Me Femme Her Stud

Glossary - For your convenience 

Femme: A traditionally feminine woman.  Mainly used to refer to a feminine lesbian who is attracted to masculine or butch lesbians (“femme” def 1).  It is important to add here that not all femme lesbians are attracted to butch lesbians.

Boi: For lesbians, a boi is a woman who is biologically female, but has a boyish appearance or presentation. A boi may be lesbian identified or s/he may be trans identified. For gay men a boi is a gay man who is boyish or young in appearance or identity.

Stud:A dominant lesbian, usually butch. This is usually the type of dyke that has gender identity disorder (she thinks and wants to be a man). She takes on the very dominant role in relationships, the male role to be exact. She dresses like a man and acts like a man. There is nothing feminine about her. She is sometimes more of a man than some men. In bed she will only want to make love to her women with a strap on. She will not want women to touch her breast, or her vagina, go down on her or provide her with any type of pleasure. She wants to do all the pleasuring. She does not want women to touch her breast etc, because it reminds her that she is a woman.

When people write into Lesbian Love and Advice for advice, they often times feel the need to classify who is talking. "My girlfriend (stud) and myself (femme) went out to eat last night." or "I want to buy my girlfriend (femme) a gift that means a lot (I'm a stud) but am having a hard time...."  Sometimes even, "We got into a massive fight last night. My girlfriend (stud) said something that I felt was inappropriate. I'm a femme."  Sometimes it's not enough to clarify the roles in the relationship. Sometimes members want to solicit advice only from femmes or studs on the page. "Femmes -- what do you think..." and "Studs -- you know what I mean" posts are quite popular.

 Labels can be misleading. You can't tell everything you need to know from a label. And sometimes, the person wearing the label has a different interpretation of said label than you do. Labels don't mean that we can automatically assume what another person's experience or opinion is. "Oh... I see. You're a FEMME. Well then, here's your advice. I thought you were a boi. If you were a boi I would have given you this bit of advice." Smh. Really hard.

I'm tired of labels being some sort of cheat sheet we use to understand people more readily. I would be better served as a giver of advice if someone were to tell me what type of family their woman grew up in, what relationships they both had currently been involved in, what habits and idiosyncrasies each of them had, etc.  A label does not tell you all there is to know about a person, nor does it give you any road map into how to best solve whatever issue the person is experiencing. It's ridiculous to assume otherwise.

I heard once that someone felt labels were important and compared it to shopping for cereal at the local supermarket. So -- Customer A likes fruity pebbles, and looks for the label that says Fruity Pebbles. They don't like shredded wheat. Shredded wheat might be good for someone else, but it's just not doing it for customer A. See? The label helps, because Customer A is not going to go home with the wrong cereal! Yeah. Ok. But this is the thing: sometimes food gets mislabeled. And sometimes manufacturers start putting shit into your fruity pebbles that wasn't there before. And sometimes there's equally great fruity pebbles that the store makes that are less expensive, more convenient -- hell, sometimes the "alternative" even tastes better. Sometimes labels fall off.

Slapping the label of "femme" or "boi" doesn't mean it's a femme or a boi anymore than putting lipstick on your dog makes it a covergirl spokesperson. And the characteristics of a boi doesn't mean that my girlfriend is going to follow the criteria of a boi to the letter anymore than my "label" is going to dictate how I act.

Arg.

I guess what I'm saying is:

Let labels be a starting point to your conversation -- not the ending where you can make assumptions and then seek generic type answers. Your girlfriend has her own personalities and her own gifts and shortcomings. Seeing her as a person might get you further.

P.S. I know these definitions of these labels are surely going to rub some people the wrong way. I'll talk about them in my blog tomorrow. Yup -- blogging every day in July is about to commence. Why not?  <3