ask, and you shall receive
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You should subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting AlphaFemme.net! I certainly didn’t expect this to happen, but, well, I am a lezzy, and this is a personal blog, so semantically, anyway, this sort of makes sense:
I’ve been nominated for a Lezzy Award in the Personal Blog category.
So, what this basically means is that one of you (or several even!) likes my ditherings here well enough to think I deserve an accolade. I am deeply flattered. Thank you!
If any of the rest of y’all are inclined to nominate me too (nominations are being taken until February 22nd, at which point the top 5 blogs in each category with the most nominations will become Finalists), here’s how you do so:
1) Click on that pretty pink square right up there.
2) Click on that blue banner right at the top of that page that says “The 2009 Lezzy Awards – Nominate Your Favorite Blogs! – Click Here”
3) Copy/paste my URL in the “Personal” section (is it weird that my fingers kept accidentally typing “sextion”?) of the little pop-up box.
4) Lather, rinse, and repeat every day! If you feel so inclined.
5) Also don’t forget to nominate your favorite blogs in the other categories. Check out my blogroll for my favorite blogs if you’re lacking inspiration!
And I might just add that regardless of what happens, I’m touched that I was nominated in the first place, and that in itself is a gift. When I started writing here, it was just me and my thoughts. I never, ever imagined that I’d be getting several hundred page hits every day, or that I’d have people reading and commenting and sending me kind and thoughtful emails. People care, and that’s pretty fucking amazing. So thank you all so much.
And if you’ll excuse me, I have some real posts to draft. I’ll be back in the morning!
It seems I’m down to just about one really substantial post per week here, which is too bad, because I actually have a lot to write about and I love doing it. I guess working a more-than-full-time job, plus taking a statistics class, plus staffing a rape crisis hotline 32 hours a month, plus having a girlfriend, plus trying to have other friends aside from my girlfriend all sort of adds up. And, while I love the thoughtful substantial posts, I think it might be time for me to expand beyond just a once-a-week post. So, I might start introducing some lighter fare to this here blog-o-mine. I can’t handle the pressure of a regular feature, or anything like that, but you might start seeing around here stuff like fashion snapshots (I’m not the most fashionable person you know, but I’ve been having a lot of fun working on my style lately), cocktail recipes, music/youtube clips (I’m a pianist, you know! maybe I’ll play something for you!), and little sex vignettes. Or, who knows, maybe I’ll just start posting substantial stuff more regularly again. Theoretically, I should have more time now that my grad school applications are in. Theoretically.
Anyway, discussing this blog was not actually supposed to be the topic of this post. I was going to write about burlesque. Last night, I and some friends had free tickets to Teatro Zinzanni, a famous cabaret and cirque show that resides along San Francisco’s Embarcadero at Pier 29. The show was splendid, and while I enjoyed the cabaret and the acrobatics and the live music, I was completely captivated by this one character, played by Rachel DeShon:
And I realized that this captivation was of the “I want to be her” variety. I don’t actually want to be Rachel DeShon. I don’t want to be an opera singer and perform cabaret and all that. But, somehow, I just watched her the entire time, thinking to myself “THAT.” It just sorta clicked. I have a similar body type to her, short hair like that, and LOVE CORSETS. But watching her perform I had this urge—no, it was more than an urge, it was more like a longing—to glam it up sometimes. Strut around, feel utterly confident in my sex appeal, pull off dark purple sparkly lipstick and huge plumes! Yes! I want that!
And so I went home and signed up for a burlesque class. I’ve had pretty healthy body positivity in the past few years, and my confidence issues aren’t because I think I don’t look good. It’s more that I’m somewhat reserved and a tiny bit introverted and so I don’t much like being the center of attention. I tend to sort of shrink into myself. In the past few years, so many people have told me that I’m tiny, and I think a large part of the impression I leave is not actually physical tininess but metaphysical tininess, if you will. I’m sort of ephemeral. I’m very good at not being noticed.
There’s a whole history there, a complicated history of sexual violence and family patterns and all that that I won’t go into right now, though I probably will eventually. And so while I think that some of my metaphysical tininess is my personality—I’m just not the life of the party type—which I’m not worried about changing, I think a lot of it is also a sort of unwillingness on my part to take up space. This certainly isn’t the case all the time; if I’m around people I know and love and trust, I fully take up my space, and am the master of my body. But in new situations, when meeting new people, or when I feel out of place and noticed, I freeze up. Sometimes I panic. Sometimes I withdraw. Sometimes I muster through. But whatever happens, my tendency is to get really small.
So when this intense urge to be like her came up for me, and I realized that it’s not, in fact, because I want to do her but because I want to be her, I decided to run with it. My first class is next Wednesday, it’s a 12-week class, and there will be a performance at the end. Gulp. So scared. But also so. excited. In fact I think I may be more excited about this than I’ve been about anything in a long, long time.
And so, on this Friday night when mi’lady is out of town and the plans I had with my good friend fell through due to a crisis in her family, I am sitting at home, on my computer, drooling over websites like this.
Just wanted to welcome everyone to the new site design, by aag. (Thanks aag!) It feels like I just moved out of a rental unit into a new home: more responsibility, but a lot more flexibility. Oh, and, it’s been at alphafemme.net for a while now, but make sure all your links are updated to reflect that, because alphafemme.wordpress.com is officially defunct!
It has essentially what it had before: archives, blogroll, about page, categories, tags, recent posts, twitter feed. New features are a contact form, where you can email me right from this website, recent comments, where you can see what people are commenting on, and “stuff I’m reading,” which I’m most excited about! I read all my blogs via Google reader, and one of the features of Google reader is that if I like what I’m reading, I can “share” it, and the post I’ve shared will be added to a feed of my shared posts. So the “stuff I’m reading” widget over on the right contains the most recent blog posts I’ve read and decided to broadcast to everyone.
My banner and design are new too, obviously, and aag actually designed several different banners following a similar theme, so when you hit refresh or load the page new, the banner will change. Go ahead, try it! SO COOL!
Lastly, you can now share my posts with one click of a mouse, via Facebook, email, tumblr, stumbleupon, twitter, or digg (see the wee little icons at the bottom of each post). I just like to make it easier for you to spread the love ;)
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I know I’ve been slow on substantive posting this month. That’s been on account of several things:
(1) writing graduate school applications has been taking up a lot of my writing energy this month;
(2) the statistics class I’m now enrolled in (a pre-requisite for the grad programs I’m applying for) is taking up a lot of my non-writing-focused energy;
(3) a lot of the things I’ve been thinking about are time-consuming even to think about, let alone write about (see my post on allyship last week, which took a week and a half of turning around in my brain before I could spit it out into a post; and that post has inspired more thoughts and things to write about, which are in turn taking some time to ferment).
But, after February 1 (deadline of my last grad application), I have a lot to write about and a lot more time in which to write. So sit tight! Don’t go anywhere! Well, ok, you can go, but just make sure to come back :)
A quick note: I posted on twitter a while back (before the umbrella poll) that I was looking for practical but above all CUTE (/fashionable) black leather knee-high boots — something I can wear to work, or around the city, or to a dance party. Turns out a pair of boots like that is harder to find than I’d thought. BUT! I found them! At Shoe Biz on Haight Street (boot by Miz Mooz). Here they are (I think the boots in this photo are brown, but mine are black, just to be clear):
Look at the BUTTONS!!! So cute!
Still sitting on the post I was tweeting about yesterday, the one in response to all the Mary Daly stuff that’s been floating around. That should come tomorrow, hopefully.
In the meantime, see this reaction to my posts on growing into my identity as femme (see here and here), and my response to it in the comments. (As of this posting, my comment hasn’t yet been approved, but hopefully it will be soon.)
She writes about how my definition of femme, and my femme fantasy, are not hers, as a femme domme, and it seems that she equates her version of femme with being both feminine AND powerful, and my version of femme with being … not powerful. Which I take issue with. I thought it was pretty clear in those posts that (a) I don’t think my version of femme is THE definition of femme, and (b) coming out as (my version of) femme was EMpowering me, and the way I am femme continues to empower me, rather than (as she seems to think) DISempowering me.
So, I just wanted to reiterate that for me, being femme and being a nurturer/submissive type IS being “utterly feminine and unquestionably powerful,” as she puts it. That’s where I get my power. And, also, I do not live as a full-time submissive, and I do make my own decisions and do make sure my needs are met, whether by mi’lady or my family or my friends or me, and I’m very capable, kind of a control freak, pretty assertive, and of course feminine and powerful. Femininity does NOT equal submissive. But for me, the two are increasingly intertwined.
My femme fantasy is not to be the Betty to Don Draper. On the surface, it might seem that way. But their relationship is my femme fantasy gone horribly wrong. Betty Draper does not get her needs met, and she doesn’t have any space to even communicate what they are, because it’s her job to be the perfect housewife. That is not remotely what my fantasy is, to be disempowered and living solely for and under another person, unable to stretch my legs and meet my own needs. But I do, in a weird way, want to be a Betty Draper. I want to be perfectly put together yet delicate, host dinner parties like the Heineken one in season two, be a perfect socializer, make my husband slash whoops I totally mean my wife look totally put together, be the quiet engine in her background (who makes noise when called upon… ahem) because it’s all so effortless. Those things make me feel immeasurably powerful. But that’s the extent of the way I want my relationship to resemble Don and Betty Draper’s. That’s IT. Because Betty doesn’t have any power. And I do. (I could also do an interesting discussion on how I relate to Joan, but I’ll save that for another time.)
Apologies for those of you are are not totally obsessed with Mad Men and have no idea what I’m going on about.
(Photo from www.vanityfair.com)
A long, long time ago—back in August?—I got an email from a reader named Asha, (1) asking where I came up with the name “alphafemme” and (2) saying that before she’d even read any of my blog, she felt a click—the word alphafemme, she thought, worked really well for her, and would I be offended if she appropriated it for herself. I promised her a post on the subject, and it is woefully overdue.
Let me first address the second thing—if the word alphafemme seems like a good fit for you in your identity, and even if your reasons for finding it a good fit are completely different from the reasons I will articulate below, by all means, if it feels good to you, use it. I think there’s a huge difference between deciding that alphafemme works as an identity label for you (which I would not call appropriation), and deciding you’re also going to publish a blog under the title “alphafemme” and write about (many of) the same things I write about or telling people that you’re me (which I would call appropriation). I would guess that most people are not inclined to do the latter, but I fully endorse the former! Run away with it people!
And now I’ll go back to the first thing, which is where I came up with the name “alphafemme” in the first place. I address this a bit on my About page (which needs updating anyway), but let me go into a bit more detail here.
After the obligatory coming out identity crisis, which I think many (if not most) queer women go through at some point or other (and I think this in itself is fascinating, and I totally want to write about this too), I started grappling with that all-important question: Who Am I? And maybe I have less self-awareness than most, but it took me quite a lot of trial and error to come to an understanding of my identity that felt right. I guess that was part of what I wanted this blog to do for me, to help me go through it all and decide what works for me and what doesn’t. And while I’ve (for now) finally settled on femme as a sort of umbrella-word for how I identify, it was hardly easy to come to terms with that.
I’m sure part of the insecurity in identifying as femme was internalized sexism, that some of the fear had to do with not wanting to choose what might seem to others to be “unenlightened” or, worse, hurting feminism. I’ve pretty much gotten over that now (see my post on femininity for a discussion of that), thank goodness, and am now fiercely, comfortably, and even subversively feminine.
But another major qualm I had with identifying as femme was this fear that I somehow didn’t actually know what femme meant, and that I would be scoffed at by other self-identified femmes for identifying as such. (“YOU’RE not femme, you have short hair!” or “but I hardly ever see you in dresses! that’s not really femme!” or “femmes don’t strap on! femmes don’t do the fucking!”) In San Francisco, it seems to me like everyone I’ve met who identifies as femme fits a certain image: dyed blonde or raven black hair, porcelain white skin, bright red lipstick, fishnets, tattoos… And believe me, these ladies are smokin’, but it’s just not my look. And so I was like, well, if that’s what femme is, then I’m not femme. (There are, of course, many other femme-identified ladies in SF who do also do not fit that particular description, as I’ve come to realize. Yay!)
And yet it still appealed to me. I still felt that my mild obsession with high heeled-peep-toe pumps and my growing infatuation with cooking still somehow made femme the right word for me. But since I was still kind of hesitant, it needed a qualifier. Something that made my identity mine.
It came to me last summer when I was watching old episodes of The L Word with a friend of mine, reminiscing about the pre-Dana’s-death days of the show. Or, rather, it came to my friend. We were watching one of the episodes where Bette is dealing with the protestors to her gallery’s art show. My friend turned to me and said, “she reminds me of you, she’s such an alpha female.”
“What does THAT mean?” I asked.
“Well… you’re strong, and fierce, and driven, and you’re always on top of everything, always in control. And you dress sharply feminine, powerful. But you’re also vulnerable, I think, I mean right? Don’t you sometimes just want someone to hold you and have someone else be the stronger one?”
And oh. my. god. YES. She was so right. I think my similarities to Bette end there (I’m not a raging bitch who cheats on my lovers in order to maintain a facade of Control Freak, and unfortunately I look nothing like her), but such as they are, the similarities ring so true. And “alpha” is an excellent way of describing me. I’m confident in my intellect, and I am meticulous, in control, ambitious, and driven. But I’m not just alpha. I’m alphafemme. I’m an alpha who wants to be enfolded at the end of the day. I’m an alpha who loves to pretend I’m a 50s housewife, a la Betty Draper, but happier (I’m currently obsessed with Mad Men). I’m an alpha with soft eyes and a maternal edge. I’m an alpha, with femme. Alphafemme.
Of course, to you, it can mean anything you want it to. If it conjures anything else for you, please share!
I have about eight thousand drafts of posts waiting for my attention. There’s been so much going on, so much I want to write about. Sometimes having too much to write about gives me greater writer’s block than having too little.
I started writing about my thoughts on the Maine election, and the repeat of last fall. I started writing a post in response to G’s post on femme invisibility. I started writing about the changes that are going on in my life, the big things I’ve been doing and thinking about. I started writing about illicit sex, the sex I have when I’m not supposed to be having it, and why that’s so hot. And now I’ve started writing so much that I’m overwhelmed and can’t finish any of it! Ahhhh!
So, instead, I’m just going to spew verbosity all over this post, and maybe that will help clear out the “clutter” in my head. If I were a self-conscious writer, I would spew the clutter, and then trash it, but I’m not, so I’m going to post it anyway. Hehehehe.
1) One of my best friends from college was here last week, arriving Wednesday and leaving yesterday. We had so much fun, and I felt more San Franciscan than I have in a long time. Having visitors who’ve never been here before always does that to me. We went to the Academy of Sciences on Thursday for their weekly NightLife — so amazing, seeing the aquarium and the planetarium and the live roof at night, with music and drinks, without little kids running around. (Love little kids, but I can also certainly appreciate their absence!) We went to the Japanese Tea Garden and then walked all the way out to Ocean Beach — her first time seeing the Pacific. We went to the Lexington (duh), but then realized we shoul’ve gone to the Rickshaw because it was Rebel Girl. Oh well, we had fun anyway! We walked all through Chinatown and North Beahc and then took a cable car (MY first time on a cable car since my childhood!) back, and as it was passing by Union Square, with the ice-skating rink in the process of being set up and holiday lights starting to go up, I just felt so happy. The holiday season tends to do that to me anyway, but this time it just felt so magical. I don’t know. I felt like I was in a movie. I find myself looking forward to winter this year, to cups of cocoa and baking cookies and cuddling in the evenings when it’s dark so early, to going ice-skating and making mulled wine and escaping to the Russian River for Thanksgiving…
2) Friday evening, my friend and I went down to Palo Alto with mi’lady to meet up with another friend from college who lives in San Jose. It was the most fun I’ve had in a long time, I don’t think I’ve laughed that hard since I left college. I have friends here, and I have a lot of fun here, and I’m happy here in San Francisco, but it was such a reminder to me that I have friends who know me inside and out, friends who make me feel at home no matter where I am, and friends where being around them isn’t socializing, it’s being, and it’s being in the fullest sense imaginable. And of course having mi’lady there made it even fuller, because I had it all in the same place. I can’t wait for my college reunion in May. Cannot WAIT. I also can’t wait until I have those kinds of friends here. It’ll happen, and it’s actually already happening now, slowly but surely.
3) Things with mi’lady feel so good and are so right right now. We’ve had some conversations about things like my relative introversion compared to her relative extroversion, and how we can balance that and make sure each other’s needs are met. We’ve had conversations about my relative planning compared to her relative spontaneity, and how to balance that as well. And I’ve had some internal conversations about learning how to let little things go. For example: She is working on recording with one of her bandmates, and tells me she’ll be over at my place around 9pm. 9pm comes and goes, no sign of her. She calls at 9:30, still in Oakland, happily making her way over to my place. I get frustrated. She gets defensive. We’ve had conversation after conversation about this. And I think my wanting her to be punctual is a control thing. It’s about sticking with plans and being meticulous, everything needing to be just so. But we didn’t actually have plans for 9. She’d just said that’s when she would be there. So… I let it go. Because really, it’s not that important. And because we’ve talked about it, I know she’s not disrespecting me. She’s just not so great at managing time. So is it worth arguing about? Again? No. It’s not. I was fully occupied the whole time anyway. Maybe a different time, if it has a bigger effect on me, if it feels like a breach of plans or a lack of respect or standing me up, then I’ll bring it up again. But this time, it just wasn’t important. And when she got to my place and I saw her, it was so much better that I’d let it go.
I’m such a meticulous person, I do things very particularly and have very specific ideas about things. I’m very organized and a bit of a control freak, and while a lot of that is good in my personal life because it keeps me functioning (and because I enjoy it! I love organizing!), it can be not-so-good when it spills over into trying to control her life. I don’t do that much, but sometimes in little ways I lose track. I’m learning, though, and it feels liberating to allow myself to let things go.
The point is, things are good. We haven’t had as much alone time as I’d like, but when we are alone, we make good of it.
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So, for the moment, I’m in a good place. So much more I could write about, but at least I’ve tidied up a bit, and gotten rid of a bit of head clutter. Now there’s more room for writing about what I actually want to write about. Problem is I’m taking the GRE on Saturday and have a lot of work this week besides, so it remains a question whether I’ll have much time to write. If you don’t hear from me again, you’ll know why — but hopefully you will!
I got an email from a reader today that kind of surprised me. Maybe I just need to accept that, if I’m using the internet as a place to publicly air all of my most personal thoughts, people are going to disagree, criticize, or hate, or whatever, and I should just grow a thick skin. So chances are, I should’ve just ignored this email.
But I can’t quite let it out of my mind, because it wasn’t an email like “OMGZ UR SO STOOPID!!1!!@$!” It was a coherent, thoughtful email, and so I feel I should respond to it. I’m going to respond to it publicly, in case anyone else has been thinking the same thing.
You say, “if you don’t let your girlfriend read this blog, how can you live with yourself posting such personal stuff about her?” You say, “you’re airing her personal shit as well as your own, you should have her permission.” You say, “I would feel really betrayed if my girlfriend wrote stuff like that about me.” Etc.
So let me clarify a few things. I don’t blame you for saying the things you say or for judging, because I haven’t really explained this before and so you’re just running with assumptions that are as fair as any others. But it’s not really what you think.
First, this is my blog. I’m speaking for myself and only for myself. I actually consciously make an effort not to speak for her or say things that might be putting words or thoughts on her mouth. Sometimes, that’s hard to do, but in any and all cases, I’m writing from my own experience and my own feelings and thoughts. I’m pretty candid, but I am candid about myself.
Second, although she doesn’t read this blog, she knows I write it and she knows that she is a subject of it. And she is fine with that. She’s definitely curious, and I’ve told her that maybe at some point I’ll let her read it, but right now, I still need it to be mine. And I repeat, she’s fine with that. She knows I write about sex, she knows I write about my insecurities, and more often than not, posting here helps me clarify my thoughts and then I go and talk to her about it anyway. And she’s fine with that.
Third, this blog is anonymous for precisely that reason. My real name is not in any way connected to this blog, and I take steps to make sure there aren’t any dead giveaways. (The San Francisco queer community is, gulp, pretty small…) In that way, her identity is also protected.
Fourth, I want to acknowledge that internet publicity and anonymity is a tricky subject. There are gray areas, for sure. If at any point, this blog grows to a readership that feels more public (right now my readership is a tiny drop in the bucket of blog readers), I will probably start password-protecting some of my more personal pages. Right now, though, I don’t want to do that. Mostly because reading other blogs, and often especially the most personal stuff, has helped me understand myself so much better. So I’m reluctant to make this blog private when I think there might be other quiet readers out there who might be too shy to ask for a password but who might relate to what I write and gain some sort of comfort from it. That sounds self-congratulatory, but really, when I started the blog, I could have started a journal–and I didn’t, I chose the blog format precisely because it’s interactive. So I’d like to keep it that way. And I think that as long as the people I write about know that I’m writing about them and are fine with it and are fine with the fact that I’m not showing them exactly what I’m writing, then I’m doing right by them.
And lastly, I just want to say that writing on this blog has been wonderful for me. It’s given me a space to go when I have thoughts swimming around in my mind that need to be articulated. It’s helping me create a space that’s all my own. It’s even in its own way helping me find community. So, thank you for reading. It means the world to me.
So, I kinda don’t like the look of this website right now. But I also don’t really like any of the other Wordpress themes. The problem is, I’m not a web designer and I really don’t have much time right now to delve into the thicket of CSS and all that. (I don’t even know if CSS is what a re-design of this page would require.)
Does anyone have any clue how I might re-design here so that it’s more personalized? My OWN theme? Or knows of an easy crash course in Wordpress theme design? Or can direct me to someone who would know?
To the person who landed here from searching “men can’t resist boobs”:
I FEEL YOU. Neither can I.
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