(no subject)

Hmm, this would go better if I didn't wait until the very end of the day to sit down and write something.

How about some news from the exciting world of homeownership? While I was on my road trip, our microwave died. Great timing, while poor T was just gearing up for a week of eating dinners at home alone. (He is a more than capable cook -- better than I am, really -- but he doesn't like to expend a lot of energy on cooking for one.) He tried his hand at repairing it, but it was well and truly busted, so we did a bit of research and found a shiny new replacement. While we were at it, we also replaced the dishwasher, which has been on its last legs for awhile, with one that we hope will be both quieter and more effective. The new models were delivered today, and the installer is coming to put in the new dishwasher tomorrow. (For some reason, Best Buy does these two things separately. It's okay because I'm not working, but I wonder how people who have less flexible jobs manage to get two days off in a row to wait for two separate people to come to their house.) The microwave we had hoped to do ourselves, but the install turns out to be more complicated than we'd hoped, so a friend is coming by tomorrow to get a look at it.

I'm hoping the net result of two spiffy new appliances in our aging kitchen will be a new house feeling without the work of moving. Because I hate moving. Appliance shopping is bad enough!

I will attempt to be more interesting tomorrow, I promise. :)

The topic that will never, ever die

So Tumblr is, once again, alight with discussion of slash versus femslash versus het, and all the various reasons why so many women chose to write slash, thereby focusing on male-centric narratives rather than female-centric ones, and people are accusing each other of sexism and homophobia and internalized misogyny, and I don't know why I am always compelled to comment on this topic, but... here we are.

The first thing I want to say, as always, is that it is the opposite of helpful for anyone to attack anyone else for writing what they write, 'shipping what they 'ship, loving what they love. People have a multitude of reasons for their preferences, all of which are very personal. And the "problem", such as it is, isn't about what any individual person writes/ships/loves, etc. It's about patterns and trends, and where they fit within our wider culture. So I hope no one ever takes anything I write on this subject personally, because that's not, and never has been, the point.

I could link to all kinds of things, but I'll start with this post, which focuses on the historical context of m/m versus f/f erotica and how differently they have been portrayed in the mainstream media. It's worth reading and not too long, but the quick summary is that men having sex with men has historically been positioned as shameful and degrading, when it's visible at all, whereas women having sex with women is presented almost exclusively for the male gaze. The author then suggests that the different contexts make it revolutionary to bring positive and joyful depictions of m/m sex into the spotlight, whereas shining the spotlight on f/f sex is more problematic.

I certainly understand where the author of the post is coming from, and agree to a certain extent, but whenever someone concludes that the solution to problematic depictions of women in the media is to write more about men, I get edgy. Why are women so quick to erase ourselves from the narrative? In a world that is so focused on men and their stories, why is our first instinct to perpetuate that imbalance rather than reclaiming the story for ourselves? It bothers me.

As always, I don't have any easy answers -- and I think it's more important to raise the questions, anyway, to think about them and keep them in mind as I make my own choices about what stories to tell. That's all I can really do, anyway.

As long as I'm on the topic of meta, I want to point the folks who don't follow me on Tumblr to these two really great bits of fandom meta: meta vs. criticism vs. critique and slash fandom and queer fetishization. These are some of the best pieces I've read on those topics in a very long time and can't recommend them too highly. They're both going into my toolbox of references, for sure.