A query

Why is it that some women who are sexually dominant assume that they have license to make everyone they meet do as they please, or that women who are sexually submissive are expected to defer and automatically be interested in them sexually? I’m not saying that all, or most, dominant women are like this, but I encountered one casually (not in a romantic/sexual context) and it really baffled me. My understanding is that kinky relationships are something to be negotiated, based on trust. So perhaps that sort of dynamic would evolve within a relationship, and I can respect that. What I don’t understand is someone who assumes that because they take on this role they should suddenly have everyone wait on them hand and foot. That’s called arrogance.

California Dreamin’

I didn’t want to say anything until it was official because I’m superstitious about some things, but I’ve booked my ticket and hotel room so I think I can announce it.  I’ll be presenting a paper in March at the Global Arc of Justice: Sexual Orientation Law Around the World conference, hosted by the Williams Institute of UCLA law school and the International Lesbian and Gay Law Association, in Los Angeles!  I’ve known that I was probably going for a month, but now that funding for 3/4 of the trip came through and I was able to book the flight, I have an ear-splitting grin on my face.  It will be amazing academically, with several of my favorite scholars, and professionally, with several people from the NGOs at which I’d most like to work in attendance, and also I have to admit that it’s pretty cool to be in West Hollywood for three nights.  I’ve never been a big LA person, though I went to San Francisco once when I was 14 and loved it, but I keep thinking about the L-Word and laughing to myself.  It’s like a fantasy trip.  If anyone reading has academic experience, I would love some advice.  I know nothing about presenting a paper: for example, do you tend to stick with laying out the paper’s argument or do you extrapolate and give interesting facts with just your core argument as a teaser for people to read the paper?  I don’t know if/when this will be published, so a teaser seems a bit silly, though maybe this will be a jumping-off point to publication.  Also, PowerPoint or index cards?  Any other tips?  I’d love to hear them.

Heads up on an interesting discussion on gay marriage

If you haven’t yet seen it, Jon Stewart makes some really thoughtful arguments in a discussion with Mike Huckabee about gay marriage.  One of my favourite points: “Religion is far more of a choice than homosexuality.”  You can get it online at thedailyshow.com, just click full episodes and select Tuesday’s night’s show. The discussion is right after the last little black commercial break bar at the bottom of your screen.

Marriage equality in Iowa? Say it’ll be so!

I was pretty bummed after months of planning to go to the oral arguments in the Varnum v. Brien case today that my ride decided that it wasn’t likely enough that we would get a seat in the courthouse and changed his mind, but I understood and due to the freezing rain it was probably a smart call anyway.  Instead, I watched the arguments at a OneIowa viewing party here in Iowa City.  These are my thoughts.

Good:

• The lawyer for the defense, a Mr. Cool, was disrespectful to the court, bumbling, and just not all that great.  He barely answered a question, he stumbled a lot, he ran himself around in circles, he contradicted himself, he often told a justice that he didn’t want to answer a question or that the question wasn’t good, and twice he reminded the court that his time had run out.  He held his folders in his hand at one point and looked like he just wanted to get the hell back to his chair.  This isn’t substantive, but I hope it will make the court look less kindly on his arguments.
• The defense presented a lot of weak arguments that haven’t worked well in other states.  The focus was heavy on procreation, and the justices all hammered the attorney on that point, wanting to know what heterosexual marriage has to do with raising a healthy family.  You could tell that the attorney knew he was backing himself into a corner and he never really made his way out.
• He also relied pretty heavily on the rational basis test, which the court very well may use, the but the court repeatedly asked him about strict or heightened scrutiny and he couldn’t answer.  Probably because if they apply strict scrutiny, he’s screwed.

Bad:

• The court mentioned a very recent Iowa case called Mitchell that I don’t know but apparently it requires the plaintiff when arguing no rational basis not only to argue that the government has no rational state interest but also to provide specific evidence to back it up.  The problem is that our side has the burden if the court picks rational basis, and the court basically said that neither side has any decent social science evidence despite thousands of pages submitted.
• It seems at least possible that they’re going to reverse the District Court on the affidavits that it refused to accept, affidavits from experts including religion professors and a history professors about heterosexual marriage being traditional, etc. etc.  The reason for not accepting those affidavits is that they were personal opinion rather than actual expert testimony, but there was a whole run-around about legislative vs. adjudicative facts and one justice asked whether the case should be remanded or decided if it didn’t agree on that point.
• One that had the law students in the room kind of gritting our teeth and holding our breath was a question about polygamy.  The defense focused a lot on the “four thousand years” of marriage and tradition and the danger of marriage being eroded in a generation domino effect blah blah blah.  The court then asked the attorney for the plaintiffs what the line is for the definition of marriage, i.e., if we’re allowing gay marriage why aren’t we allowing polygamy?  That was a tough question, though I do think he managed to squeak out of it with an explanation that polygamy changes the actual structure of marriage while same sex marriage only changes the people who can enter into that structure.  Granted, I don’t really have a big problem with polygamy myself, but I think he handled it pretty well.

Call in Gay Day: Tomorrow!

Just a reminder for those of you in work or school tomorrow, December 10th, that’s it’s the day to call in day.  People around the country, including LGBT people and their allies, will be calling in queer to work to demonstrate how important our presence is.  I, unfortunately, cannot participate, for the simple reason that I have nothing to do tomorrow but study hard for finals, and I can’t afford to blow that off to go volunteer, but if you do decide to call in gay, spend the day volunteering for your favourite queer (or otherwise) organization!

Like Tomboy, Like Lesbian?

I was just in the shower, thinking (like you do) about lesbian stereotypes.  I think that there’s at least some assumption that if you’re a gay girl, you might have been a tomboy growing up, or you really get along with “the guys.”  And for some lesbians, I know this is true, but I never fit into that mold.  I didn’t have any really close guy friends as a kid – sure, I had a few male friends, but I never connected with them in any significant way.  I had fairly “girly” interests, and I’ve always been touchy feely and liked long conversations.  Not that there aren’t men like that, but not so many in elementary and middle school.  My best friends were always girls, and I got along well with girls.  But when I young and assumed that I was straight, and when I was a bit older and identified as bisexual, I always figured that once I was in a serious relationship with a guy, he would be my best friend.  That was what I was looking for, and it never occurred to me that it wouldn’t just… happen.

Now I know there are exceptions, and there are plenty of lesbians who relate well with men but prefer women romantically, and plenty of straight women who don’t have any men friends but connect with their romantic partner.  However, the example that comes to mind is my parents, who indeed were best friends throughout thirteen years of marriage and fifteen years and counting of divorce.  My mom has always been heterosexual and she’s always had close male friends.  It didn’t occur to me that the same wouldn’t happen for me, but in my only serious relationship with a man, it really was a “Men are from Mars” situation.  We were just speaking different languages.

Since then, I’ve always thought that women are preferable as romantic partners because you can fall in love with your best friend.  And I think there’s something to that – if your best friend is always a certain gender, and you’ve never been particularly close to the other gender, you’re probably at least somewhat unlikely to suddenly become best friends with someone of the other gender because you get into a romantic relationship with them.  So maybe it’s not that unusual when a girly girl becomes a lesbian.  After all, doesn’t it make a certain amount of sense?

Lesbian book club reminder: the poll is up now for round three and will be open until Sunday afternoon.  Please vote!  Also, feel free to start discussing for round two if you read the book.

File this under “no such thing as bad publicity”

I wrote a very brief article today on Obama and McCain’s stances on LGBT issues, just a quick highlight of their positions on a few of the major questions.  It’s easily my quickest-to-gain-popularity article on Suite101, but the funny thing is that I’m getting several people coming from a website called savecalifornia.com, which is apparently a site in favor of the marriage amendment there.  A link to my article is prominently placed in the center of the page, labelled “Their positions on the ‘LGBT’ agenda.”  Wow, I never thought I’d get scare quoted!  What an honor!

Happy Sodomy Day!

That’s right, today is the five-year anniversary of the landmark Lawrence v. Texas decision, which declared sodomy laws in the United States unconstitutional.  I remember when the decision came down – I was eighteen at the time, and several of my gay male friends had AIM away messages up that said “CELEBRATING.”

Now that I’m a crusty old law student, I’ve studied the case, and I have two major thoughts about it.  One, as usual, America is too damned slow on the uptake – before this case, if you plotted the countries with sodomy laws still existing on a map, you’d see countries Africa, the Middle East, the Caribbean, Asia… and us.  Now I’m certainly not suggesting that developing nations should be behind the US, or that we’re somehow morally superior – quite the opposite.  Those who think that we’re Nation Numero Uno, ready to depart on a civilising mission to “fix” the rest of the world – uh.  Uh.  Uhhhhh…  No.  We criticise the human rights records of developing nations while at the same time being by far the worst nation in the “Western world” on human rights and international law.  If you aren’t familiar with this stuff, take a look at the major international human rights treaties and see how many the US has signed.  You’d be surprised.  So no, I don’t think it’s at all strange that it took us this long to strike down sodomy laws, more than twenty years after the European Court of Human Rights said that sodomy laws violate an individual’s right to privacy.

My second thought, however, is optimistic.  Justice Kennedy clearly made quite an effort to avoid talking about level of scrutiny or fundamental rights or suspect class or really anything that would give lower courts a clear cue.  But what did he do?  Well, he cited international authority with approval for the first time in a majority opinion, for one.  He also, despite the dicta that this wasn’t to affect laws on marriage, opened up a can of worms.  Maybe LGBT folks don’t explicitly form a suspect class yet.  Maybe they don’t fall explicitly within the fundamental right to marriage that straight people most certainly enjoy.  But there’s an opportunity.  We can say that the Court did take a step in that direction, and if LGBT people have the same rights to conduct their intimate affairs in their bedroom that straight people do, then it’s not much of a leap to say that they also have the same intimate sorts of relationships that straight people do, which often culminate (for them) in marriage.  By being rather vague in terms of legal principles but at the same time making it clear that he was considering both practices and identity of LGBT people in that case, I think Kennedy did something revolutionary, something even (gasp!) rather European – he acknowledged, in some small way, a positive right to autonomy, the right to live one’s life and conduct one’s intimate affairs as the individual sees fit.  By putting these two aspects together he acknowledged that queer people should be protected both in terms of what they do and who they are – that the two are inextricably linked.  He could have simply focused on practices, on sodomy itself, but he didn’t.  He made it bigger than that.  It’s about the real people, in real relationships, who were being hurt by an arcane, stigmatising law.  So good job, JK.  I don’t always agree with you, but I think you took a leap of courage this time.

Lesbian Book Club

I’ve decided to go ahead with the lesbian book club idea.  For our first book, we’ll be reading Stir Fry, by Emma Donoghue.  This book should (I hope!) be at your local library, and if not it’s also available in paperback.  You can also sign up at BookMooch and see if anyone’s giving away a copy.  I will post here each time we’re reading a new book in hopes that new people will find us, but if you’re interested in reading with us now or in the future, please e-mail me at judithavory@gmail.com and I’ll put you on the list for book club news.  Signing up to get e-mails is not a commitment of any kind, just showing that you’re interested and want to be updated.  Keep in mind:

• This is a no-guilt book club.  If you don’t want to read a certain book, can’t find it at your library, don’t have time, or try to start and don’t finish, that’s fine!  Anyone who does finish a book, or even reads part of it (and doesn’t mind being spoiled) can join in the discussion (message board or chat, I haven’t decided that part yet).  Anyone else is welcome to “lurk.”

• I want to give everyone time to read, so we’ll be operating on a two month schedule at first (that may be tweaked if necessary).  We’ll start discussing this book in late August. 

• Please feel free to link this post with friends who might be interested or on your blog.  Everyone is welcome!

I am an executive lesbian

I’ve been greatly surprised, the more I make contact with various parts of the lesbian community and lesbian pop culture, how much the “butch and femme” dichotomy is alive and well.  I realise that despite all the changes and movements away from binary trends, we still tend to think in twos, but for some reason I thought this was an outmoded distinction.  Then again, among the lesbians I know in real life, most don’t really talk about being butch or femme.  I know some lesbians who are decidedly butch, but then I also know a lot like me, who I don’t think of as butch, but if I think about it I really can’t characterise them as “femme.”

As far as I can tell, femme is often more or less the default for “not butch.”  It seems that butch has a more built-up set of characteristics, possibly because it implies masculinity and differentiating oneself from the norm, from the femininity default that women are born into.  When I think of a butch woman, I think of her in terms of three areas: appearance, activities/mannerisms, and sexual “stuff.”  

Appearance

I think of “butch” as meaning very masculine, but also fitting a number of other stereotypes – often overweight or big boned and very muscular, often doesn’t pay a lot of attention to dress, etc.  But there are other sorts of masculine women.  I find myself very frequently attracted to androgynous women, what I suppose you would label “bois” – petite women with short haircuts who retain feminine features, so that they more or less look like a 12-year-old boy.  There are also women who are very traditionally attractive but wear a lot of boyish clothing.  I find that the more choices I make about my own appearance, the more I start to move away from the traditional feminine.  Aside from my usual suit-and-tie combination, I’ve found that I really like how I look in more masculine casual clothes as well.  Now that I’ve found a good way to style it, I love my extremely androgynous haircut.  Yesterday, I was wearing a faded black tanktop that looks like a “wifebeater” essentially and I found myself flexing my muscles in the mirror and taking my glasses off to blur my feminine features.  When I was a teenager, I used to wonder what my “boy self” would look like.  I’ve been drawn to masculinity for a long time, and I absolutely love dressing in drag.  I just feel really comfortable and really sexy when I’m androgynous.  However, I try not to think too hard about it, because I really don’t want to be a man, or at least, not a heterosexual man. More on that later.

Activities/Mannerisms

Something else that I think bolster’s someone’s “butch” image is the things she does.  This ranges from activities – maybe owns a motorcycle, knows how to change her own oil, likes sports and having a beer with her buddies – to more simple things.  These are an area, actually, where I think femmes affirmatively make themselves femmes – by spending time on makeup and hair, wearing lotion, shopping, etc etc.  I also think this is a place where a lot of people end up falling in the middle.  I don’t look like the stereotypical butch, but I know how to change the oil, I like (not US) football, I never wear makeup or “do” my hair, etc.  It’s hard to think of me as really femme for that reason.

Sexual Stuff

Here’s where my own heebie jeebies come out.  Now of course, everything in this post is a generalisation, talking about stereotypes into which most lesbians probably don’t fit.  But I’ve read a little about fantasies and lesbian sexuality and I have to say some of the butch/femme sexuality really throws me.  The reason is that it seems, to me, to come really close to heterosexual sexuality and really close to the kind of “male oppression” stuff that has become more and more a turnoff to me since I stopped having sex with men.  Of course, I’m sure there are lesbian women who fantasise about choking on a dildo, or being fucked painfully, or having sex with someone who identifies as male.  There is absolutely nothing wrong with that.  It’s just that for me, being on either side of that equation would be a major turn-off.  Being with a man, especially sexually, turned me into a weak, meek person completely unlike myself.  If I were on the “female” side of that equation in a lesbian relationship, there’s nothing to say the same thing wouldn’t happen.  At the same time, if I were on the “male” side, I don’t want to be hurting someone or interjecting heterosexuality in the relationship.  To me, the beautiful thing about lesbian sex is that it’s two women, exploring female sexuality.  I do need to learn to mentally disconnect certain “heterosexual” acts that I actually enjoy from heterosexuality, so that I can enjoy them with a woman.  I’ll admit that.  But when actual roleplay starts up, I can’t see myself as a butch or a femme, because I don’t want that particular dichotomy in my bed.  I want whatever power differential is set up (and believe me, I like power differentials) to be between two women, using our female energies.  Man, I’m a hippie.

That wasn’t supposed to turn into a rant, but anyway, that’s my take on the butch/femme roles.  If you really enjoy fitting into one or the other, more power to you!  I’m just happy as an androgynous, outside-the-box lesbian who likes other androgynous, outside-of the box lesbians.  There it is.