We have recently started offering the podcast to verified paid subscribers only on Substack, due to personal and professional necessity (very much not as a money-grab). Read our full letter here. To ease the transition, we are offering an 80% discount for the next two months on subscriptions (which will include access to all 35+ previously released episodes, from Fall 2022 to present, including our newest episode S2 E16). The discount brings the total to $16/year. We believe and hope we’re worth it. You can get the deal at this link: https://stonebutchdisco.substack.com/poddiscount

Our latest episode is live on Substack: S2 E16: Forbidden Answers to Insurmountable Questions

—————————

Get in touch with us at [email protected]

Check out our website for more writings and butch/femme content: stonebutchdisco.com

Thank you for your support <3

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit stonebutchdisco.substack.com/subscribe

Rachel convinces an *exhausted from running to bomb shelters* Katherine that while women face our own challenges to form community, a lot of them are because of the vise-like grip of patriarchal self-discipline and self-improvement ideals requiring women to compete with/seek-to-destroy each other, and there is no need to panic. Unless the shelter alert goes off.

Rachel wrote a smutty thing and talks about why. (The new edit of the full short story, which significantly updates the already-published part, will be released soon at stonebutchdisco.substack.com.)

We discuss:

* Random Jewish marriage trivia

* Patriarchy and capitalism’s folie à deux situation that inspires unhealthy competition among women

* Queer as a process of commodification

* Rachel’s theory about why the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s didn’t actually “take” for women; i.e., it was never about usHow a lot of “liberated” sexuality was really women being called to perform a new sexual fluidity. The needle didn’t move much on male sexual agency, because it didn’t need to (their agency to choose their object of desire was and is still assumed).

* Many thinkers at this time set the stage for queer discourse. Ironically, women pushing back in lesbian discourse tried so hard to build an entirely new system of representation around sexuality that they made language/symbol prior to reality, created a safe harbor for postmodernism, and basically let men “win” structure.

* Rachel’s take on the supposed academic rejection of butch-femme in groups like Radicallesbians (she thinks it’s overblown and that even academics have always known butch-femme lesbians are real across history, even as we scare them)

* Women’s Studies and what it WAS (what it WAS was the creation of lesbians who did at least 60% of the work and then became like 5% of the beneficiaries, and finally 0% when it turned “queer”)

* We talk about philosopher Luce Irigaray and other early lesbian feminist philosophers who allowed women to be fluid and men to be stable, and… We do have the right to blame them.

* We talk about how Judith Butler started her career making space for butches and femmes, insisting that “queer” was not an identity, and arguing that gender could not be separated from sex or sexuality. Then, she sold out.

* We argue about why women’s structural and symbolic relation to the truth and to truth-telling is unique compared to men’s. Katherine thinks it’s a woman problem; Rachel says it requires analysis of patriarchy’s reward structure

* We discuss experiences whether/how straight women have felt like allies, successfully, and when the field has felt hostile

* Rachel: “I feel like it's just a socialized tendency for all of us to seek others' approval. And I think that comes from the patriarchy. I think there's no way that it doesn't. Women are to be seen, like it's John Berger, we always think about what we look like to other people. Men just exist.”

* We talk about feeling more or less comfortable with men and women, socially (and feel differently, as predicted)

* We talk about similar feelings about gender and similar experiences with bullying as we were growing up, before our opinions/experiences started to somewhat diverge

* How we played as kids, and how Rachel felt like boys could be ambiguously feminine but she would be disciplined if she was too masculine or “unladylike” (Texas), while Katherine felt like the girls created a conformist and hierarchical social world that felt similarly to how “queer” feels now

* Drag queens pretending like (or truly thinking?) they know things about lesbiansSad meme lesbians and why that doesn’t help us find each other

* People belittling femininity and femme identity, and our anger on behalf of femmes

* FEMMES CAN HAVE SHORT HAIR AND WEAR ANY CLOTHES

* How lesbians may be afraid that taking the “butch” or “femme” label means they need to conform to a narrow version of femininity or masculinity, when that’s not actually what it is — what makes it coherent is the relationality. Without the living thing being the sexual tension, masculinity becomes conflated with maleness.

* Dyads, dildos, and meaning-making

* Defending our womanhood versus defending our masculinity: where this puts us in feminist camps

* Rachel convinces Katherine in the 44th minute that it’s worth blaming the patriarchy, because that’s what’s going on (women are made to feel like we are nothing BUT appearances)

* Katherine’s flabbers are gasted despite having experienced the same herself(!!): “I didn’t realize that women [in general] don’t get that they have intrinsic worth separate from their appearance.”

* Extremely stupid definitions of butch like “a woman known to be a lesbian everywhere she goes.” Katherine says that’s ethnocentric, and also: people assume she and Rachel are men so it doesn’t quite work.

* How do internet trolls get mad at *us* for saying butch is part of butch-femme and supposedly overly-“defining” it that way, when what they say is 100% of the time wayyyy more of an extremely-specific and usually unworkable “definition” like the above?? We know not.

* On Julie Bindel and Kathleen Stock saying butches aren’t “masculine” when they probably mean “male,” but don’t separate femininity/masculinity out as a relational lesbian thing. For them, masculinity belongs to maleness (which is cray because it has no definition and is just a floating cultural concept).

* How dressing in the men’s section can be both totally normal and related to butchness but also at the same time not integral to it. The center is relating to the femme; the rest is auxiliary.

* How the structure of what we’re saying and what we have faith in (a purely female form of exchange) really scares the shit out of people

* How the idea of “roles” has reason to especially turn women off since patriarchal bullshit constantly accuses women, who are SOCIALIZED TO THINK OF THEMSELVES AS NOTHING BUT APPEARANCE, of being “fake.”

* The scariness of establishing that butch-femme is real and then realizing that what you give your partner might be something another butch or femme can provide. It’s actually helpful to both parties, but a big negative for codependent people!

* What resolves anxieties? A potent cocktail of words and freedom (*eagle screech*)

* At one point, Rachel engages in an epic rant about fulfillment. Epic.

Want more Stone Butch Disco contact? Love our work? Consider becoming a paid substack subscriber at stonebutchdisco.substack.com. Also, check out our website stonebutchdisco.com. You can get in touch with us at [email protected].

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit stonebutchdisco.substack.com/subscribe

Power femme Jamie Reed of the LGB Courage Coalition joins the podcast (@lgbcouragecoalition and @jamiewhistle on Substack).

Rachel and Katherine fangirl over Jamie’s bravery as a whistleblower, the process behind the New York Times article that changed everything, and her incredible work since to protect lesbians like her and us. We squeeze in some delightful butch-femme confessionals, too: it’s not the femme’s hips that Jamie’s talking about…

Deep thoughts:

* Jamie’s personal and professional history with “gender” and her journey to telling the world what was happening at the Washington University Transgender Center

* What it felt like for Jamie to hide her femme lesbian identity in a relationship with someone who identified as a trans man, and how their identities affected both the writing and reception of the New York Times article

* Accusations that Jamie emasculated her partner by doing wildly male things like using a hammer

* How she navigated being a femme lesbian in that relationship, and what femme lesbian identity means to her after leaving it

* The effects of testosterone on a person over time; how the drugs and ideology of medicalization kill lesbian sexiness from a femme’s perspective

* Katherine and Jamie describe their butch and femme experiences with being and disappearing in couples that passed as straight

* Jamie interviews Katherine about why Gen Z is so bleak for butch lesbians; we discuss how butch-femme proves the lie that there’s something wrong with the butch (and why Gen Z fights butch-femme)

* The historical moment when “queer” ate everything and sucked Jamie into believing she wasn’t a woman too, and the millions of reasons it’s easy for young lesbians to think their problems are gender

* “How do we medicalize girls when they haven’t experienced anything yet?!”

Fun thoughts:

* What attracts Jamie to butches?

* The experience of butch-femme sex signaling, from both sides

* How femme sex signaling works uniquely, and when it may or may not involve rocks

* Visibility: knowing the femme “from the butch on her arm” and vice versa

* Rachel becomes fixated on what Jamie says about hips

* The first rule of lesbianism: Women can do whatever they want with rocks and balls

* The femme “thing” with butch pheromones

Two must-read essays by Jamie:

* “Homophobia on My Mind”

* “Shields”

Oh, and here: queer queer queer queer queer. There, we’ve fed the hungry algorithm.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit stonebutchdisco.substack.com/subscribe

Kath (formerly known as Akiva) explains why she changed back to using her birth name, and why “harmless” name changes aren’t guaranteed harmless in the current climate. Rachel talks about her own name and voice as sex markers she cares about, and drawing the line on pluralistic tolerance when it comes to butches getting yoked to maleness. The conversation turns toward butch-femme as a deep structure that persists against the perceived male ownership of structure and rationality. We can have our own nice things, thankya very much. Women deserve to stake out stability and structure on our own terms.

Rachel and Kath also philosophize HARDCORE about what sex EVEN IS, because they’re nerds who find that sort of thing fun.

On the docket:

* Kath’s previous belief that no one would see her as a woman unless she tried to be more feminine, and how she got her groove back and decided to rep reality

* Historical narratives/images about butches “having always passed as men” when most of those people talked a ton about being women AND sex is why they made history (looking at you, Anne Lister)

* How we relate to the past at SBD; butch-femme as a transhistorical structure regardless of whether it’s being named in a given moment or what it’s being called

* Women’s burden of being aware of how we are seen (this is John Berger’s line, “Men act, women appear,” critiquing the history of Western art; Berger is a true diamond in the rough of 20th century male philosophers)

* Femmes describing attraction to a “contrast” between our masculine sexuality and our womanhood, i.e., how we are versus the expectations a patriarchal culture imposes upon our female bodies (But are we too in the patriarchy’s head if we’re conceiving of it as a contrast instead of its own natural phenomenon?)

* How in-vulvement in sex (sorry not sorry) makes the physical characteristics of the strap and any analogies to maleness absolutely comically meaningless

* Why it’s not “top” and “bottom” for women — another failed analogy to men

* Lesbian sameness doctrine’s hold on U.S.-globalized queer culture: “There is immense pressure on women…to state that they are the same as their partners.”

* It is both possible and necessary to describe butch-femme as a central lesbian phenomenon

* “You can't say the main trait of lesbian community is that it's diverse. That's not a trait.”

* Butch-femme beyond attraction and beyond sex acts: are you an internalizer or an externalizer?

* The importance of self-awareness to being a good partner in relationships. Butch-femme’s utility as a framework to learn and reflect on our responsibilities and needs: “You have to admit what your tendencies are so that you can be a responsible human being.“

* Connection between Rachel’s experience in behavior analysis and butch/femme: “We literally...classify behaviors that could harm people as externalizing or internalizing. And that's for a reason. Because this is so fundamental to the human condition. It is how you guide little humans into not harming people. It is how you guide little humans into taking care of themselves.”

* We discuss sexiness, disgust, disinterest, and other dramatic feelings: Rachel thinks everyone is an 8, while Kath would say everyone is a 4. Kath: “The reason I'm naming this is because…I hit the point that I was like, ‘Wow. The thing that I want is too sexy to be lesbian. I think I'm actually a straight man.’ I thought that I could not get what I wanted in a stable way as a lesbian. So that's why I have to name it. I'm not being mean. That's not the point.”

* Rachel agrees: “It's coming from the fact that those folks have not had our experience of thinking, I must be straight because it's sexual. Like, because butchness is sexual, I must be straight. That is the way that the trans ideology came after you and me. And that is what we are writing against….People looked at you and me and went, if you're going to keep doing it this way, if you're not ever going to switch, then you need to be male.”

* “Butch [the term] for me comes from the identification of my experience in the historical record as something women have been denied.”

* “What drives you? What are your drives? Be honest about them. Where do you feel the safest?“

* The need to be willing to ask people why they want to take on a masculine aesthetic, and to explain our own reasons: “You're actually stopping people in their development if they can't ask themselves what they're trying to symbolize when they're attached to having a certain label or a certain aesthetic.” (Is it a distance from femininity or a closeness to femmes?)

* Luce Irigaray, we love you, but no: we can’t leave rationality at the door of maleness and declare that women can’t have structure or logic because vulvas. (Email us for this whopper of a pdf, [email protected])

* Marx and Hegel didn’t come up with the structure of thinking rationally. “They just wrote it down first because they’re dudes and they had time.”

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit stonebutchdisco.substack.com/subscribe

Rachel and Akiva have fun with this one.

We start by taking apart pronouns (Dear Committee, the plural neuter is male by default, and butches are…the opposite of “multiple men”) and then take our lesbian chisel to various other anti-bravery/queer (those are synonyms) institutions of language and society.

Pride requires bravery, so we dose it out. Happy June!

We cover:

* Queer missionaries evangelizing via pronoun circles

* Akiva’s lawsuit against the Israeli government and the international, nonsensical gender garbage that wrought it

* Why “lesbian” means something “gay” can’t

* The default maleness – combined with the prohibition on female-specific speech – that deprives Pride Month of our sex-sexiness and our sex-bodiness

* Rachel’s theory on why it’s so easy for women to pass as men

* Akiva’s theory on why queerness pushes girls toward non-woman identity: that queer/gay cultural institutions, already owned by men, bought and sold trans-identified males’ image of womanhood as “feeling like a sex doll” (It’s not that far from drag culture, is it?)

* Akiva getting referred to, all by her lonesome, with the plural masculine (plural “male,” really) in Hebrew

* The plural male being the neuter category in a metric crap-ton of societies, and why “they/them” thus sticks special erasure to girls and is a bad idea

* The grand irony that gender-neutral language movements are emerging from English-speaking world powers, while academics cry “colonialism” and “fascism” at feminists

* Missed firefighting opportunities

* Missed farting opportunities

* A letter we’d write: “Dear Radfem Friends, femininity isn’t a signal to men. If women can’t make our own sign systems from within history/culture/reality, rather than magically outside of them, then radical feminism has already lost.”

* The reasons Akiva transitioned, and the undoing of them

* Why when butches depart to “they/them,” their femmes naturally feel pressure to come along (or risk continued address as less-complex humans than their partners)

* How weightlifting could help butches desist (and how butches desisting could help the whole lesbian world knock it off)

* “We don’t need to mask that men have controlled the written word. Is it even wise to mask it?”

* Actors and actresses, waiters and waitresses, and the embodied and sexed nature of both

* Why the path to rebellion is not through pronouns

* The notable lack of sex-based power analysis in societies that claim “gender equality”

* Autogynephilia, the so-called “expert” Ray Blanchard, and Rachel’s exhaustion with how male researchers talk about all of this

* Ray Blanchard says “dysphoria” is a natural part of butch existence – that “butch lesbians” lack “a way to live that doesn't require hormones or surgery.” We judge the shit out of him.

* Thoughts about meat eating and… other carnal pleasures

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit stonebutchdisco.substack.com/subscribe

This is a long one, y’all. But it’s a real one too.

This is a rerelease from Season 1 of Stone Butch Disco. Rachel’s intro explains its relevance to SBD’s past, present, and future theory aims. If you’re interested in supporting the pod, (THANKS AND—) please join us on Substack rather than Patreon! We’re in the process of permanent relocation.

In this episode from 2022, Rachel talks to femme lesbian writer and theorist Elle Cooney. They cover:

* Pride in the word “female”

* Centering women in thought

* The co-construction of femme and butch lesbian identities

* Femme lesbian specificity

* Female masculinity as a nameable category (and other important nameable categories)

* Online validation seeking and its challenge to free discourse

* Queer identity games as “giving up”

* Holding firm against the intellectual sexism that silences diversity of thought around “gender,” namely from female voices (and how queer theory/modern academic movements erased “female” as a subject position)

* The male gaze’s bedfellow relationship to trans ideology

* Why male femininity is treated differently than female masculinity

* How femmes, too, get taken in by trans ideology (more on this subject from upcoming guest Jamie Reed)

* Why “nonbinary trans masculine” people so often despise butch lesbians

* Attempts to avoid being associated with mean people (which, probably, stopped us short of telling the whole truth and nothing but it in 2022)

* The ass-suffocating patriarchy of “party favor shorts”

And much more…

Music, via Epidemic Sound:

* ”Glad It’s Over,” White Bones

* ”Get Outta My Face,” Wanda Shakes

* ”Postapocalyptic Funk,” SINY

* ”Pep Talk (Clean Version),” Xavy Rusan

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit stonebutchdisco.substack.com/subscribe

Are you attracted to feminine lesbians but doubting they could be into you?

Sick of shuffling through a never-ending cycle of gender euphoria and gender dysphoria? (Not to worry, those are made-up.)

Plagued by the need to explain to the internet how you’re butch?

Keep naming the thing, but can’t feel a damn thing?

After thoroughly attempting (and giving up on) the 21st century quest to stick a flag in “euphoria” wherever it can be labeled, we present an alternative to the dopamine mirage of something like “butch euphoria”: living over naming. We choose the quest to live a good life over the quest to publicly inventory ourselves and our emotions. 

We’re bored by the consumerist impulse of “If I want it, I can have it” being imported into identity as “Whatever I name, we are the same.” Naming ourselves doesn’t teach us anything, and actually runs the risk of stultification. The upside of naming, of course, is community. But the only way we’ve learned what “butch” actually means is to dig underneath the signs, to explore the self within the messiness of life alongside another, rather than planting an identity-flag on signifiers of butch. This makes butchness a space of action and connection rather than a function of self-idealization. In our lives, what “butch” means is co-constructed daily with our femme partners. The only reason we wave the butch flag on this podcast is so other butch-femme butches know they can trust themselves. They’re not making it up. They’re right when they feel like the freedom to be a different woman than their partner has pulled them through a portal into a hidden realm of feminism and fulfillment.

In this episode, we discuss the pressures of postmodern self-making to turn the real, grounded, lesbian, emotional, sexual meaning of butch and femme into cultural commodities that anyone, male or female, gay or straight, can buy off the shelf (or accumulate online) and thus perform ownership of. We know lesbians don’t intend complicity with this anything-goes remix, but aesthetic definitions of butch and femme cannot help but bolster it. The flattening of butch-femme’s embodied, emotional, sexual reality into memes or isolated traits on either side of the hyphen is a huge reason this podcast exists in the first place, but also why it’s easy to misread us as having a “dog in that fight” when we defend the value of the concepts “butch” and “femme.” However, the arrow of meaning for us goes the opposite way: the identities “butch” and “femme” enable post facto examination and description of the reality of our intimate lives, and most importantly, the ability to find others like ourselves. Butch and femme are not a priori concepts we can index, see, look at, point to in individuals or from any amount of distance. Butch and femme live so near to us that they’re under our skin; they’re who we are intimately, with the humans we let closest to us. 

We explain why aesthetic definitions of butch or femme, even when addressed to female humans alone, are a slippery slope in postmodernland, and how that slope slipped us to this godforsaken 2025 wasteland in which butch-femme sexual specificity has to answer to everything else, and our real existence is still up for debate or submersion beneath the surface of “similar” signs.Later, a tour of our bookshelves elucidates how our literary lineage — from the Well of Loneliness and Orlando to Ann Bannon and Stone Butch Blues — built a (false) narrative of butch/femme dysfunction, reassuring the heteros (and titillating the queers) with the thought that stability in lesbian relationships is inherently fleeting and illusory. At the root is the question of female embodiment and women’s capacity to author signs of the real in the realm of sexuality.

Before we ”sign” off, we take on Gayle Rubin’s “Charmed Circle,” or as we prefer to call it, the “Bad Wheel of Sex” — a fundamentally strange diagram, both emblematic and foundational of the toxic queer theory that argued having morals and being a homosexual were incompatible experiences. No one should have created something so aligned with male-authored continental philosophy and then have asked lesbians to accept it.

Ergo, no more letting dead/old white men tell us nothing means anything (that includes you, Ray Blanchard). All women share a realm of female sexuality, structured by our own, not male, embodiment — and orientations like butch-femme deserve exclusive territory to explore it. No gatekeeping = no depth. We’ll take the living of life over getting our butch parking ticket validated, any day.

Website: https://www.StoneButchDisco.com

Substack: https://stonebutchdisco.substack.com/ 

Get in touch with us at [email protected]

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit stonebutchdisco.substack.com/subscribe

Akiva and Rachel talk exiting the “lesbian sameness doctrine” — one of our key points of departure from much of radical feminist discourse — and how this immediately opens your life to better sex between women.

Things that made this a difficult exit:

— Use of the word butch as an aesthetic label

— Use of the word butch outside of the butchfemme context

— Use of the word butch by queers who have postmoderned themselves so hard they no longer apparently have a body

— The queer community’s active dissuasion of lesbians from caring about orgasms

— The idea that butches rebel against patriarchy while femmes comply with it

— People trying to queer butchfemme to appease the chaos gods/their own egos (“queer” is the verb for “make into nothing”)

— Labeling soup and the idea that every combination of lesbian vibes needs a special name (e.g., butch4butch, femme4femme)

— “F**king queers, man”

We articulate what it means to be a butch lesbian, beyond and beside the situation of being a non-normative woman in the world (i.e., not all “mascs” are butches).

No need to circle the drain of sense making with the queer chaos demons. The human experience, like time, is linear — and all women should direct our own. Sex begins, ends, and (when done well) involves orgasms.

Website: https://www.StoneButchDisco.com

Substack: https://stonebutchdisco.substack.com/

Get in touch with us at [email protected]

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit stonebutchdisco.substack.com/subscribe

This episode parachutes you down into a conversation between friends, in the style of sh*t talking they’d usually do off mic.

Rachel and Akiva discuss Akiva's listenership of Stone Butch Disco during Season 1 (episodes from which are now trickling back out to the public), gently alighting upon the matter of the project’s namesake — and everything the world needed that one bad book couldn’t give.

They discuss the MANY social groups who frame femininity as sex signaling for men (in queerland, this is whether the men are air-quotes “trans” or “cis”) and stifling lesbian sexuality so much as to make male identification seem like the only option — as well as other myths that stand in the way of perceiving butch-femme as the persistent, stable thing that it is.

Rachel asks Akiva about the role lesbian sexuality played as she reentered public womanhood after socially transitioning. The conversation crescendoes into Akiva’s trenchant diagnosis of queer lying, and the dull-eyed praise that drives people to it.

Listening elsewhere? Visit Substack to read what we write.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit stonebutchdisco.substack.com/subscribe

Akiva and Rachel do the Q&A thing — whereupon Rachel has the *tiniest* breakdown over the state of the world that produced the questions. (The full arc of this has been mostly spared from listeners. Lol, we tried.)

Questions we answer:

* How do stone butches have orgasms? (Because we do. Crazy, right?)

* Why are gender dysphoria zombies such sad sacks?

* What’s the correct plural of clitorises? (Our vote’s not in the dictionary.)

* Did anyone else suffer through “Slap Ass Fridays” in middle school?

Further, we address:

* “Gender dysphoria” being OBVIOUSLY a social contagion, and not least because the phrase itself is.

It’s 99% girls using this language, and why do they think they’re abnormal? Because they want things they don’t think they can have.

As Rachel literally just had to hear again this week (please help us stop repeating ourselves by talking to your liberal friends), girls want freedom: from teenage girlhood, from sexism, from violence, AND TO LIKE GIRLS. Queertrans stole “feminism for female people,” so they think they’re broken.

* Stone butch is a sexuality, not a gender crisis.

Embrace its badass femaleness and your troubles disappear.

* Our take on the “gay gene.”

* Bullshit crap patriarchal soup.

* “Our Femme”: a new sitcom we’re pitching.

* All the NSFW talk about interiors and exteriors you could possibly want.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit stonebutchdisco.substack.com/subscribe