If you live on a certain side of social media—the side with a lot of Chappell Roan videos and Cate Blanchett memes—you’ve seen them: videos insinuating that the lesbian community is currently undergoing a “masc shortage.” In one representative example, a woman dramatically pantomimes protecting her tomboyish girlfriend from crowds of admirers.
Like most memes, the masc shortage is at once kinda serious and totally not, a concept ripe to be harnessed for criticism, shitposting, and brand bandwagoning. Some see it as a harmless joke or a prime opportunity to look for dates. Others believe that it highlights prejudice within the lesbian community, that people are commodifying mascs based on superficial traits and skewed beauty standards. Whatever its origins—the meme has been popping up, Whac-a-Mole style, for over a year now—the fixation with a potential masc shortage raises interesting questions: In a community where language around identity is constantly shifting, what does it mean to be “masc”? And are such people actually in short supply? It also shows something that this writer has always taken for granted, even if the internet seems to think that it’s a new phenomenon: Masculine lesbians are totally hot.
In perhaps the biggest flash point in our supposedly masc-lacking moment, Her, the Sapphic dating app, launched the “Masc Shortage Relief Act” in February, giving away 1,000 lifetime premium app subscriptions to self-identified “mascs.” The app’s premium subscriptions, which allow users to do things like forgo ads and see who has swiped right on them, start at $14.99 a month. According to Her CEO and founder Robyn Exton, around 4,500 people signed up for the giveaway. The app’s users can add flashy graphics called “pride pins” to their profiles to flag sexuality, gender presentation, and even political views. There is now a “masc” pin, thanks to the Masc Shortage Relief Act. It depicts a white tank top and gold chain against a buffalo plaid background.
“I’ve definitely felt a renewed excitement being out in the dating world,” said Zoe Stoller, one of the giveaway winners. “And it’s cool being able to put myself out there knowing that I’m giving people more context as to who I am and how I want to be seen.”
Masc, as a shorthand for masculine, already exists in the lesbian lexicon. “Masc of center” was a popular lesbian term in the 2010s; transmasc is a word some nonbinary people use to describe their gender presentations. Masc on its own recently rose to prominence on social media and appears to be most popular among younger people. According to Exton, user data supports this assumption. The average ages of Her users with “butch” and “stud” profile pins are 29 and 30, respectively. The average age of “masc” pin users is 25. There are roughly four “masc” pins added to profiles for every one “butch” or “stud” pin.
For Jack Halberstam, a humanities professor at Columbia University and the author of Female Masculinity, this is nothing new. “A lot of the discussion in the late ’90s going into 2000s about butch was that it was an anachronism, that it was only accurate to use it in reference to the 1950s and 1960s,” he explained. He said the word butch still resonates with him, but he uses transmasc more often these days because it feels more recognizable.
Lex Segal, 26, calls herself a “proud butch” but says she sees masc as inclusive of similar identities. “To me, masc is the umbrella term for butch, stud, or whatever other kind of masculine-presenting lesbian we’ve created,” she explained. She recently took to TikTok to debunk the idea of a masc shortage.
“Probably last summer, I started seeing [the meme],” Segal told me. “I was like, Oh, great, there’s a masc shortage, which means I’m a hot prize right now,” she joked. “Didn’t go as I expected. I live very close to the lesbian bar [Wildrose] in Seattle, and I’m there quite often, and I saw no masc shortage.”
Segal thinks the real issue is one of quality, not quantity. Just as straight women online proclaim to be looking for extremely tall, wealthy men, queer women have their own unrealistic, meme-friendly standards. “It kind of goes hand in hand with this whole ‘white boy of the month’ thing going on in straight culture right now,” she said. “All the girls want a lesbian that looks like Timothée Chalamet or Jeremy Allen White.”
TikTokker Lilly Brown recently made a video to illustrate the concept. In it, she scours a Los Angeles women’s soccer game to find “a masc with dominant energy” for her single friend Bianca. It hits all the tropes one might see in a discussion of this topic: All the mascs are already wifed up or too busy playing organized sports, and everyone should pay more attention to femmes anyway. Indeed, everyone the duo approaches is in a relationship; one interviewee declares that there are “too fucking many” mascs and that it’s time to bring femmes back. Ultimately, Bianca is horrified to learn that she may have to join a kickball league to find the woman of her dreams.
Speaking as someone who falls under the “masc” umbrella, this moment has been a little weird to watch. On one hand, I get it. I’m also attracted to masculine women, and I went on my own, long journey to end up in a happy “butch4butch” relationship. On the other, it can feel alienating to be gender-nonconforming, and it doesn’t help that an online chorus of feminine women seems simultaneously vexed and titillated by our very existence.
As Jewel Telem, a 22-year-old personal trainer and transmasculine lesbian put it to me, “The beauty standards of men and the personality standards of men are put on us, and then also the beauty standards of women are put on us in other ways.” Telem posted to TikTok to question the objectifying implications of the masc shortage last year, saying, “We’re not a commodity.”
Telem and others have used the popularity of the “masc shortage” meme to speak about their experiences being derided or harassed. In our conversations, Telem described presenting as masculine from a very young age and facing rejection as a result—experiences that made it difficult for them to come to terms with their lesbianism.
I’m sure Bianca, the single girl from Brown’s TikTok, is perfectly nice, and anyone can have whatever dating preferences they want—but it doesn’t take much scrolling to feel as if every queer femme online is on the hunt for “a masc with dominant energy.” It’s difficult to divorce that from the popular (but incorrect) assumption that masc women and nonbinary people “wear the pants” in all our relationships just because we, well, wear pants. At best, this stereotype promotes sexist ideas about how men and women “should” behave. The rise of “girlypop masc,” a label for women and nonbinary people who present masculine but like feminine things, is a prime example.
Assumptions about masc “dominance” can also lead to unfair, occasionally troubling trends in lesbian sexual dynamics. “In some senses, I would relate to the story of a straight man who had a girl come on to him super heavily because she thought he would want that. Because ‘Men want sex all the time,’ ‘Men don’t have standards,’ et cetera,” Telem told me. “It goes unrecognized when femmes objectify and sexually harass mascs, and that happens a lot.”
All of this has made me wonder if maybe we lesbians, who are infamous for inventing new words, just need to quit the label biz for a while. Meanwhile, Halberstam, the professor, posits that the medium, not the message, is to blame. “Dating online, there’s just a lot of prepping and posturing and back-and-forth before anything even happens,” he said. “My guess is that that’s what produces an abundance of categories. The more people are offline, the less they’re using all of these very precise terms because then you just get to know someone.”
I’ve recently done a lot of reporting on in-person dating, and I think Halberstam is right. Whether you’re feeling fenced in by labels like masc or plagued by dating scarcity, you’ll probably benefit from logging off. Forget touching grass—go touch some bush.