The topic that will never, ever die

[owlmoose]

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.

Comments

[sarasa_cat]

Interesting links. I've bookmarked for later reading. Thanks for posting these.

I generally prefer to stay out of these debates for a potpourri of reasons. I come in with years of thinking in this area (academic, practical) and I find that tumblr, LJ, and DW seem to foster flames more than discussion so... I just stay out. In fact, I might even avoid tumblr for the next few days.

I'm starting to believe that the only way to sanely discuss these issues is in a semi-moderated face-to-face panel.

[owlmoose]

The discussion hasn't taken off that broadly, for once, so you should be able to stay out of it if you like. It's mostly that I saw the first post I linked reblogged a few times, and I wanted to respond to it, but i don't like having these kinds of discussions on Tumblr so I moved my reply here.

I do agree that a lot of people use fandom for escapist writing/reading, which might mean less of an audience for "problem" stories. (Although I disagree that candy and literature are necessarily exclusive of one another. There is some brilliant lightweight stuff out there.) And I fully cop to writing mostly lighter stuff myself -- not fluffy bunny stories, necessarily, but ones that don't closely engage with socially problematic issues raised by the source material. I have meta for that.

[sarasa_cat]

Tumblr is very poorly designed for any kind of discussion. :/

I guess it is a matter of picking nits, but I'd shelve the brilliant lightweight fic in the literary bucket. To me, the "candy" is the stuff that does *nothing more* than clearly follow a well-known, accepted, popular genre such as genre romance, action-adventure, etc. Anything that subverts a popular genre or knowingly adds a "wink-wink" knowing layer on top of the genre gets reshelved as lit in my fanfic card catalog system.

For the past six years, 90%+ of my fic directly engages with socially problematic issues and, after writing a half million words, I feel safe saying that at least for the fiction I write, if I want to attract an audience in the US and CA (and, to a much lesser extent, UK, AU, NZ), I need to keep my socially problematic issue stories focused on m/m relationships and I need sprinkle some irony and knowing-author into it.

On the other hand, if I write for a continental European audience, I can get away with writing straight up psychological/sociological realism with m/f or a mix if m/m and m/f.

All I know is that I have 6 years of tracking data on my stories, including 250k words of stories that are now unavailable, and this is what the analytics plus comment count tell me.

When I compare this to best seller lists in north america versus europe, current trends in publishers weekly, differences between prize winning fiction in the commonwealth versus the U.S., etc., the little trend I see in fanfic makes sense from a larger demographic standpoint.

[sarasa_cat]

Although, I didn't mean my comment above to sound flippant.

Btw, one of the best comments I've heard repeatedly about why some women like to read/write m/m slash is because it removes obvious gender inequality from the story and they want to write "happy feels" fic where there is no sense of compromise -- the outcome is a clear win-win.

Given that most of the fic I write (m/m, m/f, f/f, or m/f/m) purposefully magnifies inequality in order to explore uncomfortable situations, I have learned that a lot of the fic I write is not fandom-majority's cup of tea. (At least, not in the US--my most faithful followers for the past 6 years are almost entirely in Germany.)

I admit ignorance to what is being discussed today on tumblr but something that I *repeatedly* see left out of these conversations is how many authors and readers are purposefully creating/seeking a world in fic that is far more equal than our world. Not surprisingly, one way for creating that equality is to remove or downplay the unequal elements. To put this in FFXII terms, Vossler/Basch is far more socially equal than Basch/Ashe or, gods forbid, Vossler/Penelo. And, if someone does write Basch/Ashe, they often recast the two characters as the WhiteKnight/Princess-Classic trope, which, despite its hetero-normative faery tale origins that are rooted in m/f inequality, feels "safe" due to its safe, fantasy normativeness. (Writing Basch/Ashe as an age-inappropriate, power-battle with Ashe at the *losing* end is guaranteed to be ignored by mainstream fandom ... when I've written Vossler as a creepy misogynist, fandom consistently passes it up unless Basch/Vossler is strongly featured in the story).

For a DA example that I see over and over again, a lot of people in Cullen/FemMage fandom insist on recasting Cullen as a dashing hero. To be honest, the best, in-character Cullen/Mage stories I've read are all M/M: Cullen/Anders, Cullen/GarrettHawke. This, I think, is related to something nyx and I discussed many years ago (and related to the above): fandom is far more receptive uncomfortable story conflicts that involve two male characters than uncomfortable story conflicts that involve a male/female pair.

(my semi-snarky take is that fandom usually prefers candy, over literature, but I say this with great reluctance because this comment, when taken out of context, becomes troll bait.)

[zen_monk]

I kinda glanced through the post, but it lost me when it's going into the history of how gay men are being treated and how gay women are being treated. It's an ethnocentric view, and doesn't offer from what place she came to that conclusion where it's like that. Is it in Victorian England? In Napoleonic France? What about how Vikings treat homosexuality in representation, when it's shown that they held up women in a more progressive stance than Christians did during Medieval times.

If this person's talking about history, why not reference Asian representation of homosexuality. Or the Middle East? If this person is just talking about popular media, then this person would have to address how Yaoi and BL is being shown in popular media since that's a large part of fandom.

What I think this boils down to is that this person seem to think that femmeslash is being held at a higher ground than slash, or is more expected, and I guess it made me conclude that what she's suggesting is to make slash as equally accepted in the same way as femmeslash is. Which is bullshit to me, since I can't think of a more accepted thing than male companionship in the entire swath of European literature and female companionship being devalued or to be made as an inferior counterpoint to dudes' narrative. Or that lesbians have been and are being compared to immature, frosty women who just needed the "right" man.

[owlmoose]

I think that particular post was very focused on depictions of homosexuality in modern Western media, because that was the context of the discussion, but I agree that taking a broader look at the topic would be illuminating. Because yeah, that has definitely varied depending on time and place and culture, so it's not really fair to make universal/blanket statements about it.

[alias_sqbr]

I wouldn't entirely agree with your summary of that post, it seems to me that they're mainly saying that the problematic portrayals of f/f in the media have ruined f/f erotica for them, not that it's an inherently problematic genre. Which I have absolutely no problem with, I'm not wired that way but we all have different squicks and triggers etc. Their final paragraph is troubling though, since there is an unfortunate tendency in certain parts of fandom to go from "objectifying and writing porn about men is empowering" (sure) to "talking about being attracted to women, or writing porn about them, supports the Patriarchy" (noooo)

Personally, as someone who isn't all that much into explicit depictions of any sorts of genitals, this argument doesn't have much to do with me...except for the fact that it doesn't explain why non explicit m/m romance and friendship is more popular than non explicit f/f romance and friendship.

[owlmoose]

If they meant not to generalize the point, then at least for me they failed -- I would have liked to read it that way, but given the universal nature of the context they were describing, I had a hard time not seeing it as a general statement, or at least a very broad one.

"talking about being attracted to women, or writing porn about them, supports the Patriarchy" (noooo)

Yeah, that pretty much nails my issue with the thrust of this argument. I'm reminded of the bad old days, not so long ago, when people seriously argued that most female characters in mainstream media were so poorly created that the only properly "feminist" thing to do was to ignore them and write about the men. Fortunately we've (mostly) moved beyond that, but the undercurrent here is not so different.

...it doesn't explain why non explicit m/m romance and friendship is more popular than non explicit f/f romance and friendship.

Yeah. The particular debate I was following was focused on sexually explicit material, so that topic didn't really come up, but I agree that the broader question is just as important, and a much harder one to dismiss as personal preference a la kinks, sexual turn-ons, etc.

[sqbr]

The more I think about it the more I think I've just developed very, very low standards for overgeneralisation in "why we slash" meta. At least she acknowledged that non-slashers exist!

Yeah. The particular debate I was following was focused on sexually explicit material, so that topic didn't really come up, but I agree that the broader question is just as important, and a much harder one to dismiss as personal preference a la kinks, sexual turn-ons, etc.

*nods* I mean, I have heard some quite compelling reasons why some authors prefer m/m even for less explicit stories. You can't shame people into preferring stories about women, and trying will just make them annoyed and upset. But smug, illogical, dismissive self justifications for not even questioning the popularity of stories about men (or holding them up as somehow MORE PROGRESSIVE than stories about women or for that matter non binary gendered people) really get my goat.

[violacea]

You know I agree with you on this topic.

I stayed as far away from that whole conversation as I possibly could, aside from ranting at the roommate on our way home from work yesterday. It was better for everyone involved.