Wearing the Pants
CW: This article mentions domestic violence
Gender expression as a queer woman will always be confusing. With growing acceptance of queer communities and rising representation, it’s a decent time to be queer. It’s also a really confusing time to be queer.
Are you a top or bottom? Femme or masc? Dom or sub?
Maybe you only date mascs, or femme tops?
If you’re queer, all of these classifications probably make sense to you. You’ve probably been asked who wears the pants. You probably either laughed and pointed to the one who drives or wears less dresses. Or given them the classic, “we’re gay, no one wears the pants”, if you’re in a safe enough space.
Regardless of what your thoughts and morals regarding gender roles, they always find a way to influence how dating is navigated in these queer spaces.
Studies have shown that same-sex couples tend to conform to gender norms and roles less than heterosexual couples and that’s where the research slows down. As a queer woman writing this, this information feels incomplete, like there’s a story that isn’t being told. Is it just my personal experiences that make these conclusions feel so hollow? Am I letting my own bias get in the way of the actual facts?
Frustratingly, gender roles, alongside their causes and effects can’t be seen or touched. But they’re always in the background. The more I researched it, the more questions I had and less answers.
In a 2022 journal article by the Journal of Lesbian Studies, writers explain how queer research as such is so complicated;
‘As articulations of gender and sexual identity categories have shifted, some writers have framed lesbian identity as “disappearing” or “going extinct,”. Media accounts that conflate transmasculinity with “lesbians in denial” have positioned “lesbian” as an identity category in flux.’
This is an academic way of saying this shit is confusing and everyone has different conclusions. My experiences as a 20-year-old queer woman today are going to be vastly different from another 20-year-old queer woman in Wellington, let alone on a global scale throughout history.
Let's breakdown key roles determined by gender in straight roles.
The man makes the first moves.
The man is the dominant one, the woman is the submissive one.
The woman bears the child, if someone stays home to take care of children, it is the woman.
In abuse cases, men are the abusers and women are the victims.
Though these of course aren’t rules, these are without a doubt key factors.
Each of these points pose the question of, when there are two women in a relationship, do these roles still get filled, and if so, who fills each?
We’ll start off with what the first point means for queer women. When it's two women dating, there’s more of a felt pressure to overcome fears of ‘making the first move’. While it seems like a silly stereotype or minute factor, it is something very real that changes the dynamics of getting to know someone in the early stages of romance, particularly in who breaks the barrier from platonic to romantic conversations.
The second two points, you would expect to have a relatively minor impact on queer women, but the absolutely ridiculous list of labels that younger queer people are using goes to reflect how all of these roles and labels are used to create some sort of system to make sense of who does what.
Perhaps the most significant (and problematic) is the last point. While it might seem to have good implications for queer women, it really doesn’t. Rates of abuse within queer women and straight couples tend to be around the same. However, in queer women, it is much easier to ‘fly under the radar’, or not be picked up as abuse, which is really scary. Cases in abuse already go underreported as it is, but with lesbians, even more cases go unreported because of the perceived equal balance in queer relationships.
This is a very shallow look at how gender roles affect queer women, but largely because of how significant, yet intangible gender roles are. Gender roles have been a discussion in the media for a few years now, but we still have yet to make it past lighthearted discussions of the most obvious effects.