This is an absolutely beautiful mini documentary about an artist doing a photography project on butches. Her name is SD Holman and you can find information about her project here.
She talks about butches but she also mentions her femme partner and how meaningful her support was. I wrote down this awesome quote:
“I was hoping that young butches especially, but all butches or masculine-of-center women, would feel the way my wife Catherine made me feel, which was disastrously handsome.”
Here’s the video:
Purple Sage 
What a great project and wee documentary. “I felt celebrated actually”: those words brought a smile to my face.
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What a wonderful project, & thank you so much for sharing it. I felt teary with gratitude, with sadness, with anger, with love. Gotta send it to my ‘disastrously handsome’ Butch ❤. And gotta buy the book for sure! Thumbs up from here in Australia, G 🌈
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This was beautiful. I’ve always been fascinated with lesbian women. As I approach my 60’s and reflect on my relationships as a feminine heterosexual woman married to or living with men, I often wonder how different my life would have been had I been attracted to women. Most of my relationships with men have been traumatizing parlly because I kept trying to live up to the feminine ideal of being accommodating and subservient and allowing myself to be bullied and exploited. And at other times I’ve felt, in the presence of certain types of women, very masculine, assertive, confident – not that women can’t feel that way. Human beings truly are diverse in every way imaginable and the harder we try to fit into gender norms and social constructs, the more challenges we seem to experience.
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We need more of this sort of thing! This is a stunning project featuring strong, beautiful, confident women – I identify with the women in it and love the power and positivity they project.
What hits me hard, though, is the fact that I don’t see women portrayed in this way in much mainstream media. It is, at least in my experience, so rare to see masculine women portrayed in a positive light, or even portrayed at all. I think there is a real need for more of this sort of positive imagery of masculine women to penetrate into the mainstream consciousness.
When I was a teen in the 1970s, there was nothing in the magazines, books, TV and music that I could access which portrayed masculine women in a positive light – or even portrayed them at all – they didn’t appear to exist! As a young woman struggling with feeling more comfortable presenting as more masculine, it was very isolating to be bombarded with images of how women “ought” to look and act (ie: in a feminine manner) when those images felt so alien.
I had hoped things would have moved on from the 1970s in terms of exposure and acceptance when it comes to masculine women, but outside of amazing projects like this one, it doesn’t appear to have, in my experience. And I think the reluctance to portray women in arts and the media outside of narrow stereotypes harms all women, not just masculine presenting women. The more work out there which features women gender non-conforming, the better for everyone, I think. Hopefully more artists will follow PD Holman’s lead and create work where masculine presenting women are included and validated in a positive way….
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That’s a wonderful film.I’m struck by how the way these women have found to live is so much more sustainable and sane than the trans bollocks. I’m sure they get misgendered, but they don’t take it as a problem in themselves, but as someone else making a mistake.
They do what they do, and it’s about making a mark in the world, not about performing an identity.
I can’t help thinking that young women really need to see women like this. Not just young lesbians, but young straight women as well. In todays hupersexualized, porn derived youth culture a lot of straight girls don’t feel ‘properly feminine’, To see women who don’t try to be feminine, but are still proudly female is important.
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YES!!!
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great video!
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Lovely film. Very important note about female masculinity being painted as “patriarchy” in the 90s, something I was affected by as well. As a teen I tried my damnedest to stay “neutral” in everything. I confess I was relatively recent that it occurred to me that another woman might be genuinely attracted to me — there is nothing except a wasteland of conditioning that says “butch is ugly”. It is very alienating.
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