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There's been a bunch of discussion about the portrayal of gay men in m/m slash and published m/m romance recently, and despite this being a fight that doesn't involve me and I shouldn't derail I keep finding myself wanting to rant about side issues, and eventually I decided I needed to get some stuff of my chest to avoid
derailing other people's conversations.
EDIT: This post is not about issues with the way slash or published m/m fiction portray gay men. I think those issues are real, and worth addressing, and I really don't mean to minimise this important question. I'm not talking about it because I'm not a gay man or a writer of m/m fiction, so it's not my question to answer. All the stuff in this post is side issues that have been coming up in the conversation around the question of representations of gay men in m/m, and I decided to needed to get them out of my head so I didn't derail the much more important conversations other people are having. In retrospect..probably should have been a locked post.
I hope I'm not being derailing or appropriative in this post, and am going to try to be open to criticism on that score. Not screening comments anymore because the conversation is moving too fast and noone is saying anything problematic (touch wood).
This is not so much a coherent thesis as a rant. But something I want to make very clear: I am not saying that m/m slash is in any way bad! I'm just saying it's not necessarily better or more special than other sorts of fic, or at least not as special as it's sometimes presented as being.
Relating to this particular argument:
Not all m/m slash writers are straight women. They're not all straight, they're not all women (and the ones who aren't women aren't all men, and certainly aren't all cisgendered men). Not all slash is porn. Not all fanfic is slash. Not all queer fanfic writers write slash. Not all people have any interest in porn (or sex)
M/m slash is many different things to different people. Some like the unrealistic porn. Some like unrealistic soppy romance. Some are actually looking for believable stories about queer men and their lives (which may or may not be romantic or erotic or sexually explicit) And not all stories about queer characters are slash, some of them are het or gen.
The issues and assumptions around m/m slash and f/f slash are related but different, and I'm not sure you can make many generalisations about "slash" that don't differentiate between the two (and just talking about m/m slash as if that's all there is is Not Good).
And in this thread at ithiliana's lj I realised a lot of my annoyance goes right back to my first encounters with slash fandom.
Slash was sold to me, and is often presented in meta, as this wonderful way for women to express their sexuality through m/m erotica which challenges heteronormativity and reclaims popular media through a gift culture.
Which is all true. The problem is that all those things are separate, and not inherently tied up with erotic m/m slash. By lumping them all together and centering erotic m/m slash as their archetypal form you (a)Make m/m slash sound like more than it usually is and (b) erase the awesome things happening in fanfic and remix culture outside erotic m/m slash by and for women.
This isn't universal, but there is a tendency for fanfic meta by women who write erotic m/m slash to act as if that's the only form of fanfic that is really interesting, and at best to say "Oh, yes, I guess this a lot of this applies to femslash/gen/non-porny m/m slash etc too" or "Except for femslash/gen/non-porny m/m slash, I guess, if you like that sort of thing" as appropriate when prompted(*). I don't know how much of this irritation is the result of a few bad apples and how much a more pervasive problem with m/m slash fandom, and I certainly don't mean to paint you all with the same brush. But it REALLY bugs me.
Personally, I don't read fiction as porn, find m/m sex alienating, and only really enjoy stories with female protagonists or at least major secondary characters. So when I encountered fanfic via "All awesome fanfic is slash is m/m porn" I thought "Huh. Fanfic sounds like it could be interesting, but from the sounds of things all the interesting stuff is happening in a genre with no appeal to me. Pity." and didn't get into it. (nb it didn't help that all the evangelical fanfic fans I knew were not only slashers but liked tropes I find really squicky. Which is noone's fault just bad luck on my part)
A few years later when I discovered the joy of gen and gen-ish stories, and then later got into het and femslash, I realised that fanfic fandom challenges heteronormativity (and the kyriarchy in general) and reclaims popular media through a gift culture well beyond the bounds of explicit m/m slash, and became one of those narky gen/femslash fans who pops up in comments and forces m/m slash meta writers to add caveats. (See my list of rants below :))
Modulo issues of appropriation, I agree that it's awesome that slash allows some women (and also some people who aren't women) to express their sexuality in a world that represses female sexuality. But romance novels and het do that for others with different tastes. They are usually more heteronormative (and I can see why that's more of a big deal for LBGT people than me), but they also have actual women in them, and like slash het fanfic creates a space for women with non-socially-accepted sexual tastes like BDSM. (nb I'm not really interested in discussions of what kids of porn are ethical etc, because I don't feel able to judge. Hopefully we can all agree that it's good for the people who like it in principle)
And amongst those of us who aren't using fanfic primarily as a way of finding sexual satisfaction (as well as amongst those who are! Porn can be multipurpose :)) there's still a lot of serious challenging of the oppression of popular culture going on, and I think it deserves just as much attention.
If you're interested in exploring the various aspects of canon for writerly rather than porny etc reasons then you're likely to end up with gen, het, m/m, f/f, poly etc stories depending on the characters. I may not enjoy m/m or poly romance as much as het or f/f but still feel like I should try and have some of those types of relationships (or at least people who are interested in them. Plus asexual characters!) in my work because I want to show the variety of human experience, and because sometimes that just feels right for the characters. This makes me a "slasher" but for very different reasons than are usually assumed.
Mainstream media tends to treat the few female characters it has very badly. Het, femslash, and female-centered gen allow us to make female characters central and tell their stories.
I'm straight and hope this isn't appropriating queer issues, but as much as I understand the argument that unrealistic m/m slash is a valid self expression for women that deliberately doesn't represent reality or real gay relationships (and can enjoy that sort of slash sometimes, though it also sometimes pings as problematic) there's a lot of m/m slash that afaict is trying to write actual queer male characters, and I think that's just as important (and to me more enjoyable). And there's stuff like the stories at![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
queerlygen which are about queerness but aren't slash or porn or romance at all. (I feel I should add something about asexuality here but can't think of the right sentence. But: It exists!)
And there's more to the kyriarchy than gender and sexuality.
Again, I don't want to appropriate other people's oppression to shore an argument about fic preferences, but communities likechoc_fic celebrate non-white/POC characters, subverting the white dominatededness of popular culture and, alas, most of fanfic fandom. There are also communities like eid_fic and red_packet celebrating underrepresented cultures and religions.
I got into writing fic when I had to quit my job due to disability, and the first fic I started (and am still working on slowly) was about a disabled character. I have found writing disabled characters
incredibly rewarding, and given the god-awful way disabled characters tend to be written in mainstream culture there's certainly a lot of scope for fic to improve on things. I also really enjoy romances with disabled leads who end up happy without getting "better".
Unfortunately a lot of fic writers seem to see disability as a quick source of angst to be fixed as part of the happy ending :/ Still, disabled fans share recs via places like access_fandom.
I've similarly enjoyed playing around with ideas of class, eg my idea of Mary Sue wish fulfillment is becoming a princess and using those powers to create a representative democracy. I don't know of any class related fanfic comms/sites, though.
So: fanfic, slash, m/m slash and porn are all awesome and overlapping but distinct. Celebrating your little corner is fine but try not to make the rest of us feel put down when you do it.
Some things I happen not to feel like ranting about right now but still deserve rantiness: the erasure of f/f slash and poly fic. The treatment/erasure of male or otherwise not-female-identified fanfic writers. The fact that forms of fanworks outside fanfic are worth exploring. The fact that not everything outside metafandom/OTW-ish fanworks fandom is dull or sexist.
Oh, and if you're going to compare m/m fiction by women to f/f fiction by men I think it's worth noting that a lot of f/f fiction by men (original and femslash) is actually pretty good (see: Revolutionary Girl Utena).
I'm a bit worried that I come across as presenting myself as more awesome than slashers with their shallow interest in sex or whatever, which I eally don't. A lot of porny m/m slash has a lot more to it than porniness, and porniness is a valid form of artistic expression anyway. I can appreciate that and understand people's interest in the medium even if I'd personally rather read something else.
Previous rants on this topic if this just wasn't enough ranting for you:
(*)Cue someone pointing out that I've overgeneralised/omitted stuff and me adding a brief edit to paper over the hole :)
derailing other people's conversations.
EDIT: This post is not about issues with the way slash or published m/m fiction portray gay men. I think those issues are real, and worth addressing, and I really don't mean to minimise this important question. I'm not talking about it because I'm not a gay man or a writer of m/m fiction, so it's not my question to answer. All the stuff in this post is side issues that have been coming up in the conversation around the question of representations of gay men in m/m, and I decided to needed to get them out of my head so I didn't derail the much more important conversations other people are having. In retrospect..probably should have been a locked post.
I hope I'm not being derailing or appropriative in this post, and am going to try to be open to criticism on that score. Not screening comments anymore because the conversation is moving too fast and noone is saying anything problematic (touch wood).
This is not so much a coherent thesis as a rant. But something I want to make very clear: I am not saying that m/m slash is in any way bad! I'm just saying it's not necessarily better or more special than other sorts of fic, or at least not as special as it's sometimes presented as being.
Relating to this particular argument:
Not all m/m slash writers are straight women. They're not all straight, they're not all women (and the ones who aren't women aren't all men, and certainly aren't all cisgendered men). Not all slash is porn. Not all fanfic is slash. Not all queer fanfic writers write slash. Not all people have any interest in porn (or sex)
M/m slash is many different things to different people. Some like the unrealistic porn. Some like unrealistic soppy romance. Some are actually looking for believable stories about queer men and their lives (which may or may not be romantic or erotic or sexually explicit) And not all stories about queer characters are slash, some of them are het or gen.
The issues and assumptions around m/m slash and f/f slash are related but different, and I'm not sure you can make many generalisations about "slash" that don't differentiate between the two (and just talking about m/m slash as if that's all there is is Not Good).
And in this thread at ithiliana's lj I realised a lot of my annoyance goes right back to my first encounters with slash fandom.
Slash was sold to me, and is often presented in meta, as this wonderful way for women to express their sexuality through m/m erotica which challenges heteronormativity and reclaims popular media through a gift culture.
Which is all true. The problem is that all those things are separate, and not inherently tied up with erotic m/m slash. By lumping them all together and centering erotic m/m slash as their archetypal form you (a)Make m/m slash sound like more than it usually is and (b) erase the awesome things happening in fanfic and remix culture outside erotic m/m slash by and for women.
This isn't universal, but there is a tendency for fanfic meta by women who write erotic m/m slash to act as if that's the only form of fanfic that is really interesting, and at best to say "Oh, yes, I guess this a lot of this applies to femslash/gen/non-porny m/m slash etc too" or "Except for femslash/gen/non-porny m/m slash, I guess, if you like that sort of thing" as appropriate when prompted(*). I don't know how much of this irritation is the result of a few bad apples and how much a more pervasive problem with m/m slash fandom, and I certainly don't mean to paint you all with the same brush. But it REALLY bugs me.
Personally, I don't read fiction as porn, find m/m sex alienating, and only really enjoy stories with female protagonists or at least major secondary characters. So when I encountered fanfic via "All awesome fanfic is slash is m/m porn" I thought "Huh. Fanfic sounds like it could be interesting, but from the sounds of things all the interesting stuff is happening in a genre with no appeal to me. Pity." and didn't get into it. (nb it didn't help that all the evangelical fanfic fans I knew were not only slashers but liked tropes I find really squicky. Which is noone's fault just bad luck on my part)
A few years later when I discovered the joy of gen and gen-ish stories, and then later got into het and femslash, I realised that fanfic fandom challenges heteronormativity (and the kyriarchy in general) and reclaims popular media through a gift culture well beyond the bounds of explicit m/m slash, and became one of those narky gen/femslash fans who pops up in comments and forces m/m slash meta writers to add caveats. (See my list of rants below :))
Modulo issues of appropriation, I agree that it's awesome that slash allows some women (and also some people who aren't women) to express their sexuality in a world that represses female sexuality. But romance novels and het do that for others with different tastes. They are usually more heteronormative (and I can see why that's more of a big deal for LBGT people than me), but they also have actual women in them, and like slash het fanfic creates a space for women with non-socially-accepted sexual tastes like BDSM. (nb I'm not really interested in discussions of what kids of porn are ethical etc, because I don't feel able to judge. Hopefully we can all agree that it's good for the people who like it in principle)
And amongst those of us who aren't using fanfic primarily as a way of finding sexual satisfaction (as well as amongst those who are! Porn can be multipurpose :)) there's still a lot of serious challenging of the oppression of popular culture going on, and I think it deserves just as much attention.
If you're interested in exploring the various aspects of canon for writerly rather than porny etc reasons then you're likely to end up with gen, het, m/m, f/f, poly etc stories depending on the characters. I may not enjoy m/m or poly romance as much as het or f/f but still feel like I should try and have some of those types of relationships (or at least people who are interested in them. Plus asexual characters!) in my work because I want to show the variety of human experience, and because sometimes that just feels right for the characters. This makes me a "slasher" but for very different reasons than are usually assumed.
Mainstream media tends to treat the few female characters it has very badly. Het, femslash, and female-centered gen allow us to make female characters central and tell their stories.
I'm straight and hope this isn't appropriating queer issues, but as much as I understand the argument that unrealistic m/m slash is a valid self expression for women that deliberately doesn't represent reality or real gay relationships (and can enjoy that sort of slash sometimes, though it also sometimes pings as problematic) there's a lot of m/m slash that afaict is trying to write actual queer male characters, and I think that's just as important (and to me more enjoyable). And there's stuff like the stories at
queerlygen which are about queerness but aren't slash or porn or romance at all. (I feel I should add something about asexuality here but can't think of the right sentence. But: It exists!)And there's more to the kyriarchy than gender and sexuality.
Again, I don't want to appropriate other people's oppression to shore an argument about fic preferences, but communities like
choc_fic celebrate non-white/POC characters, subverting the white dominatededness of popular culture and, alas, most of fanfic fandom. There are also communities like eid_fic and red_packet celebrating underrepresented cultures and religions.I got into writing fic when I had to quit my job due to disability, and the first fic I started (and am still working on slowly) was about a disabled character. I have found writing disabled characters
incredibly rewarding, and given the god-awful way disabled characters tend to be written in mainstream culture there's certainly a lot of scope for fic to improve on things. I also really enjoy romances with disabled leads who end up happy without getting "better".
Unfortunately a lot of fic writers seem to see disability as a quick source of angst to be fixed as part of the happy ending :/ Still, disabled fans share recs via places like access_fandom.
I've similarly enjoyed playing around with ideas of class, eg my idea of Mary Sue wish fulfillment is becoming a princess and using those powers to create a representative democracy. I don't know of any class related fanfic comms/sites, though.
So: fanfic, slash, m/m slash and porn are all awesome and overlapping but distinct. Celebrating your little corner is fine but try not to make the rest of us feel put down when you do it.
Some things I happen not to feel like ranting about right now but still deserve rantiness: the erasure of f/f slash and poly fic. The treatment/erasure of male or otherwise not-female-identified fanfic writers. The fact that forms of fanworks outside fanfic are worth exploring. The fact that not everything outside metafandom/OTW-ish fanworks fandom is dull or sexist.
Oh, and if you're going to compare m/m fiction by women to f/f fiction by men I think it's worth noting that a lot of f/f fiction by men (original and femslash) is actually pretty good (see: Revolutionary Girl Utena).
I'm a bit worried that I come across as presenting myself as more awesome than slashers with their shallow interest in sex or whatever, which I eally don't. A lot of porny m/m slash has a lot more to it than porniness, and porniness is a valid form of artistic expression anyway. I can appreciate that and understand people's interest in the medium even if I'd personally rather read something else.
Previous rants on this topic if this just wasn't enough ranting for you:
- What annoys me about fanfic meta about itself
- The Revolutionary Potential of Het fanfic
- Why do we femslash?
- Why I like Gen
- Fandom as a female space
- Slash/Yaoi misogyny bingo
(*)Cue someone pointing out that I've overgeneralised/omitted stuff and me adding a brief edit to paper over the hole :)
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THIS!!!! OMG THIS.
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My one major source of irkedness with the fic headers system on AO3 is that "het" and "slash" and "femslash" are all mutually exclusive options, when you ought to be able to select more than one. I'm not sure what to do when fics have either multiple pairings or a m/m/f or f/f/m relationship in them (and I'm still not sure whether their "multi" tag is for poly, or for multiple pairings).
all I want to do is say, "That's not really poly fic. Because poly fic is about a poly relationship, which is not just giving a lonely woman a one night stand."
An awful lot of professionally published romance/erotica that bills itself as "menage fiction" or threesome fic does the same thing, except there it's more likely to be a man or a woman getting invited into a one night stand with a m/f couple. I've found very little published romance that has an actual, committed poly relationship in it, which I imagine annoys the living daylights out of romance readers who are poly.
There's also the kind-of-irritating scenario that pops up a lot in fanfic, usually when a threesome is used as a way to have the slash pairing the writer actually ships without getting yelled at by fandom for breaking up
Spock/Uhurathe canon het pairing, where both guys are sleeping with the same woman, but it's actually about them expressing their sublimated attraction for one another and not really about her at all.Re: via metafandom
You made me wished I read fic for a moment. :o
(sorry, Sophie! I find these things really interesting to read and never have any decent comments! :( )
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Partly I get frustrated that m/m is the default setting of slash. But. When people try to lump f/f in with m/m, I'm the first one bitching up a storm, because f/f is so rare, comparatively, that if you lump f/f in with m/m, you just can't find the f/f at all.
Oh, I totally get that. On the one hand, talking as if slash = m/m completely erases f/f, not to mention the problem of the default automatically being male, but as you say, on the other, there really are differences in conventions and making it a label that encompasses both makes it difficult to separate those out.
My kneejerk reaction is more to the issue of defaulting to the male in everything, but I totally get where you're coming from.
I also get frustrated with the assumption that fangirls will all "evolve" into enlightened, non-heteronormative boyslashers, because boyslash is the natural evolution of all fangirls who want to escape all that boring gender normativity stuff.
*nod nod*
"Oh, I started out writing het, but then I grew up and started writing boyslash."
Ugh.
I mean, I started out writing het and only after that started writing boyslash (and girlslash), but that was more about the pairings I was interested in, and also my own confidence as a writer growing, not because I saw het as childish and slash as grown up.
Also, "all the good het is written by boyslashers."
*stabs*
Except that I don't think that other genres of fanfic have to be heteronormative or hew to gender stereotypes, and people who have the attitude that they do seriously frustrate me. I think of that attitude as its own form of closed-mindedness.
yes. This.
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This isn't universal, but there is a tendency for fanfic meta by women who write erotic m/m slash to act as if that's the only form of fanfic that is really interesting, and at best to say "Oh, yes, I guess this a lot of this applies to femslash/gen/non-porny m/m slash etc too" or "Except for femslash/gen/non-porny m/m slash, I guess, if you like that sort of thing" as appropriate when prompted(*). I don't know how much of this irritation is the result of a few bad apples and how much a more pervasive problem with m/m slash fandom, and I certainly don't mean to paint you all with the same brush. But it REALLY bugs me.
I like (erotic) m/m slash, but I THINK THIS ALL THE TIME. I actually got into fandom via het (and a bit of gen), and when I found slash fandom I was all "woah! not heteronormative! awesome!" except without "heteronormative" because I didn't know that word at age 14, and then I started getting really irritated by the "m/m is just more SUBVERSIVE and HOT and BETTER than everything else" and then I slowly built around me a fannish circle with broader tastes. So I sometimes forget that there are still huge chunks of slash fandom like that. And it is such a problem.
So <3!
(Also, I love that you do fancomics and they are smart and awesome. Love love love. Fandom needs moar comics!)
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Re: here via metafandom
However, I also think that slash is overemphasized as the focal point of fandom identity to the detriment of other genres that also have the strong possibility of being transgressive/subversive/super-shiny.
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OH GOD THIS. I mean I have gone from mostly only liking gen to liking f/f, m/m and het more than I did, but I still like gen a lot and don't look back on my previous tastes as "immature", I just hadn't gotten the hang of finding fic I liked.
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Yes! *has just been thinking about Supernatural femslash*
Re: via metafandom
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Re: here via metafandom
It's funny isn't it? I find myself using "culture" and pondering what I mean by it, since I may be Australian but a large proportion of the people in my reading circle/the wider conversation are American, and there's also people from Britain and Canada but also from Singapore, Argentina, Germany...so what exactly do I mean by "our culture"? Anyway, I got what you meant :)
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I must admit, I like lyrical fluff sometimes. But there's room in the world for that and porn, and then we can both enjoy the adventure-with-a-side-of-romance fic :)
(*)Defined as under 18, even though the age of consent is 16. ABSURD I tells you.
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Yes. I am sad that people who might like my femslash fic may not see it since the secondary het pairing has shifted it into "multi" (Which I think is for more than one type of pairing, while "other" is for poly fic. I could be wrong though)
I've found very little published romance that has an actual, committed poly relationship in it, which I imagine annoys the living daylights out of romance readers who are poly.
There's also the kind-of-irritating scenario that pops up a lot in fanfic, usually when a threesome is used as a way to have the slash pairing the writer actually ships without getting yelled at by fandom for breaking up Spock/Uhura the canon het pairing, where both guys are sleeping with the same woman, but it's actually about them expressing their sublimated attraction for one another and not really about her at all.
Yes to both of these. And I find them both very off putting, since I don't enjoy reading about one night stands nor am I interested in boyslash-by-stealth.
Re: via metafandom
See, that's my favorite kind of het fic. I'll admit that some of my het fic is heteronormative, even though I try not to write it that way, because, well, I'm influenced by the heteronormativity of the culture I live in, whether I like it or not. However, I try my best not to be.
Me too.
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I know with absolute certainty that the first fic (An Unacceptable Sitch itself) has none -- it's basically gen or pre-slash; the relationship comes in the sequels.
Fake-edit: I just went to recheck and it says right in the summary: "Kim and Ron are twenty-one." So you should be good to go!
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I've always wished I could draw comics, but even when I drew reasonably well, I could never get the hang of having characters look the same panel to panel. So I really admire people who can, plus I just love the genre.
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Seen on Metafandom
I actually like using the minor characters (female and male) because there is more freedom to develop backstories for them.
countess_baltar on LJ
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Re: Seen on Metafandom
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But yes! Yay comics!
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