’s athletics, I would pray he’d miss dinner more often. But when I was young, a manly man was quite wonderful.
A manly man can jump a six-foot high chain link fence in a single bound, scoop up his daughter when she’s injured, and run with her to the house. He can change a tire in a torrential downpour with lightning flashing all around. He makes you feel safe and protected and proud. He plays with his kids on Saturday afternoons after the chores are done, honors his mother by visiting often, and helps his father with his acre-sized garden. He’s playful, but strict enough that all your mother has to do is issue the classic “You’d better stop, or I’m going to tell your father” warning.
Most of all, though, a manly man knows how to treat a woman. He opens doors and always compliments her appearance. He takes her out at least once a week and takes the kids to his parents. He writes her poems for Valentine’s Day and strokes her thigh while he sings “Only You” to her in the car. He dances with her in the kitchen and holds her in his lap in his recliner. He slaps your knee when Paul Harvey announces the national sex average per week and exclaims, “Your mom and I blow that to hell!”
He makes her laugh with silly puns and charming malapropisms and soothes her when she cries. He's not afraid to admit she's the brains, and he's the brawn, that it took him longer to grow up, that the best thing that can happen to a manly man is to find a good woman.
A manly man shaves his wife's head for her when she has breast cancer.
Imagine my surprise, then, when it finally occurred to me what my mother meant by manly man was that my father had been a handsome hunk!
She had spied a big strapping farm boy across a history class in college and had to approach him twice for him to get she was flirting by asking, “So what did you think of today’s lecture?” “I didn’t know what to say the first time,” my father laughs at himself, “but the second time I’d paid attention to the lesson, so I was ready!”
I was disappointed with my mother when I discovered her secret. Here I thought she’d married him for all these other reasons, and it turns out he just turned her on! But mostly I suddenly felt betrayed by my culture because I could be all those manly man things and more. I could mow the lawn and fix the toilet. I could read directions and change the oil. I was smart and physically strong, and not just at basketball or shot-putting. But I couldn’t be a handsome hunk.
I couldn’t even be everyone’s All-American in my letter jacket and jeans. Each time a mother caught on I was giving her daughter orgasms (why do girls keep diaries and expect their mothers not to find them?), I could only be Every Mother’s Nightmare, no matter how early I got her daughter home or “Yes, mam, no, mam” polite. Fortunately, my mother preferred denial. “Was there beer involved?” she’d soothe the hysterical caller. “They were just drunk.” She never stopped me from having “best friends,” but she was adamant I stop drinking.
Sexy Car That Never Ran Butchy. (Obviously why Londoners use that Underground Tube thing.)
Glamor Sport Butchy. (Bring it on, Tonya Harding! Make sure to watch the Women's Shot-Put at 3 a.m. the next Olympics!)
For years I languished in androgyne-dom, not really paying all that much attention to how I looked. If a lover wanted me to grow my hair out, I didn’t mind. If I had to wear a dress for a job interview, I could survive pantyhose for an hour. I never had trouble finding a girlfriend because they found me. I looked like a college basketball coach, all slacks and jackets and Toni Tenille hair without the curling ironed roll. They were always femmier, though they ran the gamut from skirts to jeans. But I didn’t think of myself as either handsome or a hunk.
Then I met a woman who called me a “blonde Adonis.” And just like my father meeting my mother, my mind had to race to recall, He was one of those Greek guys, right? Even though I would end up growing my hair out for her to its worst 80s Big Hair look ever, a coin dropped then. I’ll be damned. I could be a dyke hunk. Who would have thunk it?
Hair Styled By Flaming--"Queer Eye For The Hair-Challenged"--Queen Butchy. (Quick, take a picture!)
Hair Styled By Letting It Dry Au Naturelle While Determining What Outfit Would Best Match The Folks (Heh-Heh) Butchy.
So I set out to become one. And I did. My first year of getting my PhD, all I did was go to class and work out. I cut my hair back to its normally above my ears length. I started shopping exclusively in men’s departments. I began an affair with a woman who liked me in silky shirts and what I called Latin Lover pants, tight in the waist and ankles and slightly more billowing in the thighs. I can’t say I looked any more manly mannish, but I sure felt like I could salsa.
When I went home to see my lover (with whom I was in an open relationship) for the winter holidays and went to a party of my MA grad school friends, suddenly even straight women remarked on my appearance. One woman to this day can be counted on to comment every time I post a pic on FB she thinks is “dapper.”
I was feeling pretty cocky, I must admit. And you know what they say about pride and the fall. The August before my second year of my PhD coursework, I went to Michigan (as in the Womyn’s Music Festival) with my lover, and a woman on the flatbed trailer tram literally gasped as I hopped on. “Oh my goddess,” she effused, more like a gay boy than a lesbian, “you’re simply divine, darling.” A month later, my vanity would meet its demise in a class taught by a famous feminist professor, but that’s another story.
Einstein/Academic Presentations Need More Costumes Butchy.
As Buff As Butchy Gets Butchy. (I put this pic next to the booze, but thus far it hasn't helped me lose weight. Go figure.)
By the time I finished grad school, I’d left my lover, stopped having affairs, and sworn to be monogamous forever with the woman who came with me to Japan. She was the femmiest yet, and I was definitely butchy by then, but since she was from Berkeley, we were more like butch-femme hippies. It wasn’t until we broke up one daughter and ten years later that I met a woman 15 years younger, a cliché I assiduously avoided analyzing, just having turned 40, who first made me realize I could pass as a butchy butch.
She was a femme fatale, a kinky Barnard girl who had been Ivy League by day and a pro dom by night. Damn, did we have fun! She was an emotional mess, but a fierce, sensual, and in many ways fragile lover. It was with her I first embraced my butchiness from the inside out, but not because she called me BigBadButchy. Usually I picked her up from the bullet train in Tokyo and drove her back out to the ‘burbs, but this night she arrived looking so stunning (even dykes have their trophy wife moments; look at Ellen), I had to show her off with drinks atop the Park Hyatt, or the NY Bar and Grill of “Lost in Translation” fame, before the movie, when only the locals knew of its breathtaking 52nd floor views.
We drank, we kissed, we heavy petted. Then I followed her into the bathroom where she slipped the cock she’d asked me to “pack” (to be wearing) out of my pants and into her on the marble sink in one of the stalls. Somewhere around her third or fourth orgasm, she suddenly screamed, “Butchy is my big daddy!”
It’s odd, isn’t it? Butch sounded like a dog’s name to me, but big daddy felt completely natural. I guess I needed a more cliché term, uniqueness once again elusive.
The Progression Of A Butchy. From "Hey, Laa, Li-La-Li, I'm The Telephone [Dyke]" Butchy
to Parisian Butchy
to "Macho, Macho" PumpkinHead Butchy!
She eventually left, as I encouraged her to do since she’d only come to Japan for an adventure and not a lifetime. That’s when I discovered a butch-femme dating site and a whole new world of women turned on by dykely dyke, manly man, butchy butches. I wasn’t hunky anymore, never having lost the spare tire left from the Winnebago in which my daughter had gestated in style, but I still cleaned up nicely.
What I discovered on a flirt list, though, was that I wasn’t just butch. I was a butch who could express myself. Never in my life had I met a more sub-verbal group of butches/trannies/whatever they wanted to be called. I was amazed, really. I wrote like I do now, endlessly. They wrote one-liners I found annoying to open for such a paltry reward. After a month, half the verbal femmes on the list were writing to me privately, but I obviously needed another lesson about pride since I decided to pursue the feistiest one of them all.
Thus began my first taste that being butch can cause a serious dent in your finances. (Why didn’t I go for house husband instead of the provider mystique?) I moved her to Japan, complete house full of stuff, fat, fuzzy black cat and all. I got her a job. I bought her clothes and electronics and every meal we ate out. I helped plant her garden full of flowers and veggies. I adored her. She’s smart, funny, and very creative.
But she was unprepared for the life of an expat. Yes, Virginia, things are different here than the way you do things back home; that’s kind of the point. After two years of listening to her bitch, only to dump me for an online punk rocker, I paid for her to move home. It was cheaper than the years of therapy I would have needed had she stayed any longer. With an ocean between us, we’re once again good friends.
PapaMama Butchy (as the day care grannies called me. I gave birth naturally [the Japanese Way], hopped off the table, walked to the train station, and brought back burgers. I was starving!)
Cowboys and Indians (My People If Only They'd Have Me) Butchy.
Surfer Dude With "No Thanks, I'll Watch" Surfer NOT Daughter Butchy. (Was Online Dating Site Profile Pic Butchy, but, alas, it's getting old. The kid is as tall as I am now, and I'm wider.)
I’ve had another relationship since, but that, too, is a story in itself. Suffice it to say I’m broke and happily single. No money, no English-speaking long distance lover temptations. It’s true, if one is lousy with boundaries, the universe will indeed provide! So it is I stumble across OS and within a few weeks stumble upon an even more amazing phenomenon: self-identified butches who can express themselves. Oh. My. God/dess.
I confess I’ve never made it through Stone Butch Blues; it’s so full of whining. But these butches are funny! And articulate. And tender. (Yes, I’ve read Butch Is A Noun, but, frankly, I think they’re better.) I’m thrilled to find like-minded souls in such a mainstream forum. But I am a different flavor of butchy. I do not feel like a boy on the inside. I am far from the strong silent type, more strong and babbling. My manly man father may not be able to cry, but his dykely daughter can with abandon.
If anything, the more I embrace being butch, the more I feel sorry for men. There are as many different kinds of men as there are butches, and yet enculturated stereotypes of gender persist. I do not have to be a boy to feel the sweet sensation of a lover taking the head of my cock in her mouth. I do not have to prove I’m strong through emotional remoteness. When a lover’s fist is in my cunt, my lover is doing it for daddy, and that’s enough.
Mostly, I feel frustrated that masculine and feminine remain our only choices. Once you problematize gender, why merely go back and forth? Yes, “third gender” is becoming a more popular term, but it’s still a fringe genre. When people ask me how I identify, I like to answer, “Shirtless.” My favorite part of Michigan, my favorite part of being a kid, before my mom insisted I had to start wearing a shirt because my tits were getting too big.
Samurai Butchy!
Dr. Sensei Butchy!
Future Shirtless Farmer Butchy!
A manly man works outside shirtless, comes in sweaty, and somehow is lucky enough to have found a good woman/lover/partner turned on. So I’m saving to get my tits whacked next spring. When I met the doctor, I kidded him, “I just want to look like Matthew McConaughey. That should be easy, huh? At least after you suck off my gut. Can you do ab implants like pec implants, too?” He smiled his best “I’m a plastic surgeon, not a miracle worker” look.
My mother has had breast cancer twice, so I rationalize my seemingly vain desire as that I’m literally cutting out 95% of my chances of getting it. It doesn’t feel like vanity, though, as much as fulfilling a lifelong dream. I don’t think I’ll be any butchier because of it. I don’t identify it as a transsexual act, though I am using a “top surgeon” (har-har). I wouldn’t mind taking T (testosterone) for the added musculature, but I’m not willing to trade my hair for it (since the men in my family go bald).
I want to go jogging in the rain shirtless, go to the beach and feel the waves crash over my titless, lighter and brighter chest. (They’ve got to weigh at least 10 pounds.) And, yes, feel a lover's hand stroke my breastless chest, put her head to it and find the same comfort in it as a bosom.
I’ll probably still wear a jogbra (since Japanese women wear them on top of nothing, too) when I go swimming with the kid just to spare her one more layer of freak show. But when she’s not around, what do I care if people stare, now all the more confused? (Particularly in Japan, where men seldom go shirtless other than while swimming.) I get to spend the rest of my life half naked!
Manly man, butchy, tranny, third gender? I know the dance with a woman who likes my kind of difference. Yes, in my baby book, there’s a cartoon of a girl wishing on her birthday cake and--in a puff of smoke--changing into a boy. But as long as I have to choose, I’m proud of the sex I was born. As I parted with my daughter at the airport recently (flying by herself overseas for the first time at 12), I reminded her to sing “I Have Confidence" to herself, like my mother used to sing to me from "The Sound of Music," and held her tight, whispering as my voice choked, “Remember your Helen Reddy, honey. ‘I am strong—
“I am invincible,” she murmured with me, squeezing me tighter. “I am woman.”
The Old Man Still Has It
34 Years Later,
But I Carried The Kid Up Fuji-San Butchy! (Though I wouldn't suggest going shirtless on the summit; it gets nippy!)
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Comments
I was born in Japan...so I do love hearing about how you have adapted, I'm not sure I would, though I did go back in '89 and found it fascinating and confusing, lol.
Thanks for sharing this. Sounds like your daughter is really cool!
And with my parents, too, bstrangely. They are quite the characters and deserve their own book of stories, which I should start writing for their 50th anniversary next year! And, yup, you guessed it! Everyone in my family bleeds orange, but I was in love (and a whole lotta lust) and Austin was too far away. Thanks!
Would like to know tho what you have your PHD in. Can't wait to learn more about you.
Thank you for sharing so much with us.
I'm new to OS and just getting to know people. Nice to meet you!
And Tijo, you made my day/week/month. (I know, I need to get a life; it doesn't take much.) I think I'll try that for my next personal ad: Endearingly In Your Face (Though My Tits Won't Be For Long!) Thanks, darlin'. I was thinking of writing my next blog on offering my tits to an organ donor bank. I hope it's not shocking since it just seems like good ol' Great Depression common sense to me--waste not, want not! Women who want to be more well-endowed, allow me to be your Butch Charming!
My Piled higher & Deeper was going to be in Rhetoric/Comp & Native American Literature, but--long story--I had to switch to Creative Writing to finish, which was great fun, but I haven't done much writing for audience since, so please excuse me while I practice. This expectation of blog brevity is hard! Especially when you're used to bullshitting for 30-page "academic" (read: so full of jargon as to require a doobie to comprehend) articles. But I shall keep sharpening my samurai sword.
Good writing is rare, true self-exposure even rarer, and the two in combination rarest of all. But I know from experience it can be cathartic, and it sure as hell is enlightening to those of us peeking in.
Thank you for the insight and the intimate sharing.
Nanatehay, that means a lot since you're quick on the wisecrackin' draw yourself! Looking forward to making more mischief.
Risa, you flatter me. Mmm, I like it!
And nice to meet you, too micro-woman. Welcome! It's a lot of fun here!
Peace,
Shell