[ SECRET POST #6056 ]

[case]

⌈ 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.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

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

[tabaqui]

That's interesting, yeah.
I think the prep thing came from real life and tropes being mixed. Most people when having any kind of sex for the first time (and a lot of fanfic is first times) need SOME kind of prep. That fandom latched onto 1-2-3 is the same fandom latching onto all kinds of other things (the tropes are endless).

And/or, maybe it was wish fulfillment coming from writers with partners who never bothered with prep or foreplay, who knows. I don't really see how it equates to het sex, though, because i've never read a het scene where there was any kind of fingering prep, unless it was just foreplay kind of thing.

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

You've got a point that fingering isn't common in het scenes. But the idea that you're risking injury for your partner if you don't take a while with foreplay seemed like ... it appealed because it gave the het idea that foreplay was a responsibility teeth. (I could also mention that the prevalence of rimming, and a lot of the imagery and word choices fandom has adopted for describing it, seem much more suited to oral sex performed on women.)

I once read something online that I can't tell you for sure was the document that circulated, arguing that finger-insertion, scissoring, and plenty of lube were indispensible to writing "realistic" anal sex, but might have been. I think I found it thanks to reference links in Jenkin's fandom ethnography, Textual Poachers. By this point, it's absolutely a trope, but I think it crossed over from straight-person meta at a time when fewer people were drawing from direct experience when they wrote anal sex. Why we've still got it, pretty much unchanged, is up for speculation. IMO.

Found another guy who editorialized on the subject of gay sex, about 5 years back, in the process of replying, so I am including that, too. https://abeautifulblog.tumblr.com/post/175582781367/gay-sex-is-all-wrong-in-fanfic

[(Anonymous)]

I think you are right by thinking it's partly from straight sex experience crossing over, but to conclude that it's caused by toxic gender tropes in rl cis sex is overreaching, when a simpler and more likely explanation is that it comes from a lack of experience with gay sex, which of course cis women usually don't have.
As a cis woman writing slash, I write realistically about the acts, as I have actual experience with those (no 123 or self-lubing manginas in my fics), but I'm having no illusions about how well I can represent actual gay men. I try to do it with respect and honesty, but it will be an approximation. But that's okay, it's still fiction. And I'm by no means writing slash to compensate for my rl sexlife. It's a spice to add to an already very enjoyable part of life for me.

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

Not sure why you're reading "toxic gender tropes" into "fiction that treats a particular kind of (possibly non-essential) foreplay like it's really, really necessary." I'm not accusing anyone of anything bad, here.

I'm also not trying to single out any particular fan or their sex life. I think what this other guy wrote about why women writing slash was a really positive thing for him, as a gay man, and why antis should stop disguising their squicks in the supposed defense of communities they don't belong to, was incredibly on target. https://satans-tiddies.tumblr.com/post/172910706086/you-know-this-isnt-the-thing-that-fucks-me-up

But in very broad terms, I see a culture that's decided "this is fine" about women not being especially thrilled with penetrative sex, the way they're usually expected to have it, and women often feeling pressured to pretend they find that more satisfying than they do, and I see a lot of those expectations - that one can have mind-blowing sex by letting the person doing the penetrating control the action - translated into a kind of sex that they have less experience with. In fiction predominantly written by women. These things seem connected to me.

Also, I think the underlying ... why "women fantasize about slash" feels like a fraught subject because straight men wonder if their lovemaking being unskilled is playing a role in that. (In women fantasizing that men are brilliant at sex when they're touching a partner whose genitalia is entirely familiar to them.) The knee-jerk reaction in conversation is to reject that possibility outright, but it keeps coming up. So, maybe we could stop repeating the same things about fantasy sex if we explored it. Instead of immediately defaulting to "nah, that's got absolutely nothing to do with slash."

Don't feel pressured to read the links if you're not interested, they're only there because I kept finding things that seemed relevant to the conversation.

[tabaqui]

I think a lot of 'anal hurts' stuff came from, 1 - young and inexperienced gay fans, 2 - young and inexperienced het fans, and 3 - het fans that had tried anal with a partner who did NOT take care, or when they weren't really on board. If you're not into it, tense and unhappy, or feel like you're being forced by your partner (Or they just don't do any kind of foreplay or prep) anal can hurt a lot.

I've seen tons of straight guys all 'i talked my gf into anal!!!' like it's some kind of contest or something; i doubt those guys did more than slap some lube around and shove.

And the same for any inexperienced gay or bi, etc., fans; het sex hurts like fuck if everybody is clueless, in a hurry, tense, not using enough lube, etc., etc., so anal is the same.

And yes, like you said - for a long time, there were just NO LGBTQ PEOPLE in fandom spaces (OUT in fandom spaces) that you could ask, or if felt like you were crossing a line if you asked, etc.

Thanks for the link!

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

All of what you're saying about why people think it hurts seems likely to me. It's easy to hurt someone or get hurt when inexperience with sex intersects with "wanting to seem a lot more confident and knowledgeable than you actually are." When IMO, there shouldn't be any shame in treating each situation and partner like something to be explored, to whatever extent you and they need that.

>>i doubt those guys did more than slap some lube around and shove.

Unfortunately. And I've definitely seen guides online trying to correct that behavior like, "if you want her to have the kind of experience with anal that involves ever wanting to let you do that again, don't hurt your girlfriend by trying to do too much too fast, or by doing a perfunctory job trying to get her aroused, first. Porn stars have experience and they're being paid good money," and then explaining that having sex with another person should involve adapting what you do to what will feel good to them. All of which is important stuff.

But you've got a point that none of those issues are actually exclusive to anal.

And yeah - I think some of this may change (the lack of knowledge) just because the social cost of being openly uncloseted has dropped significantly since the laws got a lot less miserable to gay people in the US and the EU. But only if people actually explore the things they didn't use to feel like they could talk about.

Glad you liked the links!