Billie Eilish can be butch but she cannot be a stud, sorry!

The singer's affinity for 2000s Black fashion has returned. Just a few reminders for white people who are about to be VERY weird about this...

Image credit: Vulture

After taking an album off, Billie Eilish’s cultural appropriation is BACK, baby!!!

The singer made waves last week with the release of the video for “LUNCH,” the lead single from her third album, HIT ME HARD AND SOFT. The song is unambiguously about eating pussy. Seriously. “LUNCH” is going to be one of those songs middle schoolers today sing half-knowing the innuendos and question as adults WHY THE HELL they were singing it at 12. But I digress.

Billie, in true Zoomer fashion, has never explicitly tried to hide her queerness. She’s stated in interviews, dubbed as “coming out” for lack of a better description, that she figured people just knew she wasn’t straight. She never saw a closet to come out of. Nevertheless, the revelation made her signature formless, boyish style from her first album era make sense in hindsight.

A marginalized critique from her debut era was that she was appropriating Black fashion most prominently seen in the late ‘90s and early-to-mid ‘00s. White journalists applauded her for her “edgy” and transgressive style for a female pop star, but Black critics rightfully pointed out that Billie’s style was simply recycled from the likes of Missy Elliott, TLC, and Nelly. Because the appropriation was mostly aesthetic — not really appearing in her music, speech, or lyrical delivery — it did not invite enough ire to truly threaten her rise. Billie ultimately pulled away from the aesthetic on the next album cycle by embracing more feminine looks, and we moved on!

Or so we thought.

Although she has a lax approach to her own sexuality publicly, it appears now that Billie wants to be more overt about her attraction to women, hence this cunnilingus anthem. And with that enthusiasm, she is back leaning heavily into her to fascination with Black street fashion. Vibing in sneakers, baggy shorts, and basketball jerseys, Billie is back to a butch aesthetic¹, at least for this video. It’s interesting that Billie’s idea of leaning more into queerness entails her not just dressing masculinely, but specifically in Black masculine clothing. In doing that, she’s almost cosplaying as a stud, which she may or may not even recognize the cultural significance of.

A stud is a Black lesbian (typically cis)² woman who dresses exclusively masculine. For those of you into degrees of queer aesthetic, studs are the stone butches of Black lesbians. The term arose from a desire to distinguish Black lesbians from white ones in the mid-20th century, a time when white women were the focus of female identity, politics, and social experiences. Colloquially, Black people know studs as the aunties or cousins who dress “like men” and always have that one woman stuck to them like glue that they also happen to live with. That’s just her friend, our families often tell us.

Despite whatever attempts are made to mask their sexuality, we (Black folks) know these are not your “typical” women. We sense the queerness, the difference between studs and non-studs, even if all of us don’t have the language to name it. Speaking from my own observational experience, the studs I knew as a child in my own family had more of a kinship with men than women. Whereas white lesbians take pride in separating themselves from men (even those furthest along the butch end of the spectrum), studs often inhabit many of the cultural attitudes of men — for better or worse. Having myself been proximal to both Black and white lesbians, I can tell you that Black lesbians generally have way more willingness to be in community with straight men of their race. Their closeness to Black men as well as their identifying as women creates a unique intersection of experience that is distinct from non-studs and other women.

I want to caveat once more that these are purely my observations of studs, and I want to invite you reading this to listen to the experiences of studs from their own mouths. Given what I’ve described though, does it not feel a little weird to see the stud uniform won by a white woman like Billie Eilish?

When I first saw clips of the video online via my favorite pop culture account on IG, velvetcoke, I noticed some people in the comments implying Billie was embracing a “gay aesthetic.” Others corrected that her look was more Black than anything,

Seeing exchanges like this remind me of how white queer people have taken other aspects of Black culture as their own, from slang to eyebrow cuts (PLEASE stop calling eyebrow cuts “gay eyebrow slits”). Add in Billie’s young age, and it makes sense why she feels the aesthetic is something she can simply play around in at will. Society has come to conflate Black culture with youth culture, and the ubiquity of social media has flattened any regional or cultural specificity to pretty much any trend. Black culture is everyone’s for the taking. As marathon cultural appropriator Ariana Grande once said, “I see it, I like it, I want it, I got it.”

Yuh

The unserious nature of the “LUNCH” video belies Billie’s attitude toward the fashion itself, which is why I personally am not that upset by it. To be frank, the aesthetic is too lazy of an attempt at looking like a stud for me to believe she truly sees herself as authentic wearing it. And perhaps that’s the energy she was trying to get across — but if it is, it begs the question: why choose to attempt Black aesthetic at all? You could just, not?

As with many aspects of Black fashion and culture, there is baggage that comes with it all. Even if Black and queer folks share marginalized status, their singular experiences are not interchangeable, and there are many people that live at the intersection of both identities. Studs are the ones being erased in this case — maybe unknowingly by Billie, but certainly explicitly by sapphic fans who simply think she is dressed “butch” in the video. You can’t simply don the uniform without the rigorous training that comes before.

If you do, you’re simply playing dress-up.

1. There is separate, intracommunity discourse about whether or not Billie has a right to even dress or identify as “butch",” given that she is ostensibly bisexual and not lesbian. Historically, butch has been a lesbian identity.

2. This is my understanding of stud identity, but as queer folks know, identity labels are complex. I’m sure there are trans men out there that embrace the label of “stud.”