Catcalls and Subway Stares
My name is Sassafras Lowrey and this is the first of what will become a regular blog posting on Fridays here at The Femme Show. I’m a high femme author and artist living in New York City with my partner, princess dog, and two puddle cats. I wasn’t always a femme. I hid from my femininity for a long time, trying to be butch, trying to be an FTM; needless to say that didn’t work too well for me. I came out as femme several years ago, and this blog will be talking a lot about my observations about what it means to walk through the world as a femme, specifically surrounding issues of passing and invisibility. Additionally, in this blog I’ll be talking about the ways in which I conceive of femme-femininity as a gender transgressive, perversion of traditional femininity, and positioned outside of the gender binary.
Catcalls and Subway Stares:
“Hey mamma, I see you in those leg warmers, looking good!†– The gruff and unmistakably male voice follows after me as I struggled to carry the blue plastic Ikea bag filled with a week’s laundry down the block to be washed and dried. When I left the laundry service, I walked hurriedly down the other side of the street, cell phone in hand, eyes glued straight ahead.
There are ways in which I find myself still learning how to navigate the world as a femme, and struggling. I spent most of my childhood trying to be a tomboy, and failing. I spent my late, teens trying to be a butch dyke, and then later a man, hormone prescription and all. I failed miserably. I’ve always been a femme; it just took me a while to embrace it. A key component of the decisions that I had previously made about how I presented myself to the world revolved around making sure that I was never again read as weak, or a victim, or a target to straight men.
Living my life as an out and proud femme, as I have for the past several years has required me to confront some of my deepest fears. In order to finally feel at home in my life and body, I have had to become something whose side effect is that I am for the first time in my adult life attractive to straight men. My attractiveness is something, which I am reminded of when I stand in line at the grocery store, or sit on the subway while straight men’s eyes look past my tattoos and piercings to focus on my cleavage, or thighs peaking out from beneath my short skirt. And it’s not just me, nearly every femme I know talks about the frustrations of the ways in which our gender presentation makes us look “available†to the swarms of straight men, oblivious to the femme gendered signals that we are actually sending into the world, unaware of the queerness of the way we construct our gender, our presentation. Silly as it seems, straight men calling after me, or unsuccessfully attempting to flirt with me, results in me feeling even more invisible as a femme.
This is where I should mention that I am still scared of straight men, and that I know a lot of my frustration with my femininity being attractive to them, stems directly from that fear. I recognize that this is a problem, and my rational mind understands that they are not my step father, that the man on the corner calling after me isn’t the man who raped me, and yet if a man sits next to me on the subway I am immediately on guard.
This unwanted attention, from those I have no interest in attracting is alas part of what I live with in order to be true to myself, to display my gender and sexuality in a way which is comfortable and affirming for me. In short, although as a femme feminist I would like to think otherwise, it seems to be part and parcel with being a femme. I’m still learning how to accept it.
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