Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture

by Ariel Levy

  Sienna lived at the dUMBA Queer Performing Arts collective in Brooklyn, a place they described on the Internet as “run by a loose-knit collective, usually made up of visual artists, media artists, writers, songsters, dance fanatics, flirty bohemians, political and cultural activists, and otherwise socially boisterous girls and boys.” They had sex parties and art shows, and above the bathroom door, instead of GIRLS or BOYS, it said TRANNIES.

  When I met her, Sienna was working as a sometime runway model for Hermès and Miguel Adrover and making big, bright collages at the collective. She had recently moved to Brooklyn from San Francisco, where she’d dated “black women who drove Harleys and were college-educated and loved punk rock. Girls who were maybe butch…my whole vision about butch got shattered, though. When I first came out, I felt comfortable wearing a skirt and I had a really big afro, so I looked sort of girly. Because of that, I had all these butch girls after me and they were always pushing me to be more girly and I’m not into that; I’m not into all that princess shit. I’m from Alaska, where women are all just pretty tough, and I grew up hunting with these sixty- or seventy-year-old women. So to see all these women who are identifying as butch and acting with all this bravado doesn’t mean jack shit to me,” Sienna said in her low, quiet voice. “I think of a boi as someone who’s not trying to put on airs about being masculine…someone a little smarter. Basically we threw the term around in San Francisco, and the last couple years I’ve heard it more here. It’s new.”

  So new that most people—most lesbians—over the age of thirty have no idea what a boi is. Deb Schwartz, a thirty-eight-year-old New York City butch who had been out for fifteen years and had, at various points, worked as an activist for groups like Fed-Up Queers and ACT UP and as an editor at Out magazine, said, “It’s just wild to me that there’s this whole phenomenon out there that is completely news to me. Here I am, a bulldagger of a certain age, and when I first heard the term—recently—I had a conversation with an equally butch friend of mine and she was completely in the dark, too. What’s new is seeing these kids who really seem to be striving for a certain kind of juvenilia, not just masculinity. They really want to be kids. This hit me when I saw this girl—this boi, I guess—barreling out of a store in Chelsea in huge, oversize jeans, a backpack, and a baseball cap pulled down low. And she was running as if she were late for the school bus…her whole aura was so completely rough-and-tumble eight-year-old that I wouldn’t have been surprised if she had a slingshot in one pocket and a frog in the other.”

  “When you think about teenage boys, [that’s] who bois are modeled after,” said Lissa Doty. “Teenage boys are sort of androgynous themselves and playing with identity and the world is open to them.” When Doty came out in the eighties, militant feminism and lesbian separatism were still 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,” Doty said, smirking. “I felt like I should be a separatist if I was going to be a good lesbian, but I liked guys as people; they were my friends. It was a whole different world from where we are now.”

  Where lesbian separatists of years past tried to cleave away from men, bois like Doty are more interested in dissolving fixed ideas of man and woman in the first place. “Bois are a little more open and fluid. I don’t want to try and speak for the trans[sexual] community, but I think there are a lot of trannybois who are not going all the way, who are not thinking I need to fit into this gender mold. They’re saying It’s ok if I don’t take hormones, or It’s ok if I don’t have surgery. I can still call myself a boi. That’s great. I think it’s cool that a label can be so flexible. I like it as a spectrum instead of one specific model.”

  Being a boi means different things to different people—it’s a fluid identity, and that’s the whole point. Some of the people who identify as bois simply think it means that they are young and cool and probably promiscuous. Some, like Doty, date other bois and think of themselves as “fags,” whereas others date only femmes. Others are female-to-male transsexuals—also referred to as trans or FTMs or trannies—who are in various stages of the gender transition process, ranging from undergoing top surgery and taking testosterone (“T”) to simply adopting the pronoun he. Consider this posting from LiveJournal, a Web site on which members keep running diaries of their lives for other members to peruse: “So my story reads that I’m a butch (or whatever) living in Minnesota. Mostly I claim the trans label, but it’s not my intention to transition to male from wherever I’m at now. I’m surprisingly comfortable in this gray muck…it makes life easier when I live it instead of trying to box it up like take-out.” Next to the post there is a close-up picture of a young, shirtless person’s head and shoulders. The person has freckles and short, messy strawberry blonde hair and could be a male or a female, anywhere between the ages of eighteen and thirty. The person looks happy.

  Many bois, including many FTMs, consider themselves part of a “genderqueer” movement invested in dissolving the “gender binary.” They don’t feel that dividing the world up into men and women or, for that matter, butches and femmes is a particularly sophisticated way to conceive of gender roles. “I’m so against the whole butch-femme dichotomy,” said Julien (née Julie) Rosskam, a good-looking twenty-four-year-old documentary filmmaker and the associate producer of Brooklyn-based Dyke TV. Rosskam, who had been taking testosterone for several months, will correct you if you say “she,” which creates an interesting reality: One of the three people in charge of Dyke TV is a “he.” Rosskam was getting the money together to have a double mastectomy.

  Despite the hormones and the impending surgery and the mandatory “he,” Rosskam found the idea that there are two distinct genders and nothing in between constricting and close-minded. “I just feel really defensive; I don’t like when people feel the need to put people into categories like that. If you had a line of women we could put them on a spectrum from the most femme to the most butch, but everything in our world is set up as a dichotomy and I just feel like that’s so limiting.”

  The confusing thing, of course, is why somebody would need serious surgery and testosterone to modify their gender if gender is supposed to be so fluid in the first place. But “transitioning” is very popular. The transformation of women to men is so prevalent within the scene they have a name for it: “butch flight.” This is to say that women who don’t feel the traditional definition of femininity fits them, who in another lesbian era would have considered themselves butch, are more and more frequently thinking of themselves as transsexual, and doing whatever they can to actualize that self-conception medically.

  “I’ve noticed a lot of different levels of trans, and frankly think there are A LOT of confused lesbians out there,” an FTM named Ian wrote to me in an e-mail. When I went to meet Ian in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, I had difficulty picking him out of the crowd. I was expecting him to look like the other FTMs I’d met: like butch women with something somehow off. But Ian looked and sounded utterly and seamlessly male…a real boy, as Pinocchio would say. He had been taking testosterone for eight months, and had undergone top surgery a year before our meeting. “I went to this guy named Reardon up on Park Avenue” for the operation, Ian said. “It’s kind of like a hobby for him, doing sex changes. You walk in and there’s all these really, really rich women in there for implants, and then there’s me.”

  For a transsexual twenty-two-year-old—for any twenty-two-year-old—Ian was remarkably unconflicted about his identity. “I’ve felt like this since I was three,” he said. “I’ve never felt like a lesbian; I always felt male.” Ian’s sense of unambiguous manliness is anomalous within the scene. He discovered this when he first arrived in New York City and started attending meetings for FTMs at the Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay, Transgender Community Center in the West Village. “I only did that group on and off because I really had a hard time identifying with a lot of the people in there,” Ian said. “Be
cause some people, you’re just looking at them and you’re like, Your issues are not in this area…you’ve got issues all over the place. I mean, the spectrum is broad and gender is fluid or whatever,” Ian said, rolling his eyes, “but there are some people who I think are latching onto this term—this ‘trans’ term and this ‘boi’ term—and you have to wonder. Like I go on all these Yahoo groups for trans men? And the other day I was reading it and the thing that was being discussed was Is trans becoming the new vogue thing? And you have to wonder if it might be.”

  A butch friend of mine told me recently that for a while, she had been seriously contemplating getting top surgery, as many of her other friends already had. She said, “If you’re hanging out with a bunch of trannies it’s going to influence you…it’s like if you’re hanging out with people who all have tattoos, you know?” Then she pointed to her tattoo.

  Because there are so many people identifying as trans or bois or FTMs, and because these terms can mean so many things, when Ian used Craig’s List or other Web sites to meet women, he felt the need to be extremely precise about his identity and his body. “It seems like I have to put it up front, like, Listen: This is what I am and this is what I’ve done. Rather than just saying I’m trans, which people could think means Ok, yeah, you identify as male and you probably look like a prepubescent boy and you’re running around hooking up. Part of why the boi lifestyle is so appealing to some people is the non-monogamy. There’s less attachment, a lot of NSA”—Internet shorthand for a playdate with No Strings Attached. “A lot of NSA. There isn’t really a commitment issue when you’re so fluid.”

  Despite all the talk of fluidity and the investment people like Lissa Doty and Julien Rosskam have in reimagining gender, there is another camp of bois who date femmes exclusively and follow a locker-room code of ethics referenced by the phrase “bros before hos” or “bros before bitches,” which means they put the similarly masculine-identified women they hang out with in a different, higher category than the feminine women they have sex with. This school of bois tends to adhere to almost comically unreconstructed fifties gender roles. They just reposition themselves as the ones who wear the pants—they take Female Chauvinist Piggery to a whole different level.

  Alix, a boi from Brooklyn, said we could meet at an East Village gay bar called Starlight for an interview on a Sunday night. After she didn’t show up, Alix sent an e-mail explaining her reasoning: “I didn’t see you, but I’d be lying if I said I was there. It was raining and I need to know what I’m getting if I’m going out in the rain for some chick and she better be slammin’. And anyway, I should be the one calling the shots.”

  During an interview, Sarah, a twenty-eight-year-old market analyst, showed me an e-mail she’d received from an Internet acquaintance named Kelli regarding a femme they both knew from the scene. It read: “I hope she’s not a big deal, that you’re just riding her or whatever. Do you want me to keep an eye on her? Bros up bitches down.” Kelli’s peroration was a play on a catchphrase borrowed from sex traffickers: pimps up, hos down.

  Sarah told me she had met “maybe thirty” femmes over the Internet—on Craig’s List and Nerve.com and through the personals on the Web site PlanetOut—and occasionally she’d used the heading “boi seeks girl” instead of “butch seeks femme” just to mix it up, and because it’s the cooler term. But she wasn’t crazy about all of its implications. “I’m not entirely comfortable because so many people I’ve met consider boi to mean transgendered or faggot,” by which she meant butch-with-butch or boi-with-boi. “I definitely do not want my name attached to those definitions. I don’t understand the faggot culture…I think it’s disgusting,” she said, and her face crumpled with distaste. “What I like about women is femininity,” she said. “I’m interested in women who look like women, who have womanly gestures and smell and feel, and I don’t understand the appeal or the sense of two faggot dykes riding each other.”

  Sarah had smooth, icy pale skin and very short black hair shot with little patches of silver. She was wearing big jeans and a pinstripe shirt with rolled-up sleeves under a navy-blue vest, and sat with her legs wide apart and her big arms crossed over her chest, making her body a sculpture of toughness. “Femme-on-femme is stupid to me, too. It’s air. It’s air on air. It just seems like Cinemax fluff…long nails, you know. In a butch-femme dynamic, it’s not mirror images. One thing I hear a lot of people say about lesbianism and gayness in general is that it’s narcissistic. I’ve heard so many people say that, and not just my mother.”

  Though Sarah’s dating MO was fairly lupine, her ultimate aspirations were quite a bit more conventional: One day she planned to give up her swinging bachelor’s life and settle down. “I’ve got this model of a household that’s probably sick to a lot of people that makes perfect sense to me,” she said. “What I want is to have a job, and have a life, and I want a partner with a job and a life to come home to, and a high standard of living, and I want us to have kids that go to school and do their homework and go on trips with their parents.” She smiled for a minute with the self-satisfaction of an athlete about to cream his opponent. “And, you know, at the end of a hard day, I would like to come home from work and have my wife suck my cock.”

  San Francisco is a good town for bicycles and lesbians. Both roam the streets as if they own the place, as if it were built just for them. Cars and heterosexuals are tolerated. In the area around Dolores Park, there are lesbians with baseball caps, with attitude, with their noses pierced like a bull’s, with babies, with Subarus, with motorcycles, with money. As one local put it, “It doesn’t matter if you’re pink with purple polka dots: If you’re gay and you come to San Francisco, you’ll find community.”

  On a warm fall night, Diana Cage, the editor of the lesbian magazine On Our Backs (a sexed-up play on the title of the longest-running feminist journal in the United States, off our backs), and her friend Kim were waiting to be seated at an Italian restaurant about a block away from the Lex. They ran into Gibson, Diana’s ex-girlfriend, and their other friend Shelly, who had just come from football practice for their team, the Bruisers.

  “How’d it go?” Diana asked. She had long hair and long eyelashes and wore a skirt and lipstick and toenail polish.

  “Football! Hoo-ah!” Gibson said, half kidding. Shelly, a big girl in a sleeveless T-shirt, offered a double-armed flex to emphasize the point. On one bicep she had a tattoo of a heart with the word “mom” spelled over it. Diana pulled out a Galois and Shelly lit it almost instantaneously. “We’ll see you later at the Lex,” Gibson said and walked off with Shelly.

  Diana watched the butches strut away and said, “I only date clichés.”

  When they sat down to eat, Kim was feeling anxious about the evening ahead. Clara, the boi she was seeing, was supposed to meet up with them later, and things had been very touch-and-go. “Clara’s biggest fear when we started dating was that I was going to try and fuck her,” said Kim, a pretty, punky twenty-four-year-old who resembled the actress Rachel Griffiths. She defined herself as “femme of center” but didn’t wear much makeup or jewelry except for a tiger’s-eye stud in her chin. “I find bois the most attractive. I like the young, andro[gynous] look, but I’ve dated across the board: butches, femmes, trannies. And that really bothers Clara. All her girlfriends in the past have been pretty much straight.” Kim offered a rueful little laugh. “It also threatens her that I’m not totally vapid and vain…her big relief was when she found out I wear a thong.”

  “I sort of orchestrated Kim and Clara dating,” said Diana. “Clara is someone who I would definitely call a boi, totally, although she wouldn’t claim it for herself because she’s too cool. See now it’s like retro cool to be butch, because there are so many bois and because of the whole butch flight thing.”

  “Clara’s got this intense thing, her and her friends have a really strong distaste for this whole trans trendy explosion that’s going on,” said Kim. “But the more I hang out with her the more I’m co
mpletely convinced she’s a closet trans case: She’s obsessed with operating sexually as a male. Completely obsessed. She doesn’t make any reference to being queer or lesbian at all. And she sees all of her lesbian traits—either emotional or physical—as completely negative. I’ve never met anyone who wishes that she was a guy so much.” Kim thought about it for a minute and concluded, “Whereas a butch is somebody who is, I guess, a little more comfortable with the fact that she actually is female.”

  “I don’t have the patience for any kind of a bros-before-hos mentality,” Diana said, “and I associate that with bois. For bois it’s like in high school; they’re all worried about how they look, and maybe if they have a girlfriend that’s not cool, and will their friends approve?”

  Kim was looking increasingly forlorn and pushing her pasta around her plate. “This all ties into their kind of approach to women in general—they are so very predatory about it. Clara won’t just touch on it like That girl’s hot. She will talk and talk and talk about how she wants to get them home and fuck them.” She looked at Diana. “I’m nervous to see her now because I’m not dressed up. And then all of a sudden it’s like I’m trying to please a guy. It’s like I’ve come full circle.”

  Later, at the Lex, a woman in a trucker hat with greasy gray hair and a long, gray Fu Manchu beard was trying to give her dog a sip of her beer. There were a lot of Mohawks and a confusing amount of facial hair on several of the women, and there was a pool table.