I met this very cute ‘Butch’ girl the other day. She was stunning really – muscles, tanned skin, pearly smile. She was kind of offended though that I said Butch. I think she thought I meant that she was a “tractor lesbian” or that she’d forgotten to wax her moustache. I didn’t. She’s a gorgeous woman, both when she’s being a tomboy or when she’s perfumed and coiffed. What I really meant that she had that elusive appeal, that ease about herself that made me want to hand out my telephone number as my heart did somersaults in my chest.
Apart from the anguish about being lost in translation, I started to think about ‘Butch’ and how it has so many different connotations how we understand it differently depending on how out of the box we’ve allowed ourselves to be.
For me Butch is completely about personality and an attitude to life versus a ‘Look’. Somehow, in the media and socially ‘butch’ has come to mean that if you dress a certain way you are a certain way. Dressing in a way that’s out-of the box isn’t equatable with thinking of feeling out of the box; Looking like you don’t conform isn’t the same as non-conformity. And I mean not conforming in a purer sense, not to be contrary but because you know no other way to be.
So I don’t think being butch is about being a “diesel dyke” or a “tractor lesbian” or all the other words we have for girls who dress differently; I don’t think being butch is about wearing men’s jeans than it is about your attitude and personality,
I think what’s common to both Butch men and women, is that they’ve found intuitively or through trial and error that the good old boxes of male, female, gay straight don’t fit so well and so they go on to make their own. So I met very manly men who won’t shirk from acknowledging their soft side, who’ll allow for their creative side and who’re not scared to pretty-it-up. Or women who’re assertive, active, confident about their sexuality or sex without caring what other people think. That to me is definitively Butch!
Butch people have an ease and self-confidence about them that makes them irresistible. It’s hard not to like someone who likes him or herself the manly parts the chick parts, maybe not the moustache but whatever floats your boat.Whether you’re a guy or a girl being ‘butch’ it’s about allowing for all aspects of yourself; for the strong, for the soft and for the shades of grey.
These lucky people are a tonne of fun to be around because they don’t apologize to you for who they are and in turn inspire confidence in you to be who you are.
So to all those Beautiful butch men and women out there, who switch between manly men and womanly men and between manly chicks and womanly chicks and all the shade of Tran – you make my heart race!
FOUR REASONS 