Butch/Femme/Top/Bottom – Gender within a Gender?
As I have had the pleasure of watching the extremely funny and interesting Vlogs and interviews here in AfterEllen, one recurring issue has gotten me to wonder something that I have noticed in the lesbian-bisexual-community in general. A while back I was watching a hilarious Celesbian interviews by Julie and Kate and I saw Julie make jokes about Butch-on-Butch crime. I know she was kind of joking, but something I have seen a lot lately, is lesbians or bisexuals having the opinion that there should be a butch and a femme in a relationship and that it is somehow weird to have two femmes or two butches (not that I could even draw a line between those two groups of people). Don’t get me wrong, I totally support the fact that people express their gender identity in a variety of ways, and the right to do so is one of the things that the LGBT-community has been fighting for. It’s just the idea that in order to be “right”, there needs to be one feminine and one tomboy-kind of lesbian in a relationship, that I find difficult to understand. For me that just seems like we take the very gender roles that exist in the hetero-world and plant them into same-sex world and thus devide the lesbian community into two “genders inside a gender”. And I wonder if this is so that we could take the roles of “normal” people that might be easier to be accepted by the rest of the world ? And I don’t mean that there is anything wrong in the butch-femme relationships, just with the idea of that having to be the norm.
This butch/femme debate is connected quite closely to the fact that a lot of Vloggers declare themselves as a “top” (I have yet to see an AE -lesbian claiming to be a bottom). And again, yes, I understand that they are mostly joking, but very often they really seem to mean it. I always thought that the top/bottom-issue was for gay men and even then just a stereotype like the whole anal-fixation by the straight world. In my mind, sex is always unique between two people, the sex I have with one person is not the same as with another. Do you see what I mean? Like, in my mind sex between two people is created by those two people and doesn’t exist without those people or with other people. Therefore I can’t understand how you could have a static role (like gender for opposite-sex couples) that you carry from one relationship to another.
The question I would like to see discussion on, is do you think there needs to be a “top” in a relationship? And I am extremely interested to find out how people who identify themselves as either or, deal with that in their life. How does that work? If you are a top, can you only date bottoms? What if you meet a girl and she is hot, but turns out to be top, do you stop dating her?
I don’t think there are right or wrong answers or opinions on this topic and the point in writing this post was not to say that there would be anything wrong with having the idea of wanting to date a femme/butch/top/bottom, I am just really really interested how you guys view this issue!
