There’s a game that a bi-sexual Asian American woman friend and I came up with over coffee one day. It involves the binary terms of butch-fem and sub-dom, which are common parlance in the gay and lesbian world, but, at least until recently, have not been part of American heterosexual vocabulary.1*
The dominant paradigm of the heterosexual world is that the male is supposed to be the masculine and dominant partner and the woman the feminine and submissive partner. That is the de facto default assignment of positions in the heterosexual world, in the patriarchal hierarchy. But in the gay and lesbian world, the binary of male and female is not present. In the gay world, there are only males; in the lesbian only females. Gays and lesbians have grown up in a society where the patriarchal hierarchy of masculine and dominant, feminine and submissive, are the rule. So there are signals of appearance—dress, hairstyle, makeup, etc.—and behavior which are used to indicate butch or femme. In taking up these signals, as gay theorists have argued, gay sexuality recognizes the performative nature of traditional notions of gender.
Now if gay sexuality were merely to duplicate the heterosexual paradigm, one might think that indications of male/butch and female/fem would be enough to indicate which partner will be dominant and which submissive. But gay sexuality by its very nature questions heterosexual paradigms and reads gender to a great extent as performative. Thus, the idea that the male/butch is always the more dominant partner may not be seen in the gay world as a steadfast and eternal rule. Because gay sexuality has had to exist in the closet, the signs of male/butch and female/fem are not always blatantly advertised, and so the homosexual world also uses various signals—earrings, key rings—and behavior to indicate dom or sub.
The butch/fem and dom/sub binaries play themselves out in the gay world by allowing gays to make sexual choices according to an individual’s preference. But while the butch/dom and fem/sub might very well be the dominant pairing, other pairings are possible.
Looking at the straight world through the lens of these two binary oppositions, one sees that contrary to expectation, the straight world does not simply reduplicate the paradigm of the male being the butch/dom and the female being fem/sub. Here is a simple example (and the place where my friend and I felt these categories could be used as a board game): why did the pairing of Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt not work? They were two fem subs. But pair the fem/sub Brad Pitt with the butch/dom Angelina Jolie? You get a pair that makes sense; you get “sexual chemistry.” Similarly, why does Tom Cruise have to be with a child-woman like Katie Holmes? Because Cruise is so fem, in order for him to even have a chance at appearing as a butch-dom, he has to be paired with someone who is an ultra fem-sub.
When we are dealing with movie stars, we are dealing with people who are roughly at the same level of fame, wealth, and societally accepted attractiveness. But when potential pairings involve differences in attractiveness, fame, or wealth, this shifts the assessment of a given person’s power, and thus of that person’s potential to be either a dom or a sub.
For example, start with a hetero male who is a 6 on the attractive scale (according to the generally accepted standards of society). If that male makes thirty thousand dollars a year, it is highly unlikely that he will ever end up with a female partner who is a 10 in looks. But if that male is a billionaire? He becomes far more attractive than any number of men who are 10 in looks but make far less money than he does. And even when he is with a female who is a 10 in looks that 6-in-looks-billionaire male will still be able to be the dominant partner. But take a man and a woman who make roughly the same amount of money, and the man is a 6 in looks and the woman is a 9. The woman could be with a 6-in-looks-male who makes more money than her but she chooses the 6-in-looks-male who does not, because her 9 in looks allows her to be the dominant partner.
If you look at a standard married couple sit-com like King of Queens, Everybody Loves Raymond, or Married with Children the woman is always better looking than the man, at a ratio of about 9 to 6 (or 8 to 5). Much of the comedy derives from the fact that while the husband thinks he is the dominant partner, the woman is actually the dominant partner. We find it funny that the male is trying to assert his traditional sense of dominance but is constantly failing and thus faces the humiliation that comes with his giving in finally to his dominant wife, who moves in our minds from fem to butch.
Now Married with Children would seem to be the exception here, since Peg Bundy seems ostensibly to be ultra-fem. But Katie Segal’s portrayal of Peg is so laced with irony, with a wink to the camera, and her fem status is so overly exaggerated in its appearance, that she sometimes comes off more like a drag queen than an actual woman. She is telling the audience, “I’m just playing this role of the fem-sub, but really we all know Al is the real fem-sub” (just think of those episodes where Al is forced to don an apron).
As it turns out, according to Segal, the producers of the show originally wanted to Peg to be a slob, a female equivalent of Al. But Segal resisted this; she intuitively sensed that the pairing would work better if Peg were ultra-feminine. She said that the exchanges between the husband and wife were so harsh and biting, there needed to be a subliminal core that kept the two together, and that was the sexual tension created by Peg’s ultra-femininity and her seemingly more voracious sexual appetite. What Segal did not say, but what I think she sensed, was that both these qualities would also increase Peg’s power and thus, her domination of Al.
What kept these shows ostensibly anchored in the traditional roles of the patriarchy is that it is the husband who works and the woman who stays at home. But today more and more women are not only eschewing the stay at home mother role, but also making more money than their husbands. And inversely, more and more men are playing the role of the one who stays at home. But as women begin to make more money, they assume more leadership roles in society, thus, there’s a change in the way society views them on the scale of butch-fem.
Take the roles played by Julia Louise-Dreyfus. Part of her comic persona has stemmed from the fact that while she is attractive, she is not stunningly attractive. In the New Adventures of Old Christine, there’s a whole episode based on the fact that she is a 6 in looks going out with a guy who’s a 9 or 10 in looks and so she has to try harder than she actually wants to.2* But in the recent Veep, the factor of her looks begins to become entangled with society’s shifting paradigms of sexual roles and the confusion that ensues from such shifts.
Part of the humor in Veep is that Louise-Dreyfus’s character has become in many ways a very powerful woman. As a result of this ascension, she’s more dominant over those around her. Part of the show’s humor lies in watching the male underlings make weak attempts to assert themselves as traditional males would and then be shot down by an angry and more powerful woman. Thus, the Veep tells one of her subordinates in a recent episode, “It [what you’ve done wrong] is like using a croissant as a vibrator. It doesn’t get the job done and it makes a helluva mess” (what she is really saying to him is, “you’re a croissant dildo”). As is made clear from this quotation, to ascend the ladder of politics, Dreyfus’s character has had to adopt traditionally hetero male modes of speech and behavior. The males around her are either shocked by this or accept it as part of her power—she has the power of a man and so she can—and must—talk like a man. The humor stems from the stream of masculine invectives and obscenities coming out of Louise-Dreyfus’s mouth, that is, out of a short and somewhat attractive female’s mouth.
But an even larger part of the humor of the show stems from her character’s occasional realization that her ascendency to power has also resulted in her being perceived as butch rather than fem. She has started out her journey to power believing she could become a fem-dom, but she has, somewhat consciously and somewhat unconsciously, realized that given the present state of society, she can only achieve power as a butch-dom. Thus, she is horrified to learn that one of her nicknames on the Internet is Mrs. Doubtfire. She can’t understand why she would be associated with this character. When one of her aides tries to explain this, he cowers in fear as he delivers the news to her that people have a hard time deciding whether she’s a man or a woman—and thus, he implies, they see her as a man in drag. One can understand her confusion. Earlier in her life, when she had less power, her looks were read by those around her as more fem; but as she gained in power and was regarded more as dom, the more masculine she appeared to others, both men and women.
In other words, because the society around them is still trapped in a traditional paradigm of sexual roles, the more power white women achieve, the more they are perceived as butch-dom—i.e., Margeret Thatcher. Or Hillary Clinton. Ball-busters.
And as this happens, as women become more ascendent and powerful, the more traditional hetero white males recoil in horror and try to assert themselves as butch-dom—i.e., the Republican party. Let us go back to the good old days where men were men—butch and dominant—and women were women—femme and submissive. The days of the fifties America.
Hence, the war on women.
During the 2012 election, one of the seemingly inexplicable and disturbing oddities was the way various Republicans made absurd and ridiculously sexist remarks regarding rape and abortion. One Republican congressman maintained that someone in his family had dealt with a situation like rape where the woman decided to have the child. Upon closer questioning, he revealed that the family member was not raped but had a child out of wedlock. When the interviewer asked incredulously how the congressman could equate the two situations, he answered, “Well, they are similar. For a father.”
As the 2012 election made apparent to many, if not to the Republicans, the power in our society no longer resides solely in the hands of white heterosexual males. In an increasingly diverse society, in a society that is more and more inclusive of difference, the old paradigms are coming apart at the seams. A white hetero male can no longer assume he is in the position of masculine dominance, the position of power.
As our sit-coms have been noting for years, the position of the white hetero male has been, bit by bit, undermined and revised. What happens when you have been turned from a butch-dom to a fem-sub? That is partly what’s behind the freakout of white male Republicans over the last election. And given our demographics, and the changing in the workforce due to the changing nature of post-modern post-industrial society, the power of the hetero white male is only going to diminish.
No wonder Glen Beck said on the radio, two days after the 2012 election, that he and his followers must abandon American society and go into hiding and procreate—much like the Mormons who fled to Mexico in order to continue their traditional patriarchy.
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1. The friend here is the Asian American scholar and writer Juliana Pegues. When Juliana read a version of this essay, she said that I had misremembered a portion of our conversation. She maintained that rather than the pair “sub-dom,” she had used “top-bottom.” “Top-bottom,” she said, is a more commonly used term and more designates sexual practice—who initiates the sexual act; who is literally on top and who on the bottom. She differentiated this from “sub-dom,” which to her has connotations of S&M and is more about a specific sexual practice. I think Juliana is probably correct in her memory of the conversation; certainly, her distinction between “top-bottom” and “sub-dom” reflects the language in the lesbian and gay world. But I find “sub-dom” a more useful binary opposition for my purposes here. I am not using it to refer solely to S&M practice, though later in the essay I do use the example of S&M in my analysis. Instead, I use the terms “sub-dom” to reflect differences in power and the use of power in any given relationship. Sex and sexual practice may be part of this calculation, but so might any number of other factors—looks, age, money, social position, race, gender, etc.
2. This is all complicated by the fact that the better-looking boyfriend is played by black actor Blair Underwood. There is a longstanding practice/stereotype of good looking black men going out with lesser looking white women, and this reflected the relative difference in power between the two in terms of race. But in present day America, where this difference in power between the racial groups is constantly lessening, it has become more confusing how to read the power each partner possesses in the relationship in terms of race, as opposed to looks.