Let’s talk about our health.

Personally I am extremely grateful to have grown up in a culture where the women’s health movement had already had significant effects and waves. I went to teen-positive health centers for my first annual exams and birth control prescriptions, I went to queer-positive centers after I came out who didn’t blink twice when I checked “lesbian” on the forms.

And, honestly, Lesbian Health and Women’s Health are big - huge! - topics on which I am not so well-versed. Breast cancer, cervical cancer, HIV prevention, the myths around lesbians being less susceptible to STIs, safer sex practices, gender discrimination, transphobia … these are huge topics, each of which are worthy of their own examination.

And lucky for us, there are many wonderful people working within these fields to make it more lesbian-inclusive, queer-inclusive, gender-inclusive.

Today is Blog for Lesbian Health Day in honor of the upcoming National Lesbian Health Summit taking place March 6 through 8, 2009, in San Francisco. It’s only $30 registration for both days.

(Anyone have any plane-fare hookups? I’d love to go, but can’t afford to actually get there. Note to self, get an airline sponsor.)

I’ve been in touch with Cat, one of the organizers of the conference, and she writes:

Instead of it being just a boring conference, we want to use it as a place to build grassroots, community-based conversations on our health and what health issues affect us. AND most importantly, how we can be leaders in championing our health and getting TPTB to pay attention to our health. This is a critical moment in our nation’s history and we want to make the most of it.

The thing that is probably #1 on my list about health, as a, ahem, sexually active queer person, is STIs and safer sex. It’s something that I always intend to write about more here, to address issues how to keep your toys clean, reminders to wear gloves and use dams and condoms, but it’s a topic that – again – is HUGE, and I tend to feel like I need to do a whole bunch of research on something before I write it up, and I can’t seem to make the time to do the research. (I do practice safer sex, and I try to include it in my write-ups … but that’s not quite the same as opening up a specific dialogue about it.)

So let me take this little opportunity to say: EDUCATE YOURSELF ABOUT SAFER SEX. There are many ways to do this. I recommend Scarleteen - though it is geared toward teenagers, the information is clear and straightforward, basic, and in-depth, and I often use it as a resource when I come across health questions that I can’t answer.

So, instead of writing about my own experiences with the healthcare systems (which have been mostly positive, actually) or speculating too much about the community questions, I want to ask you:

What health issues are you concerned about? For yourself and for your community?

What information do you need to make better decisions about your health?

And what experiences have you already had with your health and the healthcare world (the good, the bad, the ugly)?

What do health issues do we need to take on and how?

How can we better grapple with how we form who we are (allowing for all of the ways we see ourselves) and let that lead our conversations on health?

What do you want to see this summit address?

Do you want to take them to task for calling it the Lesbian Health Summit? Is it welcoming to your particular identity?

If you’d like, leave your stories in the comments, or write it up on your own blog - and please do leave a link to what you write here.

Register online for the Summit now, or visit their website for more information.

Kristen spent the night in my bed on Saturday, and by five am, after waking up every half-hour or so half-hard and wishing it was morning so I could fuck her again, I give in. Shifting against her, I roll us both from our lazy sleep-embrace to her back, one of my legs between hers, right hand on the soft hair between her legs, fingers on her lips, pressing gently, caressing, opening.

I’d asked her about waking her up to fuck her - I wouldn’t presume to do it without permission. Not only did she agree, the shift in her eyes and near imperceptible movement of her hips betrayed that she would very much like it if I did so.

Her body responds immediately, swelling and cresting, though she can barely open her eyes. My mouth at her ear: “I can’t resist you any longer.”

She moans sleepily, little murmurs, body beginning to writhe, not awake. Little nips with my teeth on her neck, just enough for her to feel, not enough to wake her fully. I like her bodily responses, what her animal brain let her do while most of her cognizant self is still off.

She starts moving her thighs apart, hips circling and pulsing a little, pressing against my hand. She is so responsive. I work my fingers inside, slowly, finding the angle, finding that spot she loves, finding the sweet O of her mouth with mine.

Those small, thin moans every time she breathes get inside me like smoke. No comprehensive sound, just small ohs and mmms as her body moves.

Sweet nothings in her ear as my fingers are slick, in and out of her: “Those little noises you make get me so hard … the way your hips move when I’m thrusting against you … I want my cock in you again …”

She gasps, thickens, swells in response. I don’t let up. My mind is racing and I nearly keep talking, but she’s still practically asleep, barely hears me. I let my fingers trace a V along her lips to her clit, sticky and slick with the wet of her. She gasps, shudders, tenses at the stomach and thighs, pulses and shakes, moans louder.

Again, I flick my fingers over her clit, a little harder, steady, steady. Her arms come up around my neck. I bring my mouth onto hers again, she kisses back this time, deep and hard, and I bite her lip.

I pull away to better focus on her clit which is hard and pulsing under my fingers and she gasps, eyes wide open, wide open, as she comes, shuddering, moaning, gasping.

She wraps herself around me when her body calms, humming in low satisfied tones, her eyelids already heavy, closing again, laying back on the pillow as my hands trace her skin.

I sigh too, shift my weight off of her and she turns with me to snuggle against my shoulder, arms pulled in close to her body between us, mine around her.

We slumber a few more hours. Resting, until I wake around ten and cannot resist any longer, must have her again.

I’ve posted this before, but it was nearly a year ago and I still get a lot of questions about it, so it’s about time to repost.

It’s a full Windsor knot, the instructions on the video below, and perhaps in some ways it’s not so impressive on the table as it is to do on your neck, but I can’t quite get the full Windsor tie on the neck to come apart as smoothly as the tie trick Windsor does. I can’t quite figure out how to explain this other than to say that the two knots, though they appear similar, are slightly different in their construction, and the narrow-tie-end pulls smoothly out of the trick tie, but the knot has to actually be untied in the version on the neck.

So, if my drunken explanations at parties don’t quite teach you how to do the tie trick, here’s the video, which is much easier to learn by. It took me a few days of trying until I could really do this - it’s great, now that I got it, but it’s not all that easy to pick up. That’s exactly why I love online instructional videos, ’cause I can pause and rewind and pause and replay and do it over + over without any teacher getting exasperated.

How To Tie A Tie Under 10 Seconds - Unbelievable!! - Watch today’s top amazing videos here

This is what I learned at the Femme Conference.

Oh, the Femme Conference. I have so much to say about what happened there, both personally and in relation to this gender work. Oh yeah, and I have some hot stories to tell y’all, too.

First: THANK YOU, everyone who donated money to help me attend. I was able to go because of this website. I may not have gone otherwise because I really can’t afford to travel. Thank you.

The theme of the conference was The Architecture of Femme, and as such many of the panels explored the construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction of femme identity. As my background is in social theory and social constructionism, I tend to come from the place that says femme is constructed primarily physically, on the body, that all gender is performative. This means through symbols of femininity - shaving, long hair, skirts/dresses, heels, jewelry, makeup, etc.

One of the major themes I’ve come across in running Sugarbutch is femmes who feel invisible - that they are not read as queer because lesbians are not feminine, femininity is a constructed gender role within the heteronormative paradigm, and the perceived notion that a femme is really either bi or straight.

This misconception has to do with physical symbols of gender, and required alignment of sexual orientation and gender.

The first keynote speaker at the conference, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, said: femmes are not invisible, you don’t know how to look.

And this is point number one that I want to make. I’ll pause here to let that sink in for you.

Femmes are not invisible, the lesbian community just doesn’t know how to look.

That deeply resonated with me. I feel I’ve been trying to say that to femme friends and lovers for some time now - “well, I found you, didn’t I? Do you not go to the clubs, do you not get dates? Of course you’re queer.”

I know it’s not this simple, really - I know there is much difficulty when someone is not recognized by their own community because they are being true to their own sense of gender. That’s not an easy contrast to reconcile, and I don’t move through the world that way so I can’t really speak to the daily experience of what that’s like.

Before the conference, I started a conversation about femme eye candy - remember this? I’ll get back to that in another post more fully, but the relevance is that Muse & I were discussing requesting photos along with some text about how the femme in the photo queers femininity - how her femme-ness is coming through in any particular way that indicates that she’s femme, not straight.

[TO BE CLEAR: this is NOT be about proving queerness whatsoever. I am working on the details of how to write this up, and will explore this much more in-depth in another post soon.]

The point is to use the femme eye candy as a visual lexicon of physical symbols, as an attempt to notice any emerging patterns and begin to record the physical markers of femme identity.

The discussion at the workshop quickly went from “what are some of the femme markers” to “what are ways that femmes construct identity besides through physical markers?”

I kept thinking about these things throughout the weekend at the conference: the markers, and the ways femme is constructed besides markers.

Five things stand out greatly from the discussions as ways to construct femme:

1. In contrast to butch - the classic in some ways, the stereotype in others. We all talk about how butches lend visibility and how different a femme is perceived and treated alone verses with a butch. The conference brought up the issue of femme history, too, and how hard it is to find femmes, and one of the ways to do so is to find the butches’ visible queerness and search for their partners.I think this is an incomplete, problematic, and outdated construction of femme identity generally, but it is relevant historically and it still applies at moments. Plus, for some of us our own sense of identity is so greatly magnified when in contrast to our particular desire orientation - I am not just a butch, for example, but I am a butch who loves, desires, and partners with femmes, and that is also a key component to my identity.
2. In community - Maggie, the beautiful dancer and wicked smart femme behind the Femme Show (who has a wonderful girlfriend, I was disappointed to hear, as I developed quite the crush on her over the conference) spoke of how when she is in queer spaces, she expects that she should be read as queer. It should just simply be a given. It is not a given that the feminine girl at dyke night is queer, because the lesbian community is still closed off to the ideas that feminine girls are lesbians. I mean, in some ways that is being shattered - maybe that’s one good thing the L-Word has done for the lesbian communities - but in practice, many many queer women still don’t recognize femmes.(I could also speak to how this is probably engrained in butches especially, in butches who are attracted to femininity, from a young age, because we do tend to go for the straight girl or the L.U.G.s and end up getting our hopes up and our hearts broken when she, inevitably, leaves us for a guy, because, well, she’s straight. I still watch butches go through the realization that femmes exist - that femininity exists in a queer context - and wow that sure can be a revolutionary realization. But this is another topic to discuss later, too.)
3. Through language - Someone commented to say she has no particular physically queer markers, and in fact she prides herself on that, and would rather constantly construct her queer identity by constantly coming out verbally. But even if a femme does see herself as using many queer fashion and style markers, there is still always an element of constructing identities verbally and through language.This brings up one other idea, which is that I think all of these ways of constructing femme identity happen for everyone, that it isn’t just one or another, that some are stronger for some femmes than others, that there are many different combinations of them that make up each unique femme expression of each person.
4. Through fashion and style and through markers. There are hundreds - thousands probably - of ways to construct femme through physical feminine presentation. The conference was amazing that way, to see as many different representations of femme as there were femmes in attendance. I loved seeing the similarities, the differences. There was such an amazing array from the fanciest drag-queen femme to the pencil-skirt-and-glasses femme to the pinup girl femme to the punk rock femme to the tomboy femme to the sundress-and-cardigan femme.And the SHOES! Oh good lord, I could write an entire post on the shoes at the femme conference. (Swoon.)Honestly, I never cared for fashion until I began discovering, uncovering, and creating conscious and intentional butch/femme gender understandings. I wish I had a better grasp on fashion and the history of fashion sometimes, some folks were saying very interesting things about the evolution of women’s clothing options during the conference.
5. Through theory - feminist theory, gender theory, power theory, BDSM and kink theory, postmodern theory, historical contextual theory. The intellectualizing of my own gender has been a key component to constructing my own gender identity, and this resonated strongly at the conference.

I’m going to have to work on the butch version of this idea, the ways butch identity is constructed, though I imagine it is in many ways similar: in contrast to femmes, in community, through language, through markers, through theory. But perhaps there’s more to add, perhaps butch and femme are constructed differently? Ill keep thinking on that; please do add your two cents if you’ve got ideas on this topic.

Two specific questions for you, at the end of this looooong summary of what I learned at the Femme Conference about the architecture of femme:

• What are some other tools with which you construct your identity, femme or otherwise?
• And what do your markers look like?