A friend posted this link on fb tonight. I have a lot of feelings about it.

“Butch-femme relationships vs. lesbian relationships”

This ties into the interaction I had with my lover after sharing this post last night:

“Butch Lesbian vs. Female Faggot: Mapping the Territory”

(interesting how both have “vs.” in the title, no? How it’s always gotta be one against another??)

I’m not going to say a whole lot about these posts here tonight. Here’s what I will say:

I am a femme. I am queer. I am a dyke. I am submissive. I am a Daddy’s girl. I am a bottom. I am traditional.

That does not mean I only sleep with, am attracted to, or fall in love with people who identify as butch. That does not mean I am not skilled at performing oral sex on females, or that I don’t want to.  That does not mean I am only attracted to cisfemales. Or transmen. Or butches. That does not mean I am a doormat. That does not mean I do not love fucking my partner. That does not mean I cannot take care of myself. That does not mean I expect my lover or partner to take care of me. That does not mean I am spineless. That does not mean I can’t or won’t take out the trash, snake a drain, change a tire, swear a blue streak at a bad ump, or wear sneakers.

PEOPLE. Wake up to the fact that, when you assign negative values to identities within your broader community, you contribute to the devaluation of your own identity, experience, and self.

We can all do and be and feel any combination of things without it taking away from someone else’s doing or being or feeling. No, really. Read that again. The same way advocates for gay marriage say to opponents, “Letting us get married doesn’t mean you can’t,” we must say to each other, “Respecting your way of being butch/femme/queer/lesbian/dyke/fag doesn’t mean mine isn’t also okay.”

I don’t talk about my love life much here, for a number of reasons. But I want to. HOLY SHIT do I want to. Because this amazing, intricate, magical being I’m in love with deserves so much blog time, I can’t even tell you. And I owe a lot of my personal growth over the last several months to this relationship.

My lover is an incredibly strong woman. An incorrigible boy. A chivalrous butch. A dirty Daddy. A brilliantly creative fag. Some days she is all one. Some days he is all another. But all days, my little prince is herself. And I love every single aspect of him. She loves me better than I ever knew could be, and I am grateful every second.

K, as she will be known for now, emailed me after my post about Femme identity the other night. K has never dated a self-IDed femme. We have talked some about the ways my identity affects her, and how her fluidity in all things affects me. It is an ongoing conversation that brings out the best in me, and makes me love us all the more. This is what Femme means to K. I feel shy and honored and humbled and proud and, above all, so loved.

Her words, for me.

“Femmes come in all shapes and sizes. They have favorite colors and favorite make up stuff. They always have the sexiest under clothes and lots of shoes. They plan their outfit to coordinate with their mate as well as the date. They make you banana bread with sugar sprinkles and give it to you cold because they know that’s how you like it. Femmes have an amazing ability to be right there when you need them. I do not mean this in a clingy way, more like a super girl way. They stand tall alone but they stand a little taller when they are with loved ones.  Femmes are pretty much hot all of the time, basically. They do most everything in a super sexy way and they usually show cleavage. They even sleep sexy. Femmes leave you feeling full in your heart and they smell so nice. They bat their beautiful lashes and talk to you without words. Femmes always seem to be listening. Femmes have the softest skin in the world and if you behave they always let you touch. Sometime they let you touch even when you misbehave. Femmes have an amazing ability to make you feel bigger than a sky scraper and stronger than the Incredible Hulk. Femmes find you in the grocery store and tell you how handsome you look even if you are still in your work clothes. Femmes will tie your tie but not your bow tie. They like to mess up your hair a little and fix it the way they like it. Femmes are also, 100% without a doubt, the best kissers ever. They kiss you so good and love you so hard that you will forget your name.”

Is this about all femmes? No. Is this everything about femmes? No. Is this enough to make one femme love one boy so hard it almost hurts, but in that delicious way? Absolutely.

And it’s enough to make this femme feel a little softer toward those who feel like they need to take away from someone else to have what they need. I hope they find what I have – something that doesn’t challenge my femme identity, but embraces it. Something that doesn’t feel intimidated by my preferences, but enhanced by them. Something that doesn’t feel the need to make something else less-than, only to recognize the greater-than that two people who fully appreciate one another can be together.

I will say that, as jarring as it sometimes is when it happens, I’m super grateful for those times when people perceive things differently from how I do, and feel comfortable saying so to me. I sometimes feel like (and this is going to sound disgustingly self-important) people don’t like to challenge my opinions or offer counters to my thoughts. I am not going to pretend that I don’t know I’m a smart person. I’m not going to be all coy and demure and “teehee why would you feel intimidated by lil ol me??” Because that’s a load of disingenuous crap. But I am going to say that if you have a different point of view,  I hope you will feel that I am a safe person with whom to share it. I’d like to think I am open-minded and considerate and don’t attack people who offer a contrary opinion. I’d like to think that I say often enough that I want to learn from others. I’d like to think that no one will ever feel like the cons of sharing their thoughts with me outweigh the pros.

On that note, bed. Pillow. Sweetest dreams. Wishing the same to all of you.

The floor, my loves, is open. I officially (for what it’s worth) deem this coming weekend “Femme Identity Education Weekend.” You have questions, I have some answers. I also know a ton of Femmes whose answers will vary wildly from my own. Let’s talk about Femme. And let’s watch a little something that gives us a place to start.

Sh*t People Say to Femmes

Chances are, you’ve seen one or ten or seventy-two of the “sh*t people say to” videos. Me too. And this one is about on par with the rest – some of it resonates, some of it makes me roll my eyes, and some of it doesn’t relate to my experience at all. But it all relates to someone’s experience of Femme.

Tell me about your experience as a Femme. As someone who has dated a Femme. As someone who is friends with Femmes. As someone who has fucked a Femme. As someone who has been fucked by a Femme. As someone who has no fucking idea what the big fucking deal is about Femme.

It is all welcome, and will all be respected, and responded to with kindness, consideration, and love.

I wanna know what Femme means to you. And in comments, and in a wrap-up post this weekend, I will talk about what Femme means to me. Besides, you know, everything.

Hey everybody its Chaos/GtA/Joshua

I mainly will use Chaos in my introductions -_-

So first, how I got into making videos.  I got inspired to make walkthrough videos by Chuggaaconroy; he is funny/awesome. Also my inspiration to make movies in games is my friend, whom I will not name. My newest project is Leatherface Revival, which is my movie,  and after that, it’s my walkthrough (see trailer below).  So yeah, it’s great to see you and peace out.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Post by: Joshua/Chaos/GtA

________
Twitter:  RGE_Chaos

Youtube: gtaivmanhelper

Dailymotion:  Chaos4Life

______________________________

And, click here for the trailer of my walkthrough

So, Femme Flavor will now feature the occasional guest post from Joshua, and we’ll figure out what that will look like as we go. There will be some ground rules, which we’ve already begun discussing, and I will edit and work with him on all posts before approving them for publication and sharing the link around.

One thing this will mean is that his peers, minors, will be visiting the site. I already have it set to a maximum rating for search engines, but I’m going to think about what this means for categorization and social networking. More on that when I’ve had a chance to figure out the minutia.

In the meantime, I hope you’re all as excited about this development as I am, and that you’ll welcome Joshua and give his posts some love.

Stay tuned for the first guest post later this evening!

So, tonight I’m going to do relaxing things and let myself even out and breathe in some good calm vibes and prepare to meet tomorrow as my best self. Which, of course, means a bath and a book. And some kick-ass new tunes I downloaded from Dispatch Magazine. Cuz I do my homework.

I sure do get ahead of myself and talk all around, don’t I? This is what it’s like inside my brain, folks. If I don’t put the words down in some kind of order, they just stay in constant motion, sometimes forming complete trains of thought but more often just rattling around like a bunch of bumper cars at an amusement park.

So, as of right now, Joshua’s diagnoses are ADHD, with which most people seem to be at least marginally familiar these days, and also PDD-NOS: Pervasive Developmental Disorder, Not Otherwise Specified, which is an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). My layperson’s understanding of this diagnosis is that it’s most often used for young children who exhibit signs of autism and/or Asperger’s syndrome, but who either do not categorically fit one or the other, or who have not yet reached an age where a psychologist feels comfortable assigning a more specific diagnosis on the spectrum. As his last evaluation was over five years ago, I recently brought him to a local professional for a full neuropsych eval and will meet with her in the next couple of weeks to hear her report out on the results of the testing she conducted along with reports his teachers and I completed to assist with the assessment.

The ways Josh’s ASD and ADHD impact his behavior are sometimes quite apparent, and other times – at least to me – practically non-existent. He’s hard to understand for someone who doesn’t spend a lot of time with him because he speaks really quickly and sometimes drops words, but hell, I do that sometimes, too. He struggles with the “th” sound and says “f” instead, which is, in all honesty, a bit worrisome for me at his age, because while I know adults with lisps, I don’t know any with an impediment of that nature. I’m hopeful that it can be corrected through continued speech therapy, but it’s not life-threatening, and it doesn’t seem to bother him much right now. If and when it does, he’ll do something about it if he can, and if he can’t, he’ll work with it like we all work with our stuff.

Aside from his speech, he has involuntary vocal tics, though he’s abandoned the one he had for the first almost-year he lived with me and has replaced it (subconsciously) with a new one that is somewhat less potentially alienating to peers. I feel bad for being grateful for that, but I gotta admit, the fewer things that set him apart from the other kids, the less I worry about him.

He is weird about food. He’ll go on a bender and want the same thing for dinner for four weeks straight, and won’t eat any vegetables besides raw carrots and cucumbers. I’ve snuck shredded zucchini into pasta sauce and broccoli into cheese sauce and he’s scarfed them along with whatever I put them on, but don’t tell him that.

He’s a little clumsy and his dexterity varies wildly from task to task – his handwriting is abysmal, but he’s a damned fast typist. He struggles with knowing the right amount of pressure to use: he’ll overcompensate and knock something over instead of just picking it up, but doesn’t press hard enough with a sponge to wash a plate unless I use hand-over-hand guidance. Though this may just be his way to avoid dish duty – he’s self-admittedly lazy as hell.

He latches onto words and phrases for no apparent reason. I can’t remember one once the next has taken over, but the one that has stuck around since at least late August is “taco.” I have no idea why. HE has no idea why. But it’s his thing. I ask him why his plate is still on the table in the living room instead of in the kitchen sink. “Taco?” I tell him I couldn’t hear what he just said. “Taco!” I ask what movie he’s just put in for us to watch. “Taco.” I’ve started replying with various foods on a theme: Burrito. Quesadilla. Gordita. Taquito. It cracks him up, which cracks me up.

He obsesses over video games, musicians, and movies: he will play Call Of Duty for twelve straight hours if permitted, hunger and weariness and calls of nature be damned. He’ll put a single song on repeat until I lose my mind and make him change it up. He’ll watch the same film back to back to back. His memory for facts around his areas of interest is vast – he can tell you the production companies, ratings, and even voice actors for every video game he loves, years games and movies and albums came out, samples and featured artists on tracks he loves, and more – it’s astounding, really. His ability to be redirected away from his hyper-focus on these things has increased substantially since he’s been in an environment where he isn’t permitted to spend unlimited time on his preferred activities; he’s even gotten into a couple of books I’ve shared with him (print and audio) and is branching out in his food selection. We don’t have meltdowns if a video game won’t load, and he barely whined at all when I called XBox customer support and told him his busted console would cost too much to repair, and that I wasn’t going to replace it anytime soon. This, folks, was a true test.

Joshua has introduced me to The IT Crowd. Hot Fuzz. Super Mario Bros Wii. The Lonely Island. He’s a master of comedic timing and inflection, and can produce a movie quote for damned near every occasion. His negotiation skills when he really wants something rival those of any politician – dirty, slippery, and occasionally compelling. He laughs more than anyone I’ve ever known, and it’s contagious – since birth, this kid has just been happy happy happy, and seeing him flash his signature grin and a thumbs-up when he’s done something typically obnoxious and 14-year-old-boy-ish gets through my irritation every time.

We definitely have our rough moments. Times when I have to be the adult authority figure, and he the rebellious teen. Times when I have to say the same thing every day for two weeks and I am quite literally tearing at my hair. We have moments when one or the other or both of us has to walk away and take deep breaths before we come back to talk again. But we do. We apologize, we revisit, we conclude, and then we give each other a Gibbs-slap and he farts at me and I roll my eyes and we’re back to good.

Life with Joshua is full of both painfully routine and absurdly unpredictable. Moments in which I wonder, “Why the hell did I think I was cut out for this?” and moments in which I think, “What would I do without him?” We’re both learning. We’re both growing. And we have kind of a lot of fun while we’re at it.

Taco.

]]> http://www.femmeflavor.com/2012/01/30/my-main-man/feed/ 0 http://www.femmeflavor.com/2012/01/29/break-time/ http://www.femmeflavor.com/2012/01/29/break-time/#comments Mon, 30 Jan 2012 03:39:13 +0000 Kirsten http://www.femmeflavor.com/?p=307 [...]]]> Perhaps not surprisingly, last night’s post stirred up a lot of emotion and I’ve been grappling with the hard bits today, but also holding close all of the responses I’ve gotten from people who were moved to comment in one place or another or to reach out to me directly. I’m taking tonight off to bask in the love I’ve felt from so many, to enjoy the time spent goofing with my little man, and to relax with a movie and exceptional company to bid the weekend goodbye. Thank you all for your presence in my life; I am grateful for each one of you.

I’ve been thinking about that fact that some of you have no idea who Joshua is. I mean, you get that he’s a 14 year old boy who lives with me and eats all the food. But maybe you think he’s my son. Which isn’t the case. So I thought I would talk a bit about that.

Joshua is my brother. I was 17 when he was born, and in the delivery room with our mom and his father. I had and have never experienced anything so beautiful as Joshua’s birth; if you’ve never been present for a natural delivery, I honestly don’t have any words to convey to you the depth and intensity of emotion involved. Of course, there was also pain – my mother’s, sure, but she also dislocated my shoulder while pushing, and to this day, I’m not really sure how or at what point that was remedied. But I digress.

I was 16 years old and about to graduate from high school. I did not live with a parent; I lived with my schoolteacher, who had been a close friend of my mother’s… Until I chose to live with her instead of mom. Mom called to tell me she was pregnant. With Joshua.

Maybe some back story would be helpful here.

See, when I was 13 and around that age (chronology is really difficult for me), our family was more than a bit dysfunctional. Mom had worked really hard to pull it together after being blindsided by a divorce request from “Dad,” father to my brother A and my sister K (who was two weeks old when good ol’ Dad gave mom the heave-ho for a….. person. ahem). Mom, A, K, and I left Puerto Rico and the military family life in Decmber of 1990 and came back to New England to stay with family; what else were we to do? Mom was 28, had three kids ages 10, 7, and two months, no education beyond her GED, and hadn’t had to work a full-time job since she was 18 with a small baby child (yep, me) to support. Life was starting over, and she was in over her head to say the least.

She worked hard. SO hard. She immediately enrolled at Andover College to get her associate’s in medical assisting. She worked three part-time jobs while attending school full-time. She got a babysitter when she could, and I took care of stuff when she couldn’t. We lived in poverty, but so did most of the kids in my neighborhood. Maybe they weren’t living in the dead lady’s house, free in exchange for feeding the ancient cat who wouldn’t budge because he’d lived there for 20-odd years and if Grace had died there, by golly, so would he, but still. The kids in my hood didn’t have Shawnee Peak ski tags hanging on the zipper pulls of their North Face puffy down winter coats, and they didn’t have two parents either, and they thought fishing in the ravine with a stick and a worm on a piece of string was a great way to pass the time until it was dark enough to play flashlight tag.

Mom got her degree, and a job – a decent one – working in another small town closer to the New Hampshire border. But she wasn’t happy with the schools in Bridgton, and wanted us to go to the private school her friend Selby was starting. It was in Portland, which was a strange and wonderful universe I had only visited once (that I remembered) on a band field trip where we played a couple of songs in the middle of the mall and then Becky Danis and I bought “Best Friends” necklaces at Claire’s (which were subsequently treated much like Facebook statuses today – used to passive-aggressively express disdain for one another by wearing them under our collars or, for the worst offenses, taken off entirely).

So, we moved to Portland. A didn’t adjust well, and maybe his stuff had been building up over the couple of years we’d been in Maine already, or maybe taking him away from everything that had started to become familiar and making him start all over again broke him – I’m not sure, and don’t know if he is, either. At any rate, he became very volatile. I was older, and we were new to the city, and mom was commuting three or four hours a day to work, gone before school started and home after dinner was over. So I got us off to school, I cooked, I did dishes with my Bible quizzing index cards wedged into the gap between the cabinet and the knob so I wouldn’t lose my “rookie of the year” prestige just because we moved to the Big City. Bible quizzing was a church youth group activity at which I’d excelled in our small-town church, and also across New England. I’d been sent to the annual international competition in Florida my first year and it was the one thing I felt good about since we’d landed in Maine.

But no matter how hard I studied those verses, I couldn’t predict or prevent what happened – Mom tried to make sure I still made every quiz meet, and we went to one in Providence, RI. I don’t know what triggered him, but A had a meltdown. He had been aggressive and violent with us at home on plenty of occasions, but this small angry boy perched atop a family minivan, threatening harm to himself and others, cursing a blue streak… he was mine. My brother. My family. And I was embarrassed. I hated him for it. I didn’t know then what I know now; I was 14, 15? and my social circle was more important to me than blood. I know K was there, too, but I couldn’t tell you where she was or who was looking after her while mom tried to talk A down. Maybe I was – it was the role I was accustomed to taking, so I imagine that’s what was. But I don’t remember. I only remember the shame.

My brother was admitted to a hospital, for the first of several stays. It wore mom down, it wore me down, and I imagine it had an effect on K, too, regardless of her age. The violence continued and became a cycle, until one night when mom wasn’t around and A went beyond threats and caused me harm. I know he was as scared as I was when he saw what he’d done, because he retreated to his room – but it was a turning point. I couldn’t protect K anymore, because I could no longer effectively even protect myself. He was getting too big, too strong, too adept at evading my usual tactics. My teacher and her partner came over until mom got home to bring A to the hospital. K and I then went to stay with another family friend, with whom we’d often stayed when these things happened. But this time, when mom came back to say that everything was going to be okay, really, I couldn’t believe her. I told her I wasn’t going back. I was a junior in high school, I had been an adult for nearly five years, and I was ready to be a teenager for the first time. I stayed with those friends for a few months until a more permanent arrangement was made with my teacher’s family for me to stay with them until I graduated.

That was not the end of my contact with mom, A, and K during my high school years, but it was the beginning of boundary-setting. There were many difficult encounters. There were many scary times. There were many heart-wrenching choices. But in the end, mom and I were on good enough terms for her to call me and tell me, “I’m going to have a baby.”

The following several months were full of changes for me; I graduated from high school, signed my first lease as an almost-legal adult, and began working full time. I slowly began attempting to repair family ties that had been clawed to bits two years prior. I established enough of a connection with my mother that, when the time came, I was at the hospital for the first attempt to induce labor with Joshua. I walked mom to and from the hot tub and up and down the halls. I drank enough ginger ale to last a lifetime. I’m pretty sure I watched one of those part cartoon, part live action movies that were all the rage in the early-mid-90s in the waiting room. Then he came.

My connection with Joshua was established in those first seconds he was a breathing being. I saw very little of him for most of his youth. I lived with mom and her husband and the kids for a short while, but then I left, then they moved away, then I moved away again… It wasn’t until I was living in San Francisco and had separated myself from it all enough to see things clearly that I realized that Joshua needed me.

Along with this came the realization (and the accompanying guilt) that K and A had needed me, too. But with the help of loved ones with more perspective than I could have around it all, I also realized that I had not been capable of doing more for them than I did. With Joshua, though, I would be doing us all a disservice if I didn’t step up. I was in a better place – emotionally, mentally, financially – to provide what we all needed. Mom needed the respite to focus on her self-care. K needed to know that someone would take care of Joshua as she had when mom wasn’t able to. And Joshua needed – deserved - an opportunity to thrive in an environment that catered to him. Where his needs came first.

And I needed someone to give myself to. Someone on whom my energy and love wouldn’t be wasted. I’d done a lot of that in the years since I’d given myself to A and K and mom. Always trying to find an outlet for all this giving I wanted to do, but never feeling like there was much of a return.

I found it in Joshua.

I moved home from San Francisco over 4th of July weekend in 2010. I had a lot of settling to do – Portland had been my home as an adult once, but a very different adult than the one I’d become in my time away. Some things felt so different, and others felt only too much the same. I had talked to mom before I moved back about the ways Joshua might benefit from living in Portland, and we had discussed many options – her moving here with him, him moving here first and her coming later, etc. As fall settled in, mom’s cyclical depression came around, and I began taking Joshua on weekends while mom took care of herself. Thanksgiving was the first of several weekends in a row Joshua spent with me, through the holidays. New Year’s Eve, he and I downloaded an app on my iPhone so we could watch the ball drop together – one of the first real bonding experiences we’d had since I returned. And three weeks later, he was enrolled in school in Portland and came to live with me for good. A month later, mom, Joshua’s father, and I sat before a judge and he awarded me sole legal custody. Joshua has lived with me for a year now, and the young man he is today is light years ahead of the monosyllabic boy who wouldn’t look me in the eye for anything. He visits mom, hangs with K, often talks about A with reverence (A gave him his first real computer, with killer specs for creating video). He’s part of a family now, despite what some might see as having been torn from it.

Holy shit I need to take a deep breath or five.

Since I started writing this, three hours have passed. I’ve made Josh cheeseburgers, texted with K, and IMed with A; I wanted to let them know I was airing this shit, because I didn’t know I was going to, and I know it’s not just mine to share.

But what it all comes down to is, FUCK we must all love each other something fierce, to have been through all we have and still be in touch. To still care about each other the way we do. To still actively seek each other out and support one another as we can.

This post really hasn’t told you much about Joshua at all. And that deserves its own post, because damn, that boy is a freaking riot and I love the SHIT out of him. But I guess it told you a little about me. And maybe a little about you, whether because you relate, or because you don’t.

………Okay, I’m done.

I am all kinds of sleepy from a day that has involved many things that encourage full-body exhaustion, and also so full of love from so many sources. It has been a pretty fan-freaking-tastic Friday, and the weekend has only just begun. It’s gonna be a good one, I think.