Just a note: standard terminology is butch/femme rather than dyke/femme. I've always taken dyke to be a reclaimed derogatory term for any lesbian, so I (occasionally) label myself as dyke even though, as you might have noticed, I'm rather femme-y.

Butch/femme doesn't speak to my experience of lesbianism; then again, msot of lesbian media doesn't really speak to me. I don't think it's so much that a prejudiced mainstream media causes misrepresentation in lesbian literature so much as mainstream lesbian culture adopted the butch/femme mentality, so it's still the rubric under which many authors write. *shrug*

You make some valid points about society and moreover about my experience... I'm leading an incredibly sheltered, females-only existence. Yes, I hung out with boys in high school, and even some queer boys, but I had all of one year of high school before vanishing into the abyss of an all-girl's school. I've always known lesbians... lots of them. Family members, people at church, now my classmates. I don't know any gaymen personally (except the two friends from high school and people I know online) and certainly not as well as I know lesbians.

So yeah, maybe it is a matter of taboo and foreign-ness from my experience.