(no subject)

[sebastienne]

sodding bloody internal candidates

Real world? What real world? I may have spent all of today travelling to Oxford and back for a pointless job interview, but that's not what matters right now. What matters is that Blake's 7 fandom continues to be the best thing ever. And has led to some interesting navel-gazing, which I'll cut to save your flists from pointless self-indulgent pseudo-psychology.

I have always, since before I knew what I was doing, been a slasher. Holmes/Watson, Sam/Frodo, Remus/Sirius, these ate their way into my psyche, clear from their canon interaction, between the ages of 10 and 13 and I have never been the same. The love shared between these men, I often pontificate, is the important and interesting thing. Whether they happen to be shagging or not is immaterial. And yet, as my internet browsing history will testify, this is not quite true. I enjoy m/m slash, seek it out, even in the case of Blake and Avon where I'm not sure that their relationship ever should or could be consummated in that way, really.

And it is, almost without exception, male/male fiction. Which I could understand, were I heterosexual - it would merely be the analogue of the lad's-mag "phwoar, lesbians" culture. Erotica featuring only the gender to which I am attracted - makes perfect sense.

Only I am not heterosexual. I am bisexual (pansexual), with a varying-in-degree-but-ever-present preference for women. Surely, then, I should enjoy m/f and f/f fic as much as m/m? Yet I do not seek it out.

possible explanations

i. subversion

Male homosexual acts carry a lot more opprobrium than their female counterparts. I get off on things which are forbidden. Therefore, m/m fiction is more desirable, because it is more forbidden.

ii. representation

I slash individual people, not their sexed bodies. Sure, I have my share of shallowness, but when it comes down to it I am interested about character and interaction and tension building up in canon. I slash people who have interesting canon interactions. And - just take a look at the Bechdel test - this almost never happens between two women. Whenever such tension happens between a man and a woman, their relationship almost immediately becomes the focus of the story, and the consummation or climax of their interaction is presented for us in canon. It becomes a lot less interesting to fic, in this case. Thus we're left with a situation whereby the majority of interesting untold stories are m/m.

iii. vicarious experience

m/m interactions are the only kind of sex I am never going to be able to have. So I want to read about them as much as possible, to expand my experience of the world. This is backed up by the way that I often enjoy (challenging myself by) reading fic about things that I'd never do in the real world. Details left to your twisted imaginations.

iv. greater opportunity for angst

a corollary of i., the more forbidden an act is, the more angst the participants can have about it. This makes for more fun fic, because I am a twisted and horrible person.


My money's on ii. as the primary explanation, with a side-order of i./iv. An interesting extension of ii. is this consideration: in a world where men and women were treated equally by our culture, would my sexual orientation be different? Would I be more 50:50 bisexual, because there would not be a gender-bias on "people who get it"? (Obviously my full Utopian vision, the one with the complete deconstruction of binaries, makes a nonsense of the very concept of "bisexuality". But as this whole post is predicated on a preference for one binary-gender-combination over others, I think I'm just going to stick within that framework for now.)

I'd be interested in your input on this one.

Comments

[deathbyshinies.livejournal.com]

For myself, I'm going to go with a combination of ii and iv, with the emphasis on the ii. This is also the most common 'explanation' for slash I've heard touted around fandom and academic studies of fandom.

Another interesting thing that can happen in good fic is the restoration of agency to female characters. I lovelovelove stories where this happens, and when it does, I'm often as enthralled by m/f pairings as m/m or f/f ones - Shoebox, in particular, has become the story of Lily and James almost as much as it is the story of Sirius and Remus, and I think it's all the better for it.

An interesting extension of ii. is this consideration: in a world where men and women were treated equally by our culture, would my sexual orientation be different?

Possibly, possibly not. As a side question: is is possible your attractions would stay the same, but your ability to recognise/act on them would be different? In what direction do you think that would pull you, taking into account both societal repression and the need to 'rebel' (for want of a better word) against it?

(PS. I just had a small dance around the room at the statement in your fourth paragraph)

[deathbyshinies.livejournal.com]

Ooh, and as a further aside: if ii is in fact the explanation we're going to go with, given that Pratchett actually *does* write whole books full of fully-realised female characters who interact almost exclusively with each other, I want to know why there isn't more Granny/Nanny slash in the Discworld fan community. Personally, I suspect ageism has a lot to do with it, possibly coupled with an insidious feeling that one or both of them might be looking over your shoulder while you're writing it.

[sebastienne.livejournal.com]

I was about to say that Granny/Nanny, for me, is like Holmes/Watson or Sam/Frodo; that it doesn't matter if they're shagging or have shagged, it's the *great and epic love* that matters. Only.. I've actively sought out Holmes/Watson and Sam/Frodo fic, but I never have Nanny/Granny. The only Discworld fic I've ever sought out has been Vetinari/Vimes. Which is probably less canonically obvious.. something else is going on here. I think Vetinari/Vimes may have been recommended as a pairing, and of course I'm a huge Vetinari fangirl. Maybe that's enough, as an explanation.

Perhaps, though, there is ageism in there. I don't think that my difficulty thinking of Granny-as-we-know-her-now in sexual contexts is *just* ageism, though.

[deathbyshinies.livejournal.com]

I *would* advance the suggestion that it might have something to do with Nanny being presented as sooooo heterosexual, and Granny being presented as sooooo asexual... but that's never stopped the Sirius/Remus shippers, or even the Sam/Frodo (hello, thirteen children!) ones.

Is is possible that Pratchett is better able to present these fully-rounded, extremely convincing and *human* female characters when they are aged to a point where he feels he doesn't have to 'deal with' sex any more? Even though we hear a lot about Nanny's sex life, it's all safely filed away in the past (well, mostly) and, as you've pointed out, always played for comedy in any case. If he was to write a novel with Young Nanny as the main character, would I find her vaguely disturbing and sad in the same way I do Angua?

Sorry if I'm threadjacking - but the politics of sex and gender in the Discworld are eeeeeeenteresting! (To me, at least).

[sebastienne.livejournal.com]

I would say that Sam's bisexuality is one of the clearest things I take from LotR. That in the body of the text, in the mainstream, as it were, he marries and has thirteen children; and that in the subtext and the appendices, in the fringes and hints, he lives forever with Frodo.

I think that's the thing; Nanny is so open and comfortable with her sexuality, that if she slept with women, we'd know about it.

I think I would take very well to reading about young-Nanny, because of knowing the future-context she fits into: in much the same way that it was great to read about young-Granny in whichever book that's in.

In what ways do you find Angua disturbing and sad? I know we've talked about it before but I'm afraid you'll need to refresh my memory. Is it the rubbishness of her relationship with Carrot?

[necaris.livejournal.com]

I was going to ask that -- who might you shipping Angua with? Gaspode ;-)? (Now that *would* be disturbing and sad...)

[deathbyshinies.livejournal.com]

I don't have access to a copy of Men At Arms at the moment, which is really annoying for the quoting, but there's a particular line in the section where Angua has run off after she and Carrot have sex for the first time (he woke up to find a werewolf in bed with him, attempted to beat it to death, succeeded in chasing it [her] out into the street), and Gaspode has to try to find her, talk her down and bring her back. He explains to her that anything that's half a wolf and a half a human is actually pretty close to being a dog, and that Carrot is her 'master, see?'. That if he calls, she'll always *have* to follow. (Anyone who can correctly quote this for me, I'll be very appreciative!)

That just seems to me like the most depressing possible basis for a relationship. Even *if* you read it with S&M overtones - going back to the man who's just tried to hit you in anger (even though he didn't know what he was doing), not because you want to, not because you forgive him freely, but because your 'instincts' as a w______ (fill in the blank for yourself) are making you. And you know that, at least at this stage of the series, she's at least 75% sure that Carrot is *right*, and that she *is* a monster.

BTW, this line is made infinitely worse in the stage adaptation, because it's given for some Briggs-only-knows-why reason, to Colon. *shudder*

And then there's the scene at the end of the book where he carries her poor dead monstrous corpse into the moonlight and brings her back to life, and we're supposed to think he's all wonderful and accepting and the beeeeest boyfriend in the world, and I just get twitchy instead. And the way in which he's always trying to 'teach' her things (this was worse in the earlier books, but is still there to some degree), and the way in which he tended to discount her problems with Sally, and the fact that she *still* isn't a Captain even though Carrot was promoted within five minutes of joining the watch, and the jokes about how they can't get married because 'people get funny about dogs on the furniture, especially when it's the throne'... they all add up to a portrait of a relationship that's throughly unequal, and slightly icky.

In answer to necaris, I don't ship her with anyone else besides Carrot - I just wish he treated her as well as he gets credit for.

[sebastienne.livejournal.com]

There's something in that which I'd never quite drawn out before - the fact that he doesn't mind she's a werewolf is not, in itself, anything special. It's the first step! So, hey, you aren't a bigot, great - other things are supposed to build on that. Like mutual love and respect. Not grovelling gratitude that he's the only non-bigoted man you've ever met.

Aargh.

[deathbyshinies.livejournal.com]

Yay, I ruined Pratchett! :D

[sebastienne.livejournal.com]

Oh, I already had him down as imperfect due to the fatphobia.

But he's still doing a hell of a lot better than most other authors out there...

[andustar.livejournal.com]

Weird. I see shedloads more erotic tension between Vetinari and Vimes than Granny and Nanny. In fact I feel the latter is barely there at all (it certainly hadn't occured to me before) while the former is practically canon (tension, rather than shagging).

That said I don't read or write fic so hey.

[sebastienne.livejournal.com]

Oooh, interestingness.. I respond very strongly to people who reject society's gender norms: dykey girls and boys in make-up. Hot! So if it was more acceptable for girls to be dykey and boys to wear make-up, I really don't know if I would a. suddenly be surrounded by hotness or b. not find those things to be erotic triggers any more.

In a world without homophobia, I would act more on my attractions towards women. In a world without fatphobia, I would act more on my attractions towards people I have not thoroughly-sounded-out-first. Easy. OK. In a world without gender bias? I really don't know. Why is it so tricky? Perhaps because it is so very far from the world I live in...

[janetmweiss.livejournal.com]

I think I tend to go with sort of perverted (no pun intended) versions of iii and ii.

I'm not the most girly-girly of women, but I definitely am a woman all the same. I know what it's like to experience sex and romance and love through a female body and mind and while I'm sure these experiences differ between women, part of me can't help but feel they can't differ THAT much (not true, I know, but emotions don't have to be rational).

On the other hand, I have no idea what it actually feels like (to the man) when, say, a guy is getting a blow job. I've got a blank canvas and am free to make it feel however I want. I can imagine two guys together feeling things which are not in the least bit physiologically or psychologically correct -- reality doesn't intrude to tell me I'm being unrealistic.

Now, this may be stating the obvious but when I read slash, I want the characters to get turned. The men in slash that I read and write can get off on the slightest touch or the most severe pain, the most ridiculously effeminate lovey-dovey stuff or sheer emotional abuse and I buy it. I've completely disconnected the psychology and physiology of men from my own feelings. When I read fanfiction/erotica/whatever involving women, a little voice keeps popping up in my head saying, "She wouldn't get off on that!" (whether "that" refers to something physical or emotional or whatever) whereas when I read slash, I'm totally fine with the guys getting off on everything.

As for ii, I find...for lack of a better to explain this, I find archetypes really sexy. Anything that's kind of cliched and stereotypical, I'm all over it. Things like girls playing innocent (and then progressively not so innocent) games of truth or dare at a sleepover. Boys getting canned in English boarding schools (um, sorry to objectify your culture there). Seedy gay bathhouse culture in the 70s. That kind of thing. And because most of history is really the history of men, there are just a lot more of these types of scenarios involving men than involving women.

And I'll also add a reason v: So much pornography involving women is SO MIND-NUMBINGLY TERRIBLE that any f/f porn I watch or read has sort of a burden of proof to overcome. I go into it expecting it to be bad and it has to be superb before I'll even consider it acceptable. HA! Sort of like the experience of women in the workplace. I'm a sexist bastard :(

[janetmweiss.livejournal.com]

Oh, and this sort of seems to contrast f/f stuff vs. m/m stuff while totally ignoring m/f stuff. Re: m/f stuff, I say just this: It's been done. Yawn.

I do enjoy some m/f stuff, but it has to be one of the following things:
1) Subversive in some way
2) About an m/f couple I strongly believe should be together but are not (rare! Especially on tv shows. It's hard to find a TV show that shows the sex lives of its characters wherein the female characters haven't been involved with the majority of the male characters and vice versa)
3) About an m/f couple wherein I am strongly attracted to both individuals in the couple

If societal norms were different, then these reasons probably wouldn't apply and I'd probably rank m/m slash and m/f stuff almost the same (since they both have at least one male whose sexual responsiveness I can totally skew).

[sebastienne.livejournal.com]

(I totally objectify my own culture so it would be hypocritical of me to complain)

I really like the idea that fic involving men allows complete freedom to accept & imagine any response. I hadn't thought of it, and it probably does mean that I can read a wider range of stuff without going "wtf no, women don't *work* like that".

[ayaron.livejournal.com]

In light of this I wonder whether people can comment on whether its mainly women who write/read m/m slash. I've never come accross many men who do (they just won't keep still, dammit!). Even allowing for the fact that a straight man might just not be interested, would, say, a gay man be constantly thinking "wtf no, men don't *work* like that".

Is there a community of men out there writing and reading f/f slash? And by that I mean men, not adolescents. And even then I doubt there would be much as male teens are lazy and seem to prefer pictures.

Note I'm asking about general trends here, there are obviously always exceptions.

I've sought out and read some erotic writings in the past but I've never had the desire to seek out any form of slash, and still don't. I find myself shipping characters now but I think its more that I'm spotting the possibly imagined or accidental subtext now and thinking about what Sebastienne would say about it.

[sebastienne.livejournal.com]

Slash fandom definitely does contain a majority of women. There is the old generalisation which certainly seems to hold true to a certain extent, that women prefer written-word erotica, while men prefer images. It's not necessarily laziness; just a difference in the kind of stimulus which is most erotically effective.

I have not come across a community of men-who-write f/f, although I have come across individual men (it's much easier to aim).

It's interesting that you bring up gay men and m/m slash: it's an issue that sometimes troubles me. In my enjoyment of m/m slash on completely divorced-from-any-experience terms, am I co-opting and appropriating someone else's sexual identity? Am I as bad as the lad's-mag editors who make "lesbian" mean "bored/lonely horny femme who's just waiting for the right cock to come along"? I do not, consciously, know any gay men in fandom. I wonder if they find m/m slash ridiculous, fetishising, exclusionary?

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

Veteran Doctor Who fan Tat Wood writes in About Time, volume six - apparently from a gay perspective - that he doesn't consider slash part of what he'd consider to be Doctor Who fandom (historically, he has a point, though I don't like his exclusionist tone), and says that it generally has no idea of what gay men do with each other (which is probably missing the point).

[sebastienne.livejournal.com]

I think it both is, and isn't, missing the point; while the majority of slash-readers probably don't care about the realism (indeed the B7 fanzine I finished this afternoon contained the disclaimer "I have since been told that one of the activities in Chapter 6 would in fact be impossible to perform"), it worries me on a political level that male/male sexuality being appropriated in this way could be damaging to gay men. I would not want to be responsible for making other people feel the way that the existence of lad's-mag lesbianism makes me feel in certain company.. violated, misrepresented, misunderstood.

Though I suppose there's a diference, there - lad's-mag lesbianism pervades mainstream culture, whereas, to have a comparable experience, a gay man would, I think, have to be thrown right into the middle of fandom. It's niche.

[deathbyshinies.livejournal.com]

It's not necessarily laziness; just a difference in the kind of stimulus which is most erotically effective.

I think this is true to a certain extent: there's also another element of it, which ayaron and I were talking about last week. I personally find that 99.99999% of visual porn depicting women serves to trigger off self-comparison and body image fretting, rather than any kind of sexual feeling, and I'm more than willing to bet I'm not the only woman who feels this way. (There are certainly men who do too, and I'm pretty sure that's who a lot of those pseudo-lesbian films are made for: twice the sexay ladees, no threatening buff bloke to get in the way!).

This, I think, is where the function of alternative pornography and burlesque becomes extremely important in depicting and sexualising a range of different body types, and forcing the representation of something that refuses to conform to the mainstream definition of 'sexay' into accessible view.

[ayaron.livejournal.com]

Or, as Jeff puts it in Coupling (stop giving away all our secrets Moffat!), 'lesbian' porn gives less chance of eye-slippage or worse having the director cut to a close up of the man's face as he orgasms for no readily apparent reason (perhaps its just a personal perspective but I agree with Robin Williams, when women come they look beutiful and serene or ecstatic, when men come (and here I am using the term in its usual sense, by which I mean simple ejaculation not orgasm (topic for another time perhaps)) we look like Goofy) at the worst possible moment.

I do agree that a wider type of body types should be portrayed in porn. If you want a recomendation European, especially German, porn tends to be better at representing normal looking people in a sexualy attractive way as opposed to the cookie-cutter blonde types that infect the American industry (problem with German though is they are obsessed with watersports for some reason...).

(one fears I've revealed a little too much here)

:O)

[sebastienne.livejournal.com]

Everyone looks a bit stupid when they're having sex. For me, it's part of the intimacy - knowing that they've dropped the act, getting to be my own ridiculous self, it's liberating. At the same time, though, the orgasms of people you'd like to take to that point are always going to look more interesting than those you have no interest in, right?

[annalytica.livejournal.com]

Have you seen this discussion on the F-Word?
http://www.thefword.org.uk/blog/2008/07/ask_a_feminist_2#comments

Anecdotally, the only women I know who would admit to being turned on by the idea of two men are bisexual - judging from people I've talked to about it heterosexual women don't seem to be interested. But admittedly that's a fairly small sample!

[sebastienne.livejournal.com]

There are definitely a lot of heterosexual women in fandom who get off on m/m stories. But then, as I am reluctantly learning, Fandom Is Not Like The Real World...

I find that discussion interesting; mostly because I have kissed girls *all over Oxford*, in the street, in nightclubs, at house parties, in cafés, and I can count on one hand the number of possessive/objectifying comments I've ever received.

I wonder if it's because I'm not male-standards-of-beauty enough for them? Would I get a lot more abuse if I were thinner?

While lad's-mag-lesbianism does get my back up, I really can't see what effect women-kissing-women-and-incidentally-pleasing-men has on my life. The gods know I'm guilty of making men (consenting friends of mine!) of all sexualities (but often straight) kiss one another for the voyeuristic pleasure of myself (and other fangirls in the room - this is mostly at parties).

But does this all just come down to the fact that I'm based in Oxford - and therefore not surrounded by idiots?

[annalytica.livejournal.com]

(gratuitous picture of girls kissing at a party to male approval taken from Penny and Aggie http://www.pennyandaggie.com/index.php?p=712 )

It's only going to affect your life if a lot of the people you come into contact with believe that lad's mag lesbians are actually the only kind of lesbians, and therefore that any women they might happen to see kissing must be doing it for men's entertainment. I'd like to hope that Oxford isn't the only place where that's not the case.

I was at a pub quiz last week (in Oxford) where one of the teams was called "Lesbians are better on film". I wasn't sure what to make of that. Better in what respect?

[crouchinglynx.livejournal.com]

I've not read much of any of the three arrangements, only following occasional recommendations. My experience has been that f/f is laughably bad, while much of the f/m is... what's the phrase for "pass the sickbag"? schmoop? - as well as often having been implied within the canon[*]. Whereas the m/m, having more characters to play with, tends to find something more interesting to do. So that's a big vote for (ii).

I'm inclined to say it's the subversive aspect (i), but I'm not sure it's that valid an argument any more with the popularity/general recognition/notoriety of m/m. I have no statistics on the comparative amounts of each that have been written, but my friends outside of fandom use "slash" to refer to specifically m/m; whereas I'd always assumed that, being a description of the punctuation, it could cover any pairing.

[*] This would be a place where classic Who might provide better pickings than a lot of canons - many stories do pass the Bechdel test, and the show rarely even hinted at relationships. But this is exactly where I find the straight ships that I can't even be bothered to skim-read past the first paragraph - so maybe that's a stronger argument for (i).

[sebastienne.livejournal.com]

I do use "slash" to talk about the punctuation-object that divides a pairing; but people do try to argue me down, tell me I should talk about "slash", "femslash", and "het". But I resist.

It's interesting to consider that m/m fiction might be growing in acceptance; certainly I remember vividly reading the Sunday Times Style Magazine 5 or 6 years ago, only to turn the page and be shocked to find my-secret-internet-life published for all to see: a "Theban Band" photomanip of Sam and Frodo was adorning a journalistic piece normalising slash fanfic as something that "regular heterosexual women" write.

[ex-leighwoos982.livejournal.com]

Hey. I'm sorry But I'm going to have to ask you to defriend me. It's all my own fault but it's necessary. I'm sorry.

[anotherusedpage.livejournal.com]

Thinky thoughts about this one pending my not being in Edinburgh. Some of it comes down to.... homosociality is expressed in a sexualised way in a lot of literature, ie not only are there more characters what we love, but there also more likely to touch in ways we can easily interpret as sexual/homoerotic.

Some of it is also People Who Don't Express Their Feelings Properly kink.