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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 :)
Re: via metafandom
I'm glad it was tasty for your brain.
maybe I identify as a slasher because it has been presented as the zomgreallycoolawesome!!! part of fandom and all the others are boring and shit
While I have been feeling sad that I just don't have it in me to write slash because of my need for female protagonists (I've been trying to plot a Pride and Prejudice genderswap AU for a challenge, and all the characters keep insisting that they'd be happier female, so it may end up femslashier than I was originally planning :)) And..why should I be sad? Won't my fic be just as good either way?
And I have this meta in my head about how so many stories do the "character X overcomes their limitations!!!" thing and how if you want to respectfully write a disabled character you pretty much have to let the whole concept go entirely, and how this is cool because taking limitations seriously is amazing and fascinating and very unexplored and...
Disabled characters ftw. I have issues with stairs, and found it surprisingly cathartic writing a fic involving a character in a wheelchair where there was no stairs, only ramps (this was mostly subtle but in one case I explicitly pointed out that the stairs from canon had been adapted) And a romance about someone with chronic fatigue! Noone writes those! (Unless they have chronic fatigue. And we tend to write slow...) So, yes :)
Re: via metafandom
(Incidentally, I am jealous of your need for female protagonists. I've also just recently realised that I am totally guilty of the erasure of female characters in fanfic thing, although at the same time almost all my OCs are female and my original or semi-original fic is bursting with female protagonists and I no longer have any idea what the hell is going on in my head there.)
Also, femslash ftw. I am plotting an asexual femslash fic (OC-centric, as you can probably guess from the above) and it will be /awesome/. Femslash is one of those things I'm quite sad about not being into more than I am and... wait a moment, please don't tell me I just did the same thing as with slash just in reverse. D:
Re: disabled characters - it's so freeing, isn't it? I have a speech disorder, and my main original fiction idea (which I shall never write for fear of screwing it up, le sigh) was basically founded on "I am sick of the stereotypes. I am going to show you how to write a stuttering character /awesome/." Which turned into a whole culture where speech disorders are seen as the sign of being possessed by a god (not to say that you need this to be an awesome stutterer but I wanted a character who had /no/ hang-ups, complexes, ingrained negative feelings or whatnot about her speech whatsoever and for that you need to get rid of the stigma), and a character who considers attempting not to stutter blasphemy and, if someone made fun of her speech, would thank them for informing her they weren't worth the air needed to speak to them and thereby saving her the time of figuring that out herself. (Okay, so I often think this way but I wouldn't say it /out loud/.) It is /amazing fun/ and I got to twist all sorts of stuttering trivia to turn it to the godly avatar pov and I will stop here because I will never stop babbling otherwise.
Or my constant gripe about how standard narrative convention does not reflect the way I think (yay neuroatypicality!) and I want to write from a character's pov who thinks like I do but I'm still not sure my writing skills are up to that.
And. Uh. I should probably write a post about writing disabled chars before I derail even more shouldn't I.
Re: via metafandom
I don't think people can help liking one sort of story more than another, and if femslash doesn't call to you then I don't think there's anything wrong with not writing it as long as you're not avoiding gen fic with a female protagonist who is interested in women or non-femslash fic which has f/f relationships in the background etc (Which I'm assuming you're not :)) I have certainly read lots of m/m slash which managed to have vibrant and interesting female characters and not feel female-character-erasing, or het fic which didn't feel heteronormative etc.
That does sound like a really interesting story to plot out. *amuses self by imagining world where chronic fatigue syndrome marks you as Special*
You should totally write that post and then link it somewhere I will see so I can read it :D
Re: via metafandom
I like some boyslash fic myself. A lot of it depends on the pairing, and, if it's longer fic in a series with lots of female characters, it had damn well better have those female characters present in some fashion.
One of the few longish slash fics I've ever written (it's only maybe 2000 or so words, if that) has both a m/m and a f/f relationship as equal components, because, well, I have a very hard time writing about men only. I'm not wired that way, I guess.
or het fic which didn't feel heteronormative etc.
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.
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.
Re: via metafandom
I would totally love to read that, btw. I mean, you don't know me, and you may not care what I think, but that would be an awesome post.
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! :( )
Re: via metafandom