fandomnumbergenerator | Entries tagged with fetishizing homosexuality

http://fansplaining.com/post/149470302878/show-notes-episode-29-shipping-and-activism

Thank you to Rukmini Pande and Lori Morimoto. I feel like it is always important to understand more about how fandom feels to other people, and to be reminded to pay attention to where my biases and blindspots are.

And I do agree that m/m slash is not a form of queer activism. But I’m not sure how much “slashtivism” has to do with fan studies. I feel like it has more to do with how Tumblr and Twitter work, and a way that all arguments seem to get reduced to progressive/problematic in very black and white terms. It seems to show up in almost any progressive issue that people are arguing about: bisexuality, trans identity, sex work, kink, sex positivity.

And the platforms allow and to some degree encourage the worst internet behavior, across all these issues.

Starting with things like spamming ship tags with hate, leaving vile comments on people’s fic, anon hate, or ad hominem attacks. Through harassment and bullying, call outs, and popular bloggers rallying their followers to attack people. Up to and including doxxing and death threats.

And if someone sees what they’re doing as activism, that just gives them that much more license to “name and shame” other people they disagree with.

Though I bristle when people talk about certain fans fetishizing homosexuality. I think, largely, because I haven’t heard a clear definition that would distinguish things that are fetishizing from the rest of m/m slash fandom. I would absolutely die of shame if I had to admit to any of my gay male friends what kind of fandom trash I read. Unilock with Sherlock as a sexy strung out waif and Lestrade as a cop with a heart of gold. Political Animals Captain America cross overs. Teenage Kirk undercover as the boyfriend of a Martian drug dealer. It is fetishizing, objectifying, reductive trash, and in no way related to the actual lives of gay men. But it seems like people mean something different when they say someone is fetishizing homosexuality?

Recently I’ve seen a number of posts talking about fetishizing homosexuality, specifically referring to m/m slash. And I’m not exactly sure what they mean.

By a very broad definition of fetishizing, where you mean any kind of sexual objectification, it would be possible to call all porn fetishizing. But that doesn’t seem to be where these posts are coming from.

A lot of it seems to be push back against the segment of fandom that is using social justice concepts and strategies in the service of ship wars (e.g equating m/m slash with real world LGBT activism and “naming and shaming” people for shipping things wrong). And, I 100% agree. Don’t be an asshole.

There were also a question about invasion of privacy in the overheard story of a man with a crush on his roommate’s brother. And the question of where media advocacy energy is focused, and whether Constantine (at least based on the original Hellblazer) is really the representation battle we want to fight.

And there are so many ways that fandom could do better. So many racist, misogynistic, transphobic, homophobic stereotypes get uncritically imported into fandom. And some really simplistic after-school-special-style ideas about drug use and sex work. But, fetishization of homosexuality?

A lot of women seem to find it easier to express their sexual and romantic fantasies in m/m erotica and porn. Apparently, a lot of women also watch gay porn. And while I think there are specific labor issues that porn actors face, I don’t think that porn creates the social ills that some porn portrays.

I guess I see fetishizing as something that is expressed in interpersonal relationships. An objectifying sexual desire that keeps you from being able to see a person as possessing their own motivations and desires. So, men who see bisexual women as a means to their threesome fantasy (and actually say that to our faces), or bisexual women talking about trans women as idealized hemaphrodite sex partners (something I saw in the early 90s), or gay men who focus on black men because of sexualized stereotypes.

But then I worry that I’m being self-serving. That I am willing to condone behavior in fandom (because it’s mostly women? because it’s amateur? because the source material is flawed? because I don’t want anyone to take my porn away?) that I wouldn’t put up with in mainstream media.

I thought the “baby” part was more like, “my poor darling”. Like, when people say about a character, “my poor baby”, that’s not infantilizing, right?

Also, I am uncomfortable with criticisms of female fandom that focus on fetishizing and essentializing gay men. Because if you that that to its logical conclusion, you make all slash “problematic”. I’m still thinking about this, but I feel like we get it from both sides – writing slash is on one hand fetishizing and objectifying gay men and is simultaneously misogynistic and erasing women, and that queer women should only write femslash. I worry that it comes out of an idea that slash is socially progressive in any way beyond the most basic fact that women sharing their sexual fantasies is still a very contested act.

As far as BBC Sherlock goes, I’m perfectly willing to see Sherlock as someone who is rational and has no time for emotions, but I can’t square that with shipping Johnlock. For the first season, you could do what abundantlyqueer did, and assume they were fucking every time they were off camera. But by now, you end up with Sherlock having a massive multi-year crush on his best friend who keeps saying he’s not gay. That’s pretty classic teenage behavior, and actually kind of weird in anyone in their 30s.

I see “sad gay baby” as a trope and not an epithet, and that’s where certain criticism start to make me nervous. There are a lot of fetishizing, othering, objectifying, sexualizing, or heteronormative tropes in slash (seme/uke, A/B/O, soul mates, the abundance of missionary position anal sex) and to me “sad gay baby” is just one more. All the characters I’m interested in are big, self-destructive messes with no healthy ways of expressing their emotions, so even though I have never actually tagged anything “sad gay baby” it is perilously close to tropes that I read, write and reblog all the time.

Of course I would never call a friend of mine a sad gay baby. But I am also very unlikely to start a conversation with a gay male friend about any slash trope. Just like I don’t want to know if my gay male friends watch lesbian porn.

I understand the objections that the “gay” in “sad gay baby” carries with it an implication that gay = tragically pining, and that may be enough for me to say, it’s too problematic.

I’m still thinking about it.

I was going to reblog to the post this actually about, but I so do not have the energy to get into an internet argument with anyone. So, it’s passive aggressive vague blogging for me.

To make a long story not so long, the issue is the erasure of F/F relationships throughout all of time, including in fandom, even though fandom doesn’t have any of the various “excuses” that for-profit pop-culture falls back on.

But I just don’t have the energy to be berated right now.

Is it possible to just say, I’m trying. To think about things critically. To be self-critical and push beyond my comfort zone in any number of ways.

But there are so many other things I should probably be doing other than reading slash (including publishing a scientific paper on mouse immunology and writing a creative nonfiction piece on postpartum depression).

And I know there are so many things wrong with M/M fic from stereotyping gay men to erasing women. And those are just the legitimate problems. There’s also a whole world of cynical media attention focused on humiliating women fans.

And I think it’s possible to say that mainstream and pop culture have a big impact on what you find desirable without abdicating all responsibility for self-improvement.

But, like, desire is not always what you want it to be. There has always been someone who has found something wrong with my desires.

http://professorfangirl.tumblr.com/post/102971112229/a-subject-responds-to-fandom-meta

Thank you so much to professorfangirl and gascon-en-exil!

This is an extremely long text post, so I have put most of it behind a [read more]

I have pulled out one key paragraph, but one should really read all of it.

professorfangirl: (submission from gascon-en-exil)

As you pointed out, one cannot underestimate the significance of contemporary fandom culture, yaoi and slash included, in providing a space and much-needed visibility for women exploring and expressing themselves (relatively) free from patriarchal dismissals of the value of - and in extreme cases even the existence of - female sexual desire and gratification. Be that as it may, however, when that expression manifests itself as M/M fanwork produced by and for a (mostly heterosexual) female audience the result is, to put it bluntly, inherently no different from straight men jacking off to lesbian porn. It can contribute to greater sympathy for and more willingness to contribute positively to issues relevant to the people being objectified, but it certainly doesn’t have to, and you’ll always have to contend with the specter of queer fetishization waiting to make an appearance whenever the subjects of your erotica find it and are made uncomfortable by the realization that people who do not and will never share their sexual experiences are nevertheless deriving erotic satisfaction from exactly those kinds of experiences.

I have to admit that I get really defensive at any suggestion that women writing slash (which I use to mean M/M erotica regardless of the canonical sexuality of the characters) is homophobic (i.e. objectifying, fetishizing, perpetuating stereotypes, appropriative, silencing, etc.). Which probably means there’s something there.

I don’t know why slash is so appealing to women in general, and to me specifically. I think trying to create coherent explanations for desire is probably futile (exhibit A: Freud). Maybe, for me, heterosexual erotica is tainted by real life gender roles and is therefore not as good fodder for fantasy. In my early 20s I had a bisexual boyfriend who watched a lot of porn. And I found the mainstream F/M and F/F porn to be so distractingly fake that it was really hard to see it as even vaguely sexy. And of course the M/M porn was also fake, but it seemed less fake, more like it was populated by actual humans who were actually hot for each other (and the guys were way cuter than Ron Jeremy). [Incidentally, my boyfriend was kind of uncomfortable with how hot I found it, and that was pretty much the end of us watching porn together.] I’m not actually that upset about straight men watching F/F porn (though it would be lovely if some of the profits went to support homeless queer youth, for instance) but I can get pretty pissed of about toxic queer tropes in mainstream media, and I’m not really sure where to situate slash in that spectrum.

But, I am also really interested in the ways that the (predominantly) women writers explore what it might be like to be a man, some very specific man that we are otherwise only seeing from the outside. What is it like to have sex as a man? Many of us know about giving a blow job or a hand job or being the penetrated partner or being queer as a woman, and the ways those things are socially constructed. And we see how masculinity seems to be constructed around gay and straight men, and the ways that shame and grief play out in that context, but I’m sure we miss the mark a lot. [And I wonder if this is why you don’t see a lot of gay hook up culture represented. I’ve read a lot of queer theory about public sex, but I still find it really hard to imagine what it would be like to masturbate in a porno theater while a stranger was watching, or how Grindr dates actually play out. Though Neville in Chase820’s Miracle Year and Draco in emmagrant01’s Left My Heart ring true to me.]

I also really love the counterfactual aspects of fanfic. If a character that canonically has sex with lots of women (Kirk, Bond, Watson) also had sex with men, would he risk being seen as a slut? If Sherlock were a woman, could she still get away with being such a dick? If Irene’s role were played by a man, would I feel less pissed off by the characterization? (In splix’s If you can’t move heaven, raise hell, and Chryse’s A waste of breath, the answer is a resounding yes.)