“A girl in a newsboy cap and a white t-shirt with rolled-up sleeves is leaning against the back wall at Meow Mix and telling her friend, “Some femme . . . just some femme. I met her at a party three weeks ago, but now she’s like e-mailing me and I’m just like, chill out, bitch!” Her chest is smooth and flat: She’s either had top surgery—a double mastectomy—or, more likely, she binds her breasts. She thrusts her forearm in front of her face as if she’s rapping as she says, “Some of these chicks, it’s like you top them once and then they’re all up in your face. It’s like, did I get you off? Yes. Am I your new best friend? No. You know what I’m saying, bro?” – quote in context
Sometimes, you find cool stuff in unexpected places. That is, of course, why I surf just about any link I find. So lets follow the trail that lead me to this gem.
How it happened : A discussion on Ms. about “Scarlet teen” led me to a thread about bois on The Margins that referenced this mainstream press article.
So now that we are here, what can we find of interest? It seems that the folks who are trying to pretend that power roles are construction of something other than human nature are freaking out that some lesbians might, gasp, be taking on a the traits of some of the more extreme masculine roles.
“They really want to be kids. This hit me when I saw this girl—this boi, I guess—barreling out of a store in Chelsea in huge, oversize jeans, a backpack, and a baseball cap pulled down low. And she was running as if she were late for the school bus . . . Her whole aura was so completely rough-and-tumble 8-year-old that I wouldn’t have been surprised if she had a slingshot in one pocket and a frog in the other.” – quote in context
The new bois are having a good time being in charge. The general tenor could almost bee seen as analogous to stripped down full on alpha male concept so prevalent in the rap community. While the terms are gender based in history, these days I think they have much more to do with the dynamics of power. In crude terms they are really talking about the people who are predators and those who are by nature or desire prey.
It’s no shock that the vegetarian and leg hair wearing crowd is upset, hurt and confused by it all…
“I’m just too old school for all of this absolute crike. I love the back-to-the-land, separatist, self-sufficiency kind of life where radical feminists hit the road, form a collective, hie themselves off to wooded acreage somewhere where they erect their tipis and yurts and plant gardens, have drum circles, make music write books, publish their radical publications on their old, but functional, AB Dick press, eat organic vegan diets communally, raise their kids together, observe various woman-centered holy days.” – quote in context
They never really understood the concept of power differential, the thin line between anger, power and sex anyway. They don’t really, that I can tell, have a sexuality – they have a political movement born of dysfunction that dictates their sexuality.
“There is, however, a particular camp of bois who date femmes exclusively and follow a locker-room code of ethics referenced by the phrase “bros before hos” or “bros before bitches,” which is to say they put the similarly masculine-identified women they hang out with in a different, higher category than the feminine women they have sex with. Kelly, a boi in her late twenties, recently sent an e-mail to a fellow boi, an Internet acquaintance, regarding a femme they both know from the scene, that reads: “I hope she’s not a big deal, that you’re just riding her or whatever. Do you want me to keep an eye on her? Bros up bitches down.” – quote in context
Surprisingly for a mainstream article the primary question, and its answer, is put forth…
“The question for many women is why, given the chance to redraw the map of gender relations, anyone would choose to be that wife. Why is there such a thing as a femme? The most obvious answer is that it’s not actually a choice; that desire follows a logic all its own and nobody can really make rational sense of why they like whatever it is they like. But the more complicated explanation is really another question: Is there something subversive about playing the role of the doting wife when your husband is a woman?” – quote in context
In the end the article is obviously about a subset of the butch/boi community, you can read a little about the others in the discussion thread attached to the article.