I’ve written before about how I’m so over manufactured gender trends, and the Village Voice is at it again. Part of me just wants to leave this alone, but really, what’s the point of having a blog if you can’t make fun of every non-news story that comes along? Plus we get to talk about Rachel Maddow again. I think she needs her own tag.

Guess what, folks? Butch is back and now it wears eyeshadow and goes to the spa! I’m all for the radical expansion of gender and if some people want to do that by wearing fancy ties and eyeshadow, great! But this article sets up a false dichotomy between the ugly old butches and the sexy new butches. Not coincidentally, I think, the sexy new butches have disposable income to spend on clothes and beauty routines (just like the Voice’s glamazon darlings of the 2008 Queer issue) and are more palatable to the mainstream. It seems like we should be super excited that the media has found a way to commodify butches, not just femmes and feminine dykes.

The phrase “kinder, gentler butch” makes me throw up in my mouth a little bit. What about all those butches who were busy being butch, oh, I don’t know, last year? Last century? Before some weekly rag told them it was ok? Are they less kind? Less gentle? Less attractive? This butch-loving femme doesn’t think so.

Probably, for my own sanity, I should not be allowed to read the Voice in June. Also, for my own sanity, I would like someone to turn off the internet in a fashion that would still allow me to send emails, as sending email is my number one job right now. That and laundry.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 25th, 2009 at 10:41 am and is filed under musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.