omg seriously re arlecchino. i try to ignore parts of the canon design and make her butch in my HEART but you're right she's not even - but regardless it's still explicitly stated she does not like dresses and has never worn one, and i nearly have a stroke whenever i have to see fanart that STILL PUTS HER IN DRESSES. some people really can't comprehend a woman who doesn't want to be hyper-feminine even when she outright states it. it drives me crazy

thinking about the first part... i think it goes back to what i've talked about before where people think butch is a failure to do femininity and/or just a mimicry of male masculinity (which yikes, but a common belief even if people don't admit it). so if you believe that makeup and dresses are genderless (which of course is fine to have as a goal) or can be masculine, then butches can wear those things and it's actually close-minded for you to disagree! but that's NOT what butchness is, so they completely get it wrong and it's really offensive!!

"glad you agree that we need more lesbian kings while still very much being women bc a lot of people get mad at that stuff for some reason, for tons of reasons lol."

IT'S SO SEXY! when will people realize! especially with the popularity of things like HOD and or whatever lesbian period drama of the moment.

"you find just the right balance between actually having standards but also letting loose every single time it's so refreshing"

YOU'RE SOOOO SWEET THANK YOU... i'm glad it comes across as this and not just me being a libra refusing to commit solidly LMAO (not so much in this context but like the feminist fujo convos sometimes)

"even when drawing femme lesbians they're almost always super long haired full faces of trendy makeup..come on now"

RIGHT IT DRIVES ME CRAZY. it's why so much is just soulless for me. if you're DRAWING it there needs to be some kind of intentionality to it and not u just picking the current #1 straight (white western) girl look

i haven't but my wife plans to make me watch it this weekend!!!

but from what i've seen (read: plenty of gifsets of her with her shirt off...plus a few others), ok first let me say there's basically 3 categories of butch for me, almost on a slight scale. it goes

1 - fiction only: this character is as close to butch as we're gonna get. (if she's paired with a femme, it definitely strikes as butch/femme) (this is often my gacha game cope category)

2 - woman who is pretty masc-leaning but i wouldn't go "WHOAAA BUTCH MCBUTCH" on first sight (often these women give the impression of just vibing and not giving much thought to butch presentation/identity, which is fine!)

3 - WHOAAAA BUTCH "MCDREAMY" MCBUTCH SR.

and from what i've SEEN i'd prob put her on like a 1.5. that may or may not change lol

i have a love/hate relationship only because I HATE THAT THEY HAVE TO BE HEADCANONS!!!! sobbing on the floor. i'm sick of it. can we get some actual butch characters so we can stop headcanoning (as much).

but to actually answer the question... i feel like i see more of it in art than fanfic? or maybe that's just a result of me being more casually into f/f art than fanfic and thus seeing more of it, but i guess maybe it seems easier to portray in art than in writing, but i wish i did see more of it in writing.

OH also i can't normally say this because it would make me sound like an asshole BUT SINCE I'VE BEEN ASKED. i've been seeing more art of butches with top surgery which i'm fine with, this isn't a complaint about that! but FREE BUTCHES FROM THE DEEP THICK RED JAGGED SCARS THAT LOOK LIKE IT WAS DONE BY A CHILD WITH A SAW. GET HER A BETTER SURGEON AND BETTER SCAR AFTERCARE I'M BEGGING. (signed someone who's had similar surgery (reduction)).

and i wish i saw more KINDS of butches... i feel like a lot of what i see is like... a step up from tomboy you know what i mean? or kinda alternative... where are the grandpa butches at. also more actually masculine haircuts.

in terms of fic i would love to see more butch lesbians using masculine terms/titles without identifying as anything other than woman. lesbian husbands... lesbian kings... handsome ones.

and really my biggest/thought wish is just more of an understanding of butch and how to portray that overall. like putting her in a suit doesn't count if it's cut like a women's trendy suit. i've seen a character called butch when she wears eye shadow, lipstick, and hoop earrings daily just because she has a shaved head... pleaseeeee use your brains to read

what about you!! tell me your thoughts too

thank you for this question!! my answer is: i doubt it, and i don't feel like it's any kind of -pilled, it's just being realistic. of course, there's no one way to define "success" here, but let's say it's "enough women participating in the tenets of 4B, even if not by name, that it is a recognizable movement with an actual impact on marriage and birth rates." and with that definition, i think no. imo, there's 2 reasons that are connected: mainstream american feminism is highly individualistic, and also highly against being inconvenienced.

extreme individualism prevents organizing; they look out for themselves and their future, and also suggesting that women exist as a class with shared interests will get you called out. you can't even suggest that maybe 12 year old girls don't need to be wearing false eyelashes daily without someone coming in about how saying so is anti-feminist because it's femmephobic appearance-shaming or whatever. every time separatism gets brought up in the past, straight feminists have meltdowns about how lesbians just want them to suffer and that suggesting that maybe they stop sleeping with their oppressors is misogynistic. imo american mainstream straight feminists tend to want change without having to do any introspection or work for it.

i'm not an expert on korean feminism, but from what i do know, it seems like there's less backlash/watering down from a mainstream liberal feminism wing than there would be in american feminism, because feminism is already more fringe? obviously many women will push back against it regardless of what country it's in, but like, as far as i know, feminist-leaning korean women who don't personally adhere to 4b still aren't trashing it like straight feminists have done to separatism in the past here.

i do think a lot of heterosexual women might get on with the idea of a "sex strike," without even associating it with any kind of feminist/4b movement themselves, or more seriously insisting on birth control/condoms/vasectomies/etc or no sex. but that's only one part of it. a sex strike isn't as effective if you're still married to them and supporting a man as his girlfriend or wife, raising his children, etc.

oh it drives me crazy! if you're writing a fic where they have sex, tag (or otherwise somehow indicate) what kind they are having -- that includes who tops and bottoms! and yeah people can say it doesn't matter, but 1) it does, people absolutely write characters differently based on how they imagine it, and often i can detect which way someone ships something even when looking at sfw art or fic, and 2) even if that wasn't true, IF THAT'S JUST WHAT I WANT TO SEE, THAT'S STILL VALID. you're not going to trick someone into switching how they ship things by not tagging it, so why do you refuse lol

for how it used to be done i think it depends based on a couple things:
1) anime fandoms did tend to do name order. like everyone knew 1x2 was different from 2x1!
2) with there being less obsession with reversible "equality," many fandoms did tend to go a majority one way, and you might only see it mentioned in the author notes if it was out of the norm
3) since fics were archived and promote differently, that mattered... like a fic might not have had "bottom draco" in the summary but if it was on the Bottom!Draco Emporium (real archive) and promoted in the bottom_draco livejournal community, and you found it that way, you knew lol

but yeah, it's never been perfectly done anywhere. but the active backlash against it is more recent imo and super annoying