After finding out a bit more about butchness, I became interested in this question. As a girl/woman if you're not actively going against sociocultural expectations of how you should act or dress, you'll likely just default to some iteration of femininity, since that's considered the standard women. Every force is pushing you to act feminine.

I realized that in terms of dress, I'm feminine but in my heart and in terms of behavior, I actually don't like most things about femininity at all. This was surprising for me to learn. Even if I do like some aspects of it, it's so intimately connected with women's economic and emotional oppression, which puts me off of it. It also makes you more attractive to a wider variety of men, which I don't like either. It also seems inherently more limiting than masculinity.

So for those of you who are feminine, do you make a distinction between femme and feminine, in the same way there's a distinction between butch and masculine?

How do you parse out what aspects of femininity you want to engage in when so much of it comes from misogynist standards and capitalist money making endeavors? Especially since much of it comes with the subtle undercurrent of "women aren't good enough as they are"?

How do you parse out your genuine enjoyment from participating in femininity vs the genuine tangible benefits you receive by being a "proper" woman? Or are they forever entangled?

Are you/are femmes in general working to create a feminine identity that's healthy and not oriented around men, sexualization and harmful trad imitations, in a similar way to how butches do?