fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #792 ]

⌈ Secret Post #792 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 18 pages, 450 secrets from Secret Submission Post #114.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 1 2 3 - not!secrets ], [ 1 - not!fandom ], [ 1 2 3 - too big ], [ 1 2 3 - repeat ], [ 1 - posted twice ], [ 1 - empty comment ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

n!s3: I think he was still working through his issues in the 1980s, but Moore's Promethea is an amazing series with a nearly-all-female cast, three of whom are gay women.

117: Duh, it's not about the female characters, it's about the female audience. Writing things to turn other women on - both emotionally and sexually - and being part of a writing movement that caters to women in ways that canons do not dare to, is something I find more fulfilling in a feminist sense than almost anything else I've ever done. The way you've put it, f/f porn would be something other than misogynist, so, fail.

119: I WANT TO KISS YOU. Superb, bloody, fascinating, indifferent as if he were invulnerable -

117. Now I really don't get it. Perhaps because I don't necessarily subscribe to the whole f/f porn = misogynist. Some of it is, some of it (especially those aimed at the lesbian and bi crowd) is not.

Fan fiction, in my experience, is largely directed at a female audience - be it gen, het, m/m, or f/f. Femslash also caters to women in ways canon doesn't dare to, and yet I don't see slashers raving about how feminist femslash is, because everyone seems too busy writing about a guy fucking another up the ass. Het can also be about breaking the boundaries of canon.

I just don't see how writing m/m automatically equals fulfillment as a feminism. I don't think it's wrong, and I don't think it's anti-feminist - except when a slasher says it's about feminism, then I go "lolWHUT?"

Femslash also caters to women in ways canon doesn't dare to, and yet I don't see slashers raving about how feminist femslash is - I'm kinda surprised by that; are you sure it's actually a difference of opinions rather than a matter of popularity, ie, there's just more women turned on by men than turned on by women? Because your statement doesn't strike me as controversial at all; of course femslash caters to women in ways canon doesn't dare to.

For me, the difference when writing het pairings is that I'm rarely treading on ground that canon seems averse to. Maybe because most of my het pairings are canon, I'm not sure.

We all find fulfilment in different places - nothing's ever automatic. But for me feminism comes into it because I'm writing for women, and building fanon with other women, while in the 'real world' genre writing supposedly HAS to be pitched to appeal to men.

!!! I couldn't figure out why I didn't agree with this secret, but you articulated it perfectly for me. Thank you. It's about women having opportunities to own their sexualities when we constantly have society telling us we're not even supposed to have sex drives, and about subverting patriarchal tropes about the male gaze by making it all about the female gaze.

On the other hand, a lot of slash writers are steeped in internalized misogyny (which isn't their fault, though one hopes they'll eventually grow out of it), and this shows in their writing. But the OP seems to be conflating the acts and attitudes of certain writers with the genre as a whole, which is why the secret bothered me so much.

Wut? Don't you see the magazines, movies, TV, songs, everything constantly pushing smut on everyone? Yes, the old-fashioned types are against it, but they're not the mainstream.

The magazines, movies, TV and songs want women to enjoy being looked at by men, not to be the ones doing the looking & the desiring. Smut in fandom is a different beast.

My personal problem with your take on this issue is that you seem to completely dismiss the role of representation, in both source-fic and fan-fic. Male-slash may help build a female community behind the screens, but it still carries the implicit message that that's the only place a woman can express and enjoy herself and become important. If even a community ruled by women allows only men to be actually present on the stage, they are still assigning themselves submissive roles compared to men.

Isn't that like saying that the male-run market for pornography featuring women makes men submissive because it's all about making women present on the stage (for male consumption)?

The only people made to be absent in heterosexual porn are homosexuals, which is a different kettle of fish. Heterosexual porn doesn't make men submissive unless it makes the women dominant. Unfortunately, it still makes women submissive more often than men purely out of habit, but taking one gender out of the equation and resorting to either male or female gay porn does not take away this inequality. It just allows you to run away from it.

You don't solve inequality with segregation. That's been tried before.

I think we're speaking at cross purposes a little - I wasn't speaking of 'heterosexual' porn specifically but of mainstream porn as a genre that exists to objectify women, ie. including solo and f/f porn for men as well as m/f, and with focus primarily on female bodies even in m/f. In mainstream pornography the female gaze is absent, no matter what bodies are on screen. This isn't 'habit', it's the sole point of the genre.

You're not thinking enough about who it's for, imo. And because most people are heterosexual (I'm not, fwiw) sexual stimulation (esp. visually) is always going to be somewhat segregated, though I'd hope we could live and let live more.

117. But everything you say here about slash is true of fanfic in general. M/M slash doesn't have a monopoly on being a women's space for writing women's desire against the grain of canon.

This is pure anecdata, so I'm open to being told my experience has been unusually skewed in this regard, but in the fannish spaces where I lurk every so often the question will pop up (often from a newbie or a mundane) "Why do people slash". There're always lots of answers of course, but the two that pop up again and again are

1. Because it's hot.
2. Because the female characters are all boring.

I'll give you the first one as a feminist aspect - female desire written and performed by subverting the pop culture of the patriarchy = pretty awesome.

But the second one certainly problematises that. Het has problematic tropes of its own, of course. Still, I've not yet met any convincing argument as to why m/m slash is an inherently more feminist form of writing than any other kind of fic.

*nodnods* I kind-of agree with you about it being true of fanfic in general, but I think the Bechdel problem is hiding in the background here; female characters are often constrained to their interactions with men, and making shipfic out of that doesn't add a lot to me in most circumstances. (I think that's why female characters are 'boring' too; they're rarely written with as many varied social and emotional connections as men are).

The other thing about f/f and m/m is that, as I think a comment further down this page said, it separates 'female' from 'love interest'. I have a squick for gender roles in relationships, and while het can go past that (or slash can fail to, urgh), I think building romances without gender differences is an interesting investigation - dunno whether that's feminism or just gender studies, though. I'm not sure how common it is for women to come to slash in order to get away from conventional het roles, but it's what I'm doing. So being told it's nothing to do with feminism is strange - to me, it's at least niggling at the same questions even if you don't rate its contribution as positive.

[ SECRET POST #792 ]

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