So I brought this article up in conversation with trinityva.
(The article is about young lesbians and butches of color. It very much reminds me of Where the Bois Are, the Ariel Levy article-then-chapter about boi culture, published in Female Chauvinist Pigs. Its tone is set by its subheader: Young lesbians in Brooklyn find that a thug’s life gets them more women.)
And here is a blog entry found via google that talks about the article and the response.
The blog entry raises an issue that I want to talk about, that is, a strange function of intersectionality. I think that journalists play these prejudices off of each other. I wouldn´t argue that the media in general feels constrained to offer much in the way of respect to marginalized groups. I think that there is the tacit understanding that there are some things you just do not say any longer–at least, not often and not in as many words. But when you write about another oppressed group, suddenly you can cram in all sorts of reactionary generalizations and sound downright novel. It´s suddenly a new new thing again. And it isn´t just permissible. Levy was writing things about young butch dykes, queer masculine women, and bois that sounded remarkably Beebo-Brinker-esque, these abandoned twilight girls who want to be men. At the same time, she was pretending that lesbian history started–and should have ended–in the seventies:
There was a point at which lesbianism seemed as much like a fringe political party as it did a sexual identity: What better way to declare “a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle” than to be a woman without a man, a woman with other women. “Lesbianism is a women’s liberation plot,” was how the group Radicalesbians put it when they famously commandeered the mike at now’s Second Congress to Unite Women in 1970. It was the ultimate in dismantling the dominant paradigm, rejecting male domination, and all the rest of it, and sex seemed kind of secondary.
When Lissa came out in the eighties, militant feminism and, to a certain extent, lesbian separatism were at the forefront of dyke culture. “There was this whole movement of womyn’s land and womyn building houses on womyn’s land and insulating themselves from the rest of the world,” she says, smirking. “It was a whole different world from where we are now. It used to be if you flirted with somebody, that was it: You were set for life; U-Haul’s waiting out back. I don’t know if it’s the whole boi thing or if it’s a little sexual revolution that’s happened where you can go home and have a one-night stand just like the gay boys. Before, things were more serious: If you flirted with somebody, you better be getting her number and buying that house and getting those dogs. Otherwise, lesbian community is coming down on you. Now it’s more . . . playful.”
This sort of wide-eyed revisionism allows the writer to ignore the heap o´dated rhetoric that shows how regressive their sentiments really are. And it allows the writer to portray these people as illegitimate, fake, forced, temporary. They aren´t a natural extension of a long tradition, but a bastard confluence of the latest, most toxic trends.
“Girls to Men” is a glaring example–even the title deprives these women of any access to tradition and community, and any consciousness of what they´re doing. Like I said, I think that there is at best a thin compunction around making blatant racist statements about black men. But even that disappears as long as you are ostensibly writing about butch lesbians who are of color: suddenly all sorts of pearl-clutching regressive bullshit about black masculinity being criminal, inhuman, base, and rapine become not only permissible but courageous and incisive. Butch lesbianism suffers as well–these women are corrupted:
Rap videos have long provided men of color with milestones on their journeys to manhood. From being a successful street businessman (Notorious B.I.G.’s “Ten Crack Commandments”), to learning how to treat a woman (Dr. Dre’s “Bitches Ain’t Shit”) and protecting their manhood (50 Cent’s “What Up Gangsta?”), guys are told how to be indestructible, sexually assertive, and in general, badasses. The misogyny and homophobia implicit in that message has long raised the hackles of critics. Oprah Winfrey and columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. made news recently for saying “enough” to the influence of rap’s rougher edges on black culture.
But for increasing numbers of very young black and Hispanic lesbians, the bitches-and-‘hos lyrics of their musical heroes are the soundtrack for a thug’s life they pursue with almost as much passion as they do the hottest femme in the club.
The whole down-low phenomenon as framed by the mainstream media was another instance: the most trite stereotypes about gay men and black men trotted out as though they were brilliant insights; very common behavior that was not explored in its specific cultural context but turned into an evil specific to men of color. And it seems like it works both ways: black men as absent, dangerous, irresponsible husbands and fathers; gay men as plague-ridden, pathological liars.