femme on a mission

Hi everyone! How are you? Are you ready? Let’s talk feminism! It’s gotten a bad reputation over the years; I know growing up in my family it was certainly a dirty word. Mainstream media tells us that there is no need for feminism anymore, that the battle for gender equality has now been won, men […]

These are ten things I feel confident in taking away from spending my life watching Mad Men at the expense of my blog and/or health and/or academic future. I know it is fiction but, as they say, art imitates life or vice versa or something. Either way it feels necessary to analyze what I did […]

A lovely blog called The Well-Read Wife recently ran a contest raising money for The Trevor Project. (If you’ve never heard of The Trevor Project, they are a foundation that provides a 24-hour suicide prevention hotline for LGBT youth.) The Well-Read Wife donated $200 to the project when her post reached one hundred comments, plus […]

The first love of my life was books. I was pretty young (three or four) when my older sister first started learning how to read, but I was fascinated by the way little symbols on a page could turn into sounds, then words, then ideas. I would gobble up her Hooked-on-Phonics readers, and those little […]

Today the Freedom to Marry organization launched an online lobby to support the marriage equality bill that will soon arrive on the desks of Rhode Island Legislators. For any of you with a Rhode Island address, please follow this link and take a minute to send along a letter. There’s even a form letter you can […]

The old “lesbian sleeps with a man trick”? Not cool.

Before we get started, check out this video clip from The L Word. Watch as the ladies on the show try to ascertain the sexuality of the chef by sending in their secret weapon: Shane. While The L Word was on the air, the character of Shane McCutcheon captured the rapt attention of nearly anyone who […]

In heteronormative society, is femme the “acceptable” type of lesbian? If there is any aspect of my lesbian identity that my parents are happy about, it’s the fact that I am femme (not that they are aware of that word). Their main concern upon my coming out was that I wouldn’t start “dressing like a […]

Hi all! So remember when I wanted to kill the Oxford English Dictionary? Well, I promised there would be more where that came from, and now I’m back with Part Two! Be sure to read through the second page and vote in the poll at the end of the article – I want to hear […]

Reader, your femme on a mission slipped up last night. In spite of how hard I work to fight it, I let some unwanted male attention derail me from my goal of living fearlessly in my femininity. So here’s what happened. Last night Ash and I decided to go out on the town with a […]

Hi all! I have a question for you – would you ever consider taking your partner’s last name? I don’t think I have mentioned here yet that my partner and I are engaged. It’s really a cute story, and I just might share it with you someday! The wedding itself is a couple of years […]

Let’s start with a story, shall we? I grew up in a small beach town that had  a strange population dichotomy consisting of a large LGBT community coinciding and coexisting with a suburban, conservative mentality. My family, unfortunately for me, belonged to the latter camp. Because of the large gay population, we were used to […]

Y’all – I’ve been having troubles with the dictionary. It all started when I was researching for the FAQ page. I wanted to know just how exactly “femme” is defined in our language, so I went right to the source – the Oxford English Dictionary. Now, as an English major, I’ve had many a run-in […]

Being feminine doesn’t feel so natural when I’m plucking my eyebrows, shaving my legs, styling my hair, putting on make-up and squeezing into high heels.

Imagine you are walking down the street. You pass men and women in business suits, teenage babysitters with toddlers, girls running by in track suits, men taking their dogs for a walk. Each of these people are making assumptions about you, just as you are making assumptions about them, in an attempt to satisfy the […]