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Notes & Queeries: Rachel Maddow, Butch Fatale

Notes & Queeries is a monthly column that focuses on the personal side of pop culture for lesbians and bisexual women.

It was easy to be irritated, if not offended, by Daphne Merkin’s flashy article about Rachel Maddow in the New York Times Style Magazine last month. For one thing, the piece is titled “Butch Fatale” yet argues that Maddow’s popularity is due to the fact that she is neither butch nor femme.

Putting aside Merkin’s assumption that all lesbians fall into two distinct categories – something I am sure every lesbian would dispute – she goes on to declare that Maddow is “willing to prettify her image sufficiently to endear her to male viewers.”

I am fairly certain, even without asking Maddow, that prettifying herself to attract male viewers was never on her agenda. But beneath Merkin’s ill-informed opinions, there lies a greater truth: America is still mighty terrified of anyone who might be “butch.”

Photo credit: Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images

This anxiety with butch lesbians is expressed in numerous mainstream articles about Rachel Maddow. Every time an interviewer asks Maddow to talk about whether she wears makeup or how she dresses in “real life,” they’re trying to make sense of her butch appearance.

Take this paragraph from a recent Guardian profile:

Rachel Maddow – in her own words a mannish lesbian policy wonk who doesn’t own a television set – is not your average anchorwoman in America, or indeed on this side of the Atlantic. Later today when she goes live on air she must swap her Red Sox T-shirt and baggy Levi’s jeans for what she calls “lady clothes” – a bland slate-grey trouser suit. (She won’t say who it’s by for fear of insulting the designer.) Her chunky Eric Morecambe glasses will be exchanged for contact lenses (which she’s still getting used to). Reluctantly, there will be the merest smear of lipstick and blusher. She will, however, cling on to her trainers, safely out of sight under the desk.

We have certainly come a long way from the 1950s when most gay people lived closeted lives, but barring brief time periods in the 1970s and early 1990s, we have also continued to be a remarkably gendered society. Women, these days, are coiffed to within an inch of their lives. Hair extensions, countless makeup products, plastic surgery, cripplingly high heels – these are all signs of the extreme feminization of post-Sex and the City America. Even The L Word went this route.

Any time a lesbian who does not fit feminine norms makes a splash in the pop culture landscape (and it doesn’t happen too often), it is followed by a mass of handwringing as the media attempts to make sense of why she looks the way she looks.

It happened with k.d. lang back in 1993, when Vanity Fair published its famous cover photo of Cindy Crawford shaving lang in drag. That article went out of its way to emphasize lang’s hidden femininity even while eroticizing her butchness.

It happened with Jackie Warner, who has made something of a career of explaining to the mainstream media why so many straight women develop crushes on her. It’s even happened with Samantha Ronson, who is often denigrated for her boyish appearance.

In the mainstream press at least, Maddow has avoided too much criticism of her non-feminine appearance. This may be because she is often the first to raise those “mannish lesbian” stereotypes, saying things like “I’m a big lesbian who looks like a man” (GQ). For the most part, her disarming, good-humored charm seems to have worked.

A Rhodes scholar, Maddow has also benefited from Americans’ renewed interest in intellectualism after eight years of Bush idiocy. It’s cool, these days (finally!) to be smart.

But I don’t think it’s only her intelligence that people are attracted to, and Maddow’s sex appeal – which is ultimately what Merkin was trying to understand – is a transgressive one.

Anyone who doubts that should take a look at the batch of Rachel Maddow-themed e-cards released around Valentine’s Day. They’re obviously meant to be tongue-in-cheek, but they’re also surprisingly direct about treating Maddow as an erotic figure.

One, with a caricature of Maddow holding out a cocktail, asks, “Care to have a threesome?” The interior concludes, “You, me and a stiff drink.” Another one states: “You do realize, that the only thing you have in common with Rachel Maddow is that you both prefer women … the brutal irony is she’d have a much better shot with said women.”

Sure, many of these e-cards praise Maddow’s intelligence, and they tap into the recent popularity of geek chic in our culture. They also tap into the sexually charged category of butch.

Those who don’t appreciate or enjoy the eroticism in butch identities may not quite get it. But I think there is something to the idea of “butch fatale,” even if Merkin’s article entirely missed the point. And Maddow does possess some of it.

There is a certain butch attitude that reaches across the divides of sexual orientation and tends to snare women who might otherwise not be interested in lesbianism. The character of Shane on The L Word, though she resisted the idea of being butch, was entirely based on this attitude.

It’s not about being a Lothario, although that can be part of it. Butchness borrows from masculinity, but it is not necessarily manly. When this masculinity is expressed through a woman’s body, different things happen.

Hands, for instance, become eroticized. For straight women who might be reading this article and have no idea what I mean, consider the way someone touches you. Consider this: an imprint of a hand on the small of your back, like a promise.

A butch lesbian, at least in the ideal, is not the best of both worlds, male and female – she is a new world. She is the discovery, every day, of how a woman can be a woman without the trappings of femininity.

The set of a woman’s shoulders, the way she crosses her legs, the angle of her hips when she walks – all of these are signals of butchness. And we know it when we see it. That kind of recognition takes place in the gut.

I think that those of us who appreciate the eroticism of butchness share an admiration for the courage it takes to walk out into the world – into all those public restrooms, airport checkpoints, department store dressing rooms – as a woman who does not look traditionally feminine.

Beyond admiration, there is desire, and that is something that is not easily explained or expressed in words: the feelings that root in your body when you want someone. For some of us, butch women do that.

For others, butchness evokes an opposite reaction. They recoil from it and judge it as unnatural.

This happens among queer as well as straight people. Just look at the final season of The L Word.

In Episode 6.06, ultra-femme lesbians Bette and Tina make fun of their contractor, the ostensibly straight Weezie, for strongly resembling a bumbling fool of a butch. “That’s mean,” they chastise themselves but continue to giggle, anyway.

I wish that those who judge butch women as unnatural would stop. Those who focus on Maddow’s clothes and makeup are attempting to naturalize her, to say, “Look, she is a woman after all.” I wish they would understand that there is more than one way to be in the world as a woman.

And I wish that the anxiety about butch lesbians would dissipate. Is butch identity truly so threatening?

It seems to me that we humans often deal with difference, at least initially, by fortifying our own boundaries. When you first meet someone from a foreign country, you might feel yourself cementing your own Americanness (or substitute your own nationality) when you talk with this person – as if the very existence of difference threatens your identity.

But it does not. Difference is not a threat; it is merely different.

In my opinion, any woman who chooses to live her life outside the well-worn groove of femininity should be given a medal. It is a difficult path to take, with people at every turn attempting to push you back into the mainstream.

It takes a lot of fortitude to resist the forces of feminization that Rachel Maddow must have encountered over the past year. But she still goes home to her partner in Massachusetts, drives her truck to the dump, mixes her old-fashioned cocktails, and wears sneakers and button-down shirts to the Tonight Show.

To Rachel Maddow, for looking the way you look still, I say, brava.

For more on Malinda Lo, visit her website.

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