fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #6056 ]

[ SECRET POST #6056 ]

⌈ Secret Post #6056 ⌋

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

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 48 secrets from Secret Submission Post #866.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

07. https://i.imgur.com/5hsol2y.png

uh.

Hrmmmmmmmm.
Well, no. I, personally, can't get off being penetrated, EVER, without direct clitoral stimulation, and it's usually better if no penetration happens at all.

I don't want to read about het sex, because i don't *like* het sex in rl, and don't want to have to imagine it/kinda-sorta live it when I'm reading smut. Slash eliminates that for me and trust me, there is no 'woman' in my slash smut pairings.

Same, but I have serious pain issues and can't even use tampons. Actually, I don't even want fingers. I haven't tried sex, but when it comes to just me, I stick with porn/erotica/fantasy and outside stimulation. And I don't want to read about things in vaginas. So I stick to M/M or sometimes F/F oral sex.

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tabaqui - 2023-08-06 02:22 (UTC) - Expand

OP

All of that is fair. I didn't mean to imply that one of the two partners in a slash scene was standing in for the opposite gender. It's more that I read an old entry a gay guy wrote on LJ, commenting on the ritual of 1-2-3 fingers / scissoring / etc in fanfiction, because needing to work someone's ass open was not something he'd encountered at all despite having quite a bit of penetrative sex with other men. And it coincided rather neatly with my experiences of anal sex, so I wasn't inclined to just dismiss what he was saying. The conversation was polite, lively, and interesting, but almost a decade old, and I haven't had an LJ in a long time.

That can still be found here, if you're curious, although LJ seems to have deleted and purged the original blog. https://web.archive.org/web/20180311001005/https://reverie-indigo.livejournal.com/5686.html

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tabaqui - 2023-08-06 02:22 (UTC) - Expand

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(Anonymous) - 2023-08-06 07:12 (UTC) - Expand

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(Anonymous) - 2023-08-06 12:00 (UTC) - Expand

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(Anonymous) - 2023-08-06 18:02 (UTC) - Expand

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tabaqui - 2023-08-06 15:02 (UTC) - Expand

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(Anonymous) - 2023-08-06 18:56 (UTC) - Expand

Is that a Georgia O'Keefe painting?

It is! "Grey lines with black, blue and yellow, 1923." I love her stuff so much.

What even are you talking about?

Anal sex is a thing that exists. Orgasm from prostate stimulation is a thing that works for some people, not everyone, but some. Also, yes, it often works well in fic, like vaginal penetration often works well in fic.

OP

The way anal sex is written in fanfiction reminds me more of an idealized version of how we're told het sex is supposed to go than of anal sex, specifically. The link I posted upthread in a reply to Tabaqui sparked many of the thoughts that developed into this secret.

To clarify, I think it's entirely valid for fanfiction to be doing things differently than reality, but when I notice that it is, I like to think about why.

... okay. This is certainly a take.

OP

Would it be worth making a secret about, if it was what everyone else already thought? But I didn't write it to mess with you (or anyone). It's honest conjecture.

But het sex is written in the same way in fanfic? Penetrated person has a lot of attention paid to them and their body feels great.

OP

Thanks for the picture choice, secret-making anon!

I actually... see what you mean OP. I do have to agree with the anon that said that it's not specific to only m/m smut, but as someone who reads m/m, and m/f I've definitely seen more of it in m/m.

I feel like the 'vibe' of anal sex being more like PIV in fanfic night more be a function of most fanfic writers being AFAB and therefore being more familiar (on average) with vaginal penetration than it is a function of those writers specifically trying to make anal sex be vaginal sex. Which also makes sense when you consider those who are AFAB don't have a prostate, so anal stimulation, even for those who enjoy it, will not replicate prostate stimulation. So some writers will probably be using the experience of clitoral stimulation to describe prostate and anal stimulation.

That said, most people AFAB cannot and will not ever be able to orgasm from vaginal penetration alone, so the majority won't be able to use that experience in their writing, and many probably aren't interested in adding orgasms to sex that they don't orgasm from themselves.

Sure, the fantasy of a reliable orgasm through penetration may be part of the appeal for some AFAB writers - but if so, gay men are just as guilty of idealising orgasmic anal sex above other sex in erotica.

The question of why AFAB people are drawn to male/male romance has been discussed to death for literal decades - and I think those arguments provide a more reasonable explanation than just 'male anal sex is an idealised version of PIV for fandom writers because orgasms'.

OP

Women don't have a prostate, but I'm not sure how fandom came to the conclusion that not having a prostate = not being able to find anal sex intensely arousing. For women also, the orgasms feel different, depending on what you're stimulating.

And here's where it also gets interesting: as far as I know, very few men can orgasm reliably from only anal penetration. Without paying any attention to their dick.

But I can certainly believe that writing like, "this doesn't work for you and you know it, but we'll pretend it works for this fictional character" is not conducive to getting horny. Which is exactly why I was saying that this wasn't a depiction of heterosexual sex as it is, so much as heterosexual sex as it was "supposed" to go. With penetration-only reliable orgasms.

As far as I'm concerned, nobody is guilty and none of this is wrong.

I'm well aware that it's been discussed to death. Often unjustly and unflatteringly. And every few weeks or months, someone trots the "women are fetishizing gay men by writing slash" allegation out somewhere in the comments on F!S. But I think you're misrepresenting what I said. And little of what I've read on the subject has seemed especially insightful to me. They seem more like theories driven by straight men finding the idea that women like slash uncomfortable, and wanting an explanation for that. And mostly coming up with "explanations" that are veiled criticisms. So, I reverse engineered an argument from what I know (and think) about enjoyable penetrative sex, and put it forward.

Does it have to be this deep? This is such an exhausting way of eventually getting to "slash is hot." Like... why can't it just be "slash is hot?" I genuinely don't give a shit what anyone thinks about that, for any reason at all.

Not OP - For you. It's exhausting for you, and that's fine. Some people don't find it exhausting. Some people like thinking about this stuff. Some people just like thinking about the underlying whys and wherefores of all sorts of things. Some people find it wholly boring and unsatisfying to begin and end with "slash is hot" when they have complex thoughts and feelings about the topic.

I'm ambivalent about a lot of OP's points, but I still appreciate where they're coming from, because I think about this kind of shit all the time, and no, it's not exhausting. Comments like yours are what's exhausting for people like me.

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(Anonymous) - 2023-08-06 14:08 (UTC) - Expand

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(Anonymous) - 2023-08-06 18:44 (UTC) - Expand

OP

I entirely support your being into it because slash is hot. It is.

The thing is, I've written slash for years. Curiosity is part of how I have fun with it.

"Slash is hot" used to be the answer slash fans gave non-fans in the olden days, even while amongst ourselves we dissected our reasons and talked about them, because we figured most non-fans were like you and didn't really care about answers when they asked "Why do you like slash?", that it was a rhetorical question that really meant "I don't understand the appeal of slash, and I just have to share my opinion with you, who likes it." So a simple answer was best.

But y'all kept on asking, so maybe, just maybe some of you really were interested, or would at least be discouraged from further sealioning if we gave you the long answers. But surprise, not only did you not care, you thought we were making them up because we were the ones who needed to justify liking slash to ourselves because "slash is hot" was too shameful and shallow.

So let it be known that we didn't come up with the long, self-reflective answers for your sake. We always had them. We just knew you didn't care and that whatever answer we gave, the short or the long, would be dismissed. Give a "slash is hot" answer and get told to examine your interest more. Come back with a long answer and get told you don't need to pretend your reasons are deep. You can't win.

I think I agree with a fair bit of what you're saying. I mean, I'm ace anyway, but in general I've always struggled with feeling like, in addition to my brain just not doing the whole attraction-to-other-people thing, my body also isn't very responsive.

And I think one of the things that makes M/M so appealing to me is that it's essentially a kind of fantasy space in which sex can be everything I wish sex was for me, that it's manifestly not. Namely, my characters can be wildly horny for each other and mutually unhinged about it. And then also, the sex itself can be effortlessly mind-blowing. Maybe they fuck with finesse or maybe they don't; it doesn't matter; everything feels maddeningly good, and they're perfectly compatible.

All of this can be done with M/F as well, but I find it a bit harder to fully let go of reality and lean into the fantasy with an M/F ship, because an M/F pairing isn't as wholly separate from my own experience of reality as an M/M pairing is.

So like, as far as anal sex in fanfic is concerned, it's not about the butt as a stand-in for the vagina, per se, but it's definitely about an alternative type of penetration that, because it's less familiar to me, can more easily function however I want it to for the sake of hotness.

What you describe is one solution, and more power to you for discovering what you like, but there's more *right* ways to enjoy sex and by trying to police that you act like a bully, much like the ignorant men and slash fans you are pointing to. You are right in posting your opinion as a secret, because it doesn't fly and is disrespectful.

Did you reply to the wrong comment or something? Because OP's secret didn't actually say any of the stuff you seem to be accusing them of saying. They didn't say there is a right way to enjoy sex, and they definitely never tried to "police" anything, so like...huh?

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(Anonymous) - 2023-08-06 20:12 (UTC) - Expand

I mean, as a feminist, yeah, I can see your point.

As a queer person--AFAB--who is ace, uh. No, actually, queerness is very important to me. The fact that it's not straight is very important to me.

I think you've got a valid opinion, but it really focuses on heterosexual cis women being the only people out here reading and writing slash and queer sex. So I don't think you're wrong but you're not 100% on the ball for everyone, and you might only be correct for a small percentage of slashers who fit a certain demographic.