I just received a note from a reader who’s having trouble communicating with her butch DGF (“dear girlfriend”). She asked if I could “translate” some common butch idioms.
One mistake many butch-lovers make is assuming that butches are just like the stereotypes they have of heterosexual men. If you Google “what men really mean,” you’ll find hundreds of sites purporting to explain exactly this. Let’s leave aside for a moment the offensive nature of most of those articles, and assume for the sake of argument that there’s some truth to them. Even so, [non-male-identified] butches are not men, and “rules” of “understanding men” apply to us only sometimes.
It’s impossible to write something like this without giant, whopping dollops of stereotype. I figure I’ll get flak for this, but I went ahead and made a list anyway. I’ll be interested to learn whether any of it resonates with you.
(Writing this, I realized that while I would like to think that I’m incredibly straightforward and literal practically to a fault, that’s not always true…)
How about you? Did any of these examples sound familiar? What’s some other “butchspeak” that needs to be translated?
