Badphairy Needs a Holla Back
I was skimming through Craigslist the other day, looking to see if anyone witty had written an ad in the women seeking women area. I came across a post titled “Are there any more attractive lesbians?” Really, people all over the world should know not to give me openings like that. I happily tapped out the following post in response:
“Why no, no there aren't. The last five attractive lesbians were all terribly disfigured by a play-party accident involving a disposal, a life size cardboard replica of Ellen Degeneres, and a 220 HP outboard motor allegedly made by Evinrude.
All of the single lesbians left are overweight, hairy, shower-challenged Wicca-worshiping former Deadhead skanks who will reject you first because you're not one. Please go straight.
Love,
The Community”
I got one reply that said I was mean, but funny. Another person, with a well-calibrated sarcasm detector, thanked me for adding a giggle-coda to her day. A third replied below,
“My friend and I were actually having this discussion the other day. Why is
it in S.F. that one must be butch, mullet woman that doesn't shower and has
hair everywhere...looking very dog like. Why?”
That just makes me very sad. What kind of twisted malcontent says the same thing that straight men have been asking me for years? I used to think that “butch” meant that you weren’t trying to attract men. That’s it, that’s all, well, the shoe comfort was a bonus. Apparently, even among lesbians, we must always dress and behave like we are trying to attract men, for fear of turning off women. Small-minded and judgmental women, but women nonetheless.
I don’t get it. Are we so self-obsessed that we simply don’t realize our own prejudices and thus write ads like, “Are there any more attractive lesbians?” How should we answer such insipid, harmful negativity? “No, they heard you were coming and left town”, “Yes, but we’ve been hiding them from you”, or best, “There are millions, they just hear your vapidity coming and hide from you and you alone. We’ve all talked about it and decided that some as dumb and narrow-minded as you deserves to spend her life alone, wondering not what’s wrong with her that she is alone, but what is wrong with everyone else.”
I think that’s actually a serious problem in America right now. We are more interested in other’s faults than our own. We look at a world that is rapidly getting very tired of us and say, “What the hell is wrong with you guys? I rock, you all want to be me and you’re just jealous. My shit smells like roses and my bombs feel like a good shiatsu massage. The problem is that your peasants are revolting and your leaders are a bunch of dumb yobs.” Then we wonder why no one will sit with us on the playground.
Just a thought, if you find yourself thinking, “Why is everyone I know so dumb” it might also behoove you to ask, “Why do only dumb people hang out with me?” This person desperately needed to ask herself this question.
I could have responded with any of the above comments, but I ran the risk of sounding like just as much of an ass as I said I was decrying, so I didn’t. Even if this person was a guy just trying to piss me off, giving attitude back wouldn’t help my cause any. Most of you know how many years it took for me to figure that out. Well, lesson learned. See my reply, below:
I don't know, I've never noticed that effect. Most of the lesbians I "notice as lesbians" are, but that just means my gaydar for femmes is probably miscalibrated, not that there aren't any around. If you see a beautiful woman in heels, lipstick, and a short skirt, do you assume she's a lesbian? If you saw a dirty straight hippie chick, would you think she was a lesbian?
I think this is more a question of "to what visible attributes do you assign the value 'lesbian', and how could you change the way you see people, so that you see femmes as lesbians”? I think that's a much more useful way of looking at it, than blaming butches for how they look, just because they don't look like someone you want to fuck.
The only person you can change is you. If you don't like what you see, change how you see things, because ain't nobody gonna change for you.
I could have been more pointed, more insulting, more a lot of things. But I really did want to give the person something to really think about. I would be very interested in what y’all think about it too. Please feel free to comment on this one, because I’d like to hear some other thoughts on this issue. I never thought I’d say this but…holla back, girls.
posted by LNewsEditor at 11:15 AM
6 Comments:
Can you believe this person actually e-mailed me back with even more insipid crap? See below.
Actually I am totally open to butch women. These aren't women I am looking
for on the street I am talking about going to a lesbian club and being
surrounded by nothing but butch women. I have no problem with butch women
its just the ones I've seen look like they just rolled out of work and put
on some dirty clothes and walked out of the house. I want to know where the
standards went or has it always been this way out here?
My eventual response is below, but I'm getting VERY tired of playing nice.
Of whose standards do you speak? Obviously they are violating your "personal" standards, but have you bothered to tell every SF dyke that you won't date them unless they look a certain way? Perhaps they don't give a fuck what you think or what your standards are.
I'm beginning to
think that your insistence that women you don't know should have to live up to your standards is more of a character flaw on your part, than any problem on their part. BTW, you're not "totally" open to butch women, b/c you're denigrating a lot of butch women because apparently they've failed to appeal to you.
You sound exactly like any number of straight guys who have asked me "why are lesbians so ugly?" Answer: they don't want to attract men, and apparently it's working quite well for them, since men are not attracted to them. Has it occurred to you that perhaps these women dress like that so people who think like you won't bother to ask them out?
Furthermore, the only "lesbian club" I know of is the Lex. Not a very large sample from which to generalize, don't you agree? When I was there, I noticed how many tattooed, pierced young'uns were there. Guess I was looking for eye candy, not disappointment. Where are you from, and does EVERY SINGLE lesbian spend three hours "getting ready" there? How would you know?
Basically, you seem to be making a very sweeping generalization from a very small sample size, and then asking people who obviously don't agree with you (i.e. me) to explain your opinion. Since I don't see what you see, nor think the way you think, I would deem this an unsuccessful strategy, IMHO.
Frankly, if there are women who don't appeal to you, then don't date them. Pretty simple. Bitching that other people are ugly just makes you sound shallow, overly judgmental, and like someone no one would want to date.
Given your comments, I CERTAINLY wouldn't want to date you, or any of your friends who agreed with you. If you want cute people, by all means, go find some. But to continue demanding to know why everyone isn't "cute" according to you, is just asinine.
Well I'd have to say the "butch" lesbians I have seen are quite lovely in their own right. What they wear isn't nearly as important as who they are inside. Those who focus on the external are simply revealing their own shallowness. I'm as femme as they come, but I would hope that a woman is basing her interest in me on our intellectual compatability, because that is what I would be judging her on!
Ummmm... that person seriously sounds like a judgmental idiot and I wouldn't waste my time.
Ooops, does that sound judgmental? My bad.
Reminds me of a personal ad I saw once that required the responder to be very attractive because "your outer beauty will encourage me to explore your inner beauty."
What a steaming load of narcissistic crap.
If she'd just have said she wants to know where the femme grrlies are, it would have been one thing. But to refer to non-femme women as "ugly", that's crossin' the line.
At a women's festival in Georgia (ages ago) Rita Mae Brown said something like this to the entire gathered salivating horde. They did love Rita Mae back then, until she said (something close to) this: "I'm really glad all of yall have decided to come out of the closet. But when you came out, for some reason yall all [that's not redundant in the South] decided to get REAL ugly and stop taking baths, stopped washing your hair and smelling pretty. If you don't want to be pretty for each other, at least be pretty for ME!" That about sums it up, doesn't it? Hubris. Fame apparently has no subtracting effect on a person's previous capacity for rudeness. Maybe this woman could hunt down Rita Mae and they could strike up a correspondence, leading to carnal bliss. Some people seem to take it as a personal affront that there's no one in the room that fits their idea of attractive. I vote for Wordy's comment: it's one thing to advertise for fellow femmes, and another to call everyone else ugly. That's just UGLY ugly. It's a control thing, and formerly the province of heterosexist pigly people: "You are on earth to entertain me. I am, by my very existence, worthy of your entertaining me. Be pretty for me. It is your duty." ::::sigh:::: Thirty years out of the caves and still no headway.
Post a Comment
<< Home