Female Chauvinist Pigs (12 page)

“I’ve noticed a lot of different levels of trans, and frankly think there are A LOT of confused lesbians out there,” an FTM named Ian wrote to me in an e-mail. When I went to meet Ian in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, I had difficulty picking him out of the crowd. I was expecting him to look like the other FTMs I’d met: like butch women with something somehow off. But Ian looked and sounded utterly and seamlessly male…a
real boy,
as Pinocchio would say. He had been taking testosterone for eight months, and had undergone top surgery a year before our meeting. “I went to this guy named Reardon up on Park Avenue” for the operation, Ian said. “It’s kind of like a hobby for him, doing sex changes. You walk in and there’s all these really, really rich women in there for implants, and then there’s me.”

For a transsexual twenty-two-year-old—for
any
twenty-two-year-old—Ian was remarkably unconflicted about his identity. “I’ve felt like this since I was three,” he said. “I’ve never felt like a lesbian; I always felt male.” Ian’s sense of unambiguous manliness is anomalous within the scene. He discovered this when he first arrived in New York City and started attending meetings for FTMs at the Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay, Transgender Community Center in the West Village. “I only did that group on and off because I really had a hard time identifying with a lot of the people in there,” Ian said. “Because some people, you’re just looking at them and you’re like,
Your issues are not in this area…you’ve got issues all over the place.
I mean, the spectrum is broad and gender is fluid or whatever,” Ian said, rolling his eyes, “but there are some people who I think are latching onto this term—this ‘trans’ term and this ‘boi’ term—and you have to wonder. Like I go on all these Yahoo groups for trans men? And the other day I was reading it and the thing that was being discussed was
Is trans becoming the new vogue thing?
And you have to wonder if it might be.”

A butch friend of mine told me recently that for a while, she had been seriously contemplating getting top surgery, as many of her other friends already had. She said, “If you’re hanging out with a bunch of trannies it’s going to influence you…it’s like if you’re hanging out with people who all have tattoos, you know?” Then she pointed to her tattoo.

Because there are so many people identifying as trans or bois or FTMs, and because these terms can mean so many things, when Ian used Craig’s List or other Web sites to meet women, he felt the need to be extremely precise about his identity and his body. “It seems like I have to put it up front, like,
Listen: This is what I am and this is what I’ve done.
Rather than just saying
I’m trans,
which people could think means Ok, yeah, you identify as male and you probably look like a prepubescent boy and you’re running around hooking up. Part of why the boi lifestyle is so appealing to some people is the non-monogamy. There’s less attachment, a lot of NSA”—Internet shorthand for a playdate with No Strings Attached. “A
lot
of NSA. There isn’t really a commitment issue when you’re so fluid.”

D
espite all the talk of fluidity and the investment people like Lissa Doty and Julien Rosskam have in reimagining gender, there is another 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 means they put the similarly masculine-identified women they hang out with in a different, higher category than the feminine women they have sex with. This school of bois tends to adhere to almost comically unreconstructed fifties gender roles. They just reposition themselves as the ones who wear the pants—they take Female Chauvinist Piggery to a whole different level.

Alix, a boi from Brooklyn, said we could meet at an East Village gay bar called Starlight for an interview on a Sunday night. After she didn’t show up, Alix sent an e-mail explaining her reasoning: “I didn’t see you, but I’d be lying if I said I was there. It was raining and I need to know what I’m getting if I’m going out in the rain for some chick and she better be slammin’. And anyway, I should be the one calling the shots.”

During an interview, Sarah, a twenty-eight-year-old market analyst, showed me an e-mail she’d received from an Internet acquaintance named Kelli regarding a femme they both knew from the scene. It read: “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.” Kelli’s peroration was a play on a catchphrase borrowed from sex traffickers: pimps up, hos down.

Sarah told me she had met “maybe thirty” femmes over the Internet—on Craig’s List and Nerve.com and through the personals on the Web site PlanetOut—and occasionally she’d used the heading “boi seeks girl” instead of “butch seeks femme” just to mix it up, and because it’s the cooler term. But she wasn’t crazy about all of its implications. “I’m not entirely comfortable because so many people I’ve met consider boi to mean transgendered or faggot,” by which she meant butch-with-butch or boi-with-boi. “I definitely do not want my name attached to those definitions. I don’t understand the faggot culture…I think it’s disgusting,” she said, and her face crumpled with distaste. “What I like about women is femininity,” she said. “I’m interested in women who look like women, who have womanly gestures and smell and feel, and I don’t understand the appeal or the sense of two faggot dykes riding each other.”

Sarah had smooth, icy pale skin and very short black hair shot with little patches of silver. She was wearing big jeans and a pinstripe shirt with rolled-up sleeves under a navy-blue vest, and sat with her legs wide apart and her big arms crossed over her chest, making her body a sculpture of toughness. “Femme-on-femme is stupid to me, too. It’s air. It’s air on air. It just seems like Cinemax fluff…long nails, you know. In a butch-femme dynamic, it’s not mirror images. One thing I hear a lot of people say about lesbianism and gayness in general is that it’s narcissistic. I’ve heard so many people say that, and not just my mother.”

Though Sarah’s dating MO was fairly lupine, her ultimate aspirations were quite a bit more conventional: One day she planned to give up her swinging bachelor’s life and settle down. “I’ve got this model of a household that’s probably sick to a lot of people that makes perfect sense to me,” she said. “What I want is to have a job, and have a life, and I want a partner with a job and a life to come home to, and a high standard of living, and I want us to have kids that go to school and do their homework and go on trips with their parents.” She smiled for a minute with the self-satisfaction of an athlete about to cream his opponent. “And, you know, at the end of a hard day, I would like to come home from work and have my wife suck my cock.”

S
an Francisco is a good town for bicycles and lesbians. Both roam the streets as if they own the place, as if it were built just for them. Cars and heterosexuals are tolerated. In the area around Dolores Park, there are lesbians with baseball caps, with attitude, with their noses pierced like a bull’s, with babies, with Subarus, with motorcycles, with money. As one local put it, “It doesn’t matter if you’re pink with purple polka dots: If you’re gay and you come to San Francisco, you’ll find community.”

On a warm fall night, Diana Cage, the editor of the lesbian magazine
On Our Backs
(a sexed-up play on the title of the longest-running feminist journal in the United States,
off our backs
), and her friend Kim were waiting to be seated at an Italian restaurant about a block away from the Lex. They ran into Gibson, Diana’s ex-girlfriend, and their other friend Shelly, who had just come from football practice for their team, the Bruisers.

“How’d it go?” Diana asked. She had long hair and long eyelashes and wore a skirt and lipstick and toenail polish.

“Football! Hoo-ah!” Gibson said, half kidding. Shelly, a big girl in a sleeveless T-shirt, offered a double-armed flex to emphasize the point. On one bicep she had a tattoo of a heart with the word “mom” spelled over it. Diana pulled out a Galois and Shelly lit it almost instantaneously. “We’ll see you later at the Lex,” Gibson said and walked off with Shelly.

Diana watched the butches strut away and said, “I only date clichés.”

When they sat down to eat, Kim was feeling anxious about the evening ahead. Clara, the boi she was seeing, was supposed to meet up with them later, and things had been very touch-and-go. “Clara’s biggest fear when we started dating was that I was going to try and fuck her,” said Kim, a pretty, punky twenty-four-year-old who resembled the actress Rachel Griffiths. She defined herself as “femme of center” but didn’t wear much makeup or jewelry except for a tiger’s-eye stud in her chin. “I find bois the most attractive. I like the young, andro[gynous] look, but I’ve dated across the board: butches, femmes, trannies. And that really bothers Clara. All her girlfriends in the past have been pretty much straight.” Kim offered a rueful little laugh. “It also threatens her that I’m not totally vapid and vain…her big relief was when she found out I wear a thong.”

“I sort of orchestrated Kim and Clara dating,” said Diana. “Clara is someone who I would definitely call a boi, totally, although she wouldn’t claim it for herself because she’s
too cool.
See now it’s like
retro
cool to be butch, because there are so many bois and because of the whole butch flight thing.”

“Clara’s got this intense thing, her and her friends have a really strong distaste for this whole trans trendy explosion that’s going on,” said Kim. “But the more I hang out with her the more I’m completely convinced she’s a closet trans case: She’s obsessed with operating sexually as a male. Completely obsessed. She doesn’t make any reference to being queer or lesbian at all. And she sees all of her lesbian traits—either emotional or physical—as completely negative. I’ve never met anyone who wishes that she was a guy so much.” Kim thought about it for a minute and concluded, “Whereas a butch is somebody who is, I guess, a little more comfortable with the fact that she actually
is
female.”

“I don’t have the patience for any kind of a bros-before-hos mentality,” Diana said, “and I associate that with bois. For bois it’s like in high school; they’re all worried about how they look, and maybe if they have a girlfriend that’s not cool, and will their friends approve?”

Kim was looking increasingly forlorn and pushing her pasta around her plate. “This all ties into their kind of approach to women in general—they are so very predatory about it. Clara won’t just touch on it like
That girl’s hot.
She will talk and talk and
talk
about how she wants to get them home and fuck them.” She looked at Diana. “I’m nervous to see her now because I’m not dressed up. And then all of a sudden it’s like I’m trying to please a guy. It’s like I’ve come full circle.”

Later, at the Lex, a woman in a trucker hat with greasy gray hair and a long, gray Fu Manchu beard was trying to give her dog a sip of her beer. There were a lot of Mohawks and a confusing amount of facial hair on several of the women, and there was a pool table.

Gibson and Shelly were sitting in back, drinking beer and looking at their football playbook, and Diana was on her cell phone with Clara. She snapped it shut and said, “She’s being an asshole. She’s not coming.”

“What did she say?” Kim was crestfallen.

“She’s just being an asshole.”

Kim went home.

“What did she say?” Shelly asked after Kim was gone.

“She said she wasn’t coming here unless she knew she could get laid.” Diana’s phone rang again. “That was her. Now she’s coming.”

“I worry about that one,” said Gibson, rolling her eyes. “Then again I worry with every twenty-one-year-old I meet that they’re gonna get their tits lopped off.”

When Clara arrived at the Lex, she looked too young to be in a bar and too small to be allowed on a roller coaster. Diana pulled Clara onto her lap and said, “See, she’s nice to me because we’re not going out, but if I were your girlfriend I’d think you were a dick!”

The next night was chilly but sweet-smelling and Gibson was riding her motorcycle, whipping around the curves and up the hills. At around ten she went to Club Galia to see “In Bed with Fairy Butch,” the burlesque cabaret show a woman named Karlyn Lotney has been putting on since 1995. Lotney is a short, hefty butch who uses Yiddish phrases and has a sort of lesbian Nathan Lane vibe. She gives regular seminars like “Femme/Butch Sex Intensives” and “Dyke Sex: Nuts & Bolts,” but she is best known for these shows. She called an audience member up onstage and asked her, “What kind of girl or boi are you into?”