[ SECRET POST #6474 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #6474 ⌋

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


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[Farscape]



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05.
[Rings of Power]



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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 07 secrets from Secret Submission Post #925.
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)]

Not OP, but it seems stunningly obvious to me that in an ABO universe, alpha/omega would be considered the PRIMARY sex/gender, because it's the one with the giant physiological and reproductive consequences. "alphas" would be CALLED male, and "omegas" would be called female, based on who gives birth. You know, like how societies largely determine sex in the real world. Alpha/omega being the "Secondary sex" is nothing, it's just an excuse to write hot guys with cunts and babies without having to actually make them "women" in the writer and reader's consciousness. Tits and hips and mustaches are literally secondary sex characteristics. What WE think of as men and women should be "secondary" to people in ABO world.

I get that it's kink, and I wish people who enjoy it every happiness with their kink, and I KNOW there's lots of rich fascinating worldbuilding-centric ABO fic out there that's eager to explore the social implications, but I don't think it's actually possible to worldbuild away the fundamental underlying cognitive dissonance of "extreme intense/kinky caricature of female sexual experience but we get to pretend it's NOT about or happening to women". Which is valid! Porn does not have to be logical! But it's not my favorite porn and I hate people pretending it's logical.

[(Anonymous)]

What would betas be called? What about in worlds where alpha females and omega males have both parts?

[(Anonymous)]

This resonates with me, because I have a frustration with fandom's bypassing of the realities of female sexuality (and of being female in general) that I've never been able to shake. There are so many fandom conventions that appear to stem from either a discomfort with female bodies and the way that they work; or with the fact that there are female competitors for objects of attraction, and a total denial in many spaces that either could be at play. Some people will come right out and say that they're jealous of other women, or that they don't like thinking about their own bodies when it comes to sex, and so they only read and write about men. But it's almost impossible to have a larger conversation about these things. And it wouldn't have to be an accusatory or recriminatory conversation! It could be us trying, together, to get to grips with what it means to have a female body.

And yes, of course, nothing has to be logical, when it comes to kink. Or -- perhaps better to say that kink should be expected to have a different logic, an almost Freudian one. But nonetheless, much ABO does seem to be about taking the female side of reproduction and disconnecting it from femaleness, as so much else does.

[(Anonymous)]

Eh, I guess the problem I have with your wanting to have a larger conversation about these things is the same problem I have in general when people want to have a larger conversation about political stuff in fandom, which is that porn is porn, fandom is a hobby, and people disagree on their attitudes toward fiction and so a conversation would just be round 50 of a heated internet argument and I'm tired. I don't begrudge people who want to navel-gaze about their porn and who want their fanfic to be an expression of their politics, but I personally find it kinda tedious and cringe, especially if the navel-gazing is done by someone who doesn't have a lot of life experience and so is like... "wow, why is no one talking about this?!" when the reason why no one is talking about this is because it's already been hashed out to death, and everyone else is like 5 rounds of discourse ahead in the conversation.

Everybody has to start somewhere so, again, I don't begrudge people who are psychoanalyzing their own and everyone else's kinks. It just gets a bit tedious, especially in F!S, where this topic comes up a lot and I get the feeling that it's the same people stuck in the same parts of the discourse, who aren't really updating on new info.

Like, to respond to the points you're making in your comment (and a lot of what I'm saying here has been said many times here and elsewhere before), part of the reality of having feminist ideals of gender equality but existing in a world of (1) biological differences between sexes that put women in different roles than men (at the very least, child-bearer, as well as things related to but not necessarily entailed by that role -- child-raiser, home-maker, etc.), and (2) sexism that imposes other gender roles and stereotypes on men and women (e.g. women are passive, submissive, emotional, etc.) is that there is going to be some amount of cognitive dissonance when writing iddy sexual-fantasy escapist porn.

People deal with this cognitive dissonance in different ways.

Strategy 1: By scrubbing problematic gendered power dynamics from porn. There are no defined gender roles in relationships. No unnecessary dom/sub dynamics in sex, and when it is largely unavoidable (e.g. penetration happens at some point), characters switch and have no stable preference. Women might dominate or penetrate more than half the time due to the desirable counter-stereotype effect (e.g. femdom, strap-ons, pegging are popular kinks). Having M/M and F/F relationships are fine, but because they are same-sex, it doesn't take much imagination to depict them as gender equal. But on no occasion should M/M and F/F relationships simply replicate gendered sexist M/F relationships i.e. having one character be consistently dominant and the other be consistently submissive; or one character always receives and one character always penetrates -- possibly even having biology that facilitates (or determines!) this. The goal here is to REMOVE sexism from porn, not add gratuitous sexism to same-sex relationships where it doesn't already and doesn't have to exist. While same-sex relationships are fine, it's generally seen as more important to model truly gender-egalitarian M/F relationships to remove the cognitive dissonance around real-life M/F relationships.

Strategy 2: By divorcing gender roles from gender identity. For a lot of people (not everybody obvs) things like dom/sub dynamics, domestic fluff, aggression in sex, men, etc. are intrinsically sexy. But writing these things will often trigger that cognitive dissonance I mentioned, ESPECIALLY when it's an M/F pairing and it's the woman who is submissive, child-bearing, recipients of aggression, etc. and it's the men who are dominant, impregnating, active, etc. To escape this cognitive dissonance, the easiest way is to queer the genders. In an M/M relationship, you can get around stereotypes by having a counter-stereotype depiction of a man as passive, emotional, submissive, receiving, pregnant, alongside the stereotype-affirming seme/dark fuck prince side of the pairing. Similarly, with F/F, you can have the stereotype-affirming submissive bottom woman, but she's bottoming to another woman who is active, aggressive, ruthless, in charge, thus removing the cognitive dissonance that dom/sub dynamics in fiction usually trigger. What you (I'm guessing) see as "people reinventing sexist het with extra steps" is seen as a way to avoid associating gender roles or gendered behavior with a particular gender... while still getting your favorite kinks/dynamics/body types into the story. People who use this strategy tend to avoid writing het porn like the devil, or if they do write it, it will likely end up similar to that in Strategy 1.

Strategy 3: By divorcing porn from reality. Finally, a third strategy for dealing with cognitive dissonance is just to acknowledge that fictional tastes and sexual fantasy don't have to be "politically correct" or line up with values deeply held in real-life. You can be a feminist and also write about a woman being stalked and kidnapped as an intentionally sexy scenario. Or about a man having that happen to him. Or an omegaverse couple scenting and one penetrating the other with whatever biology you want, or whatever -- the world is your oyster, because you're writing porn, which is fiction whose purpose first and foremost is to be sexy (to the person writing it at a minimum; and maybe others also find it sexy). People with this strategy tend to write M/M, M/F, F/F, dom/sub, egalitarian dynamics, realistic sex, fantastical sex. I'm guessing you see this as just an irresponsible attitude to take toward fiction, as depictions of men and women in porn influences people's notions of what gender dynamics are and gender-stereotyped fiction leads to gender stereotype affirmation, so, no, "anything goes" isn't the right attitude to take here toward porn.

The above are three different strategies for coping with cognitive dissonance and while I regularly see people saying "my way is the best/only valid way" it honestly confuses me. They all seem legitimate strategies to me of trying to square sexuality/fictional sexual scenarios and gender-egalitarian ideals with a world that isn't very gender-egalitarian including in the ways men and women interact during sex and what sexual kinks and fantasies people have. They all seem to me to be attempting to advance feminism in some way (including advancing expressions of female sexuality as valid and normalizing them, which I view as a plank in the feminist agenda), but the way is different depending on the particular psychology and experiences of the person (if it isn't obvious, I am a Strategy 3 person (I write what I personally find sexy and don't expect people to view this as reflecting my real-life politics) and this is influenced by my personal experiences with sex/fantasy/fandom). If anything, I appreciate the diversity in strategy here, as I think they each accomplish different things (strategy 1: healthy depiction of het relationships; strategy 2: genderqueering/weakening of ability to associate gendered characteristics with a specific gender; strategy 3: normalization of female sexuality and the idea that fantasy and how you should actually treat women come apart). I think feminism is best advanced through a combination of these things.

Sorry for the essay, but I am just saying it IS possible to have a conversation about these things. People HAVE had a conversation about these things, many times. I also suspect that either you are very new/inexperienced with this discourse, or that you interpret other people as "ignoring" aspects of their behavior and not wanting to confront their sexism when actually it is most likely that people just strongly disagree with your characterization/depiction of their actions/motivation (in fact, things you mentioned play into gendered stereotypes of women as catty and jealous) and just have a different opinion than you as to what does or doesn't advance feminism in fandom. And may be tired unto death of having conversations like this in fandom where people just don't see eye to eye and sometimes the best way to deal with that is just to ignore each other in fannish spaces rather than have yet another conversation about it.

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you for this very interesting read! I think you've provided a pretty accurate analysis of the psychology behind trying to make "feminist" erotica, but I would caution that one shouldn't pigeonhole people who write 1/2 exclusively as necessarily doing so with deliberate intent to resolve their discomfort with regressive gender norms - legit, 1/2 are just the kind of porn that some people (exclusively) find hot. They are, in fact, employing strategy 3, but these are their particular tastes.

I say this as someone who really loves femdom, but finds people will get patronizingly *eyeroll* about it, like it's some kind of performative thing that people are required to do because that's the "woke" m/f dynamic of the age for afab people "uncomfortable" with their gender or what have you but the reality is I've been writing it since before I was on the internet because it's what I find hot.

[(Anonymous)]

The problem I have with this is the notion that people are employing these strategies out of some conscious attempt to advance feminism. I'm particularly put off by your suggestion that completely removing women, having it be all dicks all the time, is in fact feminist and a way to normalize female sexuality. My experience in many M/M spaces is that they are filled with misogyny. Not all, certainly, but to deny that at least some people avoid het because they actively dislike women is ridiculous, particularly when so many are very, very vocal about bashing the female characters who could potentially get in the way of their ships (and often have sections in their fanfic that reduce female characters to atrocious collections of negative stereotypes).

The idea that it can't be pointed out that women are sometimes jealous of other women, because that's a stereotype, is also ridiculous. Men are jealous of other men, as well -- intrasexual competition is a thing, for both genders! And if someone is writing awful, sexist screeds about the female love interest of a male character she finds hot, then saying, "oh no, there can't possibly be any jealousy here" is naive and betrays a total lack of understanding of basic human behavior.

But then, in general, I find that I hate the extent to which people will tie themselves in knots in order to get around the fact that there are fans, including women, who simply do not like women. "But you can't know for sure that this person who slags every woman they comes across and opines about how much better men are, and how much better fiction and porn are when it's only men, has a problem with woman! Maybe they're actually a feminist who's trying to normalize female sexuality!" Give me a damn break.

[ariakas]

You are correct, people love to divide and group and sort into a hierarchy; while they would obviously have a sex hierarchy based on alpha/omega/beta, I think it would be even more likely that the "secondary" sex of male/female would also get sorted into the hierarchy and you'd just have even more complicated bigotry. But yeah, ultimately, in an omegaverse setting no male omega would ever have been treated like we treat "men" or raised as a "boy" in our universe in the first place. Even in a setting where that "manifests" in puberty: a) this would have been one of the first things people bothered to come up with a hormone/dna test for, and b) more likely, you'd do what was actually pretty common in some cultures until a while ago and dress/treat boys/girls more similarly until the alpha/omega characteristics started to show, then alter their socialization completely.