an absolute word tart! (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} schemingreader) wrote,@ 2006-01-30 00:18:00 |
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| Current mood: |  silly |
| Entry tags: | meta |
More meta--Thoughts on Women Writing Slash
This is the promised sequel to Something Good About Fandom, which I wrote for snegurochka_lee. I couldn't figure out how to put everything I wanted to say into a single essay. This one has some mature content and is quite long, so I'm putting it behind an LJ cut.
I take as my starting point in this essay that fandom provides women with a unique opportunity to explore our sexuality. In a previous essay, I put it this way: "Fandom creates multi-generational communities of women who work together to overthrow patriarchal suppression of women's erotic impulses."
I also believe that the sexual activities that people enjoy reading or writing about aren't necessarily the ones they enjoy doing or want to do. We have many reasons to write about sexual, or sexually charged, acts. Doing so accomplishes a lot of different things for us, creatively, politically and psychologically. I don't find all sexual desires are equally healthy, and I don't believe that every sexual activity deserves to be glorified. On the other hand, I don't think we should blame or praise people for what turns them on or what squicks them. I advocate that instead we choose to discuss what we like and why, and to analyze it, without putting each other down personally for tastes we don't share.
What I wonder is, why is slash, fiction about men in love with other men, so popular in fandom? Why do we women like to read about gay sex? I know we also like to write and read about heterosexual and lesbian couples; I see that femmeslash in particular is enjoying a surge in popularity. For me, as for other slashers, erotica about men having sex with other men is the most compelling stuff in fandom. Why is that? I have a few guesses.
Cocks (and other bits) and what we like about them
I assumed, when I first started thinking about this, that most women who read slash like to have sex with men. Now that I am more immersed in the world of slash, I see that this is not true. There are women who only like to have sex with other women who get a lot of enjoyment out of reading and writing slash. Nevertheless, many slash writers talk about how slash features "twice the cocks." What do we mean when we say this?
Penetration: physical and intellectual
One rather wonderful slash writer put it this way, "Why women write slash. Because long pointy things feel really good when you stick them in holes. *WHAT* holes are inconsequential." This is one of the wittier ways I've seen the "twice the cocks" argument articulated! As cute as it is, I don't think it covers the bases for everyone who likes slash.
It seems to me that some of us like the idea of penetration even more than the reality. There has been a lot of research showing that most women need some clitoral stimulation to have an orgasm. For some women, penetration is great, but some of us find it irrelevant or even unpleasant. As I have said above and forty zillion other times, what we like to do in bed is generally only tangentially related to what we like to read about other people doing. Perhaps we like to put ourselves in the place of the person doing the penetrating. If you have, as I have, read the many loving description in slash stories of how wonderful it feels to top, you know what I mean.
All of this is true. We like the thought of penetration, even if we don't like to do it, and we like thinking about topping and bottoming. Slash writers also write about other, non-penetrative sexual acts. What could be more sexy to our hypothetical "twice the cock" female reader than a description of frottage? Even though we have to pay attention to the primacy of penetration in sexual description, it's clearly not the only factor in the popularity of slash. (See, that's the example of keen intellectual penetration. Get it?)
Men's bodies are so vulnerable!
Whether we have sexual intimacy with men or not, most women know that men are more vulnerable to sexual arousal and pleasure than we are. The penis is external, and so men have to think about hiding their arousal. Our arousal is physically hidden; it's also been occluded by repeated society-wide decisions to withhold information about our bodies from women and men. Men have to learn how to hold back to stop themselves from having orgasms. Again, the sexist occlusion of obvious information about how women's bodies work has made that...not really a problem for us. We have to try to have orgasms, not to hold back from coming. Every social movement to try to spread information about women's bodies has encountered an equal and opposite reactive force. Though we have at least the same if not a greater capacity than men for experiencing sexual pleasure, their genitals are socially constructed to go off at the slightest touch.
When we project ourselves as readers into a slashy sex scene, we can imagine that we are helpless in the face of accurate sexual stimulation that feels great. Or we can imagine that we have secret knowledge of how another man's body works and can stimulate him in ways that are charged with erotic power. Yes, people write het scenes in which women come helplessly, but do you believe them? I don't. It's much easier to believe in the hyper-vulnerable penis, whether that is actually logical or not.
It's not that we have penis envy, exactly. Any woman who understands how her body can feel sexual pleasure knows that she has a good deal. Men can't have orgasm after orgasm like we can. But perhaps we envy the social presence of the penis. You don't need specialized knowledge to work a penis. Hard not to envy that!
It also seems right to say here that a lot of women (and men) have fantasies about either taking control or having control wrested from them in sexual situations. Sometimes we call these "rape fantasies" but I'm pretty sure they don't mean we want to be raped. Part of the enjoyment of the vulnerable penis is the sense that the man can't help getting aroused, can't help having an orgasm. It's a safe way to explore giving up control without actually having to write about rape. (Though people do also write non-con, which is a sort of fictionalized version of rape.)
Men's bodies are so sexy
I don't know about you, but I like other parts of men's bodies than their penises. Men have many sensitive places, many delicious places, on their bodies. In a sexist society in which women's bodies are perpetually objectified, we don't get much of a view of a man's body--especially not the bits that excite us. Slash writers love men's faces, the varieties of their facial hair. We like their chests, so different from ours. We like their body hair. We like how they smell. We like their voices.
For women who like men, slash can be so hot. It's not just two cocks, it's two men, with muscular arms, big hands and feet, hairy bodies, and deep growly voices. Slash eroticizes the whole of men's bodies, and does it from a woman's perspective. It's not what men imagine that women like, it's what women imagine that men like. We put ourselves in the place of a man who doesn't know that his body is sexy, and discovers it as he discovers another man. (To me, this is resonant with many lesbian coming-out narratives.)
Now I don't know what I think of the politics of eroticizing men's bodies. Are we objectifying men to the same extent that we are objectified in their porn about our bodies? I do sometimes worry about this. (Because worry is my middle name.) In some ways, slash writing feels more celebratory of men's physical diversity than porn does. Whether there is a feminist justification for it, slash eroticizes men's bodies in a delightful way.
The limits of canon
Another obvious reason that women in fandom write slash is that we don't identify with the female characters. We identify with the male characters, for a variety of reasons. Sometimes the original author has just put a lot more energy into the male characters, so they seem more real. Sometimes it's their characters.
In the Harry Potter fandom, we are actually relatively lucky. There are quite a few female characters with whom a fan fiction writer or artist could potentially identify. Unfortunately, most are school-aged. As a woman approaching forty, my feelings are complicated and my experiences varied. I am more likely to identify with Severus Snape or Remus Lupin than with Hermione Granger (Though if anyone was like Hermione, it was the young Schemingreader.) Even though Rowling is, like me, a mother, she writes Molly Weasley as an annoying noodge. I can't see her as a sexual being. (Though if Schemingreader resembles any HP character physically, it is the dumpy, middle-aged Molly Weasley.) So where do you go when you want to identify with the feelings of a character? To the male characters.
Is this a feminist response? Probably not. It doesn't liberate anyone for us to just identify with the male characters. Sometimes it's the best we can do, under the circumstances. You can consider as a way of mounting a critique against what popular culture thinks women are. I'm sure you could also say that it's deconstructing gender. At the heart of it, it's a sad thing.
Their sexuality, our sexuality—a mirror of Erised
When we write about men in relationships with other men, we are working out some of the issues in our own sexual relationships. Whether we sleep with women or men, we are socialized as women. One aspect of slash that is attractive is imagining relationships between men. To some extent these relationships are a distorted mirror of our own reality.
Bishounen, butch-femme and mpreg—let's make him be the girl for a change
One way we work out our own difficulties as women is by forcing male characters to take on feminine characteristics. In reality, some men do choose to transgress gender boundaries by cross dressing or adopting effeminate mannerisms. Slash writers go a lot further than that reality.
Some slash writers make one partner always submissive, always the bottom, and to some extent, feminine in appearance and affect. Taking cues from the Japanese yaoi comics, these slashers make either or both characters androgynous, or one of them into someone who is actually pretty in a girlish way.
One outlandish convention of slash is the male pregnancy story, or mpreg fic. When I first learned about mpreg, I was flabbergasted. It seems to me now that mpreg is a great way for people to work out their feelings about women's role in reproduction. On some psychological level, it makes no less sense for a man to be able to make a baby in his body than it does for a woman to be able to do it. (Of course, for those of us who have had actually had babies, it's hard to remember what that psychological moment was like.)
When we make male characters take on female roles, including some of the ultimately female roles of pregnancy, childbirth and nursing, it gives us the opportunity to work out the social ramifications of these roles for women. When you make a hyper-masculine character have a baby for his male partner, you get to express how you, too, as a woman, are dynamic, active, a fighter—even though there are these weird expectations on you about motherhood. When you make one partner the pretty one, you get to work on your own feelings about what it means to be pretty, or not.
We like gay men and we cannot lie
Another reason to slash characters has nothing to do with the erotics of their bodies or their sexual activity. Some slashers admire gay men and their subculture. They want to place characters in this milieu because it seems to resonate with their characterization.
There is something intense about people reaching across both male socialization and heavy taboos to find love. I guess this is slash for gay wedding junkies. (I'm definitely one.) In this mirror, we see ourselves as people with the courage to love across boundaries.
The marriage of true minds that does not admit impediments
The flipside of making one male character take on a female role is imagining both male characters as equals in love. Whether you love men or women, you know that being raised female is a handicap to feeling like an equal in love. (Maybe you personally were lucky, and had a fantastic feminist mom and dad, but I'm writing about the general case.) All around us in popular culture are messages that we are the object of affection, the one who has to attract and deserve love. What we want, our sexual and emotional desire, that's undervalued, unimportant. We are the ones love is done to, not the lovers, the active doers.
In real life, women love men and women love women and women make choices and decisions about who to love. But in our heads, we are constantly fighting for our right to choose and decide who to love, and how.
What a vacation from all of that when the partners are both men. Let them be shield partners, warriors, or cowboys. In slash we can make men into equals, or we can explore other inequalities than gender. Is one partner richer? Smarter? Older? It might not be reality that gay men have these equal relationships, but in our mirror of desire, we can make them equal.
(Since people are continuing to cite this meta, I want to also link you to The Genderswap Theory of Slash by
julad that has some nice language on the same theme--scroll down.)Summing up—the word hegemonic does not appear in this meta (whoops!)
I know that there are some slash readers and writers who are not women. I am interested in what they like about slash. In this essay I was trying to address why so many women are interested in erotic stories about male/male relationships and sexual activity. I see several possible reasons that we find these stories erotic, find the relationships compelling, and want to explore them. I am available for your commenting pleasure.
