dear butch-femme matchmaker.

dear butch-femme matchmaker,

let me start by putting this out there: i've never done any online dating before. no other site has ever wooed me to browse their members and "check out who's inside!", but when i first heard of you, my interests were peaked. an online catalog of butches just looking for femmes?! awesome! an at-the-time boifriend first told me about you. she had casually alluded to having used you to find dates when she had moved to her new city. i wrote you off though. i had her, what did i need with a butch-femme dating service, right? please!

fast forward to months later after the boifriend and i parted ways, i remembered you and your promise to help me "pinpoint" my soul mate - a nerdy-handsome, bespectacled, old school kind of butch with wit, good politics and plenty of kink. i browsed briefly and ran from you, still operating with the stigma that online dating was nothing short of pathetic. i didn't look back.

and then the next big break-up happened. this one can best be described as a tsunami of hellfire. pure and total heartbreak. loss like never before. 24/7 listening to the saddest of mirah songs. a total mess. when i finally decided months later that i might give the search for that nerdy-handsome type another go, my bestie and i bravely filled out our profiles and glammed up for photos.

now i should say, i didn't expect much from you, bfm. i was able to move past my prior thoughts re: online dating as being weak, but i didn't have high hopes. i was convinced that if mr. nerdy-handsome was ever going to be around for me to woo, i was probably going to meet them somewhere offline. so, yeah, i had hesitation and little faith going into this, but dear god, bfm, you didn't do much to help a girl out!

first of all, i understand that the site and its larger home of butch-femme.com emerged many years ago and, as i gather, started as a way for butches and femmes to meet one another. it's great that the site has evolved since then and that it's not assumed when you sign up now that if you're a femme, you're seeking a butch and vice versa. i totally appreciate that if i wanted to post a steamy ad for one of my femme sisters i can do just that (...and it'd be hot). however, what's with the limited options for who i might be interested in? i can only pick butches, stone butches, femmes, stone femmes or ftms?? what if i want my profile to be accessible by butches - stone and not - and ftms?? what about genderqueer folks? call me greedy, a wanton hoarder of female masculinity, but i want some options! don't get me wrong now. i love butches! love, love, love them. but i've been known to turn my head and spread my legs for others on that side of the gender spectrum too! let's not limit the breadth of identities mr. nerdy-handsome could have, bfm!

second, listen, i know web design isn't cheap. i used to work for a political action committee where i got paid pennies compared to what i could have made designing and managing a site if i was freelance. i'm sure there isn't a lot of money floating around either. being a queer site that caters to sub-groups can't mean you're making much bank. i get it. also, and i mean this wholeheartedly, i know you're trying. i see little things change here and there on the site, but seriously, when the bestie and i signed up for our level 1: 3 month membership, we lost almost an entire month worth of use because of "upgrades" that only seemed to make the whole bfm experience more frustrating. forget the absence of mr. nerdy-handsome, the site is hard to navigate, searches don't gather the results specified, broken links abound and the chat feature is akin to one i used with my packard bell computer on a 14.4kbps dial-up modem in the early 1990s. i.e. it's slow and janky! and it's not that the chat is just a message window with little to no frills. gchat is pretty bare bones too, but it's quick and reliable and it's how i communicate with all of my friends...real life friends, i swear!

lastly, and this is partially your fault and partially not, but the selection of butches in their twenties is pretty sparse and the number of ftms is just plain sad, though i can't say i blame them for not wanting to sign up in droves when there isn't even a place for them in the name of the site. i'm sure with some tweaks to the interface and mission, this could be fixed so that you can be a more inclusive space... oh, and when i'm talking about the mission, i mainly mean that you need to change that language on the main page that says you "employsophisticated matching criteria." bfm, last time i checked, "sophisticated matching" did not mean giving me 50 results for stone femmes in malaysia when i specifically requested butches in my queer, midwestern city.

listen, bfm, i know you're kind of an institution of sorts amongst this community and i have no doubt that there are a ton of members who find you useful and may have even had success in having you find their perfect someone for them. also, i love butches and femmes and our dyanmic and have nothing but respect for our history, but i have to say that i love the potential of meeting people who don't identify as one of the two also.

i'm just saying that as a mid-20s femme still searching for mr. nerdy-handsome - and obviously willing to go to all sorts of lengths to find them - i think you need a facelift in a big way if you want to attract the likes of me and my friends.

xo,
hussy red

to the bestie: i'm sorry i outed you and our brief, unsuccessful foray into the world of online dating. kisses?