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Slash meta #1: please discuss!
Okay! I've begun reading a couple of recent-ish articles so I can have some non-anecdotal references for this article I'm writing, and came across this rather stunning sentence:
I'll be getting the book from interlibrary loan that has the essay that made this argument. I had an instant response to the comment, but rather than put out my thoughts, I'd like yours. I probably won't respond to these as I'm positing myself as an observer and will organize and interpret what happens later, but for anyone who has a thought on this who would like to share it, please do, and comment among each other. But play nice!!! No bashing on my LJ. Everyone is allowed to her own opinion.
For those who are interested, that argument came from an essay contained in the book Magic mommas, trembling sisters, puritans & perverts: feminist essays, edited by Joanna Russ and published in 1985. It's a bit older, but that premise still stunned me. And with a title like that, why wouldn't I want to read all of the essays?!
- In fact, it has been argued that slash is not really about male homosexuality at all; rather, it is about a female fantasy of heterosexual sex acted out via ostensibly male bodies.
I'll be getting the book from interlibrary loan that has the essay that made this argument. I had an instant response to the comment, but rather than put out my thoughts, I'd like yours. I probably won't respond to these as I'm positing myself as an observer and will organize and interpret what happens later, but for anyone who has a thought on this who would like to share it, please do, and comment among each other. But play nice!!! No bashing on my LJ. Everyone is allowed to her own opinion.
For those who are interested, that argument came from an essay contained in the book Magic mommas, trembling sisters, puritans & perverts: feminist essays, edited by Joanna Russ and published in 1985. It's a bit older, but that premise still stunned me. And with a title like that, why wouldn't I want to read all of the essays?!
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That Joanna Russ quote is pretty much what I always understood to be going on. If I may use Star Wars and The Princess Bride as examples, the characters are archetypes: rogue, wholesome farm boy, the clever one, the strong one, the dangerous one, the girl.
And right there, if you're female, you hit this huge problem. If you're female, that means in any given story you're "the girl." Female isn't an attribute; it's an archetype. You don't get to be the rogue. Or the farmboy. Or the strong one. Or the clever one. No, you're "the girl." Other stories may be less bald-faced about it than these two, but really, most of them aren't. So this is internalized knowledge most women have: as long as you're female, the only thing you get to be is female. There is nothing else available to you. You can't be female and something else. You're female, and that's the only interesting thing about you.
Slash has always read to me as a rebellion against the societally imposed limits of female being an archetype. "I'll be the rogue and you can't stop me. And the way I won't let you stop me is that I'll keep the male body that goes with it. Because I know that if I try to put my rogue in a female body, you'll keep trying to shove me back into 'the girl', so fine, I'm keeping the male body." In some sense, male bodies are "ungendered", by which I really mean unmarked. They're neutral. Female bodies are constantly under narrative tension to be "the girl", but male bodies can be whatever, more or less without limit or tension.
So yeah, what I see happening is that women tell the stories they want to tell, but they keep the male bodies because the male bodies have a freedom to them that female bodies don't. And then they do whatever they want to do -- including having sex with other characters -- but keep right on with the male bodies. And yes, the logic continues to follow there: because all the bodies are male, you can have sexual fantasies/interactions that are unencumbered by the sexual/sexist baggage of "female". What better way to escape the sexist narratives of society than to use a male body?
Re the assertion that these stories have nothing to do with homosexuality: if I may be terrifically blunt, they don't. There's nothing about most of these characters (as they are portrayed within many slash stries) that I recognize as being gay men. For the most part, that's just not what gay male society looks like.
What these stories read like is women's fantasies of getting to have sex in bodies-unencumbered-by-gendered-narratives. That is a really different thing than being a gay man.
NB: I should have done a better job throughout with qualifiers. I by no means to imply a universality that binds all slash into one grand "this is what is happening." A lot of stuff that I run across randomly (as opposed to what gets rec'd to me) reads to me as if this is what is going on. And to be sure, one of the reasons that I read so much of it this way could be because I've been doing this with characters since I was five or so. "I'm the rogue, and I'm keeping the male body, too, because without the male body I just become 'the girl' again."
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In fact, it has been argued that slash is not really about male homosexuality at all; rather, it is about a female fantasy of heterosexual sex acted out via ostensibly male bodies.
I can see how people would argue that and for many writers and readers I suspect that its quite true. However, for me it isn't.
Slash for me is about opening up more possibilities, about reinterpreting not just what I as a woman can do but also what men can do. There are so many rules about how people interact that are gender based, not just for women but also for men. Writing stories where two men, preferably manly-men as that's the sort of guy I like, interact romantically and/or sexually, allows me to say things about society and the way we're enculturated that I can't necessarily say otherwise.
Of course, I write a lot of AU, so I'm reinventing the rules of the world most of the time as well as putting two guys together.
I would agree in a limited way that it's not about male homosexuality. I'm not male and I'm not homosexual. However, I don't feel that the slash I write is about my fantasies as a female and the stories generally aren't about acting out a standard script of heterosexual relationships.
For what it's worth, I'm bi and somewhat polyamorous, so my slashed guys usually end up bi instead of gay. *laughs*
I think that my slash stories tend to be my fantasy of what society and interpersonal relationships could be if our culture was more accepting and more open. The smut that I do write always serves the plot and character development. PWP isn't my style.
Not sure that this is terribly coherent but it's my 2 cents.
Good luck with your article!
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Yes. In my comment above, where I equate "male" with "unmarked" with "free", that's not a statement about how it actually is to be a man. (Because, whoah, men get gender-policed with a vengeance!) It's more of a statement about how my gut sees the gender thing when I'm standing over here being female and once again wishing I could take off my breasts and hips so people would just stop treating me like my gender defines or qualifies everything about me.
The fantasies my id has of being male would not much match the reality, I think.
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The whole 'be a man' thing would drive me absolutely nuts I think.
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I write and read gen, slash, femslash, and het depending on how much the story's plot, characters or pairing interest me. The presence of romance and the gender of the people in it isn't a determining factor - it's the specifics of a story that grab my attention, the particular dynamics of particular characters, or a clever plot idea or insight. Slash is just like other fanfic genres in this respect and I don't read or write it differently or think of it differently.
In general, I don't think my interaction with fanfic is very political or id-driven. It's mostly focused on the craft of storytelling - the mechanics, the nuts and bolts, the satisfaction of finishing something. Fandom is a great playground for that stuff.
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edit to add more clarity:
(which is tricky cos i can't view the comments while i edit this :P )
agree with: not being restricted by the 'girl' archetype. sometimes it's about producing a new 'level' power structure, so far as the personalities themselves making one rather than battling against the gender constructed assumptions.
disagree with: it 'not being about homosexuality at all'. i read femmeslash because i want to read about women. i read slash when i want to read about men. sometimes i read the stories purely because of the people/characters themselves. sometimes i love the dicks. sometimes i love seeing men having broader roles than society gives them.
i love reading poly fic for a whole group of reasons, too.
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I don't participate in any fandom other than Wraeththu - which "technically" isn't m/m - rather hermaphrodite/hermaphrodite.
This wraeththu stuff appeals to me on several levels. Although I fully admit to being a perv (LOL) who enjoys m/m - wraeththu also appeals to me on a "genderless soul", growth and maturity of race, magic, etc levels.
The statement "n fact, it has been argued that slash is not really about male homosexuality at all; rather, it is about a female fantasy of heterosexual sex acted out via ostensibly male bodies." may be quite accurate for some slashers. I would even venture to say this is partially true for me. However I am doubtful that it extends to all women and all slash as not all women are the same, nor is all slash the same.
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I do find that many slash fanfiction stories fall into female fantasy, especially if the author tends to write herself into the action. She makes it easy for me to insert myself into the action as one of the males.
When considering another medium such as yaoi manga or film, it becomes even more about the female fantasy, mainly because those two mediums do rely so heavily on the visual aspect of sexuality. If a manga character is poorly drawn or isn’t visually pleasing, it doesn’t matter how well written the story may be; I can’t get past the artwork. Film is the same way. If I don’t find the characters attractive on a basic level, I can’t invest in the movie as well as I would like.
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I know! I'm a guy! Not supposed to be contributing here but can't really help myself... Particularly on this topic. I dont' know if it would be helpful or not but it would seem to me that on this issue in particular, the people most qualified to say how much slash fiction has to do with actual male homosexuality might be, well, you know, male homosexuals?
I am not the best example - of a gay male slasher that is - I'm a pretty fine example of a male homosexual! But, I have often felt that, for example, there is something of a difference of tone between slash stories written by women and those by gay men... I don't have broad enough experience of reading slash to justify this as more than a hunch but I'm sure there's something in it.
Also, not so much with the HP slash stories I wrote, but certainly when, under a pseudonym a long time ago, I wrote some Deep Space Nine slash, it felt very much to me as if the largely female 'power base' in the Star Trek fandom were very happy to keep male authors at something of a distance.
Which leads me to my final rambling point which is that I'm sure that one of the things that most slash writers don't realise is how different this activity is from professional writing of either fiction or non-fiction. Slash writing seems to me to be a FUNDAMENTALLY social activity: stories are shared as they unfold, one story may have a number of different betas, stories are discussed openly and feedback/reviews are left (and often responded to by the author in turn). Whilst it might not be true to say that slash stories are written by a community they are certainly written IN community. This requires an ability to network and manage relationships which has always been presented as quite a steroypically female way of being....
just my two penneth...
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My strong feeling is that the lines between genders are much more fluid than our digital black and white society would like to believe and that we react much more similarly than differently. I'd be curious what you thought about it? Why do you think women write slash?
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I think maybe my comment about writing as a man in the Star Trek slash community was a little unformed. I meant to say firstly, that we are talking about the mid nineties so, OMG, some 15 years ago now, when the whole set up of 'fandom' (in fact that word wasn't really around then) was a different beast altogether. But more importantly to the question at hand I meant to go on to say that there was a very definite difference between two types of fiction that were being posted to the 'newsgroups' then. On the one hand there were the majority of stories, female authored and which would be recognisable today as slash, and then there were a significant number of guys who were basically writing gay porn based in the Star Trek universe. The two were quite different - I'm sure you can intuit what I mean by that without my having to struggle to articulate it. I think there was a tendency to think at the time that the gay guys just 'didn't get it', but on reflection I think it was simply that they didn't want to write in a 'slash style' and that there was no other place to post their stuff at the time.
I used to be right up there with the genderpolitical elite and would have argued to the death that gender is absolutely fluid and socially constructed but I think as I get older I feel slightly more pragmatic about it. It appears to me that there are differences, be they difficult to define and always confounded by exceptions, but they are there, and particularly in the way the genders think about and participate in sex. A very minor example is that of all my many and varied female friends, I have only one with whom I could gaze at the men in the world and share private lustful comments and give reviews in any way approaching how I would with a gay male friend, there just seems to be a difference in the way that most men and most women 'look'... I *think* that it's possible that this could even spill over into slash - I would hazard the potentially controversial statement that there is a sutble but noticable difference between the tone and content of slash when authored by men or by women.
...I'm now rambling...
the bottom line is that I have no idea why women write slash. I don't feel qualified in any way to even guess. I know that as a man I write it occasionally because there are fictional characters that (ahem) I would like to fuck. I enjoy the plot and process of slash (as opposed simply to a piece of pornographic writing) in the same way that sometimes I want to watch a long erotic film rather than a short pornographically explicit clip... depends on the mood.. but the question is not about that so again, I'm rambling.
In my experience of reading slash by women, does it seem to me to be about something recognisable as male homosexuality as I know it? Honestly, only occasionally. That's not a criticism: I like what it is, I just think it's often not much to do with what it's like being gay, slash is it's its own thing. It's about being slashsexual rather than homosexual perhaps. And slashsexual is something that lots of women and some gay men can be!
It does raise the question of, does anyone know any straight men who've ever written slash?
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Well, I think the dividing line between genders is more fluid than generally supposed, but that doesn't mean I don't think there are any differences. Seems to me, it's more accurate to talk about a spectrum of response rather than the dichotomy we're led to believe in our society, you know the men are from Mars, women from Venus sort of thing, but I agree with you that there are differences. When I first got into writing slash I had the notion that I wanted to do it right and have my characters be men who liked men, rather than women with penises. So I read a lot of gay porn written by men (in the interest of research you understand), in addition to reading women-authored slash. Taken as a whole, I found that sex written by men tends to be more aggressive, more about the power play in the relationship and more focussed on the sex act itself, the physicality of it and the sensations the characters derive. It's more likely to go into detailed description of genitals and the act itself, and also more likely to treat the encounter humorously. Women tend to focus on the romance, the relationship, the long drawn-out encounter, teasing conversation, impediments preventing the couple from getting together culminating at the end with a permanent relationship. Not always, I'm generalizing here, certainly I've read romantic encounters written by men and hot pwps written by women. But I think the differences make sense given what we know about male and female sexual response. A male slasher friend characterized sexual encounters written by men as "spicy" and by women as "sweet," which seems fairly accurate. However, I also found that in many stories written by men, at the end, after all the hot meaningless encounters, the story WAS about finding someone the main character really cared about, someone who was not only hot in bed, but also someone he could love as a companion. Finding love seemed to be the same end goal for both sexes.
Do you think those observations are accurate or do you have a different take?
As I said, I made several good friends among male slash-writers who betaed my stories, and on a couple of occasions called me on it if my men weren't acting like men. It was rare actually that they thought I'd gotten it wrong. You mentioned that you would be unlikely to talk about men with a woman friend in the same way as a male friend, and I understand what you're saying. But I remember the night that a gay friend and I spent pretending that we were in a bar oogling and commenting on the attractiveness of various actors who we imagined had walked into the bar. We had a blast and laughed a lot together. I can't imagine doing something similar with a straight male friend.
As far as your question about whether there are any straight men who've written slash, I know of two mostly straight men who enjoy writing and reading slash. The operative word here being "mostly."
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My basic reaction to this is, if this is so why have two men together at all? Why not read the rather abundant romance literature out there about m/f sex? The question should be rather, what is it about two men together that intrigues/titillates/turns some women on. And btw, it's apparently a LOT of women. When the LOTR rage was full on, I had people from all over the world writing to me and people translated my stories into Japanese, German, Russian, and Chinese (and btw some of these folks were men). The yaoi phenomenon has a long history in Japan.
Now, when women write about two men having sex do we interject our own experiences, thoughts, desires about it? Sure. Some writers do this more than others I think. I've read m/m slash in which you might as well have made one character male and one female because all the traditional gender roles are there. I personally don't enjoy that and prefer to write my two male characters as definitely male enjoying each other as two men might (although granted I can never know for sure what that's like).
So again, the question is why would women do this? Why fantasize about relationships that we can never actually experience due to our differing plumbing? I think the answers vary with the individuals involved and the kind of slash story we're talking about, but I do think that if we're reading a hot sexy m/m story with enjoyment, at some level it's because it turns us on.
Here are some ideas I've come up with over the years:
* I think that, in general, women credit men with a more powerful sex drive, unable to control themselves to a certain extent. I think that contributes to the “hotness” of many of the sex scenes I’ve read in m/m slash and to its appeal for women. In addition (except for mpreg), a man can’t get pregnant as a consequence of this impetuousness. Does that add to the sexiness? Perhaps.
* Two gorgeous men in bed together is hotter than one. Maybe it’s the counterpart of men having a fantasy about two women in bed together. However, I think in most cases the man usually imagines sex between the women merely as prelude for him to join the encounter. I don’t think the same is true for us fantasizing about two men. Nevertheless, I would venture that we strongly identify with one or both men in the story and enjoy their relationship as we would enjoy reading about a woman having sex with a man.
* Perhaps we enjoy it because it is different and exotic.
*Two men together can, in theory, have a relationship free of stereotypic gender bias and constraint.
* Women enjoy romance. The idea of two male buddies falling into that close relationship is appealing.
*It's removed from our actual experience and that makes it more comfortable in a way. It's not like one is having a fantasy about something that could actually happen. I think this is why f/f is less popular. It might be a little too close for comfort.
* I suspect for some fanfic readers, particularly RPS, having the object of worship (the movie idol du jour) paired with another women introduces an unwanted level of jealousy and competition. Having the relationship between two men removes it from that and enables the woman to vicariously experience a sexual relationship with one or both men. Witness the desire among some fanfic groups to denigrate Orlando Bloom’s RL girlfriend and you’ll get a drift of this response. I would say a Mary Sue, where the author is clearly identified as the object of the hero's affection is a corollary to this response, i.e. it’s my alter-ego with this man, and not some fictional woman rival. Now, this last response is not exactly flattering to women, but there it is.
Sorry about all the edits. Anyway, hope that was helpful.
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I write and read slash *and* het, so when I want heterosexual sex in fiction, it's perfectly available to me and there's no need to substitute it for something else. I think a big part of the reason I'm interested in m/m slash is precisely because it's the one type of sex I've never experienced and never will in this lifetime. So I'm insanely, perhaps creepily, fascinated with it and curious about it. It has the appeal of the "forbidden" not because society forbids to me, but because my gender does. It's a way of "traveling" to "another place" in my imagination, and I've discovered that I really like it there.
That's tied into why I like fiction so much overall. I like to live in the heads of people who aren't me and don't have a life that's very much like mine. Writing self-inserts and autobiography doesn't do it for me (though of course every character I write winds up with a *little* of me in him or her, that can't be avoided); I write to try on other identities, other experiences, other places, other bodies, other souls.
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And from the reverse perspective would this mean that to the writer of the mentioned book if I wrote het it would be me putting lesbians into heterosexual couplings? My first reaction to that is why would I bother? I think there are plenty of reasons why people read and write anything, there aren't any single one size fits all answers.