Earlier this week, I had dinner with one of my very beautiful friends, a woman whose job is tied to her being beautiful. I mention her beauty, not just to brag that I have beautiful friends (although I do!), but because the fact that this woman is beautiful is relevant to what comes next.
Which is:
We were talking about my lackluster dating life, and I mentioned how I’d basically given up on dating men only to find that dating women was basically impossible. Not because relationships with women are necessarily harder than relationships with men. My problem was that I couldn’t even find a woman who wanted to date me in the first place.
“Ah yeah, femme for femme is rough,” my beautiful friend replied. “I basically gave up on it.”
I’m going to be honest here: there have been moments when I’ve wondered if my dating woes are somehow a sign that I am flawed and undesirable, like if I were only prettier than I’d have a girlfriend by now. But here was my very beautiful friend, a woman with some real queer community cred, professing to having had the exact same struggles as me — so much so that she had given up and decided it was easier to date men.
This is actually a relatively common story, I find. Any dyed in the wool femme for femme queer girl will inevitably confess to you that it is really rough; that the pickings are slim and half the time when you do find another femme for femme girl who you feel a spark with it turns out you’re better as friends than lovers. It’s honestly to the point where I am genuinely shocked every time I see a for real femme for femme couple out in the wild, to the point where I have to pull myself back from accosting one of them and demanding to know how they pulled it off.
And it is not lost on me that many of the women who get dismissed as “fake bi girls” — as ladies who allegedly lock lips with other ladies solely for attention (or maybe just fun), only to retreat to the safety of heterosexuality when it’s time to partner up — are also, you know, femme for femme. Indeed, it often feels like the very fact that a bi woman is femme for femme is used as an argument to dismiss her bisexuality as fake: clearly, she’s not really into women, but rather just adopting a porny aesthetic in order to appeal to and titillate men.
But let us consider, for a second, that on top of all the other complexities of being not just queer but specifically a bi woman, that it is actually pretty difficult for a femme who loves femmes to find a femme who loves her enough to lock it down. Let us consider, for a second, that these bi women aren’t so much “fake queers” as they are women for who find their odds in the queer dating space aren’t exactly favorable; women who wind up with men, not because they’re “really straight” but because the only people they’re attracted to who want to date them are men.
And I mean, none of this would actually matter if we didn’t assign some bizarre morality to the gender of someone’s partner, right? But things being as they are, I feel like we should take a beat to recognize that for at least some bi women, queer dating isn’t as simple as just putting themselves out there. For at least some bi women, the desire might be there, but the opportunity isn’t.
Their bisexuality, their queerness, isn’t fake. They just simply happen to be unlucky in love.
I've written about this before myself. Romantically active FF women are indeed very rare, and also for what it's worth the process of dating women does tend to be more involved and complicated whether with a man or woman. When I match with a man we exchange like three messages and then go out and that's it; there are several additional layers with women, which several queer female partners have noted to me as well. It's not good or bad, and that up front ease with men has a cost on the back end where we are...you know, men, and allergic to talking about feelings and all that other stuff women often note/complain about. Everyone has to find their own peace with who we are and what we do with what we have in the end.
Great post as usual!
I suspect there is some femmephobia involved in this as well. Like if you're "femme" or have a femme aesthetic, then you can't possibly be queer. What?
Like there's a black lesbian comic I know who is very femme, and she often talks about how people don't think she's a lesbian because she's feminine.