![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
edenfallingThere is an imbroglio going around some* fannish circles about slash and professional m/m fiction and how it is often appropriative and disrespectful to/of gay men, and how gay men are being hurtful in criticizing female expressions of sexuality through slash, and god knows what all else. Recently this has developed side issues about the way the issue is persistently framed as 'straight women vs. gay men' which ignores the fact that (apparently) the majority of slash writers identify as some variation of queer.
(You can find some of the latest round in this metafandom post, if you are curious.)
I, meanwhile, am sitting back and going WTF at all this, because whatever other people may be getting out of slash or putting into it, what I am doing when I write two men in a romantic and/or sexual relationship (which I have done, though I seem to lean more toward het or threesomes when I actually write sexual -- or presumably sexual -- relationships... and I write femslash, too) is exploring how those particular characters might behave in such a relationship.
In other words, I write character-based stories. And stories about specific, particular characters in a relationship defined by their specific, particular qualities and circumstances are the stories I am most interested in reading, as well. (Plot, world-building, and nifty thematic ideas are also good lures. *grin* And so is sex, sometimes, if and when I am in the mood, and if and when a story convinces me that this particular sex scene is realistic for these particular characters in this particular setting and plot circumstance. Otherwise I will probably be skimming right over your carefully written sex, sorry.)
Anyway, for me, slash has nothing to do with exploring my own sexuality, or acting out my sexuality through male proxies, or playing around in drag, or whatever new analogies people are coming up with. It has very little to do with sex, honestly. (The same goes for het and femslash and poly and whatever else people get up to by way of sexual/romantic relationships.) I am interested in character as displayed through relationships, and relationships as an influence on characters and actions; it is all about being human in community with other humans. Sex/romance/love just happens to be a convenient way to explore emotional and social connections, sometimes -- though generally speaking, even when I write actual sex scenes, they are not the point of the story.
I grant you, this attitude is almost certainly influenced by my general asexuality, but I would be willing to bet that character study and development is a significant part of a lot of other writers' motivation for writing slash... or at least the people who write stories where you cannot just run a global search-and-replace on the characters' names and then have the fic work just as well -- or just as badly, more likely -- in half a hundred fandoms.
But that does not make for good arguments or sociological essays, I guess. *wry*
*I say 'some' because it is clearly completely off the radar of, like, eighty percent of my flist... which I am pretty sure is related to the fact that a lot of my flist is mostly in animanga fandoms and another, somewhat overlapping proportion does not seem interested in pan-fandom meta. (This is, incidentally, much more true for LJ than DW; I use DW less for fic reading and more for thinky semi-sociological reading.)
-----
Please note that this post is not intended as an attack on anyone or anyone's point of view. I am just saying that for me, this whole argument is like reading local news from a foreign country, because none of the perspectives (except maybekaz's post about invisible asexuals) have much to do with my experience of the world.
(You can find some of the latest round in this metafandom post, if you are curious.)
I, meanwhile, am sitting back and going WTF at all this, because whatever other people may be getting out of slash or putting into it, what I am doing when I write two men in a romantic and/or sexual relationship (which I have done, though I seem to lean more toward het or threesomes when I actually write sexual -- or presumably sexual -- relationships... and I write femslash, too) is exploring how those particular characters might behave in such a relationship.
In other words, I write character-based stories. And stories about specific, particular characters in a relationship defined by their specific, particular qualities and circumstances are the stories I am most interested in reading, as well. (Plot, world-building, and nifty thematic ideas are also good lures. *grin* And so is sex, sometimes, if and when I am in the mood, and if and when a story convinces me that this particular sex scene is realistic for these particular characters in this particular setting and plot circumstance. Otherwise I will probably be skimming right over your carefully written sex, sorry.)
Anyway, for me, slash has nothing to do with exploring my own sexuality, or acting out my sexuality through male proxies, or playing around in drag, or whatever new analogies people are coming up with. It has very little to do with sex, honestly. (The same goes for het and femslash and poly and whatever else people get up to by way of sexual/romantic relationships.) I am interested in character as displayed through relationships, and relationships as an influence on characters and actions; it is all about being human in community with other humans. Sex/romance/love just happens to be a convenient way to explore emotional and social connections, sometimes -- though generally speaking, even when I write actual sex scenes, they are not the point of the story.
I grant you, this attitude is almost certainly influenced by my general asexuality, but I would be willing to bet that character study and development is a significant part of a lot of other writers' motivation for writing slash... or at least the people who write stories where you cannot just run a global search-and-replace on the characters' names and then have the fic work just as well -- or just as badly, more likely -- in half a hundred fandoms.
But that does not make for good arguments or sociological essays, I guess. *wry*
*I say 'some' because it is clearly completely off the radar of, like, eighty percent of my flist... which I am pretty sure is related to the fact that a lot of my flist is mostly in animanga fandoms and another, somewhat overlapping proportion does not seem interested in pan-fandom meta. (This is, incidentally, much more true for LJ than DW; I use DW less for fic reading and more for thinky semi-sociological reading.)
-----
Please note that this post is not intended as an attack on anyone or anyone's point of view. I am just saying that for me, this whole argument is like reading local news from a foreign country, because none of the perspectives (except maybe
kaz's post about invisible asexuals) have much to do with my experience of the world.
Re: Here via metafandom
Date: 2010-01-22 04:15 am (UTC)I guess... I think I am also slightly surprised that misrepresentation and screwy gender dynamics in m/m romance is such an issue when there is a hell of a lot of weird gender-related stuff stereotyping going on in m/f romance as well. On the other hand, I suppose the issue is that in m/f romance, whether it's written by a man or a woman, there is at least some basis of the writer's own experience going into the story, whereas if a woman writes about two men, there is less commonality between writer and characters? On the third hand, it's not as if male writers haven't spent centuries utterly fucking up when writing women of whatever sexual orientation; this is not some new and special snowflake issue just because it's happening in reverse to men now. And on the fourth hand, if I am annoyed and hurt by male portrayals of women that I consider wildly misrepresentative, it is not at all surprising that men are annoyed and hurt by female portrayals of men that they consider inaccurate and insulting, nor should that annoyance and hurt be dismissed. (...too many hands!)
It's a messy issue. But I think the basic points of both sides -- that gay men should be written as people (and as men, not as women... though that gets into ugly gender issues really fast, since defining what is 'male' and what is 'female' and so on is, well, let's not go there) and not as sex objects or stereotypes -- and that women have a right to our own sexuality and expressions thereof -- are valid. It's just that any right, when pushed to an absolute, tends to run right over other rights, so there is always a delicate negotiation of how to give everyone as much freedom and respect and safety as possible.
Um. Sorry for blathering on at such length.